Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  When he looked up, he saw three white lambs tethered to a tree nearby. On another tree were three black male goats. The scene could have come straight out of the Old Testament, he thought. He wished that Kanani could come out of his tent to see it. In a few moments, the animals would pay with their blood for Kintu’s sin just as animalkind had done for mankind throughout time. The animals chewed the cud, oblivious. It was Miisi who suffered their looming end. He smiled at the irony. To him, humanity was cursed anyway. The mind was a curse: its ability to go back in time to regret and to hop into the future to hope and worry was not a blessing.

  Next to the coffins were bundles of sticks—peeled and smooth. They were as long as chopsticks, only thicker. Miisi had almost missed them. Sheep and goats, black and white, were trademark items for a sacrifice, but the sticks did not make sense. He turned to the clan and wondered which of the cousins had faith in the rituals, which were skeptical, and which were drifting through everything half-consciously.

  Muganda greeted the clan and asked them to stand around the graves. He wore a kanzu. On top, he had knotted the traditional barkcloth. He wore a necklace of cowries. The watch was gone and in its place were traditional black gem bracelets. He carried a big staff mounted with a traditional curved knife. His feet were bare.

  “I speak for Kintu’s children—past, present, and to come. We have gathered to lay our father, mother, and brother to rest. We’ve also come together as children from a single spring to strip ourselves of a heritable curse. As we obtain peace of mind, we seek rest for our mother Nnakato, our father Kintu, and brother Kalema. Ntwire shall let go of the child nursed on Nnakato’s breast. Because Kalema found a home and family in Buganda, we shall sever all Ntwire’s claims on the lad.”

  Muganda then instructed each person to pick a stick. His assistant passed them around. Miisi picked one: it was dry and odorless. When everyone held one, Muganda continued,

  “Kalema was buried near an oasis. The sticks you hold were cut out of the musambya, the Nile tulip shrubs that grew around his grave. Now, I’ll ask you to whisper all your afflictions and rub them into the stick. You may not remember everything at once, so hang onto them.”

  A stick was placed on each of the coffins.

  All around Miisi, cousins whispered feverishly into their sticks. It felt like a Pentecostal congregation whispering in tongues. Just then, a young woman slipped past Miisi. He looked up: she was the woman who had so far stood apart from everything like a teenager forced to go to church. The woman picked up a stick and returned to the back of the gathering. Miisi caught Muganda looking at him with amusement and lowered his eyes, feeling like a child caught with his eyes open during prayer.

  Miisi did not whisper any affliction into his stick.

  “Can we have the lambs brought forward?” Muganda interrupted the whispering. “For the squeamish, it’s time to look away. We’re going to harvest their blood.”

  Miisi turned away before the lambs’ legs were bound. It did not help. Presently, a gasp escaped the gathering. Then rapid rustling like kicking came, followed by a slow puffing of blood. Thrice, the rustling and puffing came before fading. Miisi felt nausea rising. Luckily, he held it back.

  “We’re going to cover the carcasses with barkcloth.” Muganda’s voice came. There was a pause. “You can turn around now. Everyone, place your stick on top of the carcasses.”

  Miisi rubbed his stick as if he were making a fire and placed it on the pile. The sticks on the coffins were also placed on the carcasses, so were any that were left over. The gathering was asked to step back. The assistant came forward with a large urn and poured oil on the heap, soaking everything. Muganda struck a match and said, “I now set all that afflicts you on fire.” He threw the match on the heap and slowly it was engulfed in flames. “When everything has burned, the ashes will be buried in the four corners of this place but now, join me in laying the dead to rest. First, we lay Kalema. I pour a bowl of the blood we harvested from the sheep into his grave. In so doing, I sever ties with Ntwire and with Ntwire’s home. You’re no longer Kalemanzira but Kalema. Any force that comes to collect you has been blocked.”

  Muganda walked to a patch cordoned off by wooden planks. He stopped and pointed with both hands at the demarcated space.

