Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  “Yeah, I finished the BA and went to Newcastle for an MA,” Miisi and Muganda spoke about Britain as if it were a suburb in Kampala. “I see where this is going,” Muganda preempted. “You’re thinking—how can a British educated man be a medium?”

  “No,” Miisi denied.

  “You’re thinking that education should’ve lifted me above these cheap versions of psychology.”

  “Normally, when people get a calling like yours,” Miisi said, “Which in my view is really an order, they give up everything.”

  “My ‘calling,’ as you put it, did not force me to give up anything. I have a job and I travel.”

  “So, at Cambridge, you were aware that you are a medium?”

  “I found out in my third year. Got headaches and hallucinations and I was put on anti-depressants. When I came home for the holidays, my father went native, but I would not. Finally, the healer came to me. As soon as he saw me, he went into this trance saying: this is huge. He asked my father to construct a shrine immediately.”

  “When did you convert?”

  “I’ve never converted actually. I had a violent episode and my father asked me to lie in the shrine to rest. Twenty-four hours later, I woke up exhausted. Only I did not wake up, I had been up all night hosting all sorts. It took me a week to recover from the exhaustion but the headaches and hallucinations never returned.”

  “So what is it really like? I mean, do you see, hear, or feel things?” Elder Miisi probed.

  “I am a host—an office if you wish. Spirits come on my head, do their thing and go. Unlike you, Miisi, and your dreams, there is no contact whatsoever between me and the energies that occupy me. That is why I need an assistant.”

  “I don’t understand,” Elder Miisi said.

  “Neither do I,” Muganda smiled. “It is not cerebral. My intellectual friends speculate that there are energies out there in the universe and minds like mine are in touch but are too primitive to handle it.”

  “I am familiar with the idea.”

  “When the winds come, I stop being. My consciousness is repressed. When they leave, I’ve no recollection.”

  At this point, Elders Kitooke and Kityo arrived with Bweeza who had carved out the office of the Great Aunt for herself and had finally edged her way officially onto the elders’ council. As Elder Miisi made introductions again, Isaac observed Muganda. He was uncertain about an educated medium, one who spoke such immaculate English. He did not doubt that Muganda had powers—he had already performed exhumation rituals in o Lwera and had identified the spot where Nnakato was—but Muganda was too anglicized to inspire confidence.

  “At six in the morning we shall exhume Nnakato,” Muganda was saying. “My men are experienced in exhumation but Nnakato will take time because she is in a squatting position. We shall dig around her and lift her from the bottom. Then she’ll be laid out part by part. At about eight o’ clock, two elders will come with me to o Lwera to collect the Tutsi and the patriarch. I suggest that we leave Bweeza here to oversee the laying out and wrapping of Nnakato.”

  “Well said,” Bweeza beamed.

  Isaac was not surprised that Elder Miisi had opted out of the journey to o Lwera. He was a stubborn old man. Isaac feared for him: tradition showed that reluctant mediums paid a heavy price. Elders Kityo and Kitooke agreed to go with Muganda.

  Later, as he lay down on a mat to sleep, Isaac mulled over everything. Since locating Kiyiika Village, he had been busy liaising between the elders and Kiyiika’s local council. It was through the local council that he found out about the Tanzanian brothers and sisters. Isaac smiled at the thought. When he asked them whether they needed clearing at the embassy, the Tanzanians had asked, “What embassy?” Then they had crossed the border like ants—without travel documents or visas. Elder Miisi had laughed heartily. “Bloody borders! African countries are a European imagination.” It was the first time Isaac had heard Miisi speak English.

  Isaac had also procured all the materials needed for the reunion. He had hired locals to help with the physical work on the site: clearing the gorge, preparing the campsite, digging makeshift toilets, and erecting traditional tents, which they sold to the clan. For a week before the reunion, residents had worked on the track through the village to make it passable for the expected cars. The amount of money the reunion brought to Kiyiika Village had endeared the clan to the residents. There was even a taxi service from Masaka to Kiyiika for the first time. Kiyiika residents had told Isaac that Nnakato had blessed them for their faithfulness. Yet, throughout those preparations, Isaac had not considered the spiritual dimension of the homecoming. Now, having met the medium in person, he was apprehensive.

