“I know who I am,” Miisi smiles but he is now a different person.
“What about coming home with us?”
“This is home, I am the lamb, the chosen one,” he speaks in English.
“The lamb? You don’t even believe—”
“All the clan’s curses I carry on my head.”
At that point, the caretaker comes to Kusi and whispers, “When he starts to speak in English, then you’ve lost him.”
“I named him Ham and sealed his fate. What you don’t realize,” Miisi closes one eye, “is that children’s heads are a space upon which parents inscribe texts. A Hutu gave his child a name translating, ‘Tell the world I am not impotent,’” he laughs raucously. “Selfish don’t you think?”
The caretaker shakes his head at Kusi but Kusi is not giving up yet.
“Mzei, I want to take you home.”
“We are not even Hamites. We are Bantu,” Miisi continues.
“You’re lucky, he is rarely around for that long,” the caretaker whispers.
“He’s rarely around for that long, my good friend tells them as if I am not here.” Miisi whispers to himself. “It is a sad situation, isn’t it? Average IQ: 70—enough to eat and shit. Fourteen years old at most. They call me mad. But Africans are born to burden others but they’re not even apologetic.” Now Miisi raises his voice and speaks as if to a crowd, “Mend your ways, you sons of Ham! Turn away from your imbecilic ways and be grateful!” Now he whispers to himself, “But then prophets never know respect in their hometowns. They say to me: Easy, Mezraim, don’t worry, be happy.”
“He goes on and on. There is no subject under the sun that he has no theory about,” the caretaker whispered to Kusi.
“He goes on and on, says my good friend, my companion apparently.” Miisi clicks his tongue in contempt. “That’s all the companionship I have, Kusi. A man so frightened of living that he came to hide behind my back. I might as well talk to the trees, at least they won’t patronize me. Kusi, you used to listen to me. He patronizes me,” Miisi points at the caretaker, childlike.
“I’ll have a word with him.”
“What I need is an exercise book, a pencil, and a rubber. A proper writer writes in pencil. That’s the first thing you learn. Have you read my column, Kusi? I’ve received a few compliments on it lately.”
The caretaker walks away. Miisi points at him and whispers, “He’s beyond salvage, mercy upon us.”
“We’ve got to go, Mzei.”
“We’ve got to go, Father, she says,” Miisi turns away and laughs. “She thinks she is going somewhere, poor child, when in actuality she’s waiting to die. I would recommend Waiting for Godot but it’s another waste of time, isn’t it?”
“We’re leaving, Mzei.” Kusi starts to leave but Miisi does not turn around. He rubs his face with both hands, up and down, up and down. Something in his stance suggests that he understands that Kusi is leaving but that he does not want her to. Kusi touches his hand and says, “Father?” Miisi brushes off her hand and turns his back on her. Kusi stands still for a moment and then breaks down. The realization that her father hovers in the middle world between sanity and insanity is hard to take. Still, Miisi does not turn around. He looks up in the sky whispering to himself. When Kusi is composed, she asks the caretaker, “How is his health otherwise?”
“He is fine.”
“When he gets a temperature or anything you don’t understand, ring these numbers.” She gives him her contacts. “It’s important to make him feel normal. When he talks to you listen politely, make the right noises, and look like you are following his argument.”
“I understand.”
“And thank you for everything.”
“Duty is duty.”
Miisi’s wife, who has been crying behind the shrine all along, comes out and tries to bid him farewell but Miisi refuses to acknowledge her or his sister.
“He pushed the gods too far. He kept prodding and prodding until they snapped,” his wife says as they pull away.
No one responds. Kusi drives down the rough track until they come to the kitawuluzi. She looks back. Miisi is still staring at the sky. She says, “Kamu’s death snapped the last cable in his mind.”
“Maybe, but still he dug too deep. This knowledge of ours, you just be, but not him,” Miisi’s wife sniffs. “He pursued knowledge for the sake of knowing. In the end, it ran his mind down.”
“It’s nothing to do with too much knowledge.” Miisi’s sister is exasperated. “Miisi was endowed with both cerebral knowledge and a non-cerebral way of knowing. But every time ours popped up, he squeezed and muted. He worshipped cerebral knowledge.”
“So he was sacrificed at the altar of knowledge?” Kusi tries to reconcile her mother and aunt.
“For knowing and refusing to know,” her aunt says confidently.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Martha Ludigo-Nyenje for being my first reader and for those first six months in Manchester; Nicole Thiara for reading all the versions of my manuscripts; Commonword/Cultureword’s Pete Kalu for the writing group; Martin De Mello, for giving so much more than I can ever give back; the Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Lancaster, for the continuous support; the Literary Consultancy, for Sara Maitland and for Jacob Ross; Kwani?, for the brilliant idea of a manuscript project and for giving this novel a chance; Kate Haines for holding my hand; Geoff Ryman for that letter; James Macdonald Lock-hart for giving me a chance; Ellah Wakatama Allfrey for the eagle eyes and for getting more out of me than I thought possible, I was lucky to work with you; Vimbai Shire, thank you; MMU Special Collections for the gem; the City of Manchester for the libraries—don’t close them please—Damian Morris for indulging me and for not saying, “What?” when I talk to myself.
And thank you, Jordan Bamundaga, for putting up with a part-time mum.
JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI, a Ugandan novelist and short story writer, has a PhD from Lancaster University. Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani? Manuscript Project in 2013 and was longlisted for the Etisalat Prize in 2014. Her story “Let’s Tell This Story Properly” won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Makumbi lives in Manchester, UK, with her husband, Damian, and her son, Jordan.
AARON BADY is a writer in Oakland, California, and an editor at The New Inquiry.
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Kintu Page 41