“Did you ever see your mother’s people during those years?”
“By the time I finished primary seven, the relationship between me and my relatives, my aunties and uncles, was at zero—I had nothing to do with them. In fact, whenever they would come visiting, I would go away for a day or two, stay with my friends or something, and that has continued until now.”
BUILDING SMOKE
There were moments, as Emmanuel recounted his life story, when I felt as if I was listening to a tale from the Brothers Grimm or the corpus of Kuranko oral narratives that I recorded in northern Sierra Leone forty years ago. Emmanuel’s story was as stark as the experiential ground it covered. First, there were the dramatic contrasts between an absent father or lost paternal heritage and the harsh realities of everyday life in his maternal village. Then there were the Manichean contrasts between innocence and malevolence: the famished and persecuted child whose plight was only momentarily relieved by running away, bribing bullies, and preparing to be beaten by turning himself to stone.
In his recourse to what he called “tricks,” Emmanuel calls to my mind the trickster figures in African folktales who reclaim by fair means or foul what has been unjustly withheld or taken from them. Many years ago, Kuranko informants helped me understand the ethical reasoning that governed the structure of these tales.16 The initial situation is one in which a person in a vulnerable and relatively powerless position is treated unjustly by someone in a position of authority. The paradigmatic relationship is between younger brother and elder brother, though other relationships of inequality are also implied: between junior cowife and senior cowife, between husband and wife, between father and child, between chief and commoner. Crucial to the story that unfolds is the characterization of the authority figure as a slow-witted dolt, by contrast with the quick-witted underling. It is the underling’s superior intelligence that enables him to turn the tables on his oppressor and thus prevent the latter’s continued abuse of his authority. Indeed, the denouement of the story often involves the clever, small, and agile status inferior actually displacing the status superior, effectively combining the virtue of moral intelligence and the social position with which it is ideally associated.
If one can reduce the ethics of the trickster story to a single principle, it is this: that trickery and deceit are justified when they help redress a social wrong, but not when used to secure a personal advantage. Paradoxically, therefore, the restoration of moral order depends on actions that are, strictly speaking, amoral. This implies that the difference between ethical and unethical action is determined not by measuring an action against some abstract norm but by considering its context and social consequences.
This pragmatic perspective helps us understand Emmanuel’s ethical stratagems for surviving an oppressive and nonnegotiable childhood situation. When he steals clothing from the trunk in his grandmother’s house, he is acting like Jack in The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk. Just as Jack steals from the ogre articles that once belonged to his father (whom the ogre dispossessed and murdered),17 so Emmanuel lays claim to his inheritance as a way of transforming a situation he has, up to then, been powerless to act upon. He is, indeed, playing the role of a trickster or daemon, redistributing possessions to create a more equitable and endurable situation, not only for himself but for those who are dependent on him. As for Emmanuel’s action of running away, he suffers remorse for having abandoned his siblings but achieves a sense of freedom to move in a world that had previously been constrictive and closed. However, the absolute deprivation he has suffered in his mother’s village now translates into an assumption that he has the right to a life elsewhere. The ethics of reciprocity informs his every move. In cleaning the homes of strangers, he justifies a claim on their hospitality and help. He is already a migrant. Rather than suffering the degradation of being in a place where he has no voice and no freedom of movement, he chooses degradation in the place of a stranger, in the hope that the natural home of which he was deprived through no fault of his own will be found elsewhere. Choice is the operative word. For even though he continues to be abused, he embraces the abuse, even boasting of his ability to withstand what others could not possibly endure. Sartre perceptively refers to this tactic as “provocative impotence,” since the disempowered individual “reacts with an aggressive show of the passivity to which he has been reduced, and arrogantly takes on himself what the other did to him.” Sartre goes on to say that this attitude “in its pure form” is found “among colonized peoples at a certain stage of their struggle . . . when they become conscious of their oppression yet still lack the means to drive out the oppressor; in this case, the challenge, an ineffectual ideal, demonstrates at once the impossibility and the necessity of revolt.”18
In every folktale there is also a supernatural helper, a powerful intercessory without whom the questing hero could not survive the vicissitudes he encounters or the obstacles thrown in his path. Throughout Emmanuel’s narrative, the figures that would customarily provide support fail to do so (his maternal uncles), while the figure of a stepparent, the embodiment of evil in so many folktales, becomes the means by which his dreams are realized.
Emmanuel did so well at school that he won a scholarship to one of Uganda’s top secondary schools, renowned for the political leaders who had gone there, including Milton Obote. It was a boarding school, and Emmanueldescribed it as “the Eton of Uganda.” But even though he drew increasing satisfaction from his studies, Emmanuel continued to find himself marginalized because of his impoverished, rural background and stigmatized by the wealthier kids. “I had the smallest mattress in thickness, the smallest blanket in width and length, and the smallest pair of sheets on my bed. I had no pillow. The bed was one of those you can fold up and go traveling with. A safari bed, we called it. I was the only student with such a bed. All this was another big problem for me. I had to work out how best to survive this new situation. So I developed a sense of making fun. I became the funny guy, making fun of everything and making friends that way.”
To his repertoire of “tricks,” Emmanuel now added an existential strategy common to the oppressed in every human society—the strategy of currying favor with one’s oppressors by acting the clown, subverting an oppressive situation through ridicule, mockery, and gallows humor.
“Did you ever make fun of yourself? Put yourself down?”
“No, no, no, I avoided that totally. The fun I used to make was related to experiences I met along the way. Telling stories but in a funny way. Whenever I could make people laugh, I was the happiest person around. I did the same with Nanna. In the beginning I had to really make sure Nanna was happy, but of course I sensed later that the mode of our storytelling is cultural, based on Ugandan experience. Nanna is Danish and could not understand it, so there are times when my jokes or the funny things I say get lost in translation, and Nanna no longer responds—”
“Can you give me an example of this style of storytelling?”
“Yeah, like an example could be . . . it’s a long time since I’ve done this, but I could tell a story, for example . . . there was an old man, and the old man had a daughter, and this daughter had a problem because she could not get pregnant. She was married but she could not conceive a child, so she had to seek the medicine man’s help. So the witch doctor advises the girl or the woman to wake up one morning when it is still dark and go to an anthill. On the anthill she will see a mushroom that has not yet widened and resembles a penis. She will go and sit on it. [Emmanuel laughed, and so did I, recalling an identical Kuranko tale.] She will sit on that and get pregnant. So whenever I would tell this story, I would tell it quickly up to that point, and then everyone would burst out laughing, knowing exactly what I was talking about.”
“Did