Tombstones and Banana Trees (5 page)

Funerals were the best—at least they were if you were hungry. The food would be free and often available to everyone in the village. People would let us come up and help ourselves to the leftovers. Some adults would take the scraps to the pigs or dogs, but we could often get in first. We would eat all we could, cramming our stomachs, cheeks, and pockets with as much matoke, Irish potatoes, and groundnut sauce as was possible, and make our way, unsteadily, back home to deal with the inevitable stomachache that descended as soon as we lay down. Eventually my mother made each of us a cloth bag into which we could load our spoils at these events, and it went some way to prevent this severe overloading of our stomachs.

Weddings were also good opportunities for a free feast, although the adults were typically more distracted at funerals. I found this out to my cost at one wedding when I was a child. One of my relatives was getting married, and even though we were not invited, I was there as I had not eaten for two days. I was hungry, and there was a lot of food on display.

My godfather was the head cook of the wedding, and he stood near the fire, spooning out the goat stew to the guests as they approached. I had jiggers and head lice at the time and felt as though I had no meaning in life. We would go a week without bathing and we did not need to listen to the taunts and shouts from others to know we were a disgrace. Our humiliation was deep, but our hunger was deeper. I approached my godfather and asked for some food.

I honestly thought he would say yes and reach in and deliver some tasty meat right into my bag. I honestly thought he would take pity on me. Years later, my godfather told me that as I stood in front of him, asking for some meat, he felt ashamed of me.

“Look at your feet,” he said, loud enough to catch the attention of those standing around us.

I looked at my feet. They were cracked, but so were everybody else's. But mine were also covered in scabs and cuts. There was excrement on them, and flies were investigating an open sore. I looked back up at my godfather, and he carried on.

“They are as bad as those of a duck.”

This brought much laughter from the crowd.

“And your head,” he continued, “is like that of a pig. Will you ever be anybody?”

In our culture ducks and pigs are lowly creatures. To be compared to either is a horrendous slander. People laughed louder now and started to cheer as he reached into the pot and pulled out the largest bone he could find within it. I looked up. What was he going to do? Was he about to hand me something to eat? Were those words just a form of teasing before he finally showed me some pity?

He lifted the bone high and brought it down on my neck. I instinctively put my hand out to protect myself, but I was too slow. I fell over, blood leaking from the wound. I did not feel hungry anymore, but the pain was twice as bad as the ache that had been tormenting my stomach.

People were cheering and laughing, and my godfather sneered down at me. A lady called Margaret, one of the teachers at the school, pushed through the crowd, half carried me away, and administered some first aid. She wrapped her scarf around my neck and helped to carry me home. My mother was worried and crying when she saw me, and I was in tears at the sheer embarrassment of the whole thing. But Margaret told me, three times, “Your godfather has called you a duck and a pig, but one day, twenty or thirty years from now, you will surprise the whole world. I may or may not be there, but one day you will surprise the whole world.”

Those words have never left me. Whenever I have felt abandoned or rejected, when grief has held me down or sadness made me ache for the relief of death, those words have returned to me.

People may have wondered what I could possibly become, but I told them what Margaret told me: “One day,” I would say, “I will surprise you all.” I said it so often that Mr. One Day became yet another name people would call me.

Their doubts only served to inspire me more, to give me the zeal that I needed to keep going, to believe that life was not stuck in this state. Perhaps this was where hope began to take root within me. I do not know. But many years later I was delighted to be able to help Margaret a little. I had become the coordinator for education in the diocese of Kigezi, looking after 220 schools. Margaret was still teaching, and I was able to promote her to the role of headmistress. What better role model and teacher could you hope to find?

My uncles' wives, Deborah and Agnes, who were born-again revival Christians, continued to look after us as well. They taught us Bible stories and would feed us when they could. Another aunt, Jane, gave us clothes and money from time to time. Later, as I progressed through primary and then high school, I was able to do so only because of the kindness of many good Samaritans. These people owed me nothing and they acted out of their compassion and of their own free will. I am sure God would have found a way to renew me had they not helped, but it is obvious to me today that their obedience to God's Spirit was a very, very good thing. I am grateful to them all.

