Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  As Buganda faded and Uganda started to take root, it became clear that education was paramount in the new nation. Attitudes toward the schooling of children among commoners started to change to the point where educating children was the same as putting money away into a pension fund. By the late 50s, fathers close to European civilization realized that an educated daughter made for a better pension fund than an educated son. Apparently, sons, after sucking their parents dry, fled the family nest without a backward glance. Ssemata and Ziraba tried to educate their children. However, term after term, their sons brought home uninspiring grades. One day, after looking at his brood’s school reports Ssemata said, “Only my girl takes after my sharpness, the boys opted for their maternal dimness.”

  Ssemata’s sons, having been vexed by study, asked if every successful man in the world was educated. When the answer came back negative, they dropped out of school. Besides, education took too long to yield results. They could start trading slowly-slowly. Ssemata laughed, “I’ve put food on your plates but you couldn’t pick it up to eat: what makes you think that you will hunt, cook, and feed yourselves?”

  “Nonetheless, it still rains in the desert.” Ziraba, accused of being the source of the boys’ dimness, now defended them.

  And so the boys prowled Kampala streets looking for opportunity and luck while Nnamata sailed through the classes. At fifteen—they started primary school at nine in those days—she was in her final year of primary school. Ssemata planned to sell some of his land in the village so he could send her to a Catholic boarding secondary school for girls. There, she would be safe from the potential landmines of puberty. He was not a demanding father: Nnamata was only a girl. If she could become a nurse, a teacher, or even a secretary and catch a rich husband he would be content. Educated men now wanted their wives neither “raw,” without education, nor “well done,” with too much schooling.

  But before Nnamata got to the nuns’ boarding school, puberty set in and upset Ssemata’s plans. She rounded out into a body made for pleasure. Her skin smoothened and shone. Her rear was generous and provocative. When she walked, it rose in such sharp challenge and then dropped in scornful regret. Men, convinced that she shook it on purpose, twitched their legs as she walked past and swore under their breaths, “If I ever get my hands on her . . .”

  Katanga was not the place for a young girl to possess that kind of body if she wanted to put nature on hold. Some men still thought that to keep a girl in school past the age of fifteen was an act against nature.

  Ssemata watched this dialogue between Nnamata’s body and the men with a sharp eye. First, he put her in long shapeless skirts, then under curfew. He made it known all over Katanga that he kept a sharp machete at the ready by filing it publicly every evening. Once, he chased a lad wearing just his briefs. The lad, thinking that Nnamata was bathing in the communal bathroom, had put his case to her in poetry. Ssemata had listened in silence. When he could no longer take it he had whispered, “Wait there, I am coming.” He barely managed to get into his briefs and pick up the machete. He chased the lad down Katanga’s muddy corridors swearing, “I’ll kill someone if you don’t leave my girl alone.”

  As clever as she was Nnamata was not strong in mathematics. Mr. Puti Kintu, the math teacher at Bat Valley Primary School, offered to give her free private tuition.

  “Nnamata is our star student this year,” he had told Ssemata on parents’ day. “But math is a problem. I am ready to sacrifice an hour every day after school if she can stay behind.”

  Ssemata bowed and bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care. To Nnamata, Mr. Kintu was a teacher, a grown-up, and he was helping her. So when he pushed her against the wall breathing, hmm, you girls always say no. Yet you shake your buttocks like that? Respect, gratitude, and fear paralyzed her. Afterwards, the math lessons continued and Nnamata kept quiet. Normally, silence washed things like that away, but this time it watered it and the deed grew. It was not long before Katanga was laughing, and, like everyone else in Katanga, her father did not buy Nnamata’s story of rape. If he raped you, why didn’t you tell us?

  At first, in private negotiations, Ssemata said to Mr. Kintu, the math teacher, “I am a fellow man: I come to you with understanding.” But Mr. Kintu thought it was ridiculous that he should be asked to pay a father and marry a girl who had not completed her primary education. He would look after his child, no doubt about that, but there was no way he was marrying a slum girl. Mr. Kintu did not realize that the issue had nothing to do with defiling a minor. Rather, it was about theft from a pension fund. Had Mr. Kintu paid the money to the wronged father and married his daughter, Ssemata would have congratulated Nnamata for pulling a teacher so easily. When he did not, Ssemata, at last, believed that Nnamata was forced. By 1961, when Isaac was born, Mr. Kintu was serving time in Luzira Maximum Prison. Contemplating his children after the tragedy unfolded, Ssemata spat, “Such wasted sex. I should have slept instead!”

  The English saying that a man shouldn’t place all his eggs in the same basket suddenly made sense. A few months later, Ssemata left Ziraba to find another basket in which to place his eggs.

  Ziraba had another daughter, Tendo. The pregnancy took her by surprise. When she asked the friend who had taken her to the healer what happened, it was put to her that sometimes a determined child can hoodwink even the strongest medicine.

