Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  There is a belief out here that if your relationship with the person who received you in Britain survives this phase then it is for forever. It does not matter whether you’re siblings, lovers, spouses, parents, children or friends, this phase kills relationships. Often you hear people say he or she received me when I first came. I don’t know where I would be without them. You forever love that person unless you are an arsehole.

  Katassi was a contradiction, like multiple personalities.

  The more I tried to help the more she lashed out. In her quest to fit in quickly, she dressed as if shock value epitomised Britishness. She acted out the way she saw teenagers do on soap operas. Do you know what a forced Mancunian accent with Ugandan inflections sounds like? I think the harder she tried to sound and act like them, the more the kids at school rejected her. It happened to me. She then brought all the pain from school home to me. She would not lift a finger to do chores. She wanted designer gear. I bought winter woollies from charity shops for her and she was like, E mivumba? I am not wearing second-hand clothes in Britain. And by the way, she needed to go to France with her friends in summer. I was the obstacle to her happiness—strict, stingy, mean and patronising. Apparently, I was terrible to her because we did not share a mother.

  Looking back now, it was the moment she said it out loud that our kinship died.

  Katassi’s mother, Kizei, is Mum. Mine died in childbirth. We don’t talk about it. Kizei brought me up without drama. I’ve never felt that stepmother vibe. And yet here was Katassi, who I was looking after, reminding me? That day, I rang Kizei and cried down the phone about Katassi reminding me of my aloneness.

  Nnalongo stepped in. She said, ‘Bring Katassi to me, you’re too young to look after her.’

  Katassi packed all her bullshit and took it to Nnalongo’s half-Luwero house. She came and went in Nnalongo’s house without a word. When Nnalongo told her off, Katassi said, ‘You invited me to your house: deal with it.’ A few months later, Nnalongo dealt with it when Katassi reminded her, ‘This is Britain: children have rights. I don’t have to do what you say.’ Nnalongo said, ‘But you’ll pack your bags and leave my house.’

  When I arrived at Nnalongo’s I asked, ‘Katassi, what happened to you; why are you like this?’ She said, ‘Manchester, babe, Manchester happened. You’re no longer you, why should I be me?’ And then I saw her, asaliita nyini, towards my car with her bags. I said, ‘Where do you think you’re going? Not to mine.’ I was not going to watch myself fall mad because of her. I drove her to the nearest bed and breakfast and showed her how to get in touch with social services.

  Boy, did Katassi celebrate when social services found her a place at a hostel in Moss Side. When we dropped her bags off, she went berserk: ‘Good riddance to the hag and the nigger… Yo jaak shit…Yo twats…Yo nathin…wankaz!’ White residents turned puce at the racial slurs, black residents bristled. When social workers started talking of sectioning her, I switched to Luganda, I said, ‘Katassi, you better pack it in right now because these people have no religion! They’re planning to take you to the Butabika of Britain.’

  She fell silent. Every Ugandan knows Butabika Mental Hospital will sober the worst mental illness. That day I rang Mzei and said, ‘Come and take Katassi back home, social services are no place for her,’ do you know what he said? ‘As long as they feed and tell her to go to school, she’ll be alright.’ He would keep ringing the hostel to make sure everything was okay. In the subsequent calls, Mzei said that everyone at the hostel sang Katassi’s praises. She had settled down, become a model resident, model student. I guess without me to come home to and scapegoat, Britain whipped her into shape. Or her transition was complete. Sadly, I missed telling her Now you know what people mean when they say I did not know I was African until I came to the West.

  Half a year later, when Nnalongo said that Katassi had rung wanting to talk, I said, ‘You keep mothering her, I don’t want to know.’ Luckily, I had moved to a new house. Never heard from Katassi again. Eight years later—was it 2001 or 2002?—someone asked me, ‘Yii, but Nnambassa, where were you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘We didn’t see you at your sister’s graduation, why can’t you forgive? It looked bad you not being there.’ Apparently Katassi did nursing. My parents never mentioned it. Perhaps they had been expecting engineering—you know what Ugandan middle-class parents are like. I looked to the gods and said Dunda, you’ve shepherded her. Katassi had arrived safely.

