Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  The house is quiet as well when he gets there. Someone whispers to him, “Where did you find her?”

  “She came to school.”

  A girl weeps, “She slipped away, I swear, just like that. I turned my head like this, when I looked back she was gone.”

  The whispering is unnerving. Miisi wants to scream to break it. Someone follows his mother everywhere she goes. She starts to do the dishes but they stop her. She picks up a hoe and starts for the garden but someone asks her, “Where are you going?” She turns back without a word and picks up a knife as if she is going to peel vegetables. Someone asks for it. She refuses to hand it over. The boys struggle with her and take the knife from her.

  Now his mother is angry. The way she says nothing, her lips pursed. Miisi knows that look. He wonders why people treat her without respect sometimes. The problem is that he is lying in a cradle. He attempts to climb out to stop them. He screams, “Don’t talk to her like that, she’s my mother,” but a large face dips into the crib. It buries itself into his tummy and blows tickles. Miisi cries but he is giggling. He is horrified at himself; laughing at a time like this! He grabs the face’s ears and pulls hard but the face laughs and blows harder and he squeals uncontrollably.

  8.

  Miisi had no plans for further studies after his MA program in the USSR. In the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union was a major sponsor of postgraduate study for Ugandans even though anti-Soviet sentiments were high and the British system of education in Uganda looked down on Russian qualifications. Miisi went to Moscow because he had lost his job. Having set up his two wives with income-generating businesses, he ventured into further education. But after the three years in Russia—one year to learn the Russian language and two to do the master’s degree—his family in Uganda advised him not to come home—Amin was killing the educated. Rather than stay in Russia, in 1972 Miisi flew to Britain where he waited for Amin to be deposed.

  In Britain, Miisi had a lot of idle time on his hands. Then he saw a fellowship advertised in the Times Educational Supplement for research in sociology. He put in a half-hearted application: he did not expect to get it. Surprisingly, his proposal, “The Centrality of Bloodletting to Religious Practice’, was accepted and he received a large grant. He was able to squeeze on rent and food to send some money home for his children’s education. He also had a part-time job at the co-op supermarket as a cleaner.

  Miisi’s supervisor, Professor Johnstone-Clarke, was keen on the study. He advised Miisi to focus on human sacrifice in African pagan worship but Miisi wanted to focus on Christ and Isaac, the son of Abraham. Professor Johnstone-Clarke argued that these biblical figures had been studied exhaustively and he doubted that Miisi would bring anything new to the field. Miisi suggested focusing on sati but the supervisor said that the study would only be feasible if he took a feminist perspective and focused on women sacrifices. That was when Miisi decided to look at Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart in relation to collective war sacrifice of the young, relating it to child worship in African communities. Since the novel was read as an anthropological text, his supervisor did not raise any objections. Miisi reinforced the subject by looking at the practice of kiwendo in ancient Buganda where young men were sacrificed by kings. Miisi presented kiwendo as a testostoronal control by the ba kabaka in times of population boom.

  Besides something to do, Miisi pursued the research study in an attempt to overcome his invisibility. Since arriving in Britain Miisi had felt himself shrivelling. He craved attention. At work, he did outrageous things, dancing at the slightest excuse: he who was never keen on dancing at home. He told colleagues that he had six wives in Uganda: why? Every chance he got Miisi mentioned his PhD study coupled with Cambridge University, to the consternation of his working-class colleagues. The less they believed him, the more outrageous his tales became. On the other hand, he enjoyed the amazement of those who did believe him. “Meet Mezraim my African friend. Mezraim is a clever chap, he’s in college.”

  At university, during group discussions of literary theory, Miisi was so silent other students forgot he was present. At first, he attempted to contribute to the discussions but soon became aware that every time he started to speak such an anxiety fell on the other students that they sat as if bracing themselves. Sometimes, his ideas were met with stony uncomfortable silence as if no one knew what to do with them. In any case, half the time Miisi did not catch the drift of the discussions, as he could never work out their words. Students at Cambridge whistled and hissed their words. Sounds died somewhere in the nose before articulation. He soon realized that here, at the university, speaking was a performance and his Luganda-English stood no chance at all.

