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Kamu had ceased to be human.
He saw it sink behind the trees and thought, this is how we grow old: by letting the moon and the sun overtake us.
Kintu felt for Gitta. He knew the snare of being a man. Society heaped such expectations on manhood that in a bid to live up to them some men snapped.
Sleep is a thief:
Zaya had failed to transform into a wife. She was taller than most men and stood erect in spite of her breasts. Whatever made women feminine, Zaya had missed out on.
Maybe the groom was asexual, maybe he was frightened of the dark depth or he walks the male path.”
Asexual reference. Never came across the term in a story set so long ago.
“Babirye, you wanted a piece of my marriage, I gave it to you. You wanted my man; I shared him with you. You had eight children with him; I never begrudged you any of them. All I had was that one boy, a single sprout, but you begrudged him. You complained that he would be heir instead of your sons. You said that our husband loved him more than he loved yours. I never wedged a line between your children and mine. Yet you found fault with him. You found fault with our husband. You have complained and complained all our life but this is it. You can have it all: man, marriage, home, and family.”
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As with Kalema, there were neither mourning nor funeral rites for Nnakato. Those who could not help crying heaved in hiding. Nnondo hired men, strangers from a faraway village, to bury Nnakato as custom mandated. They arrived late in the evening and worked into the night. They dug a deep hole beneath Nnakato’s dangling body. Then one of them climbed up the tree and cut the rope. Nnakato fell neatly into the hole and squatted. The rope, still around her neck, fell in after her. The men piled the soil on top of her as if she were a dog. When they finished, the men raced through the villages
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“Ahhh! So Ntwire did not win?” No, every time he tries to harm Kintu’s children, Kintu is there to protect and to soothe. Up to this day Kintu is still protecting us, his children.
“I tell you my sister chose a family with the kind of madness that goes beyond having children with. And I am saying badly wired, short-circuiting, fuse-blowing mental kind of madness.”
When it rains on a pauper, it does not stop to allow his clothes to dry.
As time passed, Kanani felt coerced because he would not dare cook for himself. The Awakened had shaken off most of Ugandan culture yet aspects of traditional manhood persisted. Cooking was unmanly.
for him to let slip that Faisi was unimaginative in the kitchen was to undermine her as a woman.
Faisi and Kanani were unconcerned about gender. “Children are children; they’re neither male nor female,” Faisi would say as she made Job wear Ruth’s knickers.
asexual
Isaac decided that he was not going to be tossed about by nature anymore. He would decide when and how he and his son would vacate the world.
In his view, there is nothing as sad as having fussed over your name all your life—my name is . . . I was named so because or after my . . . only to be tagged “unknown” in death just because you can’t say it.
“We cannot blame the West for the way they present Africans in their media: what do you expect? Our savagery is their civilization. It justifies everything. My problem is the Africans who, knowing this, give them the opportunity. If only African buffoons realized how they drag every black person in the world down in the mud with their follies, they would reconsider.”
“Maybe women in the city but a peasant’s wife: what does she know beyond breastfeeding? Besides,” Nyago whispered, “When you talk to her as an equal she gets ideas. Next, she’ll be ordering you around. And she’ll do it when you are in the company of other men, to show off.”
the Ugandan notion that homosexuality was a Western export.
“Listen to that, a doctor of books! What use is that to this village?” Nonetheless, the residents knew Miisi’s wife as an unpretentious woman who had struggled with eight children on her own during Amin’s regime while Miisi rolled in European luxury, enjoying white women. When he arrived in Kande, the residents smiled and accepted him but set him apart. Whenever they saw him coming to join them, they wore an intelligent look for him, ready to sound intellectual. They found his ideas distant: talking for the sake of talking.
He had been born in Bugerere but because of a tragedy, his home had been razed and the rest of his family, save for one sister were lost. Miisi had been adopted by a Catholic parish that put him in school. When he finished university he had worked for Transafrica, an international freight company. Because of the access to transport across East African nations, he had made money quickly by buying and selling merchandise from Kenya to Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi.
He had been keen to fulfill a childhood ambition of building a big double-storied house no one could burn down. He vowed to fill it with children so that none of his children would grow up alone. When Transafrica went bust, Miisi won a scholarship to study in Russia. That was enough information for them.
From then on, their histories merged as Magga talked about Kidda’s father, Baale, the youngest son of Nnakato of old.
