Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  The youths stopped shouting at the years and started walking toward Katikamu. Along the way, when they came to a house, they called the names of the residents and told them what the village whispered about them. When they came to Miisi’s house the youths called him a Russian idiot and a communist waste of education. At first, Miisi marveled at the success of Western anti-Russian and anti-communist propaganda. But then it dawned on him that the village resented his professed principles. Perhaps to them, his rejection of a lucrative job and a life of comfort in the city seemed a mark of conceit. Miisi choked in mortification as he remembered pontificating to men who had no alternative but to struggle all their lives, that he would rather be poor than hand degrees to students who did not earn them, that he had come to this decision after he had wasted money on a pretentious house. He cringed as he realized that the ability to take such a stand was exceedingly privileged. He had even inflicted on villagers notions of the uselessness of religion, warned them against the lures of the middle class and the lie of immigration to the West. Miisi had tried to recall exactly how he put these ideas. In retrospect, he should have pointed out that religion was crucial to society in terms of discipline and management of resources, especially at the family level. Immigration redistributed resources and middle-class values built nations. Miisi had closed his eyes in shame. For the first time, he considered abandoning his crusade to build interest in global issues among residents, a crusade that attempted to make his grand education relevant to the community.

  After his house, the youths had accused Widow Bakka, the oldest person in the village—no one knew how old Bakka was, ninety-something, perhaps a hundred years old—of defying death. Apparently, instead of dying the widow wiggled, like a snake, out of her old skin into a younger one. Every time she shed her skin, someone in the village died in her stead.

  “What are you waiting for, Bakka?” the youth demanded. “Do you think you’re a tree, that the longer you live the better timber you’ll make?”

  Even to Miisi’s atheist mind, the young of a community going around the village in the night wishing the old dead at the beginning of the year did not augur well.

  Now the bees?

  Miisi turned away from the irrational thought. To forge a link between the coincidental events of New Year’s Day and the arrival of the bees was tenuous.

  Presently, he heard his wife and his sister coming up the stairs. A light flashed through the door, then he heard the balcony door open and close. After ten minutes, he decided that the women were perhaps doing spiritual rituals for the bees. He attempted to turn and lie on his right side but an arrow of pain shot through his hip and he gave it up.

  3.

  “Wake up, Miisi,” his mother whispers. “Get up.”

  “Why?”

  “Got to go.”

  “Where?”

  “The stench is unbearable.”

  “Stench?”

  “I hope it will atone.”

  “Atone?”

  “Are you an echo? I said get up, it’s not safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Your brother, Baale. I know the path he took.”

  “But it’s night!”

  “Shhh, you’ll be safe with me.”

  “When the police catch you, they will take you away.”

  “Did you hear the police coming?”

  “I hear boots. Listen . . . they’re coming,” he whispers. “They must have heard you wake up, Mother. Hurry, run to bed.”

  Miisi’s mother jumps back into her bed. She is shivering. “Tell them to go away,” her teeth chatter. “I won’t do it again.”

  Miisi gets out of bed, goes to the door, opens it and calls out into the darkness: “Go away, she’s sleeping.” He closes the door and smiles at his mother even though it is pitch black in their bedroom and she can’t see his smile. “They’ve gone, Mother. They won’t touch you.”

  “Thank you, Miisi. You’re the only one I trust.”

  The shivering is subsiding. Her breathing is even. Miisi is falling asleep again.

  “Miisi, do you smell it?”

  Miisi pretends to be asleep.

  He marvels at himself. He can speak and contain his mother’s impulse to flee, yet he is just a baby lying on his back in his basket crib looking at the woven handle.

  A squeak, then the rustling of sheets. She is out of bed. She is getting dressed. Miisi should stop her but he cannot be bothered to wake up. He feels her hands seek his underarms. He is airborne. As she swings him onto her back, his arms and legs open in anticipation and grip her body. He should wake the family, but it is so cozy on her back. No doubt they will hear her leave. She has stepped out of the bedroom. One, two, three, four, five steps in the hallway. She unlatches the back door. Someone shouts, “She’s escaping. She’s got Miisi.”

