WE SEEK A FACE…

By Mildred Kiconco Barya

copyright 2004 Mildred Kiconco Barya

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Nikki and I were at that age when one desperately wants some kind of mischief. We were on holiday. We had completed our primary leaving examination. Father saw it fit to send us to his cradle and have the old woman rocking us.

Within the first few days of village life, rather, upcountry life, as we preferred it, we had done enough gallivanting; enjoying the carefree life and measuring temperature – a term that meant walking barefoot. We were fascinated with the reality that this part of the world, it was natural for kids not to be in the habit of wearing shoes.

We engaged in a little work on the farm; fetching water for the cows and looking after sheep when the shepherd was ill. We had plenty of time to ourselves.

One evening, we were uncontrollably restless. According to our unwritten timetable, we had exhausted every kind of plan we could call ‘proggie.’ We had been to the village well and accidentally broken an old woman’s pot. We had been to the shamba and carried away a young boy’s firewood, after tricking him into playing hide and seek. We had survived a beating from a mad man, whom we provoked into telling us how he got mad.

"Perhaps we should go to the neighbours and see what they are cooking for supper," Nikki said.

"You think they’re boiling frogs? Nosing into people’s pans is rather cheap, think of something more exciting," I challenged.

"You think too, why do you leave the thinking to me."

"Okay, I have a swell idea" I said as I rose from my seat and looked around for sign of some sandals. You never know what you step on at night, along the village paths.

"What’s the swell idea?" Nikki asked.

"Let’s go out and simply look for trouble." I said.

She smiled a well-rehearsed, pleasant smile. Closing the door behind us, we sneaked out as stealthily as cats on mission. Dusk had come and I am sure in our waywardness, we looked like silhouettes against the disappearing sun.

We had not covered much distance when Matayo’s guava fruit trees stood within eyesight, beckoning. Matayo was a mean hypochondriac whose paranoia made him believe that witches were after his life. He locked his wooden gate early, a gate as high as my father’s boots. Any five-year old kid could have jumped it over easily. It was foolery to expect that his gate could block people from going to his house.

Matayo kept a fierce barking dog, which was unchained after dark. It certainly served better than the low gate, especially in scaring off thieves.

Nikki and I were feeling larger than life that evening, so we made our way to Matayo’s gesturing guavas. We had plucked off a few when the dog started growling. We tried to hide under the low branches, and the dog then barked incessantly, drawing Matayo’s footsteps to the garden. A croaky-hoarse voice bellowed;

"Who is there?"

It wasn’t time to yell Porters hell. Fear gripped us. We held on to the branches, not imagining what it would be like to attempt jumping down and running away. Somehow, we knew we would not overtake the dog and Matayo would be waving his panga. Shame!

The further up the branches we tried to reach, the more our butts stuck out. The tree shook with our fright. Then Matayo raised and flashed his torch at us and commanded us to come down.

"First hold down your dog." Said Nikki who found her voice before I could retrieve mine stuck in the chest. It was a perfect imitation of a husky voice that did not belong to a young girl called Nikki. Steadily, we came down thinking fast the way to escape.

With a few guavas stuck in our armpits, I aimed one at Matayo and hit his stomach with full force. The torch fell and Nikki struck the dog, which quickly sprung to the side of its master, thinking perhaps he had mistakenly kicked it. We run as fast as we could back to our house, where we became the good girls we were meant to be. We only revisited the scene as we fell on our beds to sleep.

"That was very close," Nikki whispered.

"We went out looking for trouble and we found it." I replied.

"Gal, it was scary!"

"There’s always scary fun the other side of the world." We both laughed.

Midway into the holiday, Grandma called us to her side. It was usual for her to tell us a folk story or teach us riddles, something she regularly did after supper. On this particular night, she cleared her throat that seemed as rough as a rugby game, and then spat a ball of phlegm in her daily companion called the small tin. We felt something really nasty was following closely, not the sweet Grandma.

Nikki and I winked at each other.

Then Grandma announced that she had called us to tell us that we’re no longer young. She had been observing us, and we had surely become women so could we please start staying at home and leave the village surveying and wandering to the boys?

We were shocked at the decree and the tone of finality with which she spoke. Profoundly, we were shocked at how easy it was to become women. Just roll over one night and the next day in the evening Grandmother tells you, you are a woman!

That aside, Grandma was aging gracefully. Father was her last born who happened to her in her early fifties when she had long given up the thought of another mouth to breastfeed.

Many of her teeth were now gone. She made a phhhhh sound as she passed her tongue over her toothless pink gum, the days she wasn’t chewing tobacco.

Her hair, had turned a milky white, and her forehead was marked with deep lines borrowed from the past. I always thought Grandma’s ears were undersized, they were as small as a large bean, seemingly acknowledging a century gone with the locusts. She was steadily growing into a constricted ball of sisal, knotted with years of yore, now and the future. When she took her ritualistic afternoon nap, you hardly recognised a body on the mat. Grandma was growing into an old baby. And this birth of Grandma into a baby, acquiring a new form but maintaining her memory, sight and strength was something that puzzled me all the time Nikki and I stayed with her.

Daily in the morning, she woke up before any of us tumbled out of bed.

"Peace," she would say, as a greeting to be followed by a toothless beam.

On the night before we left, she stretched her furrowed, elfin hand and held mine. I felt a warm sensation. Then she raised my palm to her lips and brushed my hand with her breath. My whole body tingled with enchantment.

