“Yes, Tom. That is correct,” affirms Wilson, animated and enthused. “Marriage can bring one great financial distress. So this is to be considered when one chooses a wife and a time to be married.”
Jean gathers the men around the table and introduces me as a professor from America who’ll be their new writing instructor. One of them, with a hard stare that radiates gravitas, raises his hand.
“I am very pleased to hear of this. Your class will be welcome. I myself am a great fan of the novelist Thomas Hardy. But”—he raises his hand—“madam professor, why only one week? Why not a complete college program?”
“What he means,” Wilson intervenes, “is that many people have come and gone here, with good intentions, like yourself. They bring programs, they depart. Why cannot you create a program that remains?”
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I tell them. You all can be trained as writing facilitators, and then run the class once I’m gone. Tom nods thoughtfully. A stocky prisoner with red and squinty eyes, a mustache, and a grand pot belly, enters the library and is presented to me.
“This is Chairman,” says Wilson. Luzira is a self-governing entity, and the man in charge must endorse all programs.
“I approve of this class,” he affirms, with a sturdy handshake. “Creative writing? I will come sit in.”
My future students pepper me with more questions about earning certificates and receiving grades. Then it’s time for them to be counted, yet again, and we file out, and I’m back through the prison gates and then the metal detectors at the Sheraton.
———
The morning of our first class, I am sipping bitter coffee at the hotel when my phone rings.
“Madam, I cannot come today,” says David the taxi man. “I must visit the hospital. But I will send Hakeem.”
Hakeem arrives, and, dropping me off, cheerfully demands more shillings.
Safely inside the prison library, I await my students. Never-ending head counts steal precious class time but they trickle in, one by one. Hassan ran a construction company and has a business degree. Nicholas, from the Baganda tribe, was a soldier. Grave-looking Tom, who likes golf, completed his A-levels in law and is known among the prisoners as Magistrate Tom. The senior welfare officer, slumped in her seat beside Jean, offers an indolent grin; I wonder how this lethargic-looking woman has the energy to look after her own welfare, let alone anyone else’s. Mohammed, seven feet tall and surely no older than twenty-one, says he writes music and gives us a sample, breaking into a reggae song.
Oh how woman suffers so, goes the chorus.
“By words the mind is winged. Declared by one Aris-tophanes,” Wilson reads aloud from the syllabus. He looks up. “The concept of this wise statement is that even if one is behind bars, one can be free with a pen. One’s mind is free, all times.”
“Has anyone heard of a slave narrative?” I ask.
Blank stares.
“America was founded on slavery,” I explain. “And slaves began to write about their experiences, and publish them to great success. Why might they want to do this?”
“To expose the injustice!” Mohammed calls out, finger in the air.
Tom sonorously reads aloud the words of Frederick Douglass, author of America’s most celebrated slave narrative, published in 1845:
I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.
“He does not have knowledge of his own birthday,” declares Wilson.
“Is this not sad?” I ask. Casual nods all around.
“What is noteworthy here,” Tom begins, “is that he begins his life story not with what he indeed does know about his life but what he does not know. Unusual.”
We read another excerpt, in which Douglass witnesses a bloody whipping.
“It is gruesome,” Wilson declares, flatly. He notes Douglass’s well-crafted language of restraint, along with his rhythm, cadence, and biblical references. The men are engaged yet blasé. I ask them to start writing the first pages of their own autobiographies. As distant drumming outside grows louder and they scribble against the din, I read their preclass assessments: I hope to get knowledge. I hope to keep my mind refreshed all the time, and be creative. I expect to learn team spirit in writing and my creative potential will be energized and reawakened.
Half an hour later, the students share what they’ve written. One writes of war in Mogadishu, and coming home to discover that his mother, father, and son have all died of AIDS.
“Life was difficult,” he concludes. It’s an understatement of the sort repeated again and again in the men’s narratives today. Wilson titles his “From Trash to Throne,” and reads, “I am of the youth that believes to be the less privileged, being born into a polygamous family of Mr. Bafaki and seven stepmothers. As a result of this my father gave birth to very many children, about sixty of them, and I was the thirty-seventh and alone in my mother’s womb.”
His mother died when he was five, Wilson goes on, and he was raised by abusive stepmothers “who all practiced witchcraft.” In exchange for school tuition he did manual labor for a wealthy man from a neighboring village, but shortly after he started, his coworkers managed to make him the fall guy in a scheme that caused the company to lose money, which led him to spend a year and a half in remand before being sentenced to thirteen months or a US $600 fine. Whether or not Wilson is innocent of his crime, it seems clear that he has endured a life of poverty, abuse, and trauma.
So have his peers. These students were nonchalant about a slave narrative because it really wasn’t very shocking to them. Shuttled from one abusive home to another, begging for food, battling excruciating poverty and homelessness and disease—this is life for my students. Even Jean from APP, participating in the exercise, has a sad tale.
“The only thing I had in life was abuse, beatings, and miserableness,” she reads aloud. “So since then I am psychologically disturbed because whenever I remember the mistreatment I went through, tears roll.”
