This was obviously not the answer Kanyunya wanted.
“The boy will do what he wants to, Kanyunya. You know that. Even on your money.”
Once they are out on the street again, Kanyunya pleads with his son. “You are making problems for me, Kiti. I will have to spend too much on you in Kampala. Go back to the primary school and get better grades. Then attend middle school here. It is better for everyone.”
Charles has never heard Father plead. Still, he remains silent. They visit the middle school but the Headmaster is away. An assistant says very little and they leave unimpressed.
As the sun begins to set, Charles walks behind his father, seeing Kanyunya at a distance, now such a small man against a giant road, vanishing into fading sky and dense foliage. Kanyunya’s shout suddenly cracks the air like thunder as he turns back to Charles. “You are a crazy boy, Kiti. You will put me into poverty.”
Offended, Charles sits down in the middle of the road while Father slowly walks back, the menace of him growing and growing into a huge shadow glowering over him.
He knows Charles’ mind is made up. “I want Kampala,” says his son finally. “I want a bigger world. Just like you did. I want to know more. And most of all I want to dance.”
They are both sitting on the ground now, Charles running his hand through the dust. The silence is long and terrible. Father finally understands though. “Perhaps,” he says “we can see if money is available. A scholarship. Maybe for children of alumni. But even if that is possible, don’t ever forget how you are pushing me. I will have to spend a lot. And I don’t have a lot. Times are changing. It is not the way it used to be for me.”
Two weeks later, they step off the bus in Kampala. Take a taxi to the school. Kanyunya and Charles sit solemnly. Stiff and abrupt against the harsh bright walls of the Headmaster’s waiting room. Mengo sits near the top of one of Kampala’s central hills. Here, the young minds of some of Uganda’s brightest and most well-connected young men are trained in a quiet garden city of its own.
The sturdy lower half of the room rises to pale latticed plaster, allowing cool air to flow through. Carved mahogany doors separate them from the Headmaster’s office located beneath a tiled balcony. At the bottom of Mengo Hill are dozens of shopping stalls, lottery ticket sellers, and taxis jostling together for space in a chaos of sound and movement.
The taxi driver — clearly looking for a big tip — mutters about what a lucky boy Charles is, going to Mengo and that his father must be an important man. Liking the sound of that, recalling his power days, Kanyunya pays him well.
The British Headmaster treats his guests with civility and respect, ordering tea and saying little at first. He wants his visitors to feel at home. Charles studies his bristly white hair that runs around his cheeks to meet at his chin. His eyebrows rise on his forehead like two arching caterpillars.
Headmaster Hermitage speaks directly to Charles in a way that also includes genuine respect for Kanyunya as a former Mengo student. While smoking a British cigarette, he acquaints Charles with the school and what it offers. He refers to famous graduates and fulfilled students. He talks of proud parents. Sports teams. Plays. Even Shakespeare.
“It hasn’t changed so much,” says Kanyunya who smiles broadly. Shuffles in his chair uncomfortably. Charles has never seen father so nervous.
“There is a scholarship fund,” says Headmaster. “I have looked into your application. Your Father — one of our successful graduates — has worked hard for the government. I think support can be found. We can certainly use good dancers and tall footballers.”
Charles is ecstatic.
“Leave it with me,” says Headmaster. “I’ll have the financial people write to you with details. For now, let me just say that I think you should formally accept our offer. Charles you will enjoy yourself at Mengo. And I think your father will be very pleased with your accomplishments here.”
Few words are spoken when they leave. Over lunch, however, Kanyunya suggests that they should probably get Charles his school uniform before returning home. Charles, holding back tears, says simply, “Thank you, Father.”
