When they first started school, Alikisa was presumed to be the kind of pupil they called a kiwutta—the kind of cassava that stays hard and tasteless no matter how long it is cooked. Alikisa, who had just arrived from Timiina, was fearful, but the master did not realise. Normally, a kiwutta pupil was abandoned at the back of the class to play with dust, but the catechist’s daughter could not be treated like that. After two weeks, Alikisa was sat next to Nsuuta, whose brain was sharper than the master had ever known. He hoped this would rub off on Alikisa.
Nsuuta liked Alikisa instantly. For one thing, Alikisa did not hide her awe of Nsuuta’s beauty. She stared as if she had never seen anything like it. And there was an earnestness about Alikisa’s stare that was irresistible. For another, Alikisa attended school regularly, unlike the other girls from the village. In the past, Nnaaba had sat next to Nsuuta. Nnaaba who lived in Kamuli too was Nsuuta’s best friend. But Nnaaba had no interest in studying at all. Her head was filled with dreams of becoming a woman, marrying, and having children. It was easy to replace her with Alikisa. The first day they sat together, Nsuuta broke her writing stick in half and gave one half to Alikisa. She told her to move over to create writing space on the ground. First, she levelled the dust, then she drew a page covered in neat lines. She showed Alikisa how to write a.
“First, you draw a circle like this. Then give it a tiny tail at the front, like this, see?”
Alikisa nodded.
“Now you try.”
Alikisa, her hand shaking, both lips clenched between her teeth, drew a circle so focused she held her breath. When she finished, she exhaled.
Nsuuta smiled. “That is it. Now fill the whole line.”
Later, Nsuuta confided that out of the five vowels, she liked e most. It was quiet and unassuming. i was loud. a was haughty. But e made a beautiful pattern: eeeee. Letters o and u were dumb. o did not even make patterns at all. u disappeared into waves if you tried to make a pattern with it: uuuuu.
Alikisa nodded; vowels having personalities made perfect sense.
“Wait till they become capital letters; you will see how arrogant vowels get. See a? See how it spreads out its legs like Luutu sitting in church? Luutu thinks he is too educated. That is why his children—that Dewo, that Miiro, Levi, but especially Nsangi” (Nsuuta leaned in and whispered, “She is not even beautiful”)“—are haughty.”
When Alikisa started to write numbers, Nsuuta told her she could trust 2, 5, and 8 because they were female.
“Mother is 8, while 5 is a girl. Little 2 is a toddler. Grandmother is 88. As for 4 and 6, they are female and male at the same time, but I don’t know why. They are proud because they have both male and female sides. And 1 and 3 are boys. However, 7 and 9, ho. Bullies. All the other numbers are frightened of them.”
In no time at all, Alikisa had learnt the Luganda alphabet and numbers. Her handwriting was a work of art. When the master noticed her improvement he said, “Eh-eh, she is loosening up,” as if Alikisa’s particular brand of ineptness needed soaking before it slackened.
After the successful intervention in Alikisa’s learning, Nsuuta was made the musigire of her class, a kind of pupil-teacher to monitor the class and help slower pupils. When the master was not there, she would sit at the top of the class with a long stick and make the pupils chant the times tables: 2 × 2, 2 × 3, 2 × 4.
Sometimes it was making syllables: “M and a make?”
“Ma.”
“Ma and ma make?”
“Maama.”
Nsuuta was an impatient teacher. She sucked her teeth a lot, pointing her stick at the boys who were too slow for her. “Tsk, listen to this goat, nti 1 × 1 is 2. Why don’t you just stay at home and herd your father’s cows instead of wasting our time?”
Often, when the class failed at a sum, the master would say, “Wamma Nsuuta, help us.” The fear of failing in moments like this—the boys would be vicious—made her work hard at her studies.
•
The day their class was given slates and chalk, Nsuuta ran home to show her father. She had written his name and her village in her own hand on the slate; she had graduated from scratching in the dust to writing on her own little blackboard. Her father was so impressed he said to the regionals, who were waiting for consultation, “Imagine if she was a boy.”
“Next, I will be writing in a real book with a pencil.”