  “Here lies your brother, Baale. We shall mark his resting place properly later.” Then he moved to the second grave and called out, “Nnakato, you will now lie between your beloved Kintu and Baale; search no more. The rope around your neck has been removed and you shall endure the squatting posture no more.”

  He moved to the last grave.

  “Kintu, your blood has survived the curse. You have children the way a millipede has legs. Now that you’re home, we ask that you rest.” Now Muganda turned to the gathering and raised his hands. “I call upon the winds of the clan—ghosts, spirits, and all ancestors—to come down on these children like a mother hen comes down on her chicks with her wings and feathers. Guard and guide, undo any evil plots and traps that lie in their paths now and for the rest of their lives.”

  As Miisi helped to lower the coffins, images of his children lowered into the ground swarmed before him. He busied himself piling earth on the coffins. He did not hear the medium say, “That’s enough. If you’ve put earth on the family, come around.” Miisi carried on shovelling until the medium stayed his hand and led him back to the circle.

  “My men and I shall sacrifice the goats. Their blood will be poured around the central pole of the shrine and around the wall to buttress the shrine. The goats will be roasted and shared by everyone. I shall see you when you return for the ablution rite.”

  Suddenly, there was a commotion. Miisi looked up. The reluctant woman, the one he had noticed picking up a stick, had fainted. He ran to help. Muganda ordered everyone away except the elders.

  “Go get the large sheets,” he told the assistant before turning to the staring people. “Everyone else get back to your tents now unless you want to be caught in this.” At that threat, the cousins scattered. “Who knows her? Who came with her?” Muganda asked the elders.

  “Her name is Suubi Nnakato: she is from my branch but—” a woman who was lingering shouted.

  At the sound of her name, the woman sprang off the ground unnaturally fast and sat back on her haunches. Her eyes were unseeing. She started to bob, then sway. Slowly, her head started to swing. Nsimbi returned with large sheets of barkcloth.

  “Come, hold the edge of the sheets,” Muganda instructed the elders and they formed a cubicle around the woman to screen her from public view. Miisi held two ends in one corner. This was his chance to observe the transpossession phenomenon.

  The woman’s body, swinging or rotating, picked up momentum and started hopping about on her hands. Miisi stepped back as the body lurched toward him. The spinning was so unnaturally fast that the woman’s head was hardly visible. It was clear to Miisi that the woman did not own her body anymore. He was wondering whether the spinning was the woman’s body fighting the suppression of her consciousness when he heard a finger snap. Miisi shouted at Muganda, “Stop her. She’s breaking bones!”

  Muganda ignored him. Taking his time, the medium took a tiny basket from the assistant and entered into the screen. He pulled up his kanzu and knelt down. Having broken several fingers and a wrist, the body now knelt on its knees and spun from the end upwards. Muganda placed the basket in front of the body. He placed a few coins and smoked coffee beans in the basket and requested, “We beg you to introduce yourself.”

  The spinning started to slow down. When it stopped, Miisi saw that the woman’s eyes were narrowed and she breathed with puffing, slow, and deep breaths.

  “You’re very angry. How have we offended?” Muganda was humble.

  When the body did not respond Muganda added, “I beg of you to let go of your host, she has broken several bones.”

  “Let me kill her.”

  The voice was as thin as a child’s—not older than four.


  “But who are you?”

  “Babirye, her twin.”

  Muganda sat back as if his job had been done. Miisi was trying to reconcile the child’s voice to the aggression.

  “She tried to bind me in your stick.” The body moved and Miisi saw a stick that should have been burned lying on the ground. Goosebumps spread all over his arms. The body leaned forward and picked the stick off the ground with its mouth, then spat it out again.

  “Nnakato has denied my existence all this time,” the child’s voice laughed sarcastically. “But then she binds me into a stick to burn me? Me, her sister?” she breathed as if asthmatic.

  Miisi felt nausea rise again. He could hear a grating sound somewhere in his head. He asked Bweeza, who stood outside the cubicle, to hold his corner.

  “I don’t feel well,” he whispered to the other elders.

  It was as if Bweeza had been waiting for such an opportunity all along. She took Miisi’s place with relish. Muganda was still groveling for Suubi’s life as Miisi walked away.