Not every Christian was a help to us. Our house was leaking and we needed grass to thatch the roof. It was only ever temporary, especially when we used sorghum, which we gathered from the bottom of the valley. One day we gathered up some stalks that had been chopped down and discarded on the land of one of our uncles. We placed them on our roof to give us shelter. But my uncle's wife found out and came and forced us to remove them. This woman, who claimed to be a born-again Christian, said she wanted them back as she needed them to mulch her banana trees. We felt angry and bitter. It made us question Christianity—just like when my father left and the church did nothing to help us. When the people who claimed to follow God failed to take care of us, we questioned Christianity. When they did not help us with the fees needed to attend school, we questioned the faith of those Christians who ran it. When we were hungry, we asked questions. When people were throwing food away and we were naked and were sleeping in sacks and had no soap, we expected them to care and they did not.

Later on some of these people changed and started to care, but I had the feeling it was only because I had started making money and being somebody. Even today I wonder whether they genuinely love me or just want my money. But I never question the faith of people like Margaret, Deborah, Agnes, and others who fed, clothed, and nursed us when we were at our lowest points.

My mother suffered from depression, hypertension, ulcers, and all sorts of psychological troubles. She was constantly afraid, a worrier about even the smallest things. She never trusted men at all. I remember feeling the same way. It has taken me a long time to feel secure when I am in the company of men, and these years of hardship made me bend toward women, particularly as my mother became my confidante and my closest friend. It was only when I started out in leadership that I started to build any real trust in men.

There were exceptions along the way, and while it brought pain at times, school introduced me to two men who helped undo some of the damage done by my father, my uncles, and my godfather.

I was ten years old when I started primary school. I was seventeen when I finished. In those days O-level exams were typically taken at the age of sixteen, and A-levels at eighteen. I finished my O-levels when I was twenty-one, and then my A-levels at the age of twenty-four, going on to university at twenty-five. In every year I studied I was always the oldest in the class by far. At first the humiliation was to be found in sitting next to children half my age, repeating their nursery rhymes and spelling out simple sentences about cows and goats and the sun. Later, as I grew, the humiliation became even more obvious, as I would struggle to fit my legs beneath a desk constructed for children far smaller. Ugandan classrooms are overcrowded at the best of times, and the desks are long, built to accommodate four or five children at a time. When one of those pupils is the size of a grown man, and there are five or six other pupils trying to force their way onto the bench, studying becomes even harder.

Pupils picked on me a lot, and the teachers joined in. They all called me
mzee,
which means “old man.” It can be a sign of respect when delivered to someone who is advanced in years, but it was handed out to me with a sarcastic sneer.

Even though I was older than them all, I was still punished along with the little ones. The teachers would beat me all the same, using a stick most of the time. Legs, buttocks, hands—we did not get to choose. If we were lucky it was the buttocks, but there was no real way of telling what the teacher would decide. All we ever knew was that if we were late to school, we would be beaten. If we broke a rule, we would be beaten. If we failed to get a pass mark—beaten. One teacher used to cane us for every answer we got wrong. We learned quickly enough, but only through fear. It was not a good way to learn.

I was twenty-one when I last got beaten—because my school shirt was dirty. They often gave us the option: either be suspended or take the beating. I never wanted to let my mother down, so I always took the beating. One primary-school teacher used to beat me almost every week. We had no soap at home, and the white shirt uniform got very dirty very quickly. We used a certain type of fruit to wash our clothes but it never really got the shirt totally clean. And I only had one shirt so I had to wash it most nights, drying it in front of the fire while we were asleep. The smoke just made it dirty all over again, so my beatings would continue.

The teacher got so irate that it attracted the attention of other staff members. Margaret, the kind woman who had rescued me when my godfather had called me a duck and a pig, came to see my mother at home. “What soap do you use?” she asked.

