Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  The woman returned with a blue folder. Adopted was stamped across the cover. Abbey and Kwei stared in disbelief.

  ‘He’s been taken?’

  ‘How would you look after him: are you married?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, hmm? Why didn’t you tell me every time I came?’

  ‘He was only taken this morn—’

  ‘Thieves, oh, but these people are thieves! They don’t just steal kingdoms, they steal children too.’

  ‘We want our child back.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, Mr Baker.’

  Now Abbey broke down. ‘How can I go home, Kwei, how can I leave my child here?’

  Even the woman softened. ‘Look, I am really sorry, but in this country—’

  ‘Don’t tell me about this country, you’re not good people. You don’t care who you hurt, you’re selfish. You’re—’

  ‘We were thinking about the child, which obviously you have not!’

  ‘Abbey,’ Kwei started quietly. ‘Write, write down everything. Our blood is strong, Moses will come looking.’ He turned to the woman. ‘You’ve made Moses an anonymous child, you’ll take that to your grave.’

  Abbey picked up a pen and opened the file. First, he wrote the child’s name, Moses Bamutwala Jjuuko. Under FATHER, he wrote Ssuuna Jjunju. In brackets, he wrote son of Mutikka Jjuuko of Kawempe, Kyadondo, Uganda. He paused for a second and then he signed with the flourish of a man creating his self-worth on a piece of paper. He put the pen down and walked out. He heard Kwei say, ‘I’ll write down Uncle Kwei’s contacts as well,’ but Abbey did not stop.

  Manchester Happened

  I WATCH MY PARENTS walk up to the scanners, their wheel-on luggage trailing. They stop and scan their boarding passes then stare into the red light of the retina readers. I am thinking I should have gone with them and helped, when the barriers open simultaneously and they spill into the security section. Dad—we call him Mzei—walks down the gangway as if the police might stop him and say Where do you think you are going, Mzei? He’s in such a hurry to go home, he’s refused to wait for an appointment to see the GP for a second opinion. Behind him, Mum—we call her Kizei—hobbles side-to-side the way big mamas who have been sniffy about exercising do. When her husband said no to waiting, she said, ‘Leave your father alone, we have doctors in Uganda.’ I step out of the way for other passengers streaming to the scanners and stand by the entrance to watch my parents go through security. Neither is checked. They pick up their luggage and turn. Kizei waves like I told you I would get my man back. But Mzei’s wave is impatient: Are you still standing there? Go home and get some sleep. They turn and walk out of view.

  • • •

  Instead of sleeping, my mind flies back past this morning at the airport, past yesterday. I let it wander; it might find sleep along the way. It hurtles past Mzei pushing Nnalongo and the hospital/police palaver, past the birth of my daughter, Mulungi, past Aryan, my ex, past meeting Nnalongo. When it goes past my arrival in London in November 1988, to Ssalongo Bemba’s death in Uganda, I hold my breath. Nothing good comes from delving so far back into the past. I turn on my side and curl up. I close my eyes like I’ve heard sleep coming, but my mind won’t rest. It returns to the recent events during Mzei’s visit to reconcile me with my sister Katassi.

  Mzei wasted his time coming to Britain. I don’t know how many times he has tried to make us sisters again. First, he talked to us separately spouting that traditional nonsense of Siblings are gourds: no matter how hard they knock each other they never break. Then he rang to say, ‘Katassi is going to call you to apologise—be nice.’ That happened three times, but no call came. Then he invited us to go home. I travelled, Katassi didn’t. The second time he begged, ‘Come, Nnambassa: you’re the eldest, show you’re willing to reconcile, Katassi has assured me she’s coming for Christmas.’ No Katassi came. This final time he said, ‘I am not going to die until you girls settle your differences,’ as if his cancer cared. ‘If Katassi will not come home, I’ll come to Britain.’ It was a veiled threat, but neither Katassi nor I offered to travel to Uganda. Then he rang: ‘I’ve bought the ticket.’ He was sure that as soon as we saw his sick old self we would forget our feud and hug so he could die happily. I am susceptible to that kind of manipulation because I grew up with rebukes like And you, Nnambassa, the oldest? You should know better, should show an example to the younger ones. Katassi grew up watching me take the blame. That shit does not work on her.