  Miisi retreated into himself. He started to look at the British with suspicion. This, however, had its roots in his childhood. He had grown up in Magonga Seminary with the Irish White Fathers. As a cross between a son and a pet, the priests indulged him. Every little thing he did, they washed him in praise. He found out later that the Fathers had planned to open an orphanage with him and his sister as the pioneer children. However, the project never received backing from Ireland and was abandoned. Instead, the priests found Miisi a family living in Britain to sponsor him and sent his sister away to the nuns in Nadangira. The Rector, Father John Mary McCann, kept Miisi at the seminary because McCann feared that Miisi would be killed because of a family curse. The British family, the O’Tooles, were extremely generous, paying Miisi’s school fees and sending him presents at Christmas.

  The priests and the O’Tooles were the first Europeans Miisi came into contact with. They were benevolent, gentle, and loving. To his young mind, the priests looked like Jesus Christ in the pictures and figurines scattered around the seminary. They took on a Christ-like character. And when in history he was taught about the Africans as Hamites who had been cursed by Noah, everything including his family, his people, and the priests fell into place. Miisi learned to associate white skin with goodness, cleverness, and godliness. Europe was heaven on earth. He had wished that the O’Tooles would adopt him outright and lift him out of Africa. He marveled that rather than shun him, the priests and the O’Tooles had chosen to love him. Miisi had worked hard in school to show that despite his Hamitic condition he was clever and could be good.

  When he arrived in Britain, Miisi rang the number Mr. O’Toole had sent him in Moscow. A woman’s voice answered. She had a difficult accent. He only caught the words “care home” and “are you family?” Mr. O’Toole’s voice was very strong when he came to the phone. Unlike the woman, he spoke clearly. He was happy to hear that Miisi was in Britain. “Such a shame what that Idi Amin is doing to your country,” Mr. O’Toole had said. But when Miisi asked if he could visit him, Mr. O’Toole hesitated.

  “Look, Miisi, I am proud you have achieved so much. I am happy to have been of help but I want to keep it at that. Don’t feel indebted to me. You don’t have to visit me.”

  Miisi was taken aback. He agreed and thanked Mr. O’Toole profusely but when he hung up he wondered whether he had offended the old man. How could anyone spend so much money on a person and not wish to meet him? Miisi had dreamed of visiting the O’Tooles all his life. He wanted to show them how well he had used their money. As time passed and Miisi failed to get the jobs he was qualified for, Mr. O’Toole’s request not to meet him took on the shape of rejection.

  Rejection in Russia was no surprise. Novels he had read and films he had seen in Uganda portrayed Russians as white-haired evil maniacs. He had as much contempt for them as they had for him. Britain and America were the lands of humanity, the places Miisi longed to be. The real Britain took him by surprise. He came to the angry conclusion that the middle- and upper-class colonialists had invented and perpetuated a pseudo-messianic persona which they wore for the colonies, while back home they were different people. It explained why the White Fathers and the O’Tooles had been so good to him in Africa. God became an idea; if there was a God then he was racist. In anger, Miisi walked away
from religion.

  Miisi had filled the emptiness of the years with imagination. With a few West Indians, Black Americans, and African friends from Cambridge, he reconstructed an idealised picture of Africa fed by the books he read. In the media, an avalanche of negative images of an Africa quickly sinking into anarchy so soon after independence overwhelmed him. Horror stories were broadcast with glee and broke the resolve of so many black activists. Miisi squirmed in the palpable inadequacy of the African—the violence, greed, selfishness, and savagery. To keep his sanity, he and his friends constructed their own narratives of we, they, us, and them. In these narratives, Miisi concentrated on those things that made black more human, wholesome, and natural than white. Once he had convinced himself of this, it was not hard to find evidence in the everyday manners, actions, tendencies, and behavior of Europeans.