  Nnamata, whose last lesson in school was on the law of gravity, named her child Isaac Newton. Because her math teacher was Mr. Kintu, she baptized him Isaac Newton Kintu. In the name Isaac Newton lay all Nnamata’s vanished dreams. But Isaac Newton was an ugly baby. Even Nnamata agreed with her brothers, “Yes, mine’s the ugliest child the sun has ever shone on.” For a while, assured by her mother that all newborns are hideous, she waited for Isaac to transform. Six months after his birth, when Isaac Newton failed to turn into a cute baby, when Nnamata could not find anything on the little body to anchor her love, she ran away into the night.

  4.

  Isaac was eight when Ziraba first saw him talking to someone invisible. He stood under the avocado tree next to their house. He waved a long stick angrily. Ziraba looked about but there was no one. She let it pass. Isaac was too young to have run mad. In any case, for once, he seemed passionate about something. There was nothing threatening about a child who talked to the wind. Even then, every time she saw him talking to himself, Ziraba looked about.

  Then, one day, she heard Isaac arguing to the point of crying. No one had ever aroused such emotion in him. Ziraba came out to see. Isaac was pointing a finger at someone close by. Whoever it was, was taller than him because Isaac was looking up.

  “You can go back wherever you came from, if you don’t want to play by the rules . . . I don’t care! Go away. I didn’t call you . . . Hmm hmm, not my fault . . . Not my problem, leave me alone!”

  Ziraba ran out of the house, whisked Isaac off the ground, and ran back inside. After a while, she peered out of the window and listened. Nothing happened—nobody came, no sound but the wind. She turned to Isaac.

  “Who was that?”

  “Where?”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Where?”

  “Just now, there, outside.”

  “I haven’t been talking to anyone.”

  Now his grandmother’s fear frightened him.

  “You were arguing.”

  “Oh, that one,” Isaac wiggled out of her grip. “He’s my friend.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Isaac shrugged.

  “Where does he come from?”

  “I don’t know. From around I think.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  Isaac shrugged again.

  “When did he start coming?”

  “He’s always been there.”

  “Since when?”

  “Always.”


  “Where’s he now?”

  “Where is he now?” Isaac looked at his grandmother with exasperation. “I don’t know. He’s gone, I shouted at him.”

  From that day on, Ziraba watched Isaac closely. She must have whispered to her friends for they watched him as well. He heard the women saying, “Why don’t you find his roots? Take him to meet his people. Some clans have all sorts.”

  “Especially undeclared children: blood cries out for its own.”

  “It’s the burying of the dead close to the house that encourages them to return and haunt you,” Ziraba answered cryptically. “I’ve no money to find his clan.”

  It was his friend’s coaxing that made Isaac leave his cozy corner in the house to go outside and play. The first time Ziraba saw him outside, she gasped, “Oh, my kapere is done now,” as if Isaac had been indulging in a particularly long sulk.

  “Yes,” Isaac had said, holding onto a wall unsteadily.

  “Then I suggest you spare the neighborhood your nudity.”

  Isaac started walking and talking on the same day. But Ziraba had no time for indulgent notions of trauma. She only remarked to her friends, “Nnamata’s child is finally ready to face the world.” And that was that.

  Ziraba had begun to doubt her fears about Isaac’s “friend” when one day she heard him giggling and whooping with laughter. There was no one else in the house to laugh with. Tendo was married—that is, she had fallen pregnant and moved into the guilty man’s room. The boys had long scattered. Besides, no human could elicit such merry laughter from Isaac. Ziraba went to see. The hair moved off her head.

  There, on the floor of the lounge, was Isaac playing with an enormous snake. It wound itself around his waist as he crouched on the floor laughing merrily. Then he raised his torso off the floor and balanced on his toes and hands. The snake caressed him with its coils, around his stomach and down his chest until it was in his face. Isaac stuck his tongue out at it and once again collapsed into laughter as it copied him.

  That was when Ziraba remembered to scream.

  “What is it?” Katanga called.

  “A snake is killing my child.”

  Katanga was so close-knit that neighbors could hear each other farting. Everyone cared. As one of the men tried to get into the house, the snake balanced on its coils and widened its neck. It charged toward the steps and the men scattered. Isaac, now catching their terror, screamed too. Ziraba shouted in the window, “Don’t move, Isaac! Stay still,” but Isaac shrieked and shrunk into a corner.

  When the men scattered, the snake pulled back its neck, sank to the ground, and turned to Isaac. The men regrouped and came back with more courage. This time, the snake coiled itself once and launched into the air. The men fled. The snake glided back to the house but turned, slithered along the wall, past the latrine and disappeared into the swamp.

  The neighbors advised Ziraba to sprinkle her rooms with kerosene and to kill the rats because that was what brought snakes. But she was suspicious.

  “Was that your friend, Isaac?” she asked.

  “I thought he was but—”

  “But what?”

  “It was a snake, wasn’t it?”

  “Was that the first time it visited you?”

  “No. Sometimes he sleeps in my bed.

  “Don’t worry, Ziraba,” a neighbor said. “In nature, snakes don’t harm children, especially ones that live in a house.”

  “It’ll try to come back. Make sure you get a mason to cover all the holes and cracks in the wall, floor, and roof,” another advised.

