Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  “It is because we are getting old,” Kaleebu laughed, visibly relieved that Miisi had dropped the blasphemous talk.

  Miisi drank up his juice and said that he should go home. Kaleebu mumbled something about the night falling like a stone and Miisi said that it was a great metaphor for old age. Presently, he bid Kaleebu goodnight and called his wife to say he was leaving. She said that supper was almost ready, the way the Ganda do even though they would be shocked if you accepted the invitation. Miisi said that he would stay for supper another time.

  When he stood up, his shadow sprung up, a giant walking ahead of him. The moon was out early. The two men walked in silence through the darkened coffee shamba until they came to the road. When he turned, Miisi’s shadow veered and walked by his side, half its size. Kaleebu bid Miisi goodnight.

  Miisi was chastising himself for letting the conversation get out of hand. He had come to find out what it was exactly people had against homosexuality but ended up talking about Idi Amin. He should have never mentioned God. He wondered whether he would ever gather the courage to raise the homosexual issue.

  “I’ve seen you there.”

  Miisi looked up and saw Nyago waving at him.

  “Oh, I hadn’t seen you.”

  “Because darkness is on the black man’s side,” Nyago laughed.

  “And by God he has paid for it.”

  “Come on and join me.” Nyago invited. “I’m having a late cup of tea, on my own. Such is the lot of men like me.”

  “Eh eh, I am going to miss that cup of tea. Where’s your wife?” Miisi teased.

  “What would I do with my wife?”

  “Have tea conversation with her.”

  “Do you talk to your wife? I mean real conversation?”

  “It depends on the woman.”

  “Maybe women in the city but a peasant’s wife: what does she know beyond breastfeeding? Besides,” Nyago whispered, “When you talk to her as an equal she gets ideas. Next, she’ll be ordering you around. And she’ll do it when you are in the company of other men, to show off.”

  Miisi laughed uncomfortably and started walking home. He claimed that time was moving faster than him, that he should have been home already, that he would return another day for that cup of tea and Nyago expressed pretend disappointment.

  When he arrived home, Miisi went straight upstairs to his bedroom. He reached for his pen and paper to prepare an article for his column. It was a wasted evening: his ideas on sexuality were getting nowhere. He wrote in English:

  Homophobia: A Result of Fear Imagined or Real

  He did not like the title. It did not question the Ugandan notion that homosexuality was a Western export. Nonetheless, Miisi knew that whichever way he presented the idea, religion rather than logic would dictate the readers’ response. He wrote:

  Homophobia: Cultural Amnesia or Christian Erasure?

  He liked the internal rhyme, but how does one translate it into Luganda? He decided to put his thoughts in note form:

  Old gripes—this is who we/they are, right/wrong, normal/abnormal, natural/unnatural, ancestors’ words as gospel truth—are loosening.

  Nothing is above questionable anymore, no truths(?)

  What this has revealed is stunning.

  The world is more exciting to live in now than decades ago!(?)

  He yawned and decided to leave it at that. He might have better ideas tomorrow.

  5.

  It is dusk. Miisi is sitting on a three-legged stool near the angel’s trumpet shrub with his back against the hedge. His double-story house is a ruin. The roof and parts of the walls on the top floor are in disrepair. A man stands above him. Miisi feels imposed upon because he cannot see past the man. The man is covered with bees. He has a single hair on his head as thick as a big rope.

  “Get up and come with me,” the man says.

  Miisi knows he should ask: who are you? Come with you to where? But instead, he whines, “You know my hip is bad,” as if he and the man have known each other for a long time.

  “If you don’t come with me now, you’ll have to find me. I am not easy to find.”

  “But my hip—”

  “Hurry up.”

  The man has started walking. Miisi stands up reluctantly. There is nothing wrong with his hip, yet it has been giving him pain for a long time. He is worried that neighbors are going to see him walking properly: they’ll think he is a liar. Miisi hides behind the man covered in bees. It is critical that no one sees him walking without a limp.

