Africa39

by Wole Soyinka

  On Uncle Aculu’s second visit – the next day – the vendors still laughed, but the insult was not as severe as before. Uncle Aculu sat in the sitting room. When I went to the kitchen to make him some tea, Ma followed. I thought she wanted to help, but she just wanted to talk. Ma said I should not call Patrick Aculu ‘Uncle Aculu’ any more. It was better to call him Brother Patrick, she said, because he was our brother in Christ. I did not tell her that the Sunday school children would not have agreed. They called him Red Devil. They thought his eyes were the colour of red devil peppers and that he talked like he was chewing fire, exactly like the devil on Uganda Television.

  Red Devil became a daily guest. Every evening after his job skinning fish for export in the industrial area, he headed not to his home but to ours. Red Devil wore a brown polyester suit. He lined the suit’s pocket with two sets of pens in four colours: black, blue, green and pink. I found the pens alarming and constantly worried that Red Devil’s brain was not wired properly. It did not help that at dinner time he used too much Blue Band on his bread and blew at the tea. They were things Ma said that only people with no manners did.

  Now that he was a regular guest, Ma started to plan him into our evenings. When she bought maize flour, she added an extra quarter kilo just for Red Devil. When she cooked meat, she added three ladles of soup. When we ate dinner, she invited his thoughts and opinions. Ma encouraged him to speak like he was part of the family. After a few weeks, Red Devil’s confidence had grown bigger than the man himself.

  Late one evening at the dinner table, Red Devil offered his unsoli­cited thoughts about the market vendors. I noticed he was careful about the way he approached the subject.

  ‘Your back yard is beautiful,’ Red Devil said. ‘But those vendors are too much. Have you seen how they pluck the roses? The way they leave your beautiful garden defiled, I cannot believe it sincerely.’

  Ma did not speak immediately. When she did, she said, ‘Good point. Very good point, Brother Patrick.’

  Chei, I thought, such nonsense!

  ‘You are right, Brother Patrick,’ Ma said.

  Though she was quick to agree, she was careful about implementing his advice.

  About half a week later, Ma confronted the vendors. She left her office at the printing press early, walked home as usual, and before entering the house, stopped by the back yard. She surprised the vendors. They sat up respectfully in the grass and listened to Ma as if they were schoolchildren. But being as ill mannered as they were, the vendors lost interest as soon as they realised that her stopover was not friendly. Accustomed to talking as loud as they liked without rebuke, they did not take to being scolded. I watched with amusement from the sitting room window, curious to see what the outcome might be. That evening, when Red Devil came, Ma told him it had gone very well.

  ‘You really have good ideas,’ Ma said. ‘You should have been a lawyer.’

  ‘Ah, Sister, I can still be a lawyer. With God, nothing is impossible.’

  Chei, I thought. Such nonsense.

  That evening there were fewer silences between Ma and Red Devil at the dinner table. The two of them talked adult things, reckless, as if I was too stupid to understand. They talked about God and his plans for the future. It was God who had widowed both of them, they said. It was God who knew what tomorrow looked like.

  ‘You know, Sister, the book of Song of Solomon might be about God’s relationship with the church, but it has also taught me many things. Very many,’ Red Devil said. Ma laughed. She laughed so much she almost choked on her saliva.

  ‘Amito, maybe it is time for you to sleep now.’

  In my bed that night, I thought I ought to pray for Ma. It was true what they said about some diseases being contagious. Red Devil had infected Ma with his. Now the wires in Ma’s head were not working properly either.

  The next day, I waited at the window for Ma’s return from work. I saw her making her way through the market joyful and excited, holding a pineapple in her hand. When she reached our back yard, she looked stunned. There were at least twenty vendors, some of them sleeping on the grass, others on the stairs. The paspalum grass was scattered with flower petals, as if someone was trying to decorate the yard. Papers and polythene bags from the market were everywhere.