My mother explained that we were too poor to buy soap. She explained that we were too poor to eat more than one meal a day. She explained that we were desperate and that the only way I was able to go to school was because my oldest sister, Peninah, had married a good man who had money. Margaret cried and cried and cried. She offered to do what she could to help and went away to ask another teacher if I could live with him as his houseboy. He agreed, and for two years I lived in his house, cooking and cleaning for him when I was not at school. It was not far from my own family, but it was a giant improvement in living. There was no shortage of soap there, and the food was regular and plentiful. He even had a hurricane lamp by which I would work in the evenings. He encouraged me to learn, and throughout the year that I lived at his house, my abilities as a student increased greatly. I was fourteen years old, and that year changed my life.

By the time I was nearing the end of primary school I realized I was clever. I was not the best in the class, but out of the forty pupils in the room I would always find myself receiving the second, third, or fourth best marks. It increased my self-esteem and brought a little closer the idea that one day I would surprise the world.

In 2000 I set up a primary school in Rwentobo, fifty miles from my village. Today it provides over four hundred children with an education and two meals a day. Many of the children are orphans, and many have experienced the type of poverty that I did. Some have been through worse than I have.

If you come to the school, turn off the busy road that is used by trucks coming up from Rwanda and on to Kampala, pass down through the layers of trading posts and over the potholed track that leads to our low buildings, and you will see many children, like me, finding hope in education.

Chapter Five

Jesus Delays

There had been enough shame placed upon our family, rolled in front of us like a tombstone over the entrance to a burial cave. There was no doubt that our fortunes were low, and even those acts of kindness—acts which appeared truly revolutionary at the time—were dwarfed by the scale of our troubles. Like I say, we had had enough of shame.

As a result my mother was strict with us. She did not want us to do anything that would drag us down still further in the eyes of the village. I do not think she was overly concerned with appearances; after all, we depended on food we found amid the maggots and mold of dustbins. The reason she warned us against bad behavior was not to hide the truth from others; it was to avoid giving them any more reason to hate us.

My mother was always clear that we should treat ourselves with respect, especially when it came to our sexuality. I may not have owned any underwear until I was eight, but I was no animal. I slept apart from my sisters, and we were all encouraged to respect privacy where possible.

Yet when I was six and a half one of my sisters molested me. We were alone at home, and she called me into the room where they all slept. She forced me to have sex with her.

It happened twice, and the first time was very painful. I was very sore, and the shirt I was wearing did not cover me. My sister knew that my mother would find out, and she swore that if I ever told anybody she would kill me. She told me to tell my mother that I had been bitten by red ants. What could I do? I walked out of our home with my legs apart, and when I saw my mother I had to tell her the story about the ants. Mother bathed me with hot water and took care of me. It took me almost a week to recover. A couple of months later my sister did it again.

What I felt—apart from the physical pain—was guilt. So, so guilty. I felt as if I had killed someone. I felt ashamed. I felt useless. I felt cheap, as though I was the sort of material you would use as toilet paper. I hated incest, and I knew it was a cultural crime with terrible and frightening taboos attached to it. I felt like my sister's prisoner.

And I felt as though it was all my fault. Why had I not run away like Joseph? Why did I not scream? Why did I not go straight away and tell my mother or my other sisters? Those questions kept on coming back time and time again. I developed a complete mistrust of all my sisters, and so our family had another deep wound within it. I developed bitterness and hated my sister with a passion. I learned that defilement of a close relative is painful beyond words. It bites deeper than anything.

I did not tell my mother at the time. When I was twenty everything changed in my life, and I wanted no more secrets from her. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for her to hear me tell the story of what really happened that day when I told her about getting bitten by ants. After I finished speaking she simply said that we wanted peace in this home and that I should never tell anyone else about it. She said, “It will be a huge scandal in this village. You will be ashamed, your sisters will be ashamed, your half brothers and sisters and stepmothers will use it against you.”