  • • •

  The scam story is as old as the émigré story, but the impatience of people back home with diasporic victims, defrauded by family at home, is alarming. If it happens to you, just keep quiet. People at home will laugh in your face and call you stupid. Some say it’s because at home they imagine we have it easy out here. Others claim it’s resentment; we left instead of staying to build the nation.

  That was the attitude that met Ssalongo Bemba, the guy Mzei lived with in Peckham as he did his MA. Bemba returned home in 1987, a year before I came to Britain. He spent three weeks at our house, but I didn’t know why until Kampala got wind of the story and splashed it in the papers. Nnalongo Bemba, his wife, had not only failed to pick him up at the airport, she had locked him out of the family home. Public opinion took Nnalongo’s side:

  – Ten years is too long for a wife to sit there, looking at herself. And what did he imagine kept her blood flowing?

  – How would she know he was coming back?

  – Even if he did, how many men come back, find their wives threadbare old, dump them and marry a young wife who rhymes with the new wealth?

  – Is he the first to be scammed? Get over it.

  – Let him go back and live his dream life.

  Do you know what Bemba did? He climbed onto the roof of the house his Nnalongo built with his migrant money and plunged. Kampala stopped laughing. And you know how the media at home does not hold back on graphic images. SSALONGO KILLS HIMSELF AFTER BETRAYAL. Another claimed NNALONGO TURNS TWIN DAUGHTERS AGAINST FATHER. Stories from Britain started to trickle into the papers. Apparently, all his ten years in Britain, they never saw Bemba with another woman. He worked three jobs. Without legal documents, he could not visit Uganda and return to Britain.

  Because there were no ambulances at the time, it was Mzei who paid the police to get off their backsides to pick up Bemba’s body and take it to Mulago Hospital. But by then either Nnalongo Bemba and her lawyer boyfriend had fled the country or they had paid the police more money to be useless. It was Mzei who paid for Bemba’s burial. Two days after his burial, the Bemba house was razed to the ground. It was the work of a bulldozer, but the villagers said they heard nothing all night. They speculated that someone did not want a cursed house standing in their village.

  Bemba’s story lingered as the papers looked for this and that angle, like sucking marrow from a bone. It came to light that Bemba had married his wife against his family’s wishes, that she had married him for his money, that he had constantly been under pressure to sustain her love. When Uganda became too restricting moneywise, he went to Britain and promised to send for her. It did not happen because Bemba’s status in Britain failed to become legal. Instead, he sent money. Along the way her love died. Some said she had always been a slut. Poor Bemba did not realise that he had lost his wife even though his family, his mother and siblings, warned him that Rebecca—that was his wife’s name—was no longer missing him. She had been seen too happy, too often, in a certain lawyer’s company. But why would Bemba believe them when they had been against the marriage right from the start? The more they told him, the more he resented them. Eventually he stopped talking to them entirely. So, when he returned and was locked out by his wife, his family crossed their arms and said What do you want from us; we’re the bad ones; go to your Nnalongo.

  • • •

  It was against this background that Mzei met Nnalongo in Manchester, three weeks ago.

  That day I cooked matooke, lumonde, off-layer chicken
and fresh kanyebwa beans because Dad had brought a lot of food from home. I invited Nnalongo: Mzei wanted to thank her for looking after us. I had sent Mulungi over to Aryan because I needed her bedroom for Mzei. Mzei rang Katassi to come to talk. She said she was coming. Even I believed her this time. After all, Mzei had come all the way from home to reconcile us and he was dying. It was going to be intimate—me, Mzei, Katassi and Nnalongo.