  Instead of threatening the vendors with eviction, Ma went directly into the house and stayed in the bedroom for a while. When she finally came out, she had changed into a black dress. She was wearing boots and carrying a spade. In the back yard, Ma found the vendors laughing and talking, happy, as if all was well. She tried to speak to them. They did not pay her any attention – not until she started to yell at them, her small arms shaking and her wig unstable on her scalp.

  ‘Leave. I want all of you to leave my compound now,’ Ma said.

  ‘Your compound?’ one vendor said. The rest joined in, and they did not allow Ma to speak again. If she wanted to live like the rich, she was on the wrong estate. She should hire a truck, load her household items on it, and head for Kampala’s hills, where the houses were large and double-storied and there were dogs and long fences to keep people away.

  ‘I am not going anywhere. I am not. This is my house,’ Ma said, repeating herself until she started pointing to the ground, claiming her back yard for her own, refusing to be defeated in this fight.

  ‘Your house? You think this is your house?’

  The vendors were undeterred in their efforts to make Ma shut up. They told her that no one came into the estates with any piece of land on their heads. They called my mother a whore. They said she was a husbandless slut, a fanatic Christian, a sex-starved bitch who should migrate back to the north of the country where people were unciv­ilised and lacked manners.

  I hoped Red Devil would walk up. If he did, and if he tried to come to Ma’s defence, the vendors would beat him until all his teeth fell out. Maybe if he stayed in Mulago Hospital long enough, Ma would forget him. But he was lucky, that Red Devil. He only heard about these exchanges from Ma. And being the Red Devil he was, he just said, ‘Um, um, if I was you, I would really make sure those men leave for good. This is your house, they need to know that.’

  On the third day of the confrontations, Ma decided to return late from the office, when day would be giving way to night. The day vendors would have left, and in their place would be the night vendors, who were not troublesome. The night vendors kept away from people’s back yards. They spread themselves around the market and along Estate Close with their tables full of bread and milk for sale, tomatoes heaped on sisal sacks, kerosene lamps, and large saucepans of cow-leg soup cooking, offal, pancakes, roast meat, and fried cassava, and filled the roadside with the aroma of life. Men, labourers from the industrial area, the market, and the factories around the estates, stationed themselves on benches waiting to be served. Ma always said those men fed their families on eggplant while they fattened themselves on roadside chicken and beef.

  I waited for Ma at the window. I was anxious for her, hoping the vendors would be gone by the time she returned. But they weren’t. When Ma arrived home, there were as many as the day before.

  ‘You. You thought we would leave just because you came late? You thought we would leave?’ The vendors started even before Ma crossed Estate Close. She avoided looking at them and hurried towards the house. They were not ready to let her pass. Everyone in the market stopped to see what was going on. Ma stopped too. She turned.

  The vendors resumed the shouting, but one voice among them commanded more attention. It was the man with keloid scars all over his chin. He said no woman should talk to them like that, most especially Ma. She was unworthy. He said nothing good ever came out of her. He said even Ma’s womb carried the ugliest of children, children who came out with heads the size of water basins and nostrils that could fit a man’s fist. I didn’t move from the window for a long time.

  Later that evening, I told myself I shouldn’t be affected by the stupid things those uneducated vendors said. The vendors came a
nd went, and the market didn’t even notice. But me, I was destined for greater things. I was going to end up in Makerere University, Kampala’s hills, and maybe even outside countries, the ones Naalu my friend always spoke of. Naalu said that in London, which was one of the cities we could easily end up in, people were rich. They left cars by the roadside if they didn’t like them. Every morning the city council worked overtime clearing the street of unwanted merchandise.

  I woke up early the next morning, hoping the previous evening would be forgotten. But bitterness and doubt stayed with me like an illness. Throughout the day at school, I found myself holding a fist to my nose to gauge its size. In class, even when the teacher said funny things about Didi Comedy on Uganda Television, I did not smile. I thought it was my fault I did not have many friends. I was not pretty – and good looks, it seemed, were a prerequisite for everything, even for being at the top of the class.