"Grandma, what ritual is this?" I inquired, amused.

"My child," She said calmly, then touching my forehead with her fingers;

"I want you to learn your heritage. Your people."

Like a narrating cassette, she went into the beginning of our beginnings. When the earth had only one being called Ruhanga, (creator) and he had three sons. All sons were called by the same name Kana, (child). When Ruhanga wanted some task done, he would shout, "Kana!" All the three would run to him when he only needed one of them. Sometimes he would call; Kana! And none would run to his request. One day, in the hot after lunch sun, he sat under a big eucalyptus tree and thought. He wanted to get appropriate names for his sons. As darkness approached to cover the nakedness of the sun, an idea dropped into his head.

"Give your sons a task over night," the idea said. "And see how they perform, then you will know what to name them."

Ruhanga prepared three gourds and filled each of them with milk. Then he gave out the gourds to each son to hold overnight.

"Make sure you do not spill any milk." He said.

"We obey you father." They replied.

In the still, wordless night, the youngest son dozed off and spilled some of his milk. As the milk trickled to his feet, he gained wakefulness. Then he began to cry.

His two brothers sympathised with him and decided to pour a little of their milk into his gourd and make it full again. Indebted, he smiled and appreciated their help.

Towards dawn, the eldest son fell into a deep slumber and poured all his milk.

"Please, help me fill my gourd again!" He cried to his young brothers.

"I don’t really think we can do that," The second born son said. "Dawn is already here, father will come in a flash and find that our pots are not full."

True to the prediction, Ruhanga walked into the room where his sons were seated. He inspected their gourds and then gave his sons names, accordingly. He named the eldest Kairu, which means servant. His destiny would be to serve others, always. The second son was named Kahima; he would be a cattle keeper. The youngest was named Kakama; he would be king even over his brothers. He would be a royal, ever to be served.

"Grandma, where do we fall?"

"You will know, you will discover on your own," She said.

I admired her memory, which was like a museum, with every story piece symbolically categorised. I was awed with her enduring courage, which she had not given up with age. She was ageless.

From then on, I wanted to maintain Grandma’s memory but seek visions of my days in a self-discovery journey that no one would take with me. I wanted to seek the face of an African woman who was excluded from the story, whose name was not mentioned at all, whose picture we could not see.

Years have gone with fallen leaves. In my cultural studies, I’ve understood the norms that shape people’s values and the trends that mould their lives. I’ve come to interpret hierarchy from Grandma’s angle. She opened my life to archetypal concepts then, when she sat on my bed and held my hand, when she narrated a myth of a man with sons, and no woman mentioned, no mother.

Now I see a faceless woman, who could be included in the picture, but out of her freewill, prefers not to have a man, and not to bear children. Is she a threat to culture, creation, patriarchy, and hierarchy? Is she failing the future, the promise, or breaking a connection strand meant to remain continuous?

The present world has nothing new on offer. It displays pictures of ‘servants’ who always live among us. We see those faces that have, without having to struggle, and those who sacrifice for others, who serve others and forfeit an inheritance for despised martyrdom.

Before I left Grandma, I hoped to preserve the fabrics of memory with threads of reflection. So I stared at the baskets and mats she had woven. The structures of her art and craft contained in every object in sight. The lines of her stitches suggested a recorded genealogy. The dyed indigo on her wall held a decoration of a child, a man, a woman, and a world. My eyes became full of years as I measured the width, breadth, and height to prove Herstory, History, Ourstory. Expressions of our being. Imitations of our lives woven with care and patterned with speech. Legacy!

When the school results were released, we had to go to secondary school. Father came for us. As we drove slowly back to Kampala, he asked us if there was a remarkable change from what we were, and what we knew then.

"Oh, father, while we’ve been with Grandma, we became women!" Nikki declared with a brass voice like a trombone.

Father looked at us strangely and all talking in the car faded. We felt then it was true and terrible to become women.

Years fell on us with every passing of birthday. We went through Makerere University as undergraduate students. Nikki fell in love. Memory would have stayed right where it belonged, had it not been evoked. Nikki invited me to accompany her on her visit to the fiancé home. I was thrilled with the idea. I would be a good escort, I assured her.

It turned out to be Matayo’s home. And nothing much had changed. He still had a garden of guavas, only this time; we were not interested in grabbing them to ourselves. He had also planted passion fruits in the compound where flowers would have been. The passion fruits were in their harvest season. They dangled and swung in air with heaviness. The old man was proud to take us around, showing what a flourishing gardener he was. There was one passion fruit, the size of a small ripe moon. It had fallen to the ground so I picked it. I complemented the old man on its fatness and proceeded to squeeze the juice right into my mouth. I enjoyed the sweetness of the fruit.

Later in the day when lunch was ready, we sat round the table, and my eyes danced before three glasses of rich, yellow passion juice. But, wait a minute; we were four people at the table. Matayo, in his guttural voice announced that since I had eaten my passion fruit when we were outside, I had no juice to drink.

The old man had not changed! He was still the mean bloke of yesteryears. At that moment, I had the tugging urge to tell him about the guavas. But the look in Nikki’s eyes was a plea to bury the hatchet. A year later, Nikki was married.

Left without my adorable twin and friend, I went back to Makerere University and enrolled for a masters’ program in organisational psychology. I got residence in Dag Hammarskjold, the hall for postgraduate students, and for the first time in a life passed twenty, I was alone.