When Ruth sat down she looked around. The whitewashed main house was elevated. Five steps led to a wide verandah, which together with its balcony, skirted the house. On the right was a massive concrete water tank with two taps. The funnels channeling rainwater were held up below the roof all around the house and then down into the tank. The windows, open, were large and wooden with closed screens of mosquito meshing. The roof was ridiculously high, like a church’s. The outdoor kitchen was as big as Kanani’s entire house. On the other side of the main building were the toilets and bathrooms. In front of the aluminum building, where the lorry had been, Ruth saw a wide concrete slab of at least twenty-five square meters. Spread on it were coffee beans, some still red-ripe, some grayish-dry. Children were sweeping and collecting the beans into heaps; older boys were packing them into sisal sacks and carrying the sacks into the aluminum building. The smell of drying coffee was everywhere.
“Stop staring, children. Have you no manners?”
Magda stepped from behind the house. She threw her arms in the air and hastened in joy, “Oh, whom do I see? My brother and, oh: is this our child Nnakato?” She was clearly overwhelmed. “My rude children have not offered you a seat?” She stopped in shock, looking at Kanani. “I’ll kill them today . . .”
“No, no, no, I told them I would not sit,” Kanani said quickly.
“What have I done to deserve this visit?” Before Kanani answered Magda pulled Ruth to her bosom. “I am sorry but I am a mess with happiness.”
Ruth stared. Magda was Kanani in a feminine form. Kanani began to say that he was not staying long but Magda, joining Ruth on the mat, turned to face her.
“Nnakato, how you’ve grown, my child!” Then she looked at Kanani. “Where is our wife Faisi and our son Wasswa?”
“They couldn’t come.”
“They don’t know me. My own children,” she looked at Ruth sadly. “You would walk past me on the street, wouldn’t you?”
“You look like Father exactly,” Ruth hoped to reassure her aunt.
“Aha, well said, child. He calls me cousin, the English way, to distance unwanted relatives. But blood speaks.”
“I need to whisper, Magda,” Kanani said impatiently.
Magda chided the still-staring children for lingering. The children laughed and scampered away.
Magda was only too happy to help but she enjoyed the tortured look that had replaced Kanani’s enduring righteous face. Finally, he and his crocodile of a wife had realized they needed blood relations after all. The fact that Kanani and Faisi could not handle a simple situation like teenage pregnancy made Magda feel validated: they had come to her. And then there was the snub—Kanani would neither sit down nor have refreshments in her home. He had talked to her standing like a tree. Hence, Magda could not help adding a touch of pepper to Kanani’s sores.
“Do you want it plucked?”
“No, no, no, all we ask is for you to look after Ruth until . . . she is . . . untied.”
“I am sorry I asked,” Magda said, clearly not sorry. “But you know, we’re family. No one needs to know.” Now Magda whispered, “I know someone who can pluck it out just like that.” She snapped her fingers as if flicking a speck of dirt and Kanani stepped back.
Even as he asked for her help, Magda noticed Kanani’s eyes darting around her home. She knew he was looking for signs of heathenry like traditional earthenware, barkcloth, herbs, or a prayer basket with smoked coffee beans and coins. Magda wished she had a traditional smoking pipe with three heads to puff and mutter beneath the smoke to confound him.
Yet, as Kanani bid his daughter goodbye, Magda could see his pain. “Ruth,” he said. “God is with us even in our darkest hour.”
Ruth nodded but she did not seem to see the darkness. However, Magda was not letting Kanani off easily.
“What do you want me to do with the baby when Ruth is . . . untied? I can keep the baby if you want.”
“I want to bring up my child,” Ruth protested quickly.
“Send me a word and I’ll collect Ruth and the child. I’ll send money every month with the Zikusooka bus driver. Give him any letters you want to send.”
“I was only checking. You never know with you civilized people. We don’t want our blood wandering rootless in an orphanage.”
