“I remember a very big truck. We were put in the truck and covered with banana leaves—literally covered, that’s what I remember, because I thought they were covering us from the sun or rain or something. Later on, I told my mum, ‘I have a fading memory about how we left Kumi. Why did we leave in a big car?’ My mum said, “No, we were hiding. We were being removed from a place where we could be harmed, and there were roadblocks along the road, so we had to be kept under cover.’ We went straight to the village where she had been born . . .”
“Mbale?”
“Mbale is a large town. My mum’s village is Busiu, which is about thirteen miles south of Mbale on the road to Tororo.”
“That is the Bugisu area?”
“Yes, mum is Bagisu.”
Mbale is a market town, famous for its arabica coffee. It lies at the foot of Mount Elgon, the oldest and largest solitary volcano in East Africa. The Bagisu occupy a broken landscape of hills and narrow valleys on the western and southern slopes of Mount Elgon. Tradition relates that their ancestor emerged from a hole in the mountain, though they probably arrived in eastern Uganda from the Uasin Gishu plateau in Kenya. In anthropological parlance, the Bagisu reckon descent patrilineally (through one’s father and his father and his father ad infinitum), and when a woman marries she customarily resides with or near her husband’s family. When the family moved from the area of Uganda where his father had made his home, Emmanuel found himself not only fatherless and without contact with his patrikin; he was now subject to the authority of his matrikin. Ordinarily, Emmanuel would have expected to find affection, care, and freedom among his maternal kin. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. Moreover, in the absence of a husband to support her, Emmanuel’s mother had to become the breadwinner, and Emmanuel was obliged to assume a role that would normally be assigned to an elder sister.
“So when we came to Bugisu, we came to a village where my mum was born and raised, only to face a new set of problems there. I had to grow up fast—not physically, but in understanding that life is not easy. My mum was pregnant when our father died, and she gave birth to a baby girl in 1980. I was nine years old. Because I was closest in age to Barbara, I had to take care of her.”
“But you had other siblings, didn’t you?”
“My elder brother Deo had been living with an uncle in the city for many years. My younger brother Peter lived with one of our mum’s uncles, three miles from Busiu. And then there was Mariam, my other younger sister, who lived with me and my mum in Busiu.”
“You were saying that life was not easy there.”
“My mum’s sisters and the older women in her family did not concern themselves with our well-being. They were focused on their own survival, and they did not want to sit down with us anyway because we were from a different part of the country. I didn’t know any other life. Not like now. But life in that village was not easy for me. It was horrible. Looking back, I would have preferred to be in prison. A prison in Uganda would have been better because you would know you had done something wrong and were being punished for it. But from the word go, people started telling me, mainly because I was so outgoing, so ready to help, ‘No, no, you can’t do this, you can’t come in here, because you are this and this . . .’”
“The fact that you were your mother’s son didn’t count?”
“No.”
“You were considered a stranger, because you were from your father’s part of the country?”
“Exactly. I was not welcome, and by the way, what made it worse is that, traditionally, when a girl left a village to go and get married, she’s not meant to come back. So you see, my mum coming back with us meant sentencing us to some horrible punishment.”
I found it ironic that though Bugisu and Kumi had been equally opposed to the Amin regime, Emmanuel’s family was nonetheless regarded as outsiders and ostracized. Emmanuel agreed, pointing out that most members of Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) hailed from Bugisu. But political affiliation counted for much less than customary determinations of identity and belonging.
“They should have protected us, really, but they didn’t care that we were on the same side. That was not important. What mattered was that we were from the wrong place, that we came with our mother and lacked a father. I’ve been avoiding the word ‘bastard,’ but it is actually used more in our culture than it is here in Denmark. Here it is used as a figure of speech, a way of annoying you. There it is well defined. If you lack a father or if your father and mother are not married, you are basically a bastard, and so you are not welcome. Worse still, my mum was not staying with any man by then because my father had passed away, and most people didn’t even know who my father was. This might sound a bit complicated, but in my culture relations with in-laws are a big deal. A husband doesn’t visit his wife’s home that often. He has to be invited, or he has to send a message that he is coming, so the in-laws have time to prepare. And he doesn’t stay with his parents-in-law, but with a friend or brother-in-law.”
“So your mother’s people were outraged that you should turn up on their doorstep, because, in effect, it was as if your father had appeared uninvited and unannounced to impose on their hospitality?”
“Yes, we were strangers in that place. We had no right to be there. And what made things worse was that we didn’t know the local language—we didn’t speak Lugisu; we were speaking Swahili and a bit of English. We knew Swahili because we went to preschool in Tanzania, and we spoke Swahili with our father. In Kumi, in the Teso region, we didn’t know the Teso language, and so the only language we spoke was Swahili. So language became an issue for us too. I had a problem learning the local language because I had no one to speak with, and if you spoke with anyone they would actually laugh at you, and so you shut up and gave up. I felt the same way when I came to Denmark. People made no allowance for the fact that I was from another country and could not speak their language. It had the effect of making me feel like a stupid child, just as I felt back then in Uganda.
“The problem was, we had to go to school. With the benefit of hindsight, I think nobody really cared what we were going to experience at school. They just herded us off. ‘You are going to that school,’ they said. We didn’t know Lugisu, we didn’t even know much English, but they just put us there. Now came an additional difficulty. From years five to eight, classes are taught in Luganda, because the Baganda, the largest tribe in my country, influenced the education system. Just imagine, you speak Swahili, you know a little English, you don’t know your mother’s language, and then they go and teach you in yet another language that it is impossible to understand!”
WHEN KINSHIP IS NOT ENOUGH
Emmanuel’s story not only underscored the ways in which cultural ascriptions can be radically destabilized by the impact of social violence and enforced migration; it raised the question of whether any identity is immune to the exigencies of life. Consider kinship, the prevailing idiom in rural Africa for placing people and determining how they should relate to one another. “Kinship is like your buttocks,” they say in Bunyole. “You can’t cut it off.”7 “Kinship cannot die,” say the Bagisu.8 The consternation among Emmanuel’s maternal kin when he and his family turned up in Mbale, effectively as refugees, indicates how inflexible people are when faced with an anomalous situation. But the fact that Emmanuel was fatherless, obliged to follow his mother to her natal country and become a surrogate mother for his little sister, reminds us that even the protocols of kinship can be traumatically disrupted, though