  They walk through his compound and out toward the main road, only they don’t seem to be getting closer. A few bees fly off the man and then settle back. Miisi is not bothered by the bees. It is as if he has lived with men covered in bees all his life.

  Miisi and the man are standing on a hillside. They are surrounded by trees. The place is familiar even though Miisi is sure he has never been there. The bee man touches a tree and looks it up and down. “This tree will be at the center,” he says, as he walks around it, still looking it up and down. “It will make the central pole.” Miisi is puzzled but the man adds, “Find a tall man, ask him to take ten strides,” the bee man takes a stride, “In every direction around this tree and build a dwelling.”

  Now they are standing at another end of the hill. Miisi and the bee man have been together on the hillside for years now.

  “This is Nnakato,” the bee man points to the ground. “You must retrieve her and lay her properly.” He looks at Miisi: even his eyes are bees. The eyes are stern as if Miisi is a silly child. “You must observe everything carefully so that when you return with your brothers you can identify the sites. Nnakato is near a rock. You see that tree with a red bark? Don’t cut it down. It is the same tree from which she hanged herself. You can sit under it when your head throbs or when you’re anxious. Let its water drip on you. Come with me.”

  They move from site to site instantly like ghosts yet Miisi feels as though they have been touring for a long time. The sun is very bright, but the man’s bees are not bothered. Miisi wants to warn him that the sun will kill his bees, but he remains silent out of respect.

  They are standing in a wide clearing. The bee man is pointing out Miisi’s family. Miisi knows all of them because he buried them there.

  “Bring Nnakato over here. That is Baale on my left. Don’t disturb him. Lay Nnakato on his left. When you return Kintu, lay him on Nnakato’s left. The sun must set behind them. However, Kalemanzira must be laid on Baale’s right. Come with me.”

  Miisi looks back trying to catch a glimpse of Baale but the bee man is hurrying. They stand on a heath. All Miisi can see is desolation. The bee man leads him to a mound. He bends and blows the dust away.

  “There he is.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father. Haven’t you been looking for him?”

  “Oh, him,” Miisi remembers looking in rolled mats, behind doors, under tables, behind trees everywhere all his life. His father is a smiling face without a body. The smile is of shame rather than happiness. Miisi looks away.

  “How did he get here?”

  “Humans walk,” says the bee man but Miisi wonders how a smiling face walked. “He loved you.”

  “Thank God he died. If he loved me he would have killed me.”

  “He loved you.”

  “Mother loved me.”

  “Come with me.”

  Miisi is seven years old. He is walking behind the bee man. The man’s single hair rises on his head but collapses under the weight of the bees and trails on the ground like a snake. Miisi suppresses the childish urge to step on it: the bees would sting his feet. Miisi knows he has been with the bee man for a long time because he has grown a goatee like a Japanese wise man. This worries him because his beard normally thatches the entirety of his jaws. Yet he is still seven years old. The bee man points at a patch of ground overgrown by shrubs.

  “That’s where the lad is.”

  The bee man stands away from the grave.
The grave hums. It is a metallic hum. Miisi listens: it is the hum of an electricity transformer near his school. Miisi wants to reassure the bee man that the lad is harmless. People are harmless when they are asleep.

  “This is my home.” The man points to a cave covered in bees. “I’ll not return to your house. Go back and find your brothers. Return and build the house. Then wash in the gorge below the hill.”

  Miisi returns home. In no time, he and his many brothers have built the house but they are all monkeys swinging on trees.

  6.

  Miisi sat in an easy chair in the garden. His stunted shadow sat behind him. He gazed up at the vacant sky where the sun had been. The iron roof on his kitchen made popping sounds as it contracted after the day’s harsh sun. He looked at the angel’s trumpets; the flowers that bloomed the previous evening were dying and hung like a slaughtered cow’s tongue. Fresher ones were harassed by a constant stream of bees flying in and out of the white trumpets. Dead flowers on the ground hosted flies.