  6.

  Isaac’s body still shook from the intense emotions of the rituals. He sat on the ground to try and gather himself together. He looked around the campsite and thought, “This is real.” To be within touching distance of almost three centuries’ history, to be surrounded by hundreds of relatives whose presence testified to that history. Finally, his own presence on earth was accounted for and his painful life justified. When Isaac looked back at his life—at the friend who stayed with him when he was young, at Ziraba his grandmother and at Sasa—it was not misfortune that he saw, it was intervention. Most of all, the twins, Babirye and Nnakato, had paid him a visit even though they did not stay. There was no doubt that Kintu had tirelessly intervened in his life. Isaac could not contain his trembling.

  For him, the homecoming song had set the tone of the rituals. He had heard the song in traditional performances before but its significance only hit home when the patriarch arrived. And when Muganda stepped out of the shrine resplendent in traditional regalia, everything fell into place. Isaac had whispered his father’s name, desperately willing Mr. Kintu’s mental sickness into the stick. Isaac did not flinch at the slaughter of the sheep. When he saw the blood flow, something snapped and he felt so buoyant that wind could have blown him away. That fire consuming his stick made him so giddy that he sat down and wept. His immersion was only broken when the woman became possessed and Muganda asked everyone to leave. People said that the woman was a twin who had attempted to bind her dead twin’s spirit. Imagine that! No one was surprised. The woman had only arrived that day and had carried on as if everyone and everything being done was beneath her. Why come then? These things, you need to be totally committed or you stay away. Otherwise, they rip you apart. There was so much Isaac did not understand, but he was not arrogant enough to turn his ignorance into unbelief.

  Later, as roast goat was passed around the camp, a rumor wafted along. Apparently, in Kintu’s time, ablution was a rite where each child born to him was thrown into the gorge. If the baby belonged to the family, the gorge threw it back, but if it did not, the gorge swallowed it. Having witnessed the physical manifestation of the curse in Suubi, apprehension settled on the clan. Who was sure that their mother was not a liar? Isaac had read somewhere that twenty per cent of children did not belong to the men they called fathers. Now, the actions of generations of women who married into the family became unfathomable. To Isaac, the idea of surrendering Kizza to the whims of water spirits was unsettling.

  Time for ablution came. Every elderly man, with a queue of his offspring behind him, made his way toward the gorge. Isaac held his son’s hand and led him there. A few people held back to see what would happen first. Isaac noticed that Elder Miisi cut a forlorn figure standing on his own while men his age led an extensive queue of children and grandchildren to the gorge. Isaac had heard that Elder Miisi had lost most of his children but where were the two who survived? He wanted to go and stand with him but held back.

  Muganda started. “You stand before the spring that watered the family in those days. We are going to wash the curse off. Wash your face, hands, and feet. You can have a full bath if you want, but it’s not important. Family heads will draw water and make sure that every member of their family is washed. Don’t let children near the gorge. I’ve heard that you were worried we would throw you in,” Muganda laughed. “It’s true such a ritual took place in the past, but it was for specific children dedicated to certain gods.”

  When most people had finished washing, Muganda wound up.

  “Tomorrow, the locals who’ve kept your heritage alive will join you in thanksgiving. Those who must rush back home, once you’ve washed, you can go. I thank you for taking part, for the discipline and for the desire to fight against the fragmentation of your blood. I pray that after today you will keep an eye on each other and hold each other up. I would like to say that you can go and live happily ever after, but I would be lying. What you’ve done today is to start on the journey of healing. The curse will break. However, in its death throes it might wreak havoc. Our fathers said that an anticipated plunderer makes off with less. Hold each other’s arms.”

  While young people jumped into cars and drove to Masaka to catch the tail end of Easter festivities, Isaac went to bed. As he lay down, he remembered that the results for the blood tests were still in the car. He could have rubbed HIV in the stick, but he did not believe it would go away. For a moment, his mind fancied that after the rituals, the results could be negative. He sat up to go and get them but stopped. It was no use getting delusional and spoiling the moment. He had decided that he and Kizza would check out of the world soon after the reunion. In his view, they had been given the best send-off.