Kanani turned away. Magda knew that her words had knocked him hard. For a moment, she wished she could call them back, but Kanani was walking away from her house, his stance discouraging any inclination to walk with him. As she watched him go, Magda wondered how thought rolled in that head of his. Christianity messed with the mind: how else would she explain Kanani who had frozen all his humanity to turn into a walking Bible? She turned to Ruth. “My name is Bweeza but you can call me Magda.”
“I will call you Aunt Bweeza,” Ruth smiled.
“Then, I’ll call you Luusi, your English name.”
Magda promptly put Ruth on a traditional antenatal regime of crushed herbs in her morning bath and an herbal mixture to drink. Ruth acquiesced without complaint, without enthusiasm. Magda grabbed every opportunity to pass on scraps of family history.
“Did you know we’re descendants of a great Ppookino in Buddu?” When Ruth shook her head she asked, “So you know nothing about Kintu our ancestor?”
“No.”
Magda decided not to divulge the information about the curse. If Kanani had chosen not to warn his children, then it was up to him.
“But you know that we don’t slap children on the head?”
“Yes, we have a medical problem in the head.”
“Is that what you were told?” Magda laughed.
Ruth nodded.
Now Magda’s face clouded. Three months of looking after her but Ruth would not discuss the man who owned her condition. She had asked a few times, but Ruth was not forthcoming. Magda was tempted to ask again but she let it pass. Probably it was another child who was as confused as Ruth. Instead she said, “I know your parents each have one foot in heaven already but what right do they have to take away your twin names?”
“I don’t know.”
“The day I meet a white man called Kintu is the day I’ll call myself Magdalene.”
“It’s all Christianity,” Ruth now knew the right words to say to Magda.
“It is, child. Our family dived too quickly, too deeply into Christianity.”
Magda told Ruth about their ancestor, Nekemeya, the first Christian in the family who became a teacher. “But ask yourself,” Magda said, “How was he a teacher around the 1890s? Christianity arrived in 1877: thirteen years later Nekemeya was a teacher? Sometimes I fear that we descend from the very first Ganda to sell the nation to the white man.”
“It’s hard to tell who was what back then,” Ruth said.
She felt no guilt for selling out Ganda tradition for Christianity. She felt nothing for naming, for culture, or for the grand patriarch Kintu. What she felt was a profound regret that she was born at all and had to bear her parents. Now, in the absence of Job, the only thing Ruth hinged her life on was the tadpole in her stomach. Lately, she had felt it swim noisily across her womb.
When Magda’s efforts to familiarize Ruth with family history failed, she focused on Ruth’s pregnancy. She showed her herbs to slacken her pelvic bones and ease birth, herbs to galvanize a newborn’s skin, and the clay, emumbwa, for strong bones and teeth. She woke Ruth up early every morning and sent her on a four-mile walk.
“Don’t let him sleep all day. You don’t want to work with a lazy child during labor.”
On her return, Bweeza would strip Ruth for a cold bath during which she rubbed herbs at the base of her belly with downward strokes. “The baby is properly aligned,” she would remark with satisfaction. In the evening, she would ask if Ruth had felt the baby move. When Ruth said that she had not, Bweeza would say, “Go down to the well and fetch water in a pan three times.”
Even the day that Amin took power from Obote, Ruth went to walk. That morning Ruth found all the r
epressed Ganda anger over Obote’s exiling Kabaka Muteesa II spilling in the roads everywhere in villages and trading centers in songs, dancing, and poetry. All this was new to Ruth. She had been unaware of the anger—her parents never discussed politics, as all worldly concerns were nothing but wind.
When she got back home, Bwanika, Magda’s husband who had spent the week with the family, was preparing to return to the main farm in Kapeeka where his first wife lived. Magda’s husband had three homes. Each home had a wife and a farm. Magda had coffee and cotton shambas, the first wife reared cattle while the third lived on the poultry farm. Bwanika spent two weeks with his first wife and a week each with Magda and the third wife in Ssemuto. During Bweeza’s week when he was around, Bwanika inspected coffee and cotton shambas, paying the workers. Then he went around the village talking to the residents.
