A beautiful sun was going down. Lights from the grid were back. I pull up my laptop, log on to the web. Such an evening, the world is a beautiful place.

Suddenly a man tore through the wired door. I turned and rose to meet him. I was dazed by a single blow to the head. It happened very quickly. It was about 7:15pm. The evening of the first Sunday of December 2009, the smell of Chrismas was in the air.

Blood oozed. I seized a stool in defense. I made awful noise. The attacker appeared to want to go on, but hesitated, retreated, was gone, a beast from the wilds strayed into domicile zones.

He was young, probably seventeen? He was dark, malnourished, glazed eyes, shirt once white, trousers nondescript. He accomplished his mission silently, no campus fellow, but a man of the type usually available for hire in these places. Now someone had sent him to kill me.

I was loosing blood, growing weaker by the moment. I was crying and shouting loudly. I seized a whistle from a wall and started to blow. I lost count. It was early. The sun had just gone down. Although my neighbours were within earshot of the commotion, none responded. I was on my own.

Suddenly, as if in a dream, I heard voices approaching my house. Four boys –campus students, from a far-off quarters usually reserved for house helps – heard my cry and hurried. They said they were surprised they could hear me ‘because we were playing very loud music. But the noise shocked us.’

They got my car and rushed me to the Sick Bay; half carried me to the emergency room. The nursing staff were wonderful. Angels in white. A man truly allergic to pains, I cried and bothered them. But they calmed me down. Finally after some argument, the doctor stitched the cut that he and the nurses described as very deep.

Professor Daniel Adawa of the Veterinary Medical School and his family restored the human touch. They hurried to my aid and subsequently accommodated me in their lovely home, rather than permit me to return to my desecrated house and face the wrath of unknown assassins and the studied silence of neighbours. ‘I got my problem you got yours.’ That kind of attitude.

In those still early stages, my problems were legion. It was possible my attackers would still pursue me. It was for this reason Professor Adawa rejected the good doctor’s dogged insistence that I should be moved at once and treated in the teaching hospital, kilometres away from campus. ‘Who will look after him there? Who will guarantee his security?’

The university security personnel were great. They stayed with me throughout the night in the sick bay, guarding the door and telling me not to worry.

What had come over the Ahmadu Bello University? That an assassin should go after a simple lecturer? That now he should require bodyguards fit for a monarch? In the days ahead my campus house would be placed under around the clock security guard as I lay recovering in a secret safety zone.

Why was I attacked? Who dunnit? No properties were taken and the house was not ransacked. In a town where computers are still stolen and sometimes even kept in cages, the laptop I was working on was left alone. Who sent the assassin? What will happen to me in the days ahead?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* John Otim is a Ugandan teaching at Nigeria's Ahmadu Bello University.
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