  4.

  Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004

  Suubi arrived in Kiyiika on Easter morning, the final day of the rituals, and sat away from everyone. She had only come because Opolot insisted. Such traditional gatherings were her idea of a nightmare—she had heard of the primitive things that took place. The idea of spirits and curses was backward and tedious. Regardless, she hoped that coming would get Ssanyu out of her life.

  When she arrived, she was told that cousins arriving for the first time had to put mud on the shrine, for its construction was a collective effort, but Suubi declined. She did not even seek out her branch of the clan. She had convinced herself that since her mind had chosen to bury the past, there was no reason to exhume it. In any case, remembering had been painful—as if a rod were being thrust through her head, piercing the eyeball, right down into her teeth.

  Now, looking around the site, Suubi regretted opening up to Opolot about Ssanyu. As soon as she told him about the haunting, Opolot had taken her to meet an aunt, Kizza. Meeting Aunt Kizza was a bizarre experience. The minute the woman took off her headscarf and started talking—her mouth, her smile, the sound of her voice brought back the visits in school and Suubi smiled and said, “You used to whisper!”

  But then the fantasy of her parents in England started to grate and her skin itched freakishly because scratching made it worse, yet more memories kept coming—her grandmother’s death and then Kulata—like a mudslide, overwhelming her. Then the pain had seared from her head through the eyeballs right into the nerves of her teeth.

  “Please stop: it hurts,” she said, even though her aunt had already stopped talking when she saw her flinching.

  Aunt Kizza had held her. She held very hard as if she could feel Suubi’s pain, as if squeezing her would help.

  “The pain will go slowly.”

  “There is a migraine still. It starts in the forehead and stops in the teeth.”

  “Hmm, hmm. It will go.”

  Later, when Aunt Kizza invited Suubi to travel to Kiyiika with her branch of the clan, she had declined. She could not risk the pain again. Even the thought of it now felt as if someone was hacking at her mind with a machete.

  For a long time, Suubi sat alone, away from the clan, until a sympathetic cousin came and sat with her.

  “I don’t believe in these things either,” the woman began. “But it doesn’t hurt to cast mud to the house. Relations are looking for someone to blame in case the curse does not break,” the woman paused. “Just go, pick up the mud, and cast it on the wall.”

  “Is it a house or a shrine?” Suubi asked.

  “It is both I guess. It is all about doing something. This is our generation’s effort.”

  “Don’t mistake me,” Suubi said. “I am neither Christian nor atheist: I am just plain. The supernatural have never intervened in my—” Suubi’s heart skipped a beat as the image of the old man who kidnapped her flashed in her mind. She corrected herself, “These things have no place in the modern world.”

  “As long as there are Africans in the world, there will always be someone seeking these things,” the woman laughed.

  The two women sat silently for a while. Then Suubi stood up and walked toward the shrine. The woman made sense, Suubi thought, she had made the journey, she wanted to get rid of Ssanyu, she
might as well do the rituals. As she got to the shrine, she noticed that it was vast with a conical roof. The thatch came halfway down the walls. She looked through the doorway. Inside, it was dark but she could see some people meditating while others slept on the floor. The walls inside looked dry: finger marks crisscrossed everywhere without a pattern giving the walls a rough look. Embers in the hearth near the entrance smoldered and an assortment of spears, planted into the floor, formed a row from the central pole to the wall on the right. On the floor, next to the spears, were tiny baskets with offerings and an array of gourds and calabashes.

  This is some serious witchcraft, Suubi thought nervously.

  Just then, two little boys, sweat streaking down their faces from playing, walked past her, took off their shoes at the threshold and entered the shrine. They went to an earthen pot near the wall. They unhooked a trouted gourd hanging above it, took the lid off the pot and drew water. The first boy drank nonstop until he had to take a breath. The second grabbed the gourd from him and drank as much. When he stopped, he smacked his lips and they giggled. The first one shook the gourd, found there was still some water left, and with his big toe moved the hay carpeting aside, poured the water into the earth floor, and pulled back the hay. They hooked the gourd to the wall, covered the pot, and ran out.