Magda was a different woman in that week. Her words were few and mild. She wore her non-work clothes. She did not work in the garden and did most of the cooking herself. Bwanika was treated with reverence by the family whenever he came. When Ruth saw Magda kneel before him an image of Faisi kneeling before Kanani crossed her mind and she burst out laughing. Although Bwanika was friendly and tried to talk religion with her, Ruth preferred him away. She sensed a slight strain in the air, as if the children, not used to having him around, did not know what to do with him. As soon as he left, the air relaxed and the noise picked up. The pensive look on Magda’s face did not last. Soon she was vivacious again, her attention focused on Ruth.
8.
On May 21, 1971, Ruth woke up in the middle of the night. She was sure she had felt pain in the back, around her waist, but it was gone. As she fell asleep again, the pain struck again and she sat up. It came and went as fast as a flash—no lingering pain, just a mild need to open her bowels. She remained sitting up in the dark wondering whether it would return.
The toilets were outside, shrouded in the coffee shamba at the back of the house. Then the pain came back. It was as if a tiny metallic fist had punched her in a nerve. This time she was sure she needed the toilet. She decided to wake up one of the older girls to escort her.
They lit a hurricane lamp. Two children, who needed to relieve themselves, joined them. But when Ruth squatted on the latrine, nothing came out. As they walked back to the house, she did not tell the others that she had woken them up for nothing. She blew out the lamp and she prayed that the pain would not come back.
She had fallen asleep when it hit again. This time it was so intense that she ran outside without a lamp on her own. She squatted on the latrine again. Nothing came. She decided to stay on the toilet until the new pain came. In the meantime, her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. When the pain came, she stood up and grabbed the door instead of opening her bowels. As it subsided she squatted and pushed. Nothing.
She walked back to the house, found the matches, lit the lantern and took it to her room. It was as she sat on the bed that the thought crossed her mind. Perhaps the baby was coming! But wasn’t it three weeks too early? Perhaps she should wake Bweeza up. The problem was that the pain felt like diarrhea. It would be stupid to wake her up for that.
She did not go back to sleep. Whenever the pain came she was sure she should wake Bweeza up but when it went away she did not want to fuss. For a while Ruth hovered in the corridor between her door and Bweeza’s until a no-nonsense pain gripped and wrung her nerve. She gripped the door and ground her teeth. As it let go, it spread all over her stomach. Then her innards, as if made out of butter, were melting on a fire. She ran to Bweeza’s room and shook her, “Ssenga Bweeza, Ssenga Bweeza, Ssenga Bweeza!”
“What is it?” She sat up.
“It is my stomach. I think it is the bisa pains coming. It might be diarrhea but when I go to the toilet nothing comes out.”
Bweeza yawned. “How does it feel?”
“Urgent.”
“Urgent where? Is it in the back, in the front, or all over?”
“In the back first and then all over.”
“Is it a pushing pain, as if you must poo all your intestines?”
“No.”
“Well then, there is nothing to worry about. Could be something you ate. Don’t worry. You will eventually open your bowels, probably not tonight though. Get one of the metallic basins and put it in your room. When the pain comes, squat on the basin. Don’t go out to the latrine again.”
Ruth felt stupid as she walked out.
“Tell me if anything else happens.” Bweeza was already settling back to sleep.
Bweeza did not go back to sleep as she had made out. She had not been asleep when Ruth woke her up. She had heard her waking the girls up to go to the toilet. And when she ran out again, Bweeza had got up and kept an eye on the toilet. But she was not about to let Ruth know that the baby was coming because daybreak was still far away and, according to the intervals, she was still far off. Let her think it is just a stomachache, Bweeza told herself. I am not going to entertain hysterics for the rest of the night. According to the doctors at the hospital, Ruth was three weeks early. Bweeza sucked her teeth in contempt.
At about five o’ clock Bweeza got up, had a bath, packed a bag with a few kangas, a razorblade, and other things she would need if they did not make it to the hospital. Then she made breakfast.
Ruth would not eat.
At around six o’ clock Bweeza said, “OK, Luusi, time has arrived.”
But instead of hysteria, Ruth said, “I knew it. I am getting fed up with this pain.”
“Come and show me how far gone we are.”