In the nearby shop — very British, very formal — Charles is most thrilled with the required leather shoes, his first pair. So stiff. His toes have disappeared. His feet have become other creatures, resolutely pointed. He will never be able to dance in these shoes. Nor play football
Later, in the tailor shop, Kanyunya — becoming his old Mengo self again — watches with pride as Charles is fitted for the blazer. In this house of cloth and humming machines, the walls vibrate and sway to the whirr of frantic sewing. Scissors and tape measures quiver on worktables. Shiny wheels spin, treadles pump, needles thread, and swaths of cotton and linen are shaped into men. Near the ceiling, side by side like a procession, sport jackets with brass buttons hang below bright purple shirts. Each finished outfit carries Mengo’s rose in its lapel.
In the middle of this whirring industry stands Charles now in khaki pants and white shirt. A tall dignified warrior full of self-possession, he has unwound from the loose robes of his ancestors and spun easily into the geometric complexities of shiny western propriety. In a moment of self-recognition Kanyunya also realizes that Charles is both repeating and completing him.
Father and son treat themselves to dinner and a comfortable night in a tiny rented room. The two know a natural line has been crossed. When they arrive home, Charles is anxious to show Kekinoni what he has become. He tries on his blazer for her.
Kanyunya smiles at her.
She weeps in pride.
Summer passes. Day one of his new life begins. At Mengo Collegiate School. He sits, trying to find himself in his new clothes in his new classroom. Cool air shifts through cantilevered windows. The quiet is broken only by a fountain gurgling in the garden. He is surrounded by important looking volumes lined up at attention on sturdy shelves. At his feet lies a new briefcase in which to carry books and papers. He feels very, very important. But he knows no one.
The class is composed of boys and girls from many communities and ethnic origins — Bahima and Baganda, East Indian and British. They are easy and polite. They include him. An unknown equal among unknown equals. He is one of the tallest.
The teacher enters. Writes his name on the blackboard. Then each is asked to stand, say their full names, where they are from, what they do for fun. Charles emphasizes the fun part and gets a warm laugh.
“I dance,” says Charles shyly. “I talk to my cow Suna.”
The girl seated next to him smiles. Then whispers, “I love to dance.”
Mid-morning the classes all break for a snack in the high ceilinged dining hall, pillared like a church, under photos of Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Obote. They talk of sports and clothes. Charles realizes that his new friends believe Father to be rich. He does not dispute this and goes off happily with them to wander in the town.
Charles collects an official allowance from the school each week. But he also has a bit of his own money, given to him before going away by Kekinoni and Kanyunya.
Some of the boys head into a sporting goods store. Charles has never seen so many jerseys. He is fascinated by a display of many-coloured belts, all carefully coiled like dead serpents over and through one another. Some fastened by shiny silver buckles, metal mouths wide open like snakes with their sharp tongues sticking straight out. Some are calfskin making him think of Suna and the velvety creases in her neck. Her inward looking eyes.
His eyes light on other piles of belts. More expensive than snakeskin, the costliest made of crocodile. Charles knows crocodile. Remembers seeing a crocodile once. A nesting crocodile, sleeping in a pool of sun, but rigidly attentive.
“She has eggs,” Father had told him then. “Down in the sand underneath her. She will let them bake for weeks until they are ready to hatch. And she will look ferocious for anyone who comes near.”
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Charles recalled so clearly the gaping mouth with its pointed teeth and its long raised head. An attitude that said “Stay away.” The creature’s tail curled behind her, leaving scale marks in the sand.
But he also knows about the skinner’s hut. Dead crocodiles piled on shore waiting for the knife.
Father’s next words followed the track of this thought. “Hunters kill them for their skins. They make shoes and belts.”
“Like Kitindi,” Charles recalls saying.
“No,” explained Father at the time. “The real Kitindi is all powerful and would not allow himself to be taken.”
“The snake,” Charles says suddenly to the clerk. “I’ll have the snake belt,” committing in that moment every bit of his spare money. His friends quickly gather around him to admire the daring purchase. As do the girls when he is back in school.