  • • •

  Until Mzei pushed Nnalongo, I didn’t know who Nnalongo really was. I mean, I knew her, I once lived with her, but I didn’t know her roots in Uganda, or who she was before she came to Britain. Nnalongo is one of those people who bring Uganda with them to Britain. We call her house half-Luwero because it’s littered with Ugandan paraphernalia—straw mats, masks with elongated faces, every ethnic basket from home, batiks, gourds and carvings. She eats Ugandan only. No English in her house. But mostly it is that squeaky, monotonous kadongo kamu country music she plays. Her kadongo kamu, from the 1980s and 1990s, conjures home, but it is the woman-bashing Uganda. It decries the prostitutes of Kampala, who actually were city women who couldn’t cook, were near-naked, ate your money but yielded nothing. It rebuked ugly women, old women, skinny women, dry-skinned women and even the dusty women of the slums. To me, that kadongo kamu was the cutting whip of Ganda patriarchy: why would Nnalongo lash herself with it in Britain?

  Nnalongo, in her sixties, is one of the oldest members of the community. You can’t go asking elderly people who they are. They might say things like Where does my background touch you? If they choose to tell you things about themselves, they tell you. If they don’t, they don’t. Nnalongo did not share her background with me, despite our mother—daughter relationship. Yet she’s your traditional mother hen. If she sees young girls who have just arrived from home going astray, she says, Mwana wange, don’t do that, do this. Or Watch the people you keep company with. Make sure they’ll help you develop. And if Manchester becomes too prohibitive and she feels you’re worth her while, Nnalongo offers, Move into my house, I have a spare bedroom. Save money and when you’re steady on your feet, try again. Afterwards, Nnalongo shrugs, Don’t bother thanking me, this country is not ours, we all help each other.

  But I’ve never heard Nnalongo say I am going home to visit, never heard her sigh about her twins or being wistful about being away from her family. The only sign of homesickness is her half-Luwero house. Yet she regularly visits the US. Another thing—you’ll not take Nnalongo’s photo. You whip out your phone or camera, she ducks. Apparently, Islam does not encourage taking photos. Yet at night beer is her duvet. She says her sleep needs a shove to come. I accepted these inconsistencies as human contradictions; we’re all full of them.

  • • •

  In the early 1980s, Mzei did a two-year MA course at the London School of Economics through those British Council scholarships. Typically, he scrimpled his upkeep money, joined a friend called Ssalongo Bemba in Peckham and worked while he studied. While there, he saw Ugandan teenagers arrive in Britain to work and study. These sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds were put on a plane with nothing more than Aunt so-and-so will pick you up at the airport. Life will be tough at first, but since when has life been easy for us? They arrived, set themselves up to work, studied and thrived. Apparently they became hardy, responsible and grew in character. With British degrees, the world belonged to them.

  Mzei returned home excited and we all bought into it. When Mzei confirmed his plans for me to leave soon after my O levels, I could not wait. Those were the heady 1980s. Our parents, after the horrors of the 1970s, were looking overseas for the future of their children. Born in the 1940s and 1950s, they came from austere backgrounds. Then the 1970s had so lashed the middle classes that parents were wary of bringing up children entirely middle class. Pampered, spoilt and soft, we would be helpless in tough times. In any case, because of the incessant warring, wealth in Uganda
was ephemeral—today you’re cruising in a Mercedes, tomorrow you’re hawking roast groundnuts. This made the middle-class wobbly. Besides, what could be worse than Uganda fresh out of Idi Amin, the subsequent coups and now the new disease? And so, to see real life, to learn lessons, to grow hardy, to escape the dungeon that was Uganda, but most of all to get the coveted British degrees and grab that bright future, we were sent to Britain. It was at once a sacrifice and a privilege.

  It was the wrong decade to send sixteen-year-olds unaccompanied to Britain. On the one hand, you had a Britain imploding under Thatcher—women’s lib, gay rights, racial relations and the working class were rioting. On the other you had a growing Ugandan community in London swelled by former regime politicians, embezzlers and wealthy widows and widowers of the new disease coming to Britain where drugs trials needed guinea pigs. It was destination London because Britain was supposedly familiar—former colonial masters had set up the systems in Uganda to mirror systems in Britain. In school, we not only studied British history and geography but its literature. What could be difficult?

  But 1988 London to sixteen-year-old me, newly arrived from Kampala, was Mabira Forest in the night. Like most middle-class children, I had been to boarding schools most of my life. When I came home, there was a maid, a gardener and I was chauffeured everywhere. My biggest concerns were my looks and public opinion. Now I was in a dense metropolis asking What is NI…Who is a GP: why register with one? Should I throw myself away, invent a new self and hand it in as an asylum seeker?