Ruth ran to her bed and spread her legs. She was glad that her aunt was taking a look.
“Hmm . . .” Bweeza said as she turned her head to have a better look. “Good dilation . . . things are moving properly . . . yeah, you’re doing fine.” She patted Ruth’s legs. “Now get dressed. Someone in there is getting ready to come out.” She spoke as if the whole thing was a mild headache.
Bweeza asked a lad to come along with a bicycle in case they needed it. She had arranged for Bwanika to come around by the due date but the dates were wrong! Now she insisted that instead of riding on the bicycle, Ruth walked. Walking would hasten the birth. She put their bags on the bicycle’s carrier and they set off for hospital.
“In the past, I would’ve made you comfortable at home, called a few friendly women, and we would have sat and waited with you. Now we have to go to the specialists.” She threw her arms in the air.
Ruth did not respond.
And it was like that throughout the journey; Bweeza conducted a one-sided conversation because Ruth was in her own world while the lad wheeling the bicycle watched Ruth nervously.
“You are a tough girl, Luusi,” Bweeza said. “Me, I’d be howling by now.”
Either Ruth did not hear or she was saving her energy.
“When you feel it coming on, stop and grab me or grab a tree until it lets up.”
But when pain gripped, Ruth would go down on her knees and Bweeza would pull her off the ground saying, “Hang on me, the ground is dirty.”
The lad would stop wheeling the bicycle, grip the horns, and look into the bush. When it let go, Ruth would run past him as if she had not been dying a few moments before.
“See you at the hospital,” she would say.
“Isn’t this a party?” Bweeza panted as she tried to keep up with her. “Here is a story to tell, young man.”
“Had I known it goes like this I wouldn’t have come.”
“Oh, it goes like this, young man. Remember that next time you make a woman lie on her back.”
When they arrived at the hospital, Ruth was examined by a nurse who determined that the baby had engaged. She was taken to a large ward where women in all forms of pain and states of undress were kept. Still, between the throes of pain, the women managed to ask Ruth how old she was. As soon as Ruth’s pains started again, she began to push as well; she screamed, “Something is coming, it is pushing!” but the nurses did not ru
sh as she had expected. One of them brought a wheeling bed and took her to the delivery room.
“Primigravida, fourteen years old?” A no-nonsense nurse asked as she pushed a trolley with all sorts of instruments laid out on it toward them.
The nurse wheeling Ruth nodded.
“Strap her in! I am not going to have her holding my hands and throwing herself about.”
Ruth did not care what the nurses did to her. She just wanted the thing out of her because, at that point, she had decided that whatever was inside her could not be human.
She was helped into a chair with straps on the armrests and footrests on its legs with straps too. Her hands were strapped on the armrests, her legs spread wide and tied at the ankles on the footrests.
“When the pushing pain comes, push. No playing around in this place!”
Perhaps it was the nurses’ attitude—If she is still a child, why was she sleeping with men—toward her that made Ruth strong. The pushing pain came once and the second time a baby boy was out.
By evening, the nurse suggested that Ruth and the baby could go home if they wished. Magda went to the roadside and hired a car. On the way home, she made sure that there were no roadside stoppings by curious women. As soon as they arrived, she fed Ruth and put her to bed. Then she performed all the birth rituals she wished for the child. By the time word got round the village that Ruth had unknotted and women started streaming in, Magda had protected the baby against any conditions, deliberate or accidental. The following day she asked Ruth, “Do you know his name yet?”
“Yobu.”
“Ah, after your twin?” Magda was surprised. Most girls would give their child a fanciful name or name them after the boyfriend. “I like the Ganda version better,” Magda smiled.
In the first two weeks, Magda would wake Ruth up to nurse the baby, have a bath, eat her porridge, and then go back to sleep. There were so many eager hands in the home yearning to carry Yobu and to do the laundry but Ruth wanted to keep the baby close. She insisted on putting him in her bed, she checked on him if he slept too long, and she looked anxious as he was moved from one set of hands to another. However, Bweeza was insistent: Ruth’s task was to recover.
Kintu Page 20