Charles is intrigued by the girls. They are not like Debra. These girls laugh and tease. They enjoy looking pretty. Especially the white girls in the school. And they are always eyeing him. Nearly six feet tall. Slim. Handsome. A young dancer with the playfulness of a puppy.
The headmaster’s two daughters — Julia and Dolores — especially seem to delight in his company. For Charles, they are pale, floating spirits. Their eyes wandering and enticing. Smiling in ways that Ugandan girls do not. They flirt.
What amazes Charles most is that Headmaster Hermitage doesn’t care in the least that his daughters flirt, even with the Ugandan boys. Charles knows that Father would punish his children severely were they to dare such behaviour: touching in public, blowing kisses.
Headmaster Hermitage is clearly a free thinker. Whatever that is. Charles soon realizes that white girls also apparently tell their parents almost everything.
Other than girls, Charles dreams of football. He makes the freshman team and quickly becomes its most valuable player, breaking records and receiving special mention in the school newspaper. He loves the attention this brings him, the unquestioning acceptance of others at the school. He fantasizes about playing in the national stadium.
As the year passes, Charles grows more confident with each success. The effort he puts into things he enjoys actually yields results. His achievements even go beyond him.
In his second year, the Mengo football team plays against the King’s Collegiate team, a school perhaps more famous than Mengo, in the Nakivubo National Stadium. It is a dream come true.
When Charles sends his parents a copy of a newspaper story about the game and the goal he scored, Father only advises him to pay attention to his studies. Nothing will satisfy Kanyunya now except straight As. Charles wavers around C. So, there are things he must keep from Father. How he spends his money. Who his friends are. And his growing skills as a student actor and dancer.
Father would probably not approve of Charles having so many willing dance partners. He waltzes like a silk ribbon blowing through the wind. He coils and lunges and angles to tango, rolls to rhumba, glides and skips to cha-cha beats. His British ballroom dance teacher loves his lithe, effortless grace and enthusiasm. So rare in boys of his age.
The headmaster’s daughters giggle and gossip with him as he leads them across the floor in his flared pants that float around long slim legs. Their arms cross his chest leaving tiny trails of girl on his satiny shirt. His soft leather boots shine and his hands curl the air.
“You are as pretty as a girl yourself, Charles,” the dark-haired Dolores tells him, when they take a break, the three of them standing together in a shadowed corner.
“Yes,” chimes in the fair-haired Julia, “as pretty as us. And as good a dancer. How can we ever know for sure that you are not really a girl?”
They smile mysteriously.
In third year, having won most of the school dance competitions, he volunteers to help run and judge them. When Mengo’s best dancers are invited to the local television studios to compete with schools from all across Uganda, the tension is feverish. Charles leads the Mengo dance team to victory. The lights bright and hot. The cameras moving. Directors. Sound.
Charles suddenly understands why he is on a stage and knows he never wants to leave. His audience loves him. They sing his praise and applaud him on. He has found his place to be.
In his last year at Mengo, Charles also takes drumming lessons, somewhat depressing news for Father who knows drummers are community born. “You don’t learn drumming,” Kanyunya tells him, “You inherit it. If your father is a drummer, then you will be a drummer.” Kanyunya does not understand drumming as a school subject. He does not understand drumming for fun or money. “Maybe they will throw coins at you, like a performing monkey.”
Charles learns the Ankole drum, cylindrical at one end and tapering at the other, composed of two skins. He watches older drummers tune the skins by heating them over fire and moistening them. He hears their deep drum voices that can imitate human speech.
Charles learns the Baganda drums. The big drum and the little drum — made from hollowed trees and the skins of rams — that resound in the night calling townspeople who move in a circle with burning lamps of clay and palm oil. He learns the talking drums of West Africa — the gangan, dundun, omele and djembe — used to announce importance and respect.