  “Me and Kizza, we drank out of a gourd,” they shouted to their friends, “And the water is smoked!”

  Suubi turned to the right, where the mud plaster was covered with banana leaves against the sun. Nonetheless, the plaster was starting to clog and crack. She poked the surface until she found a soft spot and scooped. She carried the mud toward the shrine and threw it hard on the wall. It stuck and she evened it out with her fingers. She noticed other uneven parts, went back for more mud, and filled them in until the part of the wall she worked on was level. As she washed her hands, a cousin asked if she had just arrived. When Suubi nodded, the cousin went away and came back with food. Suubi’s reticent stance relaxed a little. She greeted a group of people camping nearby and returned to her original place to eat.

  “It’s like pottery, isn’t it?” the cousin said as Suubi sat down.

  “What is?”

  “Putting mud on the shrine.”

  “I am not looking for new relations,” Suubi said after a pause.

  “Large families are notoriously nosy. Someone will seek you out.”

  “My name is Suubi Nnakintu.” Suubi’s heart lurched when she said Nnakintu but she had so far failed to call herself Nnakato.

  “Oh, that name! Are you afflicted? Apparently, Kintu or Nnakintu is an unfortunate name.”

  “What do you mean, ‘afflicted’?”

  “Bad luck, haunting, or things in the head that don’t make sense. That old man there, his name is Miisi Kintu. He is mad. People say he’s the clan medium but he denies it because he is a kivebulaya, a been-to-Europe and is overeducated. He dreamed about all these things but he thinks it is all a coincidence. He had twelve children but only two remain.”

  “Oh!”

  “See that blue tent? Inside is another Kintu, a Christian,” the woman laughed. “Apparently he came here to preach the word of God. Can you imagine?”

  “Preaching the word of God in this place is like ordering porridge in a bar,” Suubi said as she looked around.

  “I swear! He comes out in the morning and invites people to pray. Otherwise, he stays in his tent singing Christian songs loudly. This morning only one person turned up but he still held a service. They say he has twins but he thinks the title Ssalongo is evil.”

  “No, I am not afflicted,” Suubi looked away.

  “You won’t believe how many Kintus and Nnakintus are in this place. Do you have hay fever? Are there twins in your family?”

  “I have hay fever. Any drop in temperature sets me off.”

  “Wait for the evening, one person goes akchuu and soon the whole place is sneezing. It’s hilarious. It is blood, you know what I mean; we are all the same blood. As for twins, they believe they’re extra special because Nnakato of old had so many sets of twins. My name is Nnabaale though. Baale was Nnakato’s favorite son.”

  “The thing is . . .” Suubi paused as if to think again, “You don’t realize that you’re cursed until you’re exposed to this other way of life. I mean, if we lived on our own, in our cursed world, we wouldn’t know. Then the curse would not exist.”

  “Hmm.”

  “My father was a twin, Wasswa. He hacked his brother Kato to death with a machete and then killed himself. But to me that is life. You know, like those ten men killed in Bwaise on Friday?”

  “My God, that was crazy. Ten people killed and no one was arrested?” Nnabaale said.

  Suubi shrugged. “My view is that they came on earth, did their thing and now they have bowed out. Who is to say that things are not right? Nature is as ugly as it is beautiful. People drop dead, people kill each other, people go hungry: you don’t dwell, you just exist. But then this other world comes along and gives you ideas. You start to think, hmm, I am not right, it’s not fair. Things you would never have said before. Soon you start to blame everything on a curse.”

  “Our own cursed world!” Nnabaale laughed belatedly. “It’s just hit me.”

  “What is a curse to some people is normal to others.”

  “Hmm.”

  “With me, I feel as if I was dismembered, you know, chopped into pieces?”

  Nnabaale nodded as if she knew what being chopped into pieces was really like.

  “And so far I have lived my life in pieces quite OK.”