  Struggling at the door.

  “Let me go.”

  “Who left the key in the door?”

  Strong hands wrench him off her back. He does not wake up. He is laid back in his bed. The house is quiet. Miisi is surprised that he did not wake up through it all. He must be dreaming. It does not make sense: dreaming when he is lying awake in a crib? Yet when he wakes, his mother is gone and there is a vast silence. No one talks to him about his mother. They think he is a baby. Yet, he sees everything. This bothers him. He wants to say, “You think I am a baby, that I don’t see what you do to my mother, but I do.” But when he speaks they smile at him and make gurgling sounds.

  Bump, bumpy, bumping. Miisi wakes up. She’s escaped. He did not hear her wake up or swing him onto her back. It is all right. He loves sleeping with his arms and legs wrapped around her. He can feel her buttocks rise and fall rubbing against his own as she walks: it is reassuring. He will not open his eyes: the dark will be frightening. What if a bad animal attacks them? She stops, bends over slightly, and tosses him further up her back. She tightens the cloth tying him. “Sleep,” she whispers. But his left ear, pressed hard on her back, hears deep vibrations running up her spine when she says “sleep.” She cradles his bottom in her hands to support him.

  Noises.

  “Poor child. On her back all night.”

  “Where were they this time?”

  “On the river banks as usual.”

  “What is it with her and Kiyira River? One day she will jump in.”

  “The child should be moved out of her bedroom.”

  “He won’t sleep anywhere else.”

  Yanked.

  Miisi moves from one set of hands to another. He does not open his eyes but he sees everything. His mother is struggling.

  “Give me back my child.”

  “Take the child away.”

  “Give him back.”

  “Ah ii . . . she’s bitten me.”

  “Hold her tighter!”

  Someone is running with him but Miisi turns and sees his mother’s face. There is blame in her eyes. Miisi shakes his head at her, “I didn’t call them.” Why does she blame him? Can’t she see he is just a baby? How could he have set them on her? “I was on your back all night,” he cries, but she looks right through him. They hold her hands and tie her. Someone says they should use a strong piece of cloth not a rope. Miisi tries to wiggle out of the hands holding him.

  “Don’t tie her like that,” he shouts.

  “He’s tired, poor child.”

  “Leave her alone.”

  “Oh, the baby smiled at me, did you see that?”

  Miisi kicks, throws his body around, and sinks his gums into someone’s flesh. The person smiles and gurgles at him.

  His mother cries.

  He cries too.

  They have brought his mother back from hospital already although they took her just a moment ago. She sleeps all day. Miisi has stolen her tiny red, yellow, blue, and green tablets. He sucks the sweet color off and spits the bitter white out. He is feeding his mother with a spoon even though he is a baby. When people see him, he expects them to marvel and say, “look, a baby is
feeding his mother,” but they don’t, as if it is normal for a baby on his back in the crib to feed his mother. She has grown fat.

  4.

  Miisi walked leisurely, his hands clasped behind him. He watched his feet come and recede, come and recede from under his kanzu. His shadow, in tow, was huge. Miisi was one with himself. A kanzu made him feel authentic: African, Ganda, a muntu. He came to the top of Katikamu Hill. On his right, the local Anglican Church was locked and deserted. In the same compound were the Church of Uganda primary and secondary schools. On his left were Katikamu SDA Church and both its primary and secondary schools. The Klezia and the Roman Catholic primary and secondary schools were further away in Kisule. The hill started to descend. Miisi walked down past the teachers’ quarters, past the rocky patch of land until he came to the huge falawo trees opposite the triangular junction. He turned into Kaleebu’s walkway.

  As he got to the house, a modest concrete block, Kaleebu’s wife saw him and called out in welcome. A child ran out of the house with a folding chair and placed it under the shade of a tree for him. Then Kaleebu appeared in the doorway, dressed in a kanzu as well. There was a mixture of surprise and pleasure in his smile.