  I did not see it happen. Nnalongo arrived, I opened the door and took her raincoat. As I hung it up, she walked into the lounge. I heard a shriek and something shattered. I rushed in, Nnalongo lay on the floor, the glass coffee table shattered. Mzei, wild-eyed with fear, said, ‘I only pushed her away, she tried to hug me, I only pushed her away!’

  Amidst my calling the ambulance, telling them, ‘She’s dead, She’s dead,’ and Mzei trying to explain to me, ‘She killed him, mukazi mutemu, I didn’t mean to push her too hard,’ I realised who Nnalongo the killer was. But with the police’s arrival and questioning us and the paramedics and Mzei’s delirium, there was no time to be shocked.

  I asked Mzei for Katassi’s number and called her. Her phone rang for a while, but there was no answer. Meanwhile, I wondered who to follow in my car—Nnalongo in the ambulance, who was not dead after all and being taken to hospital, or Mzei being taken to the police station? I rang Katassi again; it went straight to voicemail. I decided to go with Mzei. I’d be of more use to him than to Nnalongo.

  When we stepped outside my house, I counted at least five police cars, emergency lights flashing, interviewing our neighbours. I imagined them thinking Black people and violence.

  Sometimes events in Britain fail to translate into Luganda. Kizei kept asking, ‘Did you say hospital or jail? You mean cancer has gone to his head?’ I told her to talk to my siblings; they would make sense of things, but she asked how they would make sense when they were in Uganda. In the end she said, ‘If your father is in police custody instead of hospital, then I am coming.’ I said that the money she would blow on the visa application and ticket could be used for legal fees. She asked me if it was my money she was wasting. Meanwhile, Katassi had no idea that her Muzei was blinking behind bars and Kizei was coming. Our siblings at home said her phone was still switched off.

  The only time you wish the British High Commission to deny someone a visa, they go and give it to her. Kizei arrived in Manchester with this sense of Now that I am here everything is going to be alright. But because Mzei had confessed to pushing Nnalongo, he was held in custody. The first time I visited him in jail, we looked at each other—me failing to deflate the sense of mortification in the air, him searching for redemption in my eyes. Then I realised that I could hug him and make small talk and show I was not ashamed of him. Afterwards, we sat down, his clasped hands digging between his legs, my arms crossed. Silence was tenacious. I said, ‘It’s cool and silent in here,’ like I envied him. But he asked, ‘Has Nnalongo returned to consciousness?’ I shook my head and silence rolled in again. When he asked about people at home, I said his wife was coming. He perked up.

  ‘She is?’ As if Mum was the only thing he had got right in his life.

  ‘I could not convince her otherwise.’

  He grabbed me in a constricting hug and cried the tears of an old man. He cried the way you should never hear your old man cry. I remember thinking, where is cancer pain when you need it? Mzei needed another kind of pain, one he was not responsible for, to forget this one. When he let me go, I said, ‘British weather is mean; the last three days have been hot and sunny.’

  He wiped his tears. ‘There is enough sunshine back home.’ He did not ask about Katassi.

  • • •

  Nnalongo regained consciousness as if she had only fallen asleep. That day, we spoke at length without talking at all. She would not meet my eyes.

  I told her the Ugandan community did not know what had happened yet. ‘Do you want me to inform them?’

  ‘No need,’ she said. ‘People have things they keep to themselves.’

  ‘Anyone you need me to get in touch with back home or in the US?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Take my house keys’—she reached for her handbag, rummaged and removed a bunch—‘and check that everything is fine. Turn on the lights when it gets dark and turn them off at bedtime.’

  But the facts—that Mzei had almost killed her, that she was Nnalongo Bemba, that Ssalongo Bemba had committed suicide in desperation, that she was not Muslim—sat right there on her hospital bed swinging their legs.

  Just before Nnalongo was discharged from hospital, Kizei arrived. From the airport, we took her bags back to my house. Then, as if her legs were not as swollen as her bags, she said, ‘Take me to see my one.’ Mzei received her like the Second Coming—on his knees, holding out his hands. I stepped away because I am not used to them displaying their aged love. On our way back, Kizei asked to see Nnalongo. I said I had to ask Nnalongo first.