  At the end of 1979, when Miisi was finally able to return home, he had no idea how much he had changed. He was not prepared for the deterioration Uganda had undergone. Raw wounds were everywhere, on everyone. Looking at the impact on his family, he felt like a coward for staying in Britain. The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values shunning Westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern vivid colors of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral. To make matters worse, people around him, including his family, called him muzungu: Miisi had become European amongst his people.

  For two years, Miisi lectured at Makerere University, trying to bury the guilt that in his absence, none of his children had gone beyond O-level study. He could not bring himself to reconcile to his wife in the village to whom he had sent money for the children’s school fees. He lived at the university dating different women. His children, knowing the emphasis he put on education, were embarrassed by their own lack and avoided him. His second wife had remarried.

  The students at Makerere were more interested in certificates than in education. They hardly attended lectures and kept throwing recycled essays at him. The number of students per class was above two hundred. There were no tutorials, no seminars, and the library was a museum of books from antiquity. Miisi suspected that staff at the university press subsidized their meager salaries by selling exam papers to students. It crossed his mind that he could have stayed in Britain and he was ashamed of it. In 1982 Miisi gave up his university job, left the city, and settled in Kande Village with his first wife. He concentrated on raising cattle and blending in with the peasants.

  But blending in was not easy. In rural Bulemeezi, a double-story, multi-bedroomed house and a doctorate from Cambridge were hard to disguise. At first, there was genuine interest as rumor went around the region that Dr. Kintu in the golofa house was coming home to stay. But when the villagers found out that his doctorate had nothing to do with medication they sucked their teeth in contempt.

  “What’s the use of a doctor who can’t heal people?”

  “It means he’s read a lot of books.”

  “Listen to that, a doctor of books! What use is that to this village?”

  Nonetheless, the residents knew Miisi’s wife as an unpretentious woman who had struggled with eight children on her own during Amin’s regime while Miisi rolled in European luxury, enjoying white women. When he arrived in Kande, the residents smiled and accepted him but set him apart. Whenever they saw him coming to join them, they wore an intelligent look for him, ready to sound intellectual. They found his ideas distant: talking for the sake of talking. However, they were proud to see their ideas and village published in Bukedde Sunday paper.

  After getting to know him, the residents blamed Miisi’s quirks and atheism on communist Russia. And though Miisi was not locally born, they knew enough to trust and respect him. He had been born in Bugerere but because of a tragedy, his home had been razed and the rest of his family, save for one sister were lost. Miisi had been adopted by a Catholic parish that put him in school. When he finished university he had worked for Transafrica, an international freight company. Because of the access to transport across East African nations, he had made money quickly by buying and selling merchandise from Kenya to Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi. He had been keen to fulfill a childhood ambition of building a big double-storied house no one could burn down. He vowed to fill it with children so that none of his children would grow up alone. When Transafrica went bust, Miisi won a scholarship to study in Russia. That was enough information for them.

  Miisi never talked about his research to the residents. What would he say? That he had spent four years exploring the possibility that bloodletting in society was buried deep in the human psyche where spiritual impulses lay? Understandably, the residents had nothing but contempt for Ugandans who got a chance to acquire knowledge and chose to acquire the useless kind. Human sacrifice, bloodletting, and the release of societal anxieties! What was he thinking? Nonetheless, he would have loved the residents to ponder his doctoral view that religious murder is either presented creatively as sacrifice or manipulatively as punishment.

  9.

  Miisi arrives home from school but home is not home: it is the seminary. This does not make sense. Why did he go to the old school when there is a primary school attached to the seminary? He should not go to his old school. He will never do that again. He turns into the neat paved way of the seminary but the house where he lives with the priests is occupied by his father, who has a large family. This is not right. His father has no right to be at the seminary. The seminary is his and his European friends’. He points this out to Father John Mary, “Take me away from him. Take me to Ireland,” but the priest laughs at him. Miisi, now frantic, runs to the backyard but it is his old home. The roof is burned out but the walls are still standing. A crowd is milling around the door hole.

  “Take that child away.”