  Nnattu brought a cup of tea and two slices of bread. Miisi murmured thanks and put the tray down. He was preoccupied by the multitude of ants that had constructed highways on the ground. The ants carried a delicate cargo of white eggs. There were so many eggs that the highways were covered in white. However, the ants carrying unhatched brothers stopped and kissed every time they met, which was every inch of the way. Miisi looked on bemused: why stop to be polite when you’ve exposed your posterity to danger? Now here comes a hen.

  The hen took slow tentative steps toward the ants. Its beak was open as if it were gasping for water. The hen was ready to jump in case Miisi threw something at it. Finally, it reached the ants. It pecked once, liked it, and made a low glottal noise. A brood of yellow chicks, seven or eight, scurried out of the hedge and joined the hen, pecking madly at the ant eggs. Miisi looked at the ants fleeing but still stopping along the way to wish each other luck. He could shoo mother hen and her chicks away but he lacked the will. Nature is as such: its cruelty to one creature is a windfall to another. No one had shooed nature away from his children. Let them be eaten, he thought savagely.

  “Jjaja, would you like your tea reheated?” Nnattu asked.

  “Oh, wife, what I have done?” Miisi had forgotten about his tea.

  “There’s a bug in my tea. I wonder whether my little wife has some tea left in her kettle.”

  “There is.”

  “But the tea left in the kettle is for my little wife.”

  “I’ve had mine already.”

  “Then I’ll have it.”

  Nnattu picked up the tray and went to get more tea. Miisi bit into a slice of bread. The bread was so hard it grazed the roof of his mouth. Miisi wondered why bakeries in Uganda were obsessed with making bread sweet. He missed the old bakeries of the 60s when bread was not a vulgar cross between scone and cake but proper bread. Nnattu came back with a steaming cup of tea and he beamed at her. “I can’t remember what life was like without you.” But as he grabbed the cup, a cold shiver ran through him.

  “I’ll get your jacket,” and Nnattu was off to the house before he could stop her. The hen and chicks were pecking frenziedly.

  “You’re sure you don’t want another cup of tea?” he asked as she handed him his sweater. Nnattu shook her head. “Then sit with your husband and tell him stories like a good wife.”

  Nnattu giggled and rolled her eyes and scratched her arm exaggeratedly, looking up at him. He nodded that he was waiting and finally she called, “In old, old time—”

  “Kin, you were our eyes,” Miisi replied.

  And Nnattu repeated a story he had told her. She forgot parts that she patched with her own imagination. There were parts she was not sure of and she asked him to remind her and he said he didn’t know her story and she said he did and they argued and laughed. She sat on his lap. The night sky let out the stars, the bushes released fireflies, and the shrubs released fragrances. When the grass got damp with dew Miisi and his little girl stood up and went into the house.

  After supper, he lay on his bed waiting for sleep. An idea of how to illustrate colonization had been brewing in his mind since visiting Kaleebu. He was alarmed at the sheer lack of anger over European colonization among the residents. He sat up and scribbled the title in English:

  AFRICANSTEIN

  Then he translated the title into Luganda:

  EKISODE

  Buganda, unlike the rest of Africa, was sweet-talked onto the operating table with praises and promises. Protectorate was the plastic surgery to set the sluggish African body on a faster route to maturity. But once under chloroform, the surgeon was at liberty and did as he pleased. First, he severed the hands then cut off the legs and he put the black limbs into a bin bag and disposed of them. Then he got European limbs and set upon grafting them on the black torso. When the African woke up, the European had moved into his house.

  Though the African was too weak to get up, he still said to the European, “I don’t like what you are doing, my friend. Please get out of my house.” But the European replied, “I am only trying to help, brother. You are still too weak and drowsy to look after your house. I will take charge in the meantime. When you’re fully recovered, I promise you will work and run twice as fast as I do.”

  But the African body rejected the European body parts. Africa says that they are incompatible. The surgeons say that Africa discharged itself too soon from hospital—that is why it is hemorrhaging. It needs a lot more continual blood and water pumped intravenously. Africa says the blood and water are too expensive. The surgeons say, “Nonsense, we did the same to India, see how fast it’s running.”