  ‘What are you waiting for? Go and ask her.’

  I told her the visiting hours were over. They were not. But I had to stop her. I took her home; she had a shower and put her feet up. Then she picked up the phone, called Katassi and told her a few horrors which would befall her if her father died with this anguish on his heart. The following day, when I asked Nnalongo whether she was happy to see my mother, she looked at me as if I was dumb.

  ‘You mean she made this horrible journey too?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Of course, bring her; how can you ask?’

  Kizei had a few tricks up her sleeve. As we came to Nnalongo’s bed? She turned on the waterworks—like Nnalongo was dying and we were in Mulago Hospital. Nnalongo opened her arms and turned to soothing my mother: ‘No need to cry, Maama Nnambassa! I am alright, aren’t I? These things happen, we all make mistakes.’ I drew the screen around them. But then Nnalongo too was overcome and they cried. Me, I was just dying of what we call ‘African parents’ in Britain. When they stopped, Nnalongo said, ‘Can you imagine, this child asked me whether I would mind seeing you?’ Kizei shook her head in despair: ‘That’s what happens when they live too long in these countries.’ Now Kizei looked at Nnalongo and asked, ‘Tell me the truth: down inside yourself, how do you feel?’

  Nnalongo flashed a smile. ‘When you look at me, how do you see me?’

  ‘Like every day England makes you younger!’

  ‘How? When you’re the one that looks like Nnambassa’s sister. Tell me about the children.’

  I asked if either wanted a hot drink. They looked at me in a you mean you interrupted us for that nonsense way. I told them I was going to the restaurant and walked out of there.

  • • •

  To the police Nnalongo denied everything. Who said he pushed me…Don’t listen to Mzei. He has cancer; it has got to his head…That Nnambassa was in the corridor when it happened. She didn’t see anything. I am telling you it was an accident. Coerced? What do you call me? A child? Tsk, coerced indeed. That’s how Nnalongo talked to the police.

  I did not witness the awkwardness of Kizei and Mzei visiting Nnalongo. Katassi was scheduled to see them and Nnalongo in hospital anyway. I could not go along in case Katassi turned her shame into anger against me again. I dropped Muzei and Kizei off at Manchester Royal Infirmary—Kizei knew her way to Nnalongo’s ward now—and drove to Nnalongo’s house to turn on the lights.

  Because it was still daylight, I went into her bedroom to open the window and let natural light in. It was silent, like I was trespassing. I walked across the room, drew back the curtains and opened the window. Then I saw the pictures. For some reason, Nnalongo had recently filled the walls with her wedding and family pictures. I walked to a large wedding portrait. Nnalongo sat on the chair, staring into the camera. She was ridiculously skinny. A great beauty. No sign that she would ‘kill’ the handsome man standing behind her, both his hands on her shoulders. He was happy hereafter. It was an Afro Studio collection of the seventies. Staged with fake backgrounds. I turned to one w
ith the bride’s and groom’s families flanking them. Bemba’s family didn’t look like they would abandon him. Then there was a funny one. Nnalongo had put on some weight. She was dressed in one of those old-fashioned maxi dresses with frills everywhere. She and Bemba sat on chairs, fake bookshelves behind them, a tiered flower stand, with plastic flowers, on the side. They held the twins on their laps. The children looked nine, ten months old. One of those poses where children refuse to play along. One twin was head thrown back in a mighty howl. The other rubbed her eyes searching for tears. Ssalongo and Nnalongo were laughing when the picture was taken. A chill swept over my arms. You don’t forget a moment like that. I stopped looking at the pictures and walked back to close the window and get out of there. On the floor was a kakayi, one of the scarves Nnalongo used to cover her head with as a Muslim. I picked it up, folded it and put it on the bed. I closed the window, drew the curtains and tiptoed out of the room.