What came first was the promotion of her class to upper primary at the start of 1937. The girls were entering Primary Four at the time. There was a sense of achievement when the class moved into the newly completed brick block where the floor was cement and the blackboard was painted on the wall rather than a mobile one mounted on an easel. This achievement was marked by three changes. First, pupils sat in pairs on benches attached to desks. The desks had a shelf where you kept your fruit or crunchies like roast corn and nuts to nibble on when you were peckish. Secondly, the master distributed exercise books and pencils. A big pencil sharpener was mounted on the master’s desk. The whole class grew feverish with excitement. Pages so smooth, so clean, you hungered to write. The girls promised each other not to mess up, to get everything correct so their exercise books would be covered in nothing but ticks. But the biggest change was that all lessons were to be taught in English. No jabbering Luganda. The teacher put up a big sign at the back of the class: NO SPEAKING VERNACULAR. Studying had become serious.
Now that they looked up the wall at the blackboard, Nsuuta sat at the front of the class. Boys accused her of cosying up to the master to protect her teacher-pupil position, but Nsuuta said she had problems with the master’s handwriting. The letters c, e, and o looked the same. Sometimes the letters slanted forward like they would fall, sometimes they blinked on the blackboard. When she talked about it, Alikisa laughed, because it was just like Nsuuta to see letters and numbers dance.
Because the girls had started to bleed that year, Alikisa brought up the question of children. Nsuuta’s response was, “I am not going to breed like a rabbit.”
“Then we shall have ten children only.”
“Ten?”
“Five each.”
Nsuuta shook her head. “I want one.” At the horror on Alikisa’s face, Nsuuta relented: “Okay, two, no more. My mother has fifteen now. Father has I-don’t-know-how-many. We are so crowded in Mother’s house we sleep on top of each other. Recently I asked Mother, ‘When will you stop?’ She said, ‘Stop, how? If children are still in there, they will come out.’ I said, ‘Ah.’”
“But only two? That means I will have to have eight. My mother has had three so far. Her womb is the kind that has to be begged. But we are dying of silence in that house. I will not do that to my children. Maybe I will have my five and then I will help you. But we shall have to marry a modern man who does not want too many children. Otherwise he will have to marry other wives.”
“Let’s have eight. I will have two, you six. If our husband wants more children, let him marry other wives. That is the only thing I like about Luutu—he is richer than rich but has only four children.”
“Have you been to his house?”
Nsuuta shook her head.
“His family rattles about in that huge house of theirs like four peas in a pan, especially now that Dewo and Miiro are studying in Mmengo.”
Because of the way the girls discussed their future, because of the way Nsuuta helped her through lessons, but mostly because of the pact, Alikisa presumed Nsuuta would always be there to walk with her through life.
5
After six years of living in Nattetta, Alikisa’s hometown, Timiina, still came to her in sharp darts of loss. The feelings were less frequent, but the sting had not mellowed. Mostly, she missed her grandmother.
For two and a half years, while her father worked with Luutu to set up Nattetta Native Parish, Alikisa stayed in Timiina. She had grown so attached to her grandmother that when the time came to join her parents, she refused. At the time, Luutu had just revolted against the Cathol
ic Church. The Protestants, who had been pumping him to rebel, quickly gave him the mandate to build a parish and sent him a catechist to work with. Alikisa’s father and mother left Timiina and came to Nattetta to help set up the Native Church, as the Protestant Church was called at the time. For two and a half years, Alikisa did not see her parents at all. In the end, Alikisa’s grandmother came along and stayed in Nattetta for two months while Alikisa got used to her parents again.
But every time Alikisa talked about her grandmother and how she missed her, Nsuuta would sulk as if Alikisa were showing off. Nsuuta never talked about her grandmother, just those grandmothers. For a while Alikisa presumed it was forbidden in Nsuuta’s home to single out real grandmothers from not-real ones. Then she wondered whether Nsuuta’s real grandmother had died. Finally, she asked, “Which one of those grandmothers is your real one?”
“None.”
“Oh, she died?”
Nsuuta shrugged. “We don’t know.”
“Oh?”
“After she had my father, she dumped him there, no breastfeeding, no nothing, and disappeared. It was the other women who rescued him.”
“Some women have no hearts.”
“She was Ssoga.”
“Then Ssoga women are most heartless.”
“She was raided.”
“Ha.” Alikisa caught her breath, then burst out, “Forgive me, Nsuuta, I did not realise.”
