In 2022, some Ugandans will remain capable of evil

When they contemplate things like a global disease and the devastation of so many lives, or the obscenity of Uganda’s elections, or the filth pastors hurl at their estranged spouses, people sometimes long for divine intervention to demolish everything and start afresh.

Around this time of year, the biblical story of Noah and his ark is often highlighted.

The story is of course at least 90 percent fiction, which makes it no less intriguing.

For one thing, Noah and any number of paid carpenters or volunteers could not build a vessel large enough to accommodate more than a few pairs of creatures not far beyond their neighbourhood.

Once afloat, assuming he had sweet-talked two lions and two donkeys to board the same vessel, not to mention Kalulu the hare, fox, all sorts of monkey et al, plus their mating partners, Noah would immediately run into a management problem bigger than at Orwell’s Animal Farm.

When Mrs Cock lays her egg, Kalulu sneaks off with it.

Wolf is watching, and thinks, why not eat Kalulu himself? And his mate another day.

Lions were already princely dignitaries in Noah’s day. They were not going to beg for a meal, when Noah’s original plan should have put donkeys on their menu.

Tiger, lord of the Indian jungle, and his better half are similarly upset by Noah’s miserable arrangements.

The elephants, too, are a problem. After consuming most of the stuff stocked for all the herbivores in a few days, they are still hungry. They are excited, dangerous.

Clearly, this boat, which by God’s command was 300 cubits long and 50 cubits wide (about 600x100ft), and which Noah was instructed to stock with all the food and fodder needed, was too small. Noah should have cut millions of acres of jungle to stock an ark thousands of times bigger than the largest tankers of our day.

Along with the shortage of food, there was too much urine and pupu; from cow to dog, all those different monkeys, from horse to elephant pupu. Mixed with the urine, the slime covered all the three floors of the boat.

And its depth covered Noah’s feet, and the feet of his sons and all their wives to the ankles. And the air was exceedingly unclean.

Such was the stench; when they ate, Noah’s wife was always sick.

And the sons said their father was an eccentric gone mad; why didn’t they die with the other humans instead of living in animal filth?

It even became meaningless to toss the human waste through the window.

Probably based on a season of very destructive storms superstitiously regarded divine punishment for human wickedness, the story is a fable.

God learns that it is futile to try to abolish human evil by genocide or the destruction of man’s world, because the capacity for wickedness is part of his nature; an imperfect God acknowledging an imperfect creature!

Very soon after the flood, Noah’s kinsmen, the chosen breed, returned to evil.

Presumably, God is no longer an all-powerful primitive barbarian whose only corrective language is destruction and genocide.

The other story about God’s intervention that is highlighted this season is even bigger than Noah’s, and it involves human sacrifice. But this time it is God’s Son and God Himself who suffer; the victim and the bereaved. That story, whose climax is in March/April, begins now.

However, that story, too, leaves human evil intact. So, Ugandans, like all mankind, will have to live – and deal – with their evil.

Mr Tacca is a novelist, socio-political commentator.

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