  The following day, Isaac was woken up by Bweeza. It was midmorning. Bweeza seemed panicky.

  “Son, you’re needed in the shrine.”

  “Is it Suubi the twin?”

  “Suubi will be fine. Run to the shrine.”

  Outside, the morning was slow. It was Easter Monday, the last day of the reunion. Isaac’s heart fell. Women cooking in the kitchen area were talking animatedly. A few meters away, sounds of chopping led his eyes to men butchering the meats. Kizza and other children sat on mats eating breakfast. Isaac smiled. The sisters, on finding out that he was a widower, had taken Kizza off his hands saying, “Leave him to us,” and Kizza was enjoying having so many children around him. He looked around the campsite: nothing rang wrong or urgent in the air.

  When he arrived in the shrine, he saw a lifeless form lying on the floor. It was covered in barkcloth like in death. Fear in the shrine was almost tangible. The assistant was beside himself. Isaac guessed it was Muganda.

  “Sit down, Isaac,” Elder Kityo whispered.

  Elder Miisi sat leaning against the wall, his legs inside a sleeping bag. He looked up at the roof, but his jaws danced.

  “What happened?”

  “Ntwire’s demon,” the attendant answered. “It speaks Lunyarwanda only.”

  Isaac noted that Elder Miisi did not join in the explanations. He still looked up at the roof, his jaws frantic.

  “Is he alive?” Isaac whispered.

  “I couldn’t find a pulse last time I checked but I cannot say he’s dead,” Elder Kityo said.

  Isaac wanted to ask why Muganda was covered as if he were dead but changed his mind. If the elders had not queried it, then it was the right thing to do.

  “We’re waiting for an interpreter.”

  “I’ve never come across anything like this in my entire career,” the assistant said. “A spirit that won’t speak a language you understand means only one thing; it’s come to terrorize.”

  “I thought it was one of those deaf or dumb demons vindictive people hire because they’re aggressive. But then Nsimbi tried sign language and it swore at him in Lunyarwanda,” Kityo said.

  “We woke you up because we need more hands when it gets roused.” Elder Miisi finally looked at Isaac.
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  7.

  Easter Monday, April 12, 2004

  It was ten in the morning and the sun was sweetness. Paulo was walking down a narrow trail. The tall bushes on either side leaned into the path so that sometimes he had to push branches out of his face. The skin on his arms was burning: he suspected he had come into contact with a fiery shrub. He was on his way to meet a local lad who had promised to take him to the other side of Nnakato’s hill and show him the no-man’s land between Uganda and Tanzania. So far, the reunion had been a long weekend of nature walking for him. He had been to all the places fabled for Nnakato’s sighting and had been to see abakomazi of barkcloth at work. Now he was on his way to Tanzania.

  Presently, an elderly man came toward him and Paulo stepped aside to let him pass. The man looked at him curiously then asked authoritatively, “Why aren’t you with your clan at this critical moment?” Paulo started to explain that he was not one of them but changed his mind.

  “There was nothing wrong when I left a few minutes ago.”

  “Ah, the elders are hushing it.” The man sucked his teeth. “Did you really think that you would come here and in a weekend undo a taboo that took hold hundreds of years ago?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A demon has gripped your medium. He tried to separate the Tutsi father and son—these educated people! Apparently, he learned his trade in Britain.”

  “What does it want?”

  “Blood, what else do demons demand?”

  “Have they found it?”

  “It wants Tutsi blood but the interpreter would not share his in case the evicted demon needs another host.”

  “So they’re still looking?”

  “Mhm.”

  Paulo ran back. He would share his if the demon would have a half-blood Tutsi. He remembered Bweeza saying that he was significant: this could be it. But when he got there, there was no urgency in the air. All around, people looked relaxed. Nonetheless, Paulo asked for an elder. One came and introduced himself as Kityo. Kalema stated breathlessly, “I am Tutsi. I can give you some blood.”