I have spoken about the abuse a little more of late. I think that it is important to be honest about the pain we experience in life, especially when that pain goes on to affect us in later life. I can draw a line between what happened to me as a child and the way I treated women when I was a teenager, and years later when I was thinking about marriage and realized it was still troubling me. Although I was less uncomfortable with women than with men, I was still mistrustful of them.

I was involved in a number of relationships that I thought might end up in marriage, but four of them failed, the last one ending just before the wedding. Even though we were both born-again Christians, I was still affected by the abuse from the past and the demons of rejection, abandonment, and my father's curse of blowing away everything I touched, like so much ash.

And when I finally did get married—to my beautiful Connie—the abuse came with me into the marriage. It started to affect us both, even from the time we were engaged. I had not talked about it with my sister, and I was starting to think about what happened. I developed this terrible fear about the wedding night, especially since Connie had told me it would be her first time and I knew how painful and dirty it was for me. I was so full of fear that I almost ended the engagement. But an aunt came to my home and called Connie to join us. Together we began to talk about it all and to deal with the issues. So we started our marriage with some confidence, gained largely by the fact that Connie accepted me despite my past. Yet for the first year and a half of our marriage I hated sex. Gradually that changed.

It was not until I was thirty-seven that I confronted my sister about what had happened. She had buried it too and had forgotten about it. At first the conversation was impossible, but eventually we talked. We cried and we prayed and we put things right between us. We told the other sisters as well, and it was a key moment in the healing of our family, bridging the rift that had formed between my sister and me. It had divided the whole family, with everyone taking sides, even though nobody knew the real cause. But once forgiveness flowed, the root of bitterness was torn from the ground; the broken bonds between us were restored.

It makes me wonder what life is like for girls who are raped, as they get older.

I heard a story about a woman who had been raped when she was a child. On her wedding night her husband got out of the bathroom, and something changed for her. Instead of seeing her husband, she saw the rapist. She jumped out of bed, picked up an iron bar, and prepared to defend herself. She hit her husband twice on the head. He fell. Immediately she regained consciousness and picked up the phone to reception but could not talk. Reception came to the door but could not get an answer. The police were called. They arrested the girl and took the man to the hospital. She was silent for a week.

I know this story because the police commander was a born-again Christian, and nobody knew what to do about the woman who would not talk but who had blood on her hands. The police commander called me and asked me to join them at the police station. I started praying and felt that I needed to rebuke whatever power it was that had taken her over. We prayed, and God performed a powerful work of healing within the young woman. She was able to talk and narrated the ordeal in tears. We told her husband in the hospital what happened, and because he understood spiritual warfare, he forgave her, and they are now happily married with a son. His relatives needed more time before they could understand.

There is much pain within my country, bitterness with roots that lie deep in the past. And you cannot talk about the past of Uganda without hearing the name Idi Amin Dada.

Amin was a tyrant. He ruled Uganda as a military dictator from 1971 to 1979, leaving behind anywhere between one hundred thousand and five hundred thousand corpses. Those who disagreed with him, who opposed him, or who were from the wrong ethnic background were all targets, and his cruelty spread throughout the entire country.

Almost every family was affected by his brutality since he militarized villages, and at every level of government there would be one of his men sitting with a gun in his lap. There is a story that one day Amin called all his soldiers together and told them to raise their guns above their heads. “That is your salary,” he told them. And so began an age when the whole of our country was controlled by lawless soldiers who rampaged, looted, stole, and hired themselves out as assassins.

There was no justice in Uganda in those days. The police were corrupt, the army were terrorists, and all the lawyers had either been chased away or corrupted themselves and become liars. I remember soldiers coming to our village to arrest people, and the fear was tangible even for a peasant boy like myself. Once the army arrived with empty trucks and told us to get in. They said that President Amin was making his way to the football stadium in Kabale and that we had to go with them to watch. We did as we were told and arrived to join the crowd of five thousand to watch the president.