“Even though he is old, my father is still in pain. He still dreams that one day she will come back to see him. Grandfather refuses to talk about it. Once, when Father pestered him, Grandfather said, ‘What is it that you are looking for that I have not given you? Why do you cry for a woman who never suckled you?’ but Father will not listen. He has been to Busoga to look for her. He left messages everywhere, but nothing. When he returned, he renamed the villages—Kamuli, then Bugiri—after places in Busoga where people said she might have been abducted from. At the time, the villages were too young to resist. If it was not for Luutu, he would have renamed Nattetta too.” Nsuuta paused. “Her name was Naigaga. That is why, for my father, each wife’s eldest daughter is named Naigaga. We swear upon her name,” she shrugged, “hoping that one day she might hear us. If Naigaga came today, Father would kill her with love. But all those grandmothers who were abducted are our real grandmothers because they loved our father.”
“Hmm.”
“Sometimes, in my mind, I see my grandmother put my father down to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night. She makes a hole in the fence, looks around, then runs and disappears into the bushes. She makes it back to her home and vows never to leave her house again. But other times I see my grandfather’s men catch her as she tries to escape, and later sell her. She is somewhere in the Arab world dying, having had Arab children.”
“No she is not, Nsuuta. Your grandmother made it to safety, lived a quiet life, and died in peace.”
“You know Kisoga, the village where Luutu keeps his servants and cattle?”
“Yes?”
“That is where all the loot from Busoga—animals, humans, skins, and tusks—used to arrive. First, my grandfather took his pick, then his men; the rest was sold.”
Alikisa clicked.
“My father says he will never inherit anything from Grandfather. His wealth is soaked with the blood and tears and sweat of other people. My father is making his own, but I think it is impossible. Once you are born in it, it is in you. Everything terrible my grandfather did is already in our blood. But I am lucky to be a girl; I will not inherit anything.”
“Did Luutu’s clan also raid in Busoga?”
“Luutu came from Ssingo. His wealth is new. It comes from being close to Christianity. But then again,” she sighed, “with well-off people, you never know where their privilege first came from. Often someone bled, someone sweated, someone cried or died to make them rich. That is what my father says.”
Alikisa looked around her. They were standing on a plain picking bweyeyeyo to make straw brooms for school. Suddenly, Nattetta, with its wilderness and its sparse population, looked like a place where nefarious acts like abduction were condoned. She had heard that Nsuuta’s grandfather was one of the earliest settlers in Bugerere. He came from the Ssese Islands in the 1870s. For a long time, he and his men reigned over lower Bugerere with no one to curb their excesses. She had heard they sold tusks, not humans, to Arabs—that was how Nsuuta’s great-uncle, Nkuggwa, died. Elephant charging. The monster did not even blink when it was hit by a bullet and trampled him like a leaf. But no one had mentioned the sale of humans.
Compared to Timiina, where villages stretched for miles, Nattetta, Bugiri, and Kamuli were jungle, surrounded by stretches of verdant bush. It was days before you heard human noises outside your family. You could go for days without hearing a single voice other than those of your immediate family. Alikisa’s family was lucky: they ran a church and a school. Even in holidays when the school was dead, travellers stopped at the church for a night, a week, to catch their breaths. At the road, on the musambya tree near the walkway to their house, her mother hung ripe ndiizi bananas for both schoolchildren and travellers. Every house did this. In Timiina it was only done at the edges of the village to alert travellers that they were entering wilderness and should carry as many bananas as possible. This isolation made homes in Nattetta self-contained—your own well, your own swamp for njulu and nsansa to craft mats, baskets, and carpets, and your own forest to collect firewood and poles for construction. If something happened to your family, only gwanga mujje drums could raise the alert. Alikisa was a tough girl, she was slow to cry, but the thought of Nsuuta’s grandmother’s abduction made tears gather. She wished her father had never been sent to Nattetta. She was sure no such thing had happened in her Timiina. The Ganda never sold humans. Nsuuta’s grandfather must have been a criminal.
It was surprising what a bit of history did to a place, how it coloured it. Before she came here, all Alikisa knew was that Bugerere was Buganda’s paradise of sweet bananas and fruit. Most birds in the world migrated to Bugerere. As a child, whenever she saw the mpa abaana, the long beaked ibis, flying past in pairs she would sing, “Give me the children, give me the children / I am going to Bugerere to eat sweet bananas,” and she would imagine a shimmering Bugerere.