  “What lies has the world been telling?” Kaleebu asked as they sat down.

  “Apart from the sun?”

  “Is the city roasting too?”

  “This year’s sun burns right through the loins.” Miisi shook his head.

  “And the president wants a fourth term.”

  “Don’t start on that leech.”

  “That man is like balding,” Kaleebu said. “Once it arrives it demands more and more space.”

  “That is our Africa. That is what circumstances have done to us.”

  “Aha, we Moslems watched as this president heaped insults on Idi Amin. We said, OK, let’s wait and see. Now we’re wondering whether it is the State House that turns every president swinish.”

  One by one, the members of Kaleebu’s family came to greet Miisi. Saying that it was late and that he would lose his appetite, Miisi declined the drink he was offered. This gave him time to consider Kaleebu’s words. He knew he had to tread carefully. Kaleebu was still haunted by Amin’s regime. Like many Moslems, who formed a minority, he felt implicated whenever a Moslem committed an offense. Miisi was sympathetic. Moslems had been vilified and marginalized during colonial times. Even after independence, Christian Ugandans had taken on the same attitude as the colonialists toward Moslems. Then Idi Amin came along. His horror not only stamped and sealed the horrible beliefs held about Moslems but conjured up new nightmares for them as well. Hence, any political discussion with Kaleebu always veered toward making sense of Amin’s regime. In a way, Miisi understood Kaleebu’s feelings of persecution. When he had lived in Britain in the 70s, he felt implicated whenever he read in the papers that a black person had stolen, murdered, or raped. Now he answered, “All politicians are the same: once in power they imagine that they’re the only ones with brains.”

  “What has this president done for the country, seriously?”

  “At least we can sit here and criticize him.”

  “But only his tribal region is prospering and he has brought back the Asians.”

  “At least one region’s developing,” Miisi said evenly. “I wish Obote and Amin had developed their regions: we would have fewer problems here in the south. As for the Asians, they have given the city a face-lift. My problem with this man is that he has snuffed out our self-belief.”

  “But he’s taking properties from Ugandans and giving them to Asians. How can that be right?” Kaleebu sat up.

  “He’s not giving them properties; he is returning their properties,” Miisi tried to explain. “The international community will not invest in Uganda until all properties Amin confiscated from Asians have been returned.”

  Kaleebu kept silent. Finally he said, “I know you’ll think that I say this because I am a Moslem and that I stand by Amin blindly, but don’t you think this president is taking us back to those old days of ‘Boy this’ and ‘Boy that’? Who doesn’t know how cruelly Asians treated us? Maybe you educated people don’t but for us who worked in their shops or homes, the idea of having them back is sickening.”

  “Those days are long gone. Asians return as equals. Besides, they learned to call us ‘Boy’ from the British.”

  “The problem with Amin was not that he killed people; who hasn’t? Amin’s sin was that he killed the untouchables—the educated. Where Amin killed an Archbishop, Obote killed a hundred peasants. Did the world cry out?”

  “On second thought, I’ll have a glass of water,” Miisi said.

  “Someone bring us a glass of water,” Kaleebu called. Then he carried on, “When the British love you, they wash the ground you tread white with praise, but let them turn against you . . .”

  A child brought a glass of orange juice and Miisi was disappointed. Juice would not quench his thirst. He considered repeating his request for a glass of water but decided against it. When he put the glass down, Kaleebu carried on. “The British said that Amin killed his son Moses and ate his heart but Moses’s mother returns to Uganda and says that her son is alive in France.”

  “We cannot blame the West for the way they present Africans in their media: what do you expect? Our savagery is their civilization. It justifies everything. My problem is the Africans who, knowing this, give them the opportunity. If only African buffoons realized how they drag every black person in the world down in the mud with their follies, they would reconsider.”