At the mention of Nnakato, Magga’s voice fell indicating that he was taking a break. Kato broke in to explain, “This Nnakato was Kintu’s kabeja. Legend has it that for Kintu, the sun rose and set upon Nnakato. She only gave birth to twins, you see, until Baale came along. In turn, Baale had one child—this Kidda that we three share. Baale had Kidda by a servant called Zaya.” “Zaya was not a servant,” Magga corrected as if they could not have a servant in their genealogy.
“This Zaya, how she got pregnant with Baale’s son when Baale was just about to get married, is unexplained—”
Zaya ran away with the unborn child and settled somewhere in Kyaggwe. When the child was born, he was named Kidda after his grandfather, our forefather Kintu Kidda who was a Ppookino. But I will come back to that.” “Indeed, Kintu, Kidda, and Baale are recurrent names in our clan.” Magga’s recitation rose again and he weaved through Baale’s life. Baale was indulged by his parents. Apparently, because he was the only child without a twin, he asked for his own twin. His parents adopted a Tutsi, Kalema, as his twin and the two boys grew up together. “Then tragedy fell on the family. Baale dropped
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“You are at the heart of the family tree,” Magga said to Miisi. “We three are descendants of Kintu, of Baale, then of Kidda but you are the only surviving son of the heir lineage as it comes down the bloodline.” “You see Kintu Kidda had chosen Baale as his heir. In essence then, Baale’s unborn son Kidda was to be the heir. When you follow that heir’s blood it leads to you.”
“We know that the curse has been harsh on you. Ours is a dreadful inheritance—” “But then we’re blessed with twins,” Magga interrupted. “Yes, there is that,” Kato, a twin himself, smiled. “But we would like to say that you should not be hard on your father, he was only trying—” Miisi laughed cynically. “He was ill-advised by a quack who had no idea what he was dealing with.” “Indeed, any true medium would know that one man’s action toward this curse is a dog barking at an elephant.” “So it is true?” Miisi asked.
“That I had an older brother called Baale.” “You were young.”
“Yes, your oldest brother was Baale and . . . he died.” “Father sacrificed him.” “He did not. It was the quack. No father would—” “Abraham almost did.”
don’t know about Abraham but your father was told that just one son, the eldest, would break the curse.”
“The quack prescribed to keep the embalmed body in the roof to ward off the curse.”
“If I believed in this curse you talk about, I would take you outside to my back garden and show you the beds laid out for ten out of my twelve children.”
Miisi glared at the men as if they had killed his children. “We know.” “But the reality is,” Miisi interrupted Kato firmly, “that five of my children were killed during the war and five have died of this our new thing. How can I blame a curse?” Magga sighed as if he had expected this resistance. “Regardless of what you believe, Miisi, the sooner we start the res...
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“Who is buried in o Lwera?” M...
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“What I know is that either there was a brother named Kayuki or there was a colony of bees close to the house.”
“A man covered in bees took me to an old place, a hill. He showed me where a Nnakato and a Baale are buried. Then he took me to a moor where a lad Kalemanzira and my father are buried.” There was silence. The men stared at him. “Before I forget,” Miisi could not help laughing at their grave faces, “He told me to take my brothers and build him a dwelling: he gave me the specific measurements and showed me the tree to use and the one where Nnakato hanged herself.” There was silence for a long time. Then Kato stood up rather quickly. “We
have to hurry back and report this to the clan elders. It seems like the ancients came to you before we did.” Magga was clearly rattled.
“My sister, who believes in that sort of thing, buried them. And as you can see, no one has died.” “Wait a minute,” Magga whispered to Kintu. “You have no sister.” Miisi glared first at Magga then at Kato for a while. Then he blurted, “I don’t like the news you have brought.” “We are sorry,” Kato threw a warning glance at Magga as if to say watch what you say. “None of your family survived the fire. The priests wanted you to heal and gave you a playmate.” “Maybe we should wait until you meet the rest of the elders: they’ll explain things better.”
“Don’t worry about it. No one will tell me she is not my sister,” he smiled. Seeing how shaken the men were, he added, “For a moment there, I got caught up in this whole spiritual situation and played the spiritualist at you. It is true I dream but my dreams are nothing but the rumblings of a disturbed mind. Please don’t read anything into them.” “We hear you, Miisi, but the elders will decide what is significant and what is not.”
Here was an ancient story kept alive by the breath of belief.
And he, Misirayimu Kintu, was at the center of it. It did not matter that he did not believe the spiritual aspect of it: what mattered was that for some reason, tradition had preserved the history of his ancestry.
It was interesting listening to relatives talk about their mental disorders or other problems with pride as if it were a badge confirming Kintu as their ancestor.
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.
