Kintu

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Everyone knows, I have a reputation . . .” “Reputation? Did you ask him why only boys have a reputation?”

“Three women living in the same house turning against you: there’s a frightening prospect.” “Don’t put women in the same house.”

“True,” agreed Kayima of Mawokota. “A sexually satisfied woman is a good wife, that’s all I am saying.”

“God knows the women people pick to be grooming-aunts: this one was evil. She woke the groom up and asked: Do you imagine my girl came here to admire your backside? Whose girl do you think you’re going to starve? Before the groom could explain, she had reached for his manhood.” “Who reached for his manhood?” Baale hissed. “The aunt.

As you can imagine, the member had not stirred. What is this—she flapped him like a straw—Have you ever got ‘this’ up?” “Women are ruthless.” “Before long, she was manipulating him, telling the girl to strip.” “Is it allowed for the aunt to touch him there?” Baale was alarmed. “Is it allowed? Baale, it’s decreed in Ganda law that when a groom fails to get it up, the aunt must get him going, that when a bride’s having problems, the aunt must show her what to do. What do you think they have her there for?”

“Who knows? Maybe the groom was asexual, maybe he was frightened of the dark depth or he walks the male path.” “That’s what we brothers do for each other, Baale. After all, the most important thing, the children, are still blood,” Kitunzi of Ggomba said quietly. “A brother will come and say there’s a problem. He asks you to help with his wife. If his woman does not mind, then we do it. Men by nature don’t have thin lips. We don’t discuss each other with our wives. Even when you fall out with your brother, what must be kept from the tongue stays off the tongue. You don’t say to a fellow man: After all, I fuck your wife for you. There, right there, you cease to be a man.

peace reigns, foreigners start to flock in. And you know with foreigners: they bring their troubles with them. At that time, people from nations around Buganda had started to arrive, especially the Lundi, the Ziba, and the Tutsi. Now, we Ganda were known the world over for our hospitality because we treated those who settled among us well. However, we asked for one little thing in return for our hospitality; one little thing—that everyone who settled among us became Ganda. You see, it was important that we were all one people—same language, same life, same everything—so that people

is a twin?” “She is the Nnakato. Babirye was born full of life, but then suddenly ppu,” Kulata

There were a few elderly houses, built between the 40s and 60s, which boasted of good days gone by. Tenants said that some of the old houses belonged to Kabaka Muteesa II’s elite men and the families who first bought into British administration; others belonged to the landed gentry. The landlady insisted that in the early 70s Bulange had verve and ambition. At the time, the village was fast becoming an affluent residential area. The old houses belonged to the landowners and the unfinished structures mostly to their sons and a few people they sold to. But then Idi Amin came and one by one, the men erecting modern houses disappeared. Her own husband had disappeared in 1977. Sometimes, she pointed at the incomplete houses naming their owners and the dates they had disappeared and she would cry.

The master bedroom, large and self-contained, was rented by a woman who brought home a different man every night and another during the day. She had a proper window with panes and curtains. She opened the window during the day and the curtain fluttered in the wind, like in a real house.

Sometimes, to harness it, she got her books out and sat on the porch, where everyone would see her, to study. She knew that grown-ups loved the sight of a child working hard at homework. She would only put away her books when the sun went down. Suubi too started to believe that if life allowed her

girl in the garage had had a baby in the night. Suubi had not seen the girl’s stomach swell. The attitude of the women toward the shy girl turned abruptly. They visited her in hospital, took her food, and washed her clothes. When she was discharged, they helped her with the baby. The landlady heaved herself up and went to the bush and collected the kamunye herbs to heal the girl’s stitches, the slut woke up early every morning and helped her in the bathroom, the quiet woman collected herbs for the baby, boiled them in ekyogero, and bathed the baby every day until the stump of the umbilical cord fell off. Suubi heard her instruct the shy girl, “Not just the tit: put the whole areola into his mouth as well or he will suck the skin

What kind of malaria is that, hmm? And then suspicion started to grow around the Palace. That malaria is not alone; there is something else and the suspicion spread into the village.

“If you don’t know what to do with them, hand them over,” a woman cried. “That child was on her way to school,” she added, as if going to school was the most moving aspect of Suubi’s story.

Suubi was now convinced that she was possessed by a jealous spirit that did not want to see her happy with a man. Dating Opolot had not only conjured Ssanyu Babirye out of hell, it had also pressured Suubi into telling the story of her life.