  When Africa looked in the mirror, it saw that it was hideous. Africa looked in others’ eyes to see how they saw it: there was revulsion. That gave Africa permission to self-harm and self-hate. Sometimes, when the world is not looking, the surgeons poke Africa in the wounds. When it falls down the surgeons say, “You see, we told you they were not ready.”

  We cannot go back to the operating table and ask for the African limbs, Africa must learn to walk on European legs and work with European arms. As time goes by, children will be born with evolved bodies and in time, Africa will evolve according to ekisode’s nature and come to its best form. But it will be neither African nor European. Then the pain will settle down.

  Miisi was relieved by the reception of his ekisode analogy by his fellow villagers. It was the first time he had discussed an article with them before sending it off to the newspaper. Probably, the fact that he had asked for their help with Luganda vocabulary piqued their interest. Either way, Miisi was thankful for their enthusiasm. For the first time, the residents asked pertinent questions such as, “If, because of this ripping, grafting, and stitching, societies like ours are of ekisode nature, should we just sit back and wait until evolution smoothens things out?”

  “No, not sitting back: we must manage the pain. However, whatever we will do or can do, will be within the scope of ekisode. It’s important for us to realize that we’re operating under a different nature so that we do not compare ourselves unfavorably to others or hold grand expectations.”

  “How do we manage the pain?”

  “Swallow the painkillers as prescribed by the surgeons, keep using our own herbs and do all those things that will not exacerbate the wounds; but all that is just to soothe. Evolution is perfect at perfecting even mistakes.”

  “In which world are we going to evolve?” Kaleebu was skeptical. “I am not pouring water on your fire, Miisi, but the whole thing sounds too neat for me.”

  “It’s hope though, isn’t it?”

  “In a perfect world maybe,” Kaleebu said, “Where all other continents are asleep and would not interfere.”

  “Miisi, I say this with a raw mind,” Ssekito started. “But if Europeans outwitted us, no matter how despicable their tactics were—isn’t it time we came up with a strategy for our own survival rather than sitting here crying look what they have done to us?” />
  “That is for politicians, Ssekito,” Kaleebu laughed. “This discussion is intellectual: we’re merely thinking aloud, suggesting possibilities.”

  Despite Kaleebu’s cynicism, Miisi was satisfied. At least the residents did not exchange worried looks this time. All he had to do was to tidy up the piece and cut it down to three hundred words before sending it off to his Sunday column, Obufilosofi bwa Mzei Kintu in Bukkedde, a Luganda tabloid. Its English sister paper, the New Vision, translated his column as Local Worldview, and had asked for an English version. The problem was that the most exciting responses came from the English-language readers. Miisi was wary of a militant feminist at Makerere University who sought a feminist angle in whatever he wrote. She had already called him a chauvinistic dinosaur perpetrating the patriarchy. That was why he had taken care to masculinize Africa this time.

  7.

  Lower primary pupils are dismissed from the midday parade. It is end of school for them. Boys and girls scatter, screaming. Miisi walks along the lower-school classroom block kicking a pebble with his bare feet. He is about to climb the ramp to the playground when a group of boys fly past challenging, “Fastest to the road, Miisi.”

  He breaks into a sprint.

  Just as he is about to catch up, he sees his mother standing at the fringes of the football pitch waiting for him. He stops running.

  She is frowning.

  Miisi is seething. He walks toward her to chastise her for embarrassing him. What kind of mother tags along with a boy on his way home when he wants to race his friends down the road? He prepares to say, “Why have you come? I know my way home.” But as he gets closer to her, he realizes that it is back. He can see it in the defiant way she holds her head. The condition makes her bold and unwomanly. But when he gets to her, without knowing why, Miisi walks past her.

  As he walks home, he keeps looking over his shoulder. She is following him. The boys, huddling away from him, move in a group. He hurries to tell them that he does not know her: that she is just a woman following him, but they run away from him. The village is silent, as if everyone has fled. Miisi knows why. Residents are hiding from him and his mother. They are watching from behind their windows.