True to the song, all kinds of banana species and fruit thrived in Bugerere. When Alikisa first arrived she was surprised to find that even matooke ripened in plantations everywhere. But that was because there was hardly anyone to eat it. Alikisa’s parents said that Bugerere was demographically challenged because of that lubwa fly. They told her that since the beginning of time, the lubwa had infested areas from Mabira Forest through Bugerere across the Nile to Busoga, millions and millions of the tiny flies that flew into your ears and nose. You yawned carelessly, you swallowed a mouthful. And, despite its miniature size, the lubwa had a mean bite. To survive, you covered every inch of your skin and surrounded yourself with smoke. Thus, by the 1870s, when Nsuuta’s grandfather arrived, Bugerere was as fertile as a sow. Herds of elephants, antelope, buffalo, wild hogs, lions, and leopards. But then in 1900 Chwa’s regents teamed with the colonial government and sprayed the lubwa fly out of existence. From then, Kabaka Chwa launched a campaign to populate Bugerere. He sent educated envoys like Luutu, gave them a lot of land, and told them to start missions and sinagoogi to encourage Ganda immigration into the region. In the 1920s Chwa often travelled in his car, an Albion, to hunt buffalo or antelope with Luutu. Alikisa’s parents had seen it with their own eyes. Subjects came from all over Buganda to feast and see Chwa’s car. But few settled in Bugerere, except criminals running from the law. Cynics scoffed that Chwa’s campaign to populate Bugerere was a drive against the Ruuli and Nyara people in the northern parts of Bugerere who had resisted Ganda colonisation.
Despite this, Chwa’s campaign would continue even after his death. By the 1950s, Bugerere would be carved out among the landed Ganda gentry. But now, in 1937, brazen wild hog
s looked at Alikisa as if to say This is our wilderness; what are you doing here? Bugerere seemed like the place which would turn humans into savages.
6
Nsuuta’s mother was getting restless. The value education brought to a girl on the marriage market depleted with age. Nsuuta had been bleeding for two years; she was on the verge of overstaying in school. But Nsuuta’s father was too soft. Instead of telling her firmly that a suitor had approached them and that he wanted her to seriously consider him, he would ask, “Nsuuta, someone is interested in you; do you want to meet him?”
Nsuuta would screw up her face: “But I have said I want to take my studies further. Masters say I have potential. I could be Kamuli’s first nurse or teacher.” And her father would let the chance slip by. Her mother, having no say in what a man does with his children, would huff but keep quiet.
The real reason Nsuuta had stayed so long in school was her father’s growing hatred of Luutu. The master who came to ask for Nsuuta to be put up for a Gayaza High scholarship knew the story of the hostility between the two men all too well, and had exploited it. He argued that Nsuuta would put Kamuli on the map in Bugerere. Two years earlier, Luutu’s daughter, Nsangi, who was weaker in studies than Nsuuta, had been awarded the same scholarship. “When you mention Bugerere County, the village that sounds is Nattetta because of Luutu Omusomi and his children’s education,” the master told Nsuuta’s father. “Nsuuta is Kamuli’s chance. Let’s send a daughter to Gayaza and give hope to our children. And who else but you, the Muluka Chief, to lead the way?”
The Muluka was also worried about the growing power Christianity gave to Luutu. Luutu’s roles of building churches, of starting schools, of being a liaison with the British administration, were cannibalising traditional structures and institutions. When Luutu asked for masters and catechists to come and teach in his schools, they were sent. When the Muluka asked for a tractor to clear roads and attract more locomotives into the region, he was told that the task fell on residents to repair their roads—tractors were for the Kyadondo region only. It all came down to Luutu’s ability to speak English, the Muluka knew. These days, Luutu’s name sounded louder than the Ssaza Chief who had once hunted buffalo with Kabaka Muteesa Mukaabya, then briefly with Kabaka Mwanga. Now, because Chwa’s regents had sold the Buganda Kingdom to the British, when Chwa visited Bugerere he slept at Luutu’s house. Where the Ssaza used to talk of the prestige of hosting Kabaka Muteesa, Luutu boasted of Winston Churchill opening Mmengo High—what stupidity was that? Luutu had parroted Churchill’s words in English when he opened Nattetta Native School—We yal in darkaness, bati schools like zis one are a bikon—even though no one understood a word he said. Often, Luutu told church congregations and schoolchildren with fawning pride how Churchill had described Uganda as Za paal of Afirika. But what was a pearl? Who had ever seen one? What did it do? As if Buganda had been waiting for Churchill to come from Bungeleza and tell us what a wonder Buganda was. And yet all of that added up to giving Luutu weight wherever he went.
A Girl is a Body of Water Page 26