Luckily, you’re Atesot: we can’t be related. Yes, clans are about identity, but essentially they’re a measure against inbreeding. Yes, Suubi means ‘hope’ but my parents never told me what they were hoping for. I have no attachment to names really.

“I speak English on principle. Otherwise, Luganda would be my first language. There are those that imagine that Uganda is synonymous with Luganda and that, to us non-Gandas, is infuriating.” “Except in the markets and shops.” “English is costly in markets.”

Opolot smiled politely but did not return the greeting. Tell the Ganda that you are Atesot and they will fling Ejakait at you as if it summed up the whole of being Atesot. Some of them cannot even be bothered to learn your name. They will just call you Ejakait.

Suddenly, there were palm trees in Kampala.

Faisi and Kanani Kintu were Awakened, an old sect within the Anglican Church. The Awakened were based at Namirembe Cathedral, though they had other churches all over central Uganda. For decades, the Awakened claimed to be the only people on the right course to heaven. They had declared other Anglicans Asleep, and Catholics were pronounced heathen for worshipping idols and a woman. Moslems were a primitive tribe.

The twins were hermaphrodite: one side was boy, the other girl. As babies, people thought they were identical—sometimes boys, but mostly girls because when they smiled, which was rare, Ruth and Job had such disarming dimples.

The fact that Kanani and Faisi could not handle a simple situation like teenage pregnancy made Magda feel validated: they had come to her. And then there was the snub—Kanani would

“I was only checking. You never know with you civilized people. We don’t want our blood wandering rootless in an orphanage.”

“It’s hard to tell who was what back then,” Ruth said. She felt no guilt for selling out Ganda tradition for Christianity. She felt nothing for naming, for culture, or for the grand patriarch Kintu.

She woke Ruth up early every morning and sent her on a four-mile walk. “Don’t let him sleep all day. You don’t want to work with a lazy child during labor.”

Walking would hasten the birth. She put their bags on the bicycle’s carrier and they set off for hospital. “In the past, I would’ve made you comfortable at home, called a few friendly women, and we would have sat and waited with you. Now we have to go to the specialists.” She threw her arms in the air. Ruth did not respond.

“Sometimes when we lack something, those who have it seem to flaunt it at us,” a woman explained.

Counting how many children there were in the house was to invite death because only death counts people. You don’t ask visitors whether they will eat or have tea because you are telling them to say no. It was taboo to ask who was cousin, niece, or nephew. Only Ruth was niece in the house and only she called Bweeza aunt.

The mantra, there is no sin too big for God, which Kanani and Faisi dished out to strangers, had not been offered to her.

“But where your father is not, Job is. If you’re my son, Paulo, then you’re Job’s son. We’re one person.” Paulo shook his head, but Ruth continued. “You’re the one who insists on this Rwandese thing. You can start your own Kalemanzira clan. You can buy a plot of land in Kigali if you want and spend some time there. But don’t dig this up. Many Tutsis are without roots but they have sprouted their own and made a life. Immigration is like that. It breaks things up—tribes, families, even races.” Ruth took a breath and then asked cheerily, “So are you planning to marry Nyange?”

He wondered at Magda: she loved people regardless of whether they loved her back. To compensate for Ruth’s oversight, he promised to come back soon. Before he left, Magda made Paulo promise that he would make sure that Kanani read the letter.

Nonetheless, most of them felt that “Uganda” should remain a kingdom for the Ganda under their kabaka so that things would go back to the way they were before Europeans came. Uganda was a patchwork of fifty or so tribes. The Ganda did not want it. The union of tribes brought no apparent advantage to them apart from a deluge of immigrants from wherever, coming to Kampala to take their land. Meanwhile, the other fifty or so tribes looked on flabbergasted as the British drew borders and told them that they were now Ugandans. Their histories, cultures, and identities were overwritten by the mispronounced name of an insufferably haughty tribe propped above them. But to the Ganda, the reality of Uganda as opposed to Buganda only sank in when, after independence, Obote overran the kabaka’s lubiri with tanks, exiling Muteesa and banning all kingdoms. The desecration of their kingdom by foreigners paralyzed the Ganda for decades. As Buganda faded and Uganda started to take root, it became clear that education was paramount in the new nation. Attitudes toward the schooling of children among commoners started to change to the point where educating children was the same as putting money away into a pension fund. By the late 50s, fathers close to European civilization realized that an educated daughter made for a better pension fund than an educated son.

Ssemata bowed and bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care.