  Nnabaale’s eyes darted here and there, working out what living in pieces was like, but she nodded again.

  “Now this reunion is forcefully grafting and stitching all the pieces back together, which is a good thing, but in some cases, like mine, it does not work. I don’t want the pieces back. I have lived without them for too long that I don’t know how to live with them.”

  Nnabaale was still wondering why stitching could not be good for anyone, how living in pieces could possibly be a good thing, and how anyone could not want pieces of themselves back? Suubi continued.

  “I’ll do the rituals, but as soon as I step out of here, this world will cease for me.”

  “Sounds like you’ve worked your life out,” Nnabaale smiled kindly. That was all she could manage.

  “Before, I had no choice. Life did to me whatever it pleased. Now, there are options. My boyfriend is Atesot. When we marry, I’ll become Atesot too.”

  “I like being Nnabaale now that I know the history.”

  Just then the truck that had gone to fetch the patriarch and the Tutsi from o Lwera arrived. People stood up and started milling around it. Someone sang, Nyini munno mwali? and the clan broke out into the traditional homecoming song and someone ululated as if she were Nnakato of old receiving Kintu back. Yet some cousins started sniveling. The hair on the back of Suubi’s neck rose. Babirye was hovering, she could feel her. She put her food down and stood up. Nnabaale had run off to join in the singing.

  5.

  Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004

  It was time. Miisi stood up to join the members of the clan streaming toward the new graveyard for the main event.

  Earlier, when he saw the coffins unloaded off the truck and a wave of emotion run through the clan, he could not suppress a tinge of cynicism. Whose bones were in the coffins? After all, a lot of people had died in o Lwera over the centuries and it was not like the medium had carried out a DNA test. But then he had chastised himself: it didn’t matter. Facts are immaterial to faith. For a moment then, he regretted the fear that had stopped him from going along to o Lwera to look at the remains.

  His fear went back to the moment when, on return to Kiyiika Village to tour Nnakato’s hill, the elders had come across a tree with a large beehive. The hive sat in an alcove where the tree split into five branches. Bweeza had run back to the car to get tiny baskets into which she dropped smoked coffee beans and coins befo
re placing them below the hive. Then she gave thanks to the spirit Kayuki for revealing himself to the clan. Miisi had stood at a respectful distance, knowing that chances were that there would be at least one beehive in the woods. In any case, in his dream, the bee man or Kayuki as Bweeza referred to him, lived in a cave. But when they found the tree with the pink bark Miisi went numb, especially as there was a rock nearby. All he had said to the other elders was that according to his dream Nnakato had hung on a similar tree and that she would be close to the rock. Then he had pointed out a tree that would make the central pole of the shrine.

  “If you believe my dreams, the dwelling should be built here: it should be circular and ten strides in radius.”

  Perhaps sensing his turmoil, the cousins had allowed him to wrestle with his doubt privately. No one asked provocative questions, there was no sarcasm and no jesting in the car as they traveled back home—just worried silence. That was when a grain of doubt formed. He still could not rule out coincidence, but now and again what if crept up on him.

  In his instructions regarding the location of the patriarch and the lad in o Lwera, Miisi had been true to the dreams, but he stood by the fact that they were just dreams.

  “If you find nothing, and I doubt you’ll find anything, don’t blame me. I’ve warned you over and over that these are images conjured by a traumatized mind.”

  Two weeks later, when the party returned having located both bodies, Miisi decided that they were other people’s remains. Now he wondered what would happen to his restless sleep after the rituals. He could not wait to see the power of the mind.

  “Ready for the main event?” Muganda smiled at Miisi as he made his way to the gathering. Miisi nodded and hurried to join the clan.

  When he arrived at the graveyard, he was met with silence. Anticipation and trepidation hung equally in the air. The clan stood facing the three coffins—Kintu’s, Nnakato’s, and Kalema’s. Each coffin was placed alongside a grave. For a moment, Miisi was caught in the awe of being in the presence of history. He saw Kintu’s blood flow unbroken through the ages leading to him and he bowed his head. He wanted to whisper something in acknowledgement but did not know how.