Standing on the grass in the middle of the stadium were seven people, heads down, hands cuffed, and eyes blindfolded. Soldiers were lined up twenty meters or so opposite them, their guns at their side. Amin took the microphone and raged against the seven who were there to be punished. Amin was angry, and he made it clear that if anyone else even disagreed with him they would share the same fate as the individuals standing in the middle of the pitch. They were Christians, and Amin accused them of being behind a plot to overthrow him. I was told they were villagers from the local area, but I did not know any of them. Eventually they were given the opportunity to say something. Some talked about heaven and forgiveness. Then the local bishop—a man named Festo Kivengere, the bishop of Kigezi—prayed for them. And then they were shot.

We left the stadium in silence. My mind was split. On the one hand I was heartbroken for the ones who had been killed and full of hatred for Amin, but I was also impressed by the dignified way these Christians had met their end. I thought I knew what suffering was, and I raged against it, wept for it, and struggled as best I could. Yet these people—these Christians—were different. They did not resist or hate; they accepted. Their beliefs were real; all of us in the crowd could see that. It painted a strong picture of Christianity.

Earlier I wrote that almost every family was affected by the brutality of Idi Amin's regime, and we were no exception. I also said that my eldest sister, Peninah, who was now married, helped to transform our fortunes. Her husband, Eric, had already taken one wife, but he was a good man and Peninah was happy to be his second wife. She was very beautiful, and her marriage brought new hope into our family. She took all financial responsibility for the family, paying my primary-school fees and buying us the new land at the top of the hill. In a way she adopted me as her first son, but we all benefited from her generosity: We were clothed and finally able to eat two meals a day. She became a Christian and seemed to be more than just an older sister. We felt as if we had a sense of security. She became the source of our self-worth and our significance. She would stand with us if we had a problem and filled the gap that our father's absence had left. We fixed our eyes on her for everything.

People who had made a habit of despising us started to change their views. They started to look at us with something approaching respect instead of disgust. It was a remarkable change, and it made us even more happy.

I had performed well in my final exams at primary school, and because of this I was admitted into a high school, Makobore High School Kinyasano in Rukungiri town. Peninah had agreed to help pay those fees, and I felt as though life was about to make a substantial turn for the better. Was this what Margaret meant when she told me that one day I would surprise the world? Certainly nobody had ever expected me to be able to attend and complete primary school, and I do not think that even I imagined I would be good enough to continue my studies. To have the financial backing to make it possible was so far beyond us that I do not think I ever dreamed of it. I was the first of my siblings to be accepted into high school; surely the whole world was surprised?

Others looked on at our rapidly changing situation, but not everyone was pleased. Some of my relatives and others in the village who hated us were particularly resentful of these changes, and when they spoke with Eric's first wife, they found a mirror of their bitterness. She did not like Peninah, which was not at all an unusual way for a first wife to feel about the second, but somewhere along the way her dislike joined forces with that of our enemies and turned into a murderous hatred.

Our land is beautiful. I am told that there are parts of China where the hills are terraced in similar ways, as if some giant has sculpted the mountains with a knife. Those hills rise like they do in the highlands of Scotland or beside the deep lakes of New Zealand, and it is not hard to stop, lift your eyes from the red soil, and look up to where the sky is held up by these peaks and feel a sense of God's power and a love for creation.

I felt something like this as I left home and headed toward Peninah's house one morning. We had arranged for me to meet her so she could give me the money I needed for my first set of high school fees. I was also going to buy some books with the money and do full shopping in preparation for the start of term. It was not hard to feel a sense of gratitude when so much good was coming my way.

The journey from our house to Peninah's home took two or three hours. I was not in a rush, just happily walking and thinking about what life would be like in a few weeks' time when I would start high school.

Halfway along I met my friend Isaiah, who was my sister's houseboy. He did not look well. He told me my sister was dead.

I did not believe what he said. I
could not
believe it. Why would she be dead? Isaiah told me she had been shot, but why would anybody shoot Peninah? She was not political in any way. How could this be true?