  “Of course, Amin was a tyrant. I’ll be the first to tell you that, but how much of Amin is myth?”

  “Anyone can separate myth from fact.”

  “Can they? How much of that dehumanization in the media actually dehumanized Amin as a person?”

  “Of course no one believes he had people’s heads in his fridge, but Namanve was real. Amin was exaggerated because that sort of thing was unexpected so soon after independence. By the time Obote II and the others set in, we were numb, save for Moslems who were feeling it for the first time.”

  “My friend, you think we Moslems were the people Amin gave the shops to when he took them from the Asians?”

  “I am saying that Moslems didn’t feel Amin the way we did. Non-Moslem men got circumcised and acquired Moslem names hoping it would protect them: have you forgotten?”

  “I’ll tell you this, Miisi. Yes, there were people I know who prospered during Amin’s regime but there were also Moslems who were killed by Amin and there were Christians who gained from him. You don’t realize that the vast majority of Ugandans didn’t feel Amin as harshly as you did. We peasants, apart from the lack of soap, sugar, salt, and those little luxuries we could no longer afford, Amin kept away from us. I might be uneducated, but I know that embargoes were clamped on the country. Even if the fools Amin gave the factories and shops to could trade, where would they do it, with whom? However, you the elite had never known a car without petrol and, Oh the drive-in has been closed, so you imagined we all suffered the same.”

  “Surely you must have suffered?”

  “We suffered the war from Tanzania and persecution afterwards because we were Moslems.”

  “Surely—”

  “No, Miisi, you are the educated one. Tell me, what was wrong with Amin? He was human. What made him do what he did?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe he was a monster like the Europeans said?”

  “I’ve never thought it through.”

  “I’ll tell you why you’ve never thought it through my friend: because Amin was Moslem.”

  “That is not fair.”

  “Consider this. Amin came from the smallest and most despised tribe, the Kakwa. He was a northerner. He was uneducated. He was Moslem. I mean, you Christians had adopted the Europeans’ view that all Moslems were imbeciles—only good as shopkeepers, drivers, or butchers. It never occurred to you that to forcefully baptize our chi
ldren when they went to mission schools kept us away from Western education. Did you know that it was Amin who introduced schools for Moslems: that he even went to OIC to ask for an Islamic university so that we could have an education acceptable to us?”

  “I am sure he did some good somewhere, but—”

  “I’ll use your rationale, Miisi. As a president, Amin was first surrounded not only by Christians and the educated, but by southerners, especially us, the arrogant Ganda, who looked down on everyone. Not to mention the Western media that presented him as a cannibal. Is it possible that Amin lashed out to frighten people as much as he was frightened?”

  Miisi rubbed his hands up and down his face as if removing something sticky. Kaleebu stopped, ashamed of his outburst. He knew that in Uganda to say anything positive about Idi Amin was blasphemous. He dropped the Idi Amin subject and turned to Obote. “Obote avoided the educated because you people scream so loud that they hear you across the seas,” Kaleebu smiled. “Instead, he terrorized us peasants and there were no embargoes this time, were there?”

  “You see,” Misirayimu started, “this is exactly what happens when a society is gripped with the notion of an almighty God. What would stop their leaders from emulating Him? Can you criticize your God? Can God be held accountable? God-fearing people tend to ape their deity in their own perverted way.”

  “Ah, there you stray, my friend. When it comes to questioning Allah, we part company.”

  “This ‘God’ is unashamedly bent on annihilating other gods: is it surprising that the people who believe in him are intolerant themselves?”

  “In this conversation,” Kaleebu was shaking his head, “I have hit the wall, my friend. I can’t go any further.”

  “Kaleebu, I listened when you sounded me out on Amin. You made sense. Why can’t you listen to me?”

  “My friend, I talked about Amin, a man. You’re talking about God.”

  Miisi dropped his head. The evening had become cold. Darkness was falling. Mosquitoes swung above Kaleebu’s head. “Time is in a hurry these days,” he sighed after a pause.