  “Don’t worry, snakes are like that. You can live with them for years and years without knowing. Once they get your sleeping pattern, they slither in and out unnoticed.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Could be family things, you know. Has the boy been taken home yet?”

  “That’s why we don’t kill house snakes—you never know.”

  “That boy has a strong taboo on his head. I’d be careful if I were you, Ziraba. He sat silent for seven years, then suddenly he walked and talked in one day?”

  “No wonder it fought gallantly.”

  As each resident shared their snake stories, Ziraba relaxed. That night, she sprinkled the house with kerosene and the following day a man filled in the holes in the wall. She planned to go to Luzira Maximum Prison to talk to Mr. Kintu the math teacher but she never got around to it.

  That day, Isaac was not given the chance to tell them that they had got it wrong. His friend did not come as a snake only: sometimes he was a lizard, a bird—all forms. When he came, Isaac knew it was him. Once he was crying when a leaf floated through the window and fell on his hand. It was not an avocado leaf yet there were no other trees around. Isaac had stopped crying at once. Even though he had navigated childhood without the intimate touch of love—no one ever tickled him or rubbed their cheeks against his or blew into his tummy to make him laugh, he never fell asleep with his head cradled between a loving neck and shoulder—he instantly knew the love of his friend.

  The following year, at ten years old, Isaac started primary school.

  5.

  Thursday, January 22, 2004

  Isaac reversed out of the packing yard of MTN headquarters. Because he was the on-call engineer for mast repairs in western Uganda that week, he drove a double-cabin Hilux truck. He did not know why or when he had changed his mind, but he and his son Kizza were on their way to the Joint Research Centre to take the blood tests.

  Isaac was back at work. To him, the phrase “life goes on” after the death of a loved one meant that time drags you along. Kizza was in the back seat. Though he had wiped his mother’s forehead ritually to say goodbye, and had watched her coffin lowered into the grave, he seemed unscathed by her passing. He had only asked once when they would pick her up from the grave, and when Isaac explained that they would not, Kizza had kept quiet. Isaac hoped that as Nnayiga had been ill for over a year and had been unable to look after him, Kizza had detached himself.

  They came to the top of John Hanning Speke Road near the top of Nakasero Hill. It was an affluent area with plush hotels, expensive cars, few pedestrians, and hideous Marabou storks. When Isaac turned into Speke Road, he realized something was wrong with the birds. Some had perched on the walls of Standard Chartered Bank, their gular sacs hanging down their necks like long scrotums. Others strutted Speke Road pavements like they paid tax. As he came down toward the General Post Office, he saw why. Urchins, looking like black vultures themselves, were up the trees pulling down the birds’ nests. Others were on the ground hurling stones, cans, and obscenities at the storks. Pedestrians kept close to buildings, watching nervously. A fight between street kids and the storks was a family affair: it was volatile and you didn’t interfere. Probably, Isaac surmised, an urchin had died in the gutters and the storks had found him first.

  It was two weeks after Nnayiga’s burial that Kaaya, a friend who checked on Isaac every evening, broached the question of blood tests. Apart from the sappy smell of the coffin timber that still lingered in the sitting room, the house was back to its old self. Kaaya chose the moment when Isaac’s mother was present, to enlist her support.

  “This time, Isaac, we’re doing things right. We need you to take a blood test so we can start treatment.”

  There was a moment of silence as irritation crossed Isaac’s face. His mother looked down at the floor.

  “What’s the use of a blood test?” he finally asked. “What didn’t you see?”

  “There was no post-mortem—”

  “Have you just arrived from New York? Post-mortem indeed!”

  “And there was no comprehensive diagnosis apart from the unexplained kidney failure.” Kaaya carried on despite Isaac’s sarcasm.

  “Yes,” Isaac’s mother now picked up the thread, “the vast majority of us decide we have ‘it’ because a partner died.” Kaaya shook his head sadly. “That is Africa. People who’ve never seen the inside of a lab make diagnoses: She has it because we saw
her with so-and-so who is dead. And what is incredible is that these diagnoses are never wrong because if a person does not exhibit any symptoms they’re either on a fattening diet or are labeled a ‘carrier’ of the virus who gives it to partners but never suffers from it.”

  “But most people pointed at end up dying nonetheless,” Isaac said.

  “Dying of what? Probably some die of the anxiety that comes with being ‘diagnosed.’”

  “It’s as if before this thing came there was no death,” Isaac’s mother said evenly.

  “All I am asking, Isaac, is for you to take a blood test. No one doubts that it is what you think, but it helps to have ink on paper.”

  “Tell him, Kaaya,” Isaac’s mother said. “Maybe he’ll listen to you. I ask myself, if an educated person like Isaac can hold backward views like that, what chance do we illiterates have?”

  “It’s now possible to live another fifteen to twenty years just by changing your lifestyle and starting treatment early. In the past, we used to see this disease walking up and down the streets, now you can’t tell any more. Give your child and yourself a chance.”

  “Can’t I start treatment without a checkup?”