  Miisi’s arm is yanked. He is led away. But then he sees four policemen carry his mother out of the house. There is a rope around her neck. Her eyes, googly, stare at him. The policemen stand on the verandah and swing her body back and forth once, twice, on the third count they launch her into the courtyard. He hears her muffled thud. People scatter. The woman holding his hand lets go. Miisi runs back and sees one of the policemen pull out a whip. The policemen are dressed in the colonial uniform of starched khaki shorts and shirt with lots of pockets. They wear fez hats, black boots, and knee-high socks. The policeman lashes his mother’s body. Women scream. Men look away. Miisi shouts at the policeman to stop but instead says, “You’re wearing a safari suit,” as if the policemen are daft.

  “Take that child away,” someone says because they don’t want him to see.

  All the grown-ups descend on him with unnecessary force and carry him away. But the whip is still cracking. Women cry as if the whip is being used on their bodies. The men are useless. “Do something, can’t you hear Mother crying?” He catches snippets of whispers, “It’s the law . . . The police must lash . . .”

  “They’ve put the rope around my mother’s neck so they can take her away,” Miisi cries but no one listens. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts not being listened to.

  Now the policeman is dragging his mother’s body. Her corpse tries to crawl to keep up but it is too slow. It bothers him that his mother’s corpse does not fight. She allows herself to be dragged to the grave. All those people staring, no one tries to save her. Yet in the grave she stares up at Miisi pleadingly. He says, “You’ve done this to yourself, you wanted to die!”

  To his horror, he spits into the grave.

  10.

  Monday, January 12, 2004

  Miisi was sitting on the balcony when two men emerged from the depression of the tarred road below his compound and walked toward his house. His heart jumped and he found himself trembling. Perhaps it was because he had never seen the men before. His heart had jumped needlessly because the men seemed uncertain. They wore awkwardly fitting coats with faded trouser
s. They were peasants dressed to mask that fact. Unfortunately, the effort seemed only to enhance their discomfort. The men came to the steps and disappeared under the balcony. After a short pause, he heard them call. He waited as they were received downstairs, listening out for the expected footsteps on the stairs coming for him. Finally, his sister came.

  “There’re men here asking for you. I’ve not told them that you are here, in case you don’t want to see them.”

  Miisi went down the stairs with her. When he had greeted the men, they inquired whether he was Misirayimu Kintu.

  “I am.”

  The men introduced themselves. The oldest, wearing an old-fashioned but new-looking coat, was Magga. Miisi guessed the coat was part of his wedding suit but Magga had not found an excuse to wear the coat since. The other man, whose coat was creased because it had been washed rather than dry-cleaned, was Kato. Presently, Miisi’s wife brought refreshments but the men declined.

  “We must do what we came to do first,” Magga said.

  The men started by each reciting his parentage back to his sixth paternal grandfather who, in both cases, was called Kidda. Miisi thought it was strange: recitation of one’s genealogy was done at traditional engagement rites, to eliminate common ancestry between the couple. He had never seen it happen between people who were meeting for the first time. He hoped that the men did not expect him to do the same for he did not even know his immediate grandfather’s name. He did not need to worry. Magga, when he had done his own genealogy, looked straight at Miisi, reminded Miisi of his own name, his father’s and grandfather’s. Magga even knew where Miisi’s father and grandfather had lived and where they were buried. Then he recited four more generations of Miisi’s grandfathers. Magga’s voice shook with emotion as he chronicled the generations. He sat on the floor with his legs folded underneath him as if he sat before the gods. Miisi listened to the names of his ancestors, where they had lived, where they were laid, and tried to picture them. Miisi’s sixth grandfather was also Kidda—the common ancestor between the three of them. From then on, their histories merged as Magga talked about Kidda’s father, Baale, the youngest son of Nnakato of old. At the mention of Nnakato, Magga’s voice fell indicating that he was taking a break. Kato broke in to explain, “This Nnakato was Kintu’s kabeja. Legend has it that for Kintu, the sun rose and set upon Nnakato. She only gave birth to twins, you see, until Baale came along. In turn, Baale had one child—this Kidda that we three share. Baale had Kidda by a servant called Zaya.”