But if Charles’ drumming lessons depress Kanyunya, Charles knows that his study of acting with Mr. Makuba, the Ugandan English teacher, is probably driving Father to tears. “The stuff of childhood,” Father rages. And it is true. Theatre is not taken seriously by anyone Charles has ever known. It is considered showing off. Tawdry. Cheap entertainment. But Charles is drawn to it.
His first experience of a real play is a special visiting performance by a British troupe at Kampala’s National Theatre. When Charles learns that it will be Hamlet, however, his heart sinks. He does not like Shakespeare. He has never understood the words or the situations. On the other hand, he has never watched a Shakespearean play performed by real actors so perhaps it will make some sense.
He dresses for the occasion as if for a visit to church. The group enters the theatre building in awe. Nearly filled to capacity, the National is a huge rental hall, the largest indoor space he has ever seen, with a facade open to the air.
“That is so the spirits of the play can drift out when they want,” Mr. Makuba tells the class with a wink. “They are hard to catch,” he continues. “They come to life only on the stage or, if you are lucky, in your imagination.”
Mr. Makuba is thirty, an age that sounds very old to most of the students he teaches. They feel close to him but know he himself has touched the magic. They fear that part of him. The rumour is that he has also written some plays.
He ushers the students through the entrance and they find their numbered places. The group is excited and whisper enthusiastically as they settle themselves in the plush seats before a huge red curtain. What marvellous thing is behind it? they wonder. Is it safe? The mainly student audience holds its collective breath.
The theatre goes dark.
When the curtain opens, Charles is sure he is in a waking dream. His eyes are transfixed on the large square of light in front of him. A castle. Night. Guards.
“Who goes there?”
He is looking into another time and place. The story of Hamlet has come vividly to life. Its people talk and laugh and curse and cry. Others are watching too, but the dream is his alone and he is lost in it. At the intervals, he remains in his seat, only once daring to walk toward the stage where he looks down into the empty orchestra pit. As swords are drawn in the play’s last scene, he is somewhere far away. When it is all over, he leaves the theatre dazed.
Charles knows he has been transported. Transformed. But he has also been allowed to return. Was he ever in peril? Has he changed? He must have. Something raw and magnificent touched him. Delivered in whirls of smoke and unearthly screams. Delivered through sound and fury and flooding colour. Unbear
able moments of want and fear, hatred and hopelessness. Nothing has ever spoken to him like this. So directly.
The next day they speak in class of the experience with excitement. Now they all want to be actors. Near the end, Mr. Makuba announces his wish to put on one of his own plays with the class. “And if you do well,” he adds, “it will be recorded. And perhaps played on the national radio station. You might all become famous right across the country.”
Charles can’t believe his ears. He hadn’t even begun to consider where actors come from. What kind of people they must be to turn into others the way they do. Was it witchcraft? Or magic? How do you become someone else? And stay yourself.
“Acting is like putting on a mask,” says Mr. Makuba, as though reading his thoughts.
Charles conjures up masks. Ritual masks, with their huge features and fixed grins, connecting to the dead. Whole body masks of grassy swirls in which dancers spin and leap. The fixed wooden faces of otherworldly spirits carrying the essence of the ancestors.
“But Sir,” says Charles, “those actors we saw last night were not wearing masks.”
“We all wear masks,” responds the teacher, cautiously. “You have been wearing masks ever since you came to Mengo — the school blazer and tie, special pants and shirts. The girls too in their knee socks and skirts. These are your masks, not the masks of village children. You are playing another role now.”
“But does the mask change you?” asks Julia.
“Has it changed you,” asks Mr. Makuba “being here?” Before she can answer, he hands her a man’s felt hat from a hook on the wall. “Here, Julia, put this on.” Charles watches her tuck her sunny curls under it. Then she puts on a stern frown and puffs out her stomach.
“There you see,” says the teacher with a flourish of his arm, “now you look like gruff old Polonius!”
Charles looks at this old man Julia and laughs. Julia can never be anything but a perfect girl for him.
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