  The first thing I was told when I arrived was You don’t go gushing at someone just because you’ve heard them speak Luganda. Ugandans would look at you in a Mpozi, which car boot brought you here way. There was distrust and intrigue within the community. You had to be careful who you sought to network with on jobs, housing and visa issues. You had to be careful how much of yourself you put out there. A lot of people hid from fellow Ugandans. A lot of people in public were hidden. Rumours were like rumours.

  As for physical London, someone kind handed you the London A–Z booklet and said Go. In those first few months, I would get lost and burst into tears. Then I would soothe myself: Nnambassa mukwano, stop crying. Now try again. I had no option but to love myself.

  Don’t start me on the Tube.

  Take District Line, not southbound, northbound—which had nothing to do with the Northern Line—Kwata Jubilee Line, leave Victoria Line, Vva ku Hammersmith—don’t you hear English? The first time I was like Line? What line? I don’t see any queues here. Heh heh, let me laugh now because I could not laugh then. In moments of great distress English can sound Greek.

  As for getting jobs, with a name like Nnambassa the first interview was on the phone to weed out nightmarish accents. If the interviewer started saying I didn’t catch what you said…can you spell that word for me please, you knew you’d failed. So you swallowed your pride and applied to a nursing home. Meanwhile, budget the little money you have—bills, rent, transport. Don’t worry about food, bread is cheap. Visa has expired? Stay well clear of the police—even if you’re attacked. Exams are coming—ask for leave to prepare for them. In case you have forgotten, I was a sixteen-year-old from Kampala.

  Ugandans who had arrived earlier—those who knew the system and how to make it work for them—preyed on the alone and frightened. Teenage girls moved in with men they would never look at twice at home. Boys serviced women older than their mothers. HIV acquired legs. Some teenagers struggled and got hooked on drugs. Some ended up among the homeless, some were sectioned in mental health facilities, some died with no one to cry for them. Girls turned tricks because some aunts never came to the airport to pick them up. Some aunts picked you up grudgingly and then proceeded to make your life so miserable you moved out of their homes as soon as you could. Even aunts who were happy to see you got fed up within six months. Then there was the ruthless aunt who picked you up, found you a job, registered you in her name, her National Insurance number and bank account. You worked your fingers to the bone but at the end of the month your salary was paid into her account. When you asked for your money she’d say Don’t you eat, or do you imagine the bills pay themselves? Sometimes the aunt introduced you to a man and said You’re lucky he’s interested in you. Why don’t you go and live with him? He has the right documents, maybe he’ll marry you. But why would he marry you when the following year some reckless parents would send another bunch of hapless daughters and he needed to sample them?

  And yet we kept quiet when we returned home to visit—draped in high fashion, flashing cash and British accents. Nothing scared us like going back home looking like a failure. Being laughed at—Did you see her? London scotched her! Besides, the brave ones who tried to talk about it were accused of scaremongering: If Britain is as harsh as you say, why don’t you come back home?

  What do you say to that? That starting all over again in Uganda is scary? That you’re saving to return but it may never happen? After all, there are those that made it, legitimately or otherwise. So we killed ourselves working, ensnared ourselves in debt so we could masquerade when we came home and perform success and perpetuate the dream. But inside? Inside we were dying.

  Of course, there were savvy parents who knew the reality. The ultra-rich who came with their children, set them up in accommodation or paid the aunts. Parents who could afford to come regularly to see their children, who sent tickets for Christmas holidays because their children were on student visas. My parents were not among them. My aunt in London was no relation at all. She felt infringed upon. When I complained about the hardships Mzei said, ‘Look, Nnambassa, who is not suffering?’

  That first year in London I survived on adrenaline. I retain some of that jumpiness. Every time I hear a siren—police or ambulance, it does not matter—I sweat. Then I say to my irritable bowels Don’t be silly! Sometimes I look at Mulungi, my daughter, how she takes everything for granted, her entitlement to Britain, how my Ugandanness embarrasses her, her indifference to Uganda, and wonder whether to tell her the brutal truth.

  • • •

  I was lucky.