Tom reads last. His earlier references to Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy had indicated that he’s no stranger to formal education, and his eloquent essay confirms it. He writes about growing up in relative comfort in Entebbe, landing in jail for a white-collar crime, and being deserted by those he considered friends.
“I am now looking ahead and focused on improving things and positive change. I will never keep those who abandoned me in my hour of need as hostages in my heart because my heart is too small to keep old issues. I will never fail in my quest to be a better man.”
I leave our first class moved by my new students’ words, impressed by their willingness to reveal their own stories, and heartened by how well they’re taking to the assignments. But I also feel weighed down by the anguish of their lives, past and present. What can simple words do in the face of such devastation?
———
I spend the weekend with Al, a twenty-something friend of a friend. We share a love of reggae, which is astonishingly popular here. Like Uganda’s population, three-quarters of it under age thirty, the country’s music scene is extraordinarily young, essentially born since 1986, when Yoweri Museveni took power. After the brutal reign of Idi Amin, after a series of military coups and political instability, the peace of his regime provided space for culture to grow. So the music is still finding itself, and much of this involves diligent copycatting. After a night out with Al, from one over-the-top nighttime palace to another, I decide that Ugandans are more Jamaican than Jamaicans.
Perhaps because I’m something new and foreign to spice up his routine, Al generously appoints himself my tour guide. Saturday morning he picks me up in a silver Mercedes with a crack down the windshield and a missing side mirror.
“A boda-boda took it off last month,” he explains. “We’ll just have to avoid the police since I’
m not meant to drive without it. Sure?
“Have you seen the slums?” he goes on. “Mzungus always want to see the slums. They always have many projects there.”
We visit Old Kampala, up in the hills, where impalas once roamed, then haggle over entrance fees to the Lubiri Palace, the compound of the Buganda king, where a guided tour includes a peek at Amin’s torture chamber and Rolls-Royce. Uganda’s ubiquitous hustle has me watching my back at all times, but there’s an endearing earnestness to Al that allows me to let my guard down, for the first time since arriving. He showers me with questions about life in America, mostly about how much it costs. He schools me on the social scene here, criticizes local homophobia, and explains that like many Ugandans, he has Rwandan roots—his family fled here after one of the early genocides. Then he tries to convince me that Ugandans are preferable to Rwandans.
“In Rwanda they may smile at you a lot but then they will kill you. Here, you know what you are getting. Sure?”
Suddenly Al turns frantic at the wheel.
“Quick, pass me some shillings!”
“Huh?” I reach for my pocketbook.
He pulls over by the side of the road and rolls down the window.
“Hello, Officer!” Broad smile.
“Hello, sir! And how are you on this lovely Women’s Day?”
“I am wonderful, sir! I will soon cook for this woman right here!”
Al proffers his hand to the grinning policeman and the two shake firmly.
“Enjoy your day!” And to me: “Happy Women’s Day!”
Then we’re off, without having to pay a fine for the missing mirror. I’ve just witnessed the friendliest bribe of all time.
“I am just glad we are not in Rwanda. I could not do that in Kigali, sure? I would never want to live in a place so proper.”
Monday morning, I dive into the local paper. There’s a story on Museveni and corruption, one on a bombing two hours from Kampala and one about a twenty-year-old, HIV-positive woman who lives with her one-year-old son inside Luzira Prison, still on remand after three years now. Her charge? Stealing a mobile phone. I share the story with my students at Luzira that morning, but they seem unmoved.
“How many of you are behind bars because you could not afford the fine for your crime, or the bribe to elude it?” I ask, describing my police encounter over the weekend. Nine prisoners raise their hands.
Corruption is endemic here. In the East African Bribery Report of 2012, launched by Transparency International, Uganda registered the highest number of bribery cases in the region, with a rate of 40.7 percent. That same year, $12.7 million in donor funds to Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister—earmarked for rebuilding northern Uganda, ravaged by a twenty-year war, and Karamoja, Uganda’s poorest region—were funneled into private accounts, prompting the European Union to suspend foreign aid to the country.
Uganda isn’t alone. In various incarnations all over the world, money and justice are bonded together in unholy matrimony. Take the United States, where it’s an accepted reality that your case is as strong as the lawyer you can afford, not to mention the bail money that gets you out of jail, in a better frame of mind and thus far less likely to take a plea bargain. Is that not a form of bribery? Justice is, ubiquitously and dispiritingly, not only for sale but also costly. Consider the Michigan teenager who caught a fish out of season and landed three days in jail, or the homeless Iraq War veteran who served twenty-two days for getting drunk and climbing into an abandoned building. In both these cases, jail time wasn’t for punishment but for failing to pay the ever-increasing fines associated with the criminal justice system. Fees for arrest warrants, court-ordered drug and alcohol treatment, DNA samples, jury trials—are these not a kind of legally sanctioned extortion, too?
We turn to Wilson’s autobiographical essay from yesterday, for peer criticism.
“Pastor,” Tom begins. He always begins. Tom is as insightful about literature as he is somber—I have yet to see him smile. “You seem to imply that polygamy has not served you or your family well. Or am I reading this wrong?”
“Indeed this is correct, Tom.”