  On my way home that evening, I waited for Naalu at the end of Estate Close. She went to another school, and we always met by the cemetery before walking together. That evening, when Naalu joined me, I asked her if she thought I was ugly. Yes, she said and then, realising I was serious, she asked what was wrong with me.

  ‘OK, OK,’ I said, and I told Naalu the vendors must be evicted from our back yard. I told her I was fed up.

  ‘Eh, this is serious,’ Naalu said. But she offered to help, as long as we did whatever we were planning to do when her father was not home.

  The next afternoon, I sat in the cemetery waiting for Naalu. After an hour, I started to worry. But just when I was getting restless, Naalu burst through the cemetery, running. She reached me and did not stop. I ran after her, slowing only when Naalu herself slowed down half a kilometre later, by the city council hospital.

  ‘Is someone chasing you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but it is better to run just in case.’ And then, ‘The bastards must pay. It is war. It is war!’

  The sun was still hot and evening seemed far away. Naalu and I reached Mama Benja’s house one block from ours to the left. From the safety of her fence, Naalu and I threw stones. There were about nine men under the umbrella tree that day, in the middle of our compound. The tree was small, but in the afternoon its shade turned generous and could accommodate several of them stretched out in the grass beneath. It took at least three stone throws before the vendors noticed that someone was trying to command their attention. They stood up one at a time. One of the men, the one with the keloid scars, made as if to come towards us, squinting to peer through the thick layer of fence.

  Naalu and I ran. At the corner of Mama Benja’s block, I fell and scraped my knees bloody. Naalu raced on. She stopped at the large jambula tree. I rose from my fall and darted through Mama Farouk’s fence. When I reached Naalu at the jambula tree, the man with the keloid scars appeared at the corner of Mama Benja’s house. Off we raced again. We never looked back until we stopped at the road that turned into the police barracks. But Naalu was worried that her father would be home, and so we made our way back through the estate houses towards the dead water point.

  At one time this water point had been the main source for our neighbourhood. Age and lack of use had rusted the taps, which looked fit for scrap only. Naalu’s father, who was also the chairman of our residential area – the man charged with settling petty quarrels and taking small bribes for writing letters of introduction and stamping passport applications – had raised funds to renovate the water point and replace the taps. Activity returned. People thought it was good they didn’t have to trek half a kilometre to fetch water in Lugogo, but by six in the morning, jerry cans were lined up as people fought over whose turn it was. Then the jerry cans, even if they were carefully labelled, started to disappear. The next time the taps broke, water flowed all the way to the market. It spewed everywhere and children ran around naked, happy for the artificial rain. After that episode, no one bothered with the water point again.

  After our first try at evicting the vendors, the evening of the next day came. We were inside our house. In the kitchen, I fetched a bucket full of water that I had used to clean the fresh fish from the night before. The water was going stale now, the scent of rotting tilapia fermenting and turning the house into a fish brewery.

  Ma was still at work. She would not be home soon. But I was still worried that if we did not hurry, she would return to find the house still smelling of fish. So I repeated to Naalu that we really needed to be quick.

  The men were still in our back yard, basking and anticipating another exciting confrontation with Ma while Naalu helped me carry the bucket of water from the kitchen to the sitting room.

  ‘I think you can carry it from here,’ she said when we reached the back door. I looked at her and frowned, I knew she would not go outside with me even if I threatened witchcraft.

  I descended the stairs by myself, carrying the bucket of water slowly down. On the grass, I pulled the bucket towards the umbrella tree. I wasn’t sure if the men were paying attention, but I knew they had seen me.

  I pulled my bucket farther. As soon as I sensed I was too anxious to go on, I lifted. It was heavy but not as heavy as I had expected it to be. I directed the bucket towards the umbrella tree, then I poured and ran. On the stairs I said to myself, ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise be to God!’ In the house, under the bed in the bedroom where I stayed the whole evening, all I thought was ‘Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise be to God!’