  I don’t know why Nnalongo came to London that day. I met her on a bus in Tottenham. She was looking for Uganda Waragi gin. At first, she spoke to me in faltering English. Her accent gave her away and I replied in Luganda. She almost died with relief. Then she went all native on me, yii my child, hugging, gesturing, laughing kiganda like we were in a kamunye taxi back home. She had met other Ugandans who had no patience with her old mama stance. I took her to Seven Sisters, where a shop stocked Uganda Waragi. Along the way we got talking. She said, ‘I don’t know what is wrong with London. The first thing people do when they arrive in London is strip themselves of their humanity. But Manchester is not like this; people are human.’ Then she offered, ‘If London ever gets too much, come to Manchester. I’ll help you settle in.’ I was so grateful, I took her back to Victoria Coach Station to see her off back to Manchester.

  When I came to Manchester, Nnalongo lived in Salford. Her main job was with Sodexo Cleaning Services, but she was bank staff for Apex Cleaners and had a few under-the-table jobs cleaning people’s home’s. The British still looked down on certain jobs—factory work, farm work, cleaning, nursing homes, working with people with learning disabilities. As long as you had a National Insurance Number, no one asked to see your visa. Nnalongo enrolled me with Sodexo and we cleaned hospitals, schools, colleges and universities. We worked in unison like termites. I threw away all that Uganda had taught me socially and culturally and allowed Britain to realign me.

  • • •

  Things were going so well I moved out of Nnalongo’s into a flat of my own and I started to buy new clothes from Peacocks instead of second-hand ones from charity shops. Guess what Mzei did when he heard? He sent my sister Katassi to live with me.

  Katassi was fourteen years old; she could not get a job and contribute to the bills. That was 1993. I had been in Britain just over four years and to Mzei I had had en
ough time to establish myself. I tried to explain that it was unfair but Mzei thought I was being selfish: ‘Give your sister the chance we gave you.’ Apparently Katassi had been dreaming of joining me for the last two years. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘It’s not good for you to be on your own in a foreign country.’

  Katassi arrived full of the I am going to Britain where you sweep money off streets kind of bullshit. She had this unrealistic image of white people as generous, infinitely obliging, friendly and altruistic. She had grown up with the white figure conflated with images of a blonde, blue-eyed Christ—sending money, arriving in Uganda to do charity work in hospitals and schools, starting projects, aid, adopting children, eyes melting at poverty—and took it at face value. She was unprepared for that disgusted gaze that questioned your humanity, for white people sleeping rough in London, for white beggars on the streets (how can they give us aid when their own people are begging?), for the rough area we lived in in Salford, for burglars (why would white people steal from us?), for the fact that she was going to be poorer in Britain than she had been at home. Her African heart must have told her that if white people can suffer in their own country, she was in trouble.

  Within two weeks of starting school, Katassi froze. I mean zombie-like. Then, and I don’t know when it happened, she started to smoulder. Do you know how the male turkey—I mean ssekkokko—puffs itself up and you hear small, sudden bursts of air like it has puffed itself too much? For three months Katassi walked around like that. Then she exploded and became this vicious, twisted creature who snarled. One moment she was saying racist things about white people, the next she was saying vile things about black people. I became that nigger of a sister, the bitch. She wrestled with her own Africanness. I could see her pain and confusion but there was nothing I could do. It is a phase every new arrival from home goes through out here. The more hopes you have in Britain, the more arrogant and inadvisable you are, the bitterer the pain. It’s like withdrawal symptoms from drugs. You suffer alone. In this phase, many teenagers denied ever having been on the African continent. They faked British accents, changed names and became British-born. I knew a Jjuuko who turned Jukkson and spoke patois. On the other hand, you had grownups, especially intellectual types, who reacted by becoming pan-African fundamentalists. I mean aggressively African, in-your-face African. They dropped their Christian names like sin, turned away from things European the way newly saved Christians turn from heathenry. They wore the continent on their body as if not to be mistaken for anything else. I tell you, this transitional shit can be so bad it kills families. I had friends, a sister and a brother, whose parents had left them home in Uganda for twelve years. In the meantime, the parents gave birth to three other children while in Britain. When the family reunited in London, the older kids were strangers. The parents did not speak Luganda any more. The problem was not just that my friends lived with a strange family, but that the parents treated the British-born siblings as special. They got away with things the older kids would never have dreamt of in Uganda at the same age. They not only babysat their British siblings, the siblings treated them as badly as their parents. My friends felt so unwanted they ran away and social services were involved. The last I heard they were asking to divorce their family entirely.