“So how can you show your reader this?” I nudge, rolling out a writing mantra: show, don’t tell. Wilson takes a deep breath.
“The financial stress. The fighting among siblings. The pain of being hated by your stepmothers. Beaten by them, as well. Every day, with belts and paddles. This wears on one’s spirit.” He sighs.
“And what of the manual labor, when you worked for the rich man? How did that feel?” Tom is adopting the mantle of my co-instructor, and I welcome the assistance.
“I am a grown man so I will try not to cry when I remember. But it was painful. You are doing things you do not have to do at home; you are abused year upon year, and you turn your hands to God. It feels as if you have been forgotten by him.”
Wilson pauses and shakes his head.
“This is painful, to write. It is to remember. To remember is pain.”
“In the pain is a healing,” Tom, the temperate intellect, tells him.
Wilson shrugs, fingering his yellow floppy sunhat. As the week moves on, I come to know more of Wilson’s pain and slow healing. One morning he sits down on the bench beside me and, before class begins, details his life plan. When released he’ll start a prison ministry and help people coming home from prison find work on a farm. Steadily, in his usual sermonlike tone—he’s Pastor Boma, indeed—he sums up conditions behind bars.
“I sleep on my side for lack of space. Lice and scabies inhabit my blankets. The food is insufficient. There is no clean water, so among many it is a commodity traded for acts.” Sex acts, he means.
“Even my mother would be shocked to know I am here,” his classmate Mohammed, eavesdropping, interjects. “At first I cursed and cried, I am an innocent man in prison. But I learned to survive.”
The call comes from outside; a student looks up from Slavery in America. “Come, let us go again for the count before they come with the canes.”
The thought of canes makes me shudder. And perhaps because of the frustrations with the count, today’s class is slow going. No one has done the reading—excerpts from Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom—or written their dramatic dialogues, because they haven’t grasped the assignment. So when the students return from the third count, I try a writing exercise.
“I was happy,” I print on the board, instructing the men to rewrite it by showing that they’re happy instead of saying that they are.
Roderick raises his hand. “I was happy when I at last got a trial date,” he reads.
“But how were you happy?”
“How about ‘I was happy when I became free’?” asks Siraj, finger in the air.
“I was happy when I was no longer begging for food!” Chairman calls out.
Finally, Wilson stands and announces, “I was so happy I jumped up and down.”
“Yes!” I exclaim. “This shows us an image and an emotion.” The men nod silently.
“I was surprised.”
Mohammed: I was surprised when my father beat my mother and she ran away.
Hassan: I was surprised when I had to be a soldier and hold the heavy gun.
Extracting visible emotion from such flat accounts of trauma proves a colossal challenge.
The call comes again and my students scramble to gather their things.
“Off to our wards,” Wilson mumbles. “Do you know why they call it that, Baz? It is the language of hospitals. They imagine that we are sick and they are healing us.”
———
As the days pass I find things to enjoy in Kampala. Go where the foreigners go and there’s a burgeoning arts scene, late-night sheesha bars, and white-sand beaches framing Lake Victoria. But still the haggling and hustling, the Uzis and bomb checks, the hostile glares from strangers and familiar folks alike, all of the things that make up daily life for me here—they take a toll on my spirit. So does my time in Luzira, land of inspired stud
ents and dreams deferred. The daily walk from the taxi to the prison, through the heartrending slum, fuels my cynicism and alienation. It’s as if the work I did in Rwanda and the optimism it inspired about possibilities for change, globally and back home, came from another life. Did those possibilities even exist at all? The rumors I’m hearing here about Rwanda’s dark side, about politically motivated detentions and disappearances attributed to the Rwandan army and police, targeting those critical of the government, deepen my depression. I begin to wonder if progress is a mirage.
Yet still I enter the prison and behold that beautiful sight of students hunched over the wooden table, too busy writing to greet me. Luzira’s conditions and deadening bureaucracy shred my optimism, but our writing course diligently labors to sew it back together. Class by class, the students’ journals fill up with lively letters. When they try their hands at short stories, Wilson mesmerizes the class with a tale about a snake and a caterpillar who crash a party, only to get beaten up and tossed out.
“At this point, the snake blamed the butterfly for deceiving it with the idea that everyone admired them,” he reads. “Little did they both know that the snake never really changed, apart from pulling itself from the old skin.”
“That’s what we call a fable,” I say. “Is there a moral?”
Tom raises his hand and finally lets forth his first half-smile. This morning I’d run into him while making my way through the prison gates and he told me he’d be late to class because the officer in charge wanted to speak with him.
“You’re a gifted writer, Tom. You really must know this,” I’d told him.
“I’m humbled,” he’d said, head bowed, still sans smile. “I truly wish you would run a proper college program here, though.”
I’d mumbled something about trying to help him get his work published. Knowing the inadequacy of such a response—a talent like Tom deserves far more than I can offer—I’d rushed off to class.
“If I am not mistaken,” Tom says to Wilson, “the story’s moral is that some changes are merely superficial.”
“And, too,” Wilson interjects, “that people can be like the butterfly. Find wings. Change. Grow. Reinvent ourselves, as some of us are doing here in this prison.”
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