If he raped you, why didn’t you tell us? At first, in private negotiations, Ssemata said to Mr. Kintu, the math teacher, “I am a fellow man: I come to you with understanding.” But Mr. Kintu thought it was ridiculous that he should be asked to pay a father and marry a girl who had not completed her primary education. He would look after his child, no doubt about that, but there was no way he was marrying a slum girl. Mr. Kintu did not realize that the issue had nothing to do with defiling a minor. Rather, it was about theft from a pension fund. Had Mr. Kintu paid the money to the wronged father and married his daughter, Ssemata would have congratulated Nnamata for pulling a teacher so easily. When he did not, Ssemata, at last, believed that Nnamata was forced. By 1961, when Isaac was born, Mr. Kintu was serving time in Luzira Maximum Prison.

People in Katanga said, “Amin has no problems with us. It’s them the ‘I-Knows’ who are trouble.”

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

Bweeza claimed to have come in place of Kanani Kintu, the head of her branch of the clan, who had declined. The young man, Isaac Newton Kintu, who represented his father, had not secured leave from work to join them.

“A child of Nnakato is our child. She is the constant feature in this region; the rest of us are wind.”

For Miisi, listening to the councillors, it was amazing how the Kintu story had mutated over the centuries. Kintu Kidda, the essence of everything, had been erased from Kiyiika’s memory while Nnakato had flourished to divine proportions. When he asked the councillors what they knew about Nnakato’s legend one of them explained, “Nnakato was a powerful matriarch who gave birth to twins only, apart from her last and favorite son, Baale. But then her family suffered a great tragedy in which family members died, including Baale. Nnakato is said to have taken her life afterwards.”

Before leaving, Miisi asked the councillors how far away the border with Tanzania was. “Get to the top of Nnakato’s hill and roll down the other end. At the bottom you’ll be in Tanzania.” Miisi whistled. “That’s what the British call a close shave. A slight wavering in the colonial pen and Nnakato would be Tanzanian.” “Would the Tanzanians let us claim our heritage?” “Ask Idi Amin what happened when he tried.”

Though dressed traditionally, Cousin Miisi’s posture—the way he held his head, the unrelenting humility and friendliness—reminded Kanani of the British missionaries that came to Namirembe Cathedral from time to time. There was no English intrusion in Miisi’s speech, but the way he weaved his sentences and his gestures betrayed a distinct Western influence. It is this exoticism that has won him adulation in the clan, Kanani thought contemptuously. Yet if the Devil had taken human form, it was Miisi. To Kanani, despite his professed atheism, Miisi was a more potent weapon for evil than the openly heathen cousins. In the presence of Miisi, Kanani felt he was in the cold and calculating presence of Lucifer. For all his disbelief in the supernatural, Miisi was the so-called chosen one, the one whom the evil spirits spoke through. Yet he had constantly insisted, “My mind is overactive. I must have heard the story of Kintu Kidda as a child before my family died. It must have lain

As for the family curse, Miisi argued that it was a documented fact that in Buganda mental health problems such as depression, schizophrenia, and psychosis ran not only in families but in clans—the so-called ebyekika, clan ailings.

That seamless marriage of heathenism and intellectuality was unnatural.

“Our branch of the clan is headed by a fool just because he’s a man.”

Elder Miisi had laughed heartily. “Bloody borders! African countries are a European imagination.” It was the first time Isaac had heard Miisi speak English.

“Bad luck, haunting, or things in the head that don’t make sense. That old man there, his name is Miisi Kintu. He is mad. People say he’s the clan medium but he denies it because he is a kivebulaya, a been-to-Europe and is overeducated. He dreamed about all these things but he thinks it is all a coincidence. He had twelve children but only two remain.”

He smiled at the irony. 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.

“But he is the kind of child our culture calls mawemuko.”

wherever they were scattered. “What is mawemuko?” Paulo asked. “You don’t know?” “Uh uh.” “It’s sort of . . . incest.” Paulo did not react. Then he gave a short laugh. “She actually told me!”

Paulo looked uncannily Tutsi: lanky, sharp pointy features, a bridged nose, very dark, even skin, and very dark gums. He got a response, smiled, and moved further away from the car. Paulo seemed to have lived a cosseted life. Isaac felt a pang of envy. Why was Paulo, a child of incest, loved and good-looking while he, a child of mere rape, was shunned and ugly? The call ended and Paulo walked back to the car. Isaac started the engine. “That was Nyange, my girlfriend.”