  Ma came home to a riot – men with stones and bricks. She also came home to find Naalu’s father standing on our stairs, trying to make sure everyone understood he’d come as chairman to settle the matter.

  Years later, Ma would say that when she came back from work and saw him standing on the stairs trying to calm everyone, she didn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed. It was well known among our neighbours that Ma and Naalu’s father did not like each other. Naalu’s father thought northerners were to blame for every single thing that had ever gone wrong in the country – the coups d’état, the bad roads, the hospitals without medicine, the high price of sugar, his addiction to nicotine, and the fact that the country was landlocked. As for Ma, her reasons for disliking the man were simple. He was Catholic, like the unforgiving nuns of her school days; he supported the Democratic Party; and he was a Muganda, like most of the vendors who messed her back yard. According to Ma, all three things were incurable ailments. Catholics worshipped idols. DP was a dead political party led by a goat of an old man who did nothing but make dead deals. And Ma thought the Baganda were thieving traitors who’d been selling the country to the highest bidder right from the time of the British. Ma said it often that Baganda treasured money over loyalty. They would steal your hand if you turned away. The Baganda were banana eaters. They consumed matooke for a staple. Ma said matooke was a useless food, one per cent air and ninety-nine per cent water. She thought the Baganda were a weak people, fearful of confrontation and conflict, who chose the easy way instead of the upstream path of honesty, clarity and directness. My friendship with Naalu Ma had tolerated for the most part because of the day she found Naalu and me in our sitting room sharing a plate of dried fish and millet. Ma asked Naalu if she liked it.

  ‘Yes,’ Naalu said.

  ‘Good,’ Ma said. ‘Tell that to your father when you see him. Tell him you eat millet these days, not bananas!’

  In our back yard, Naalu’s father forgot about his ongoing war with Ma. He focused on the vendors and spoke with eloquence and seriousness. He told all the gathered people that the market and the estates were two different entities. It was irrelevant that they were both owned by Kampala city council. If the men wanted to use such flimsy arguments, he said, we should as well go and camp at the state house and tell the president it was our right as citizens. If the vendors did not stop coming to Ma’s back yard, or any other back yard in the estates for that matter, he would take this issue up with the market management.

  That evening a new law came into for
ce, written on plywood with charcoal and hurriedly constructed by a carpenter. It was erected right next to Ma’s newly planted red euphorbia fence. Anyone caught crossing over to the estates would be fined twenty thousand shillings. When I saw the sign from the safety of our window, I thought it would be pulled down. But that signpost survived hail and dogs, vendors and trucks for years.

  Red Devil came home just when Naalu’s father was trying to settle the matter. With the confidence he’d built over the weeks of coming to our home, he tried to intervene on her behalf. Someone took the pens from his brown suit pocket and pocked his skull with them. They ordered Red Devil to shut up because he had no right to speak. A man who knew him well took the opportunity to embarrass him. He said that Red Devil was not a Christian. He did not care about God – only about the Christian women he infected with gonorrhoea while reciting verses from the Song of Solomon.

  I did not see Red Devil after that, but neither did I see Naalu. Over the next days, I searched for any sign of her in their front yard. When she did eventually surface, it was only because her father had sent her to the market to buy cooking oil for the house. Naalu hurried there, running as if there was fire on her hem. When she saw me following, she broke into a sprint and left the market without buying the cooking oil. She did not look back either. Maybe she was afraid she would turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Naalu raced up the hill as if it was a flat football field. And that was the last time I saw her. Ma was not speaking to Naalu’s father again, and Naalu’s brother, Nviiri, was not talking to me, so I could not ask him. Only the silly estate boys seemed available to offer some answers. It took several tries before they told me what they knew. They said that Naalu’s father, fearing that I would turn her into a good-for-nothing millet-eating uncivilised northerner, had enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school to join the Order of St Bruno, the crazy nuns who committed to a vow of silence and solitude for the rest of their lives.