Born to walk, p.8
Born to Walk, page 8
Some neighbours in the camp brewed their own alcohol, and it became my father’s favourite drink. When he drank, his behaviour worsened. Dorosera also liked to drink herself into a stupor. We grew used to him coming to the tent drunk, his clothes reeking of gin. If it were evening, we’d conceal ourselves under the blankets, pretending to be sick, or hide outside the tent. He would take whatever was cooking on the makeshift stove and pour the contents onto the ground. On those nights, we slept on empty stomachs. If we dared to complain, he’d strike us with a cane. Living with my father meant living in terror.
I will never forget the day he came home with a box of cookies, a gift from Frank, one of the Red Cross workers. Later, Dorosera sent one of her daughters, Mutesi, to steal the cookies from Papa’s vault. His vault was just a basket beside his bed, but none of us would dare to even think about touching it. Because we lived in a tent, Dorosera’s children came in any time they wanted, and my mother couldn’t stop them. When Papa returned in the evening, he searched everywhere — the pockets of clothes, inside saucepans, bags — but could not find his cookies.
“Kadur!” he shouted angrily. I was outside the tent, playing with other kids, but as soon as I heard his voice my heart started racing. I knew from experience that situations like this ended in a severe beating, even if I had done nothing wrong. He never listened to my pleas of innocence. My mother could have watched him in silence as he flogged me, but she often tried to defend me or pleaded with him to spare me, which meant that he would beat her, too.
He shouted my name a second time. “Yes, Papa!” I answered and went into the tent. He slapped me on the chin and ordered me to stay in the corner, and then he summoned Elijah into the tent as well.
“I left a box of biscuits here, and it’s gone,” he said to Elijah. “You and your sister were the ones at home, which means you ate them!”
We denied knowing anything about it, but he did not listen. He told us to wait for him and went out to get his bicycle chain. He had three tools he used to beat us with: the bicycle chain, slippers called umoja, and a leather belt. The slippers did the least damage. The leather belt meant you couldn’t sit down for a week. A flogging with the bicycle chain would take you to the very gates of Hell. Only God could have saved you from the bicycle chain.
“Instead of dying here,” I whispered to Elijah, “let’s run, and save our death for another day.” With that, we crawled out of the tent and fled. We stopped to see if our father was chasing us, but we saw no one. We slept in a tree that night. I thought about the thrashing my poor mother had surely suffered because of our disappearance.
In the morning, on her way to fetch water, one of our friends saw us in the tree. When she returned home, she told my father where she’d seen us. He got on his bicycle and rode to the tree, where Elijah and I were trying to figure out what to do next.
My father dropped his bicycle and ran toward us. There was no way we could outpace him, so I told Elijah not to run. For a second, I prayed for the ground to swallow me.
My father tied my hands with a stretchy rope and tethered me to the right side of his bicycle. He did the same to Elijah on the left side. Papa rode his bike like a warrior returning home with the spoils of war, flogging us the whole way. We stumbled and fell many times. No one intervened on our behalf. Rather, they encouraged him. “Kill them!” they shouted. “They are your kids!” And in our community, they were right. He had complete control of our lives. Like Mama, we belonged to him.
By the time we reached the tent, our hands were bleeding from where the rope had cut into our skin. When Mama saw us tethered to the bicycle, she hid in our neighbour’s tent. She could not bear to witness the whipping that awaited us.
In the corner, I saw Dorosera giggling. I wished my father would just flog us to death, and if he didn’t, I wished that I could run away from home. But I had nowhere to go. Aunt Karuhanga lived too far away, and I didn’t want to leave my sweet mama. Why couldn’t he choose his second wife and leave us in peace? More than once, I tried talking my mother into divorcing him, but she feared he would kill her. Even if she were bold enough to leave him, she’d become an outcast in our community, mocked and taunted.
There is a saying in Kinyarwandan, “Amafuti y’umugabo nibwo buryo bwe” — “A man’s shots or decisions are his way, and inherently praise-worthy.” It means that everything he does is right. If a woman filed for divorce and her parents were still alive, they would have to return to her spouse twice the amount they received for her dowry, a penalty that trapped many women in abusive marriages. If the parents received twenty cows for their daughter, they would have to return forty cows to the husband, and few families had the means to do that. The actual cows they’d received at the time of the marriage were either dead or had been traded for land. The social stigma of divorce meant that even if the parents could pay the penalty, they might still expel their daughter from their family home, and then where would she go? Divorce was almost never an option. You stayed with your husband and endured the pain. If you didn’t talk about the abuse that you endured, people would call you a good and intelligent woman. Those who spoke out were labelled weak and stupid.
One morning, Eugenia, my half-sister, came to our tent. The day before, my father had given my mother a small amount of money, and Eugenia said that he had sent her to get it back. She carried with her one of his shirts as proof. That was something my father did: when he sent someone to fetch something, especially if it involved money, he would give them one of his shirts to prove that he had issued the order. My mother didn’t hesitate. She gave Eugenia the money.
When my father came back to the tent that night, he asked for the money. He planned to go to the bar for a drink. “What money?” my mother asked. “I gave Eugenia the only money I had when you sent her over to get it.”
“Are you stupid?” he bellowed. Knowing it would not go well for my mother, I crawled into our neighbour Daforoza’s tent. I heard my mother screaming as my father beat her senseless. After several long minutes, my father left her lying on the ground. A crowd quickly gathered. Many believed my mother was dead. Daforoza checked and found that she was breathing but unable to speak.
The camp had no ambulances, so men would carry sick or injured people to the hospital in ingobyi. They would take turns carrying the patient, two in front and two behind, until they reached the hospital. About sixteen men showed up to carry my mother. I followed with a basin, some clothes, and a few things I knew my mother would need. Tears soaked my shirt.
My mother was in the hospital for three days, and I stayed with her. My father never came to see her. Our neighbours brought us food, and Gramma looked after my siblings. I tried to talk to my mother about leaving my father, but all she would say was, “You are still young. You think it’s easy to leave, but it is not.”
My father’s behaviour was not unusual in our culture. Daforoza’s husband, Rurinda, had two other wives. Our community considered him rich and treated him like a king, just like it did other men with multiple wives. Having more than one wife increased a man’s ability to father children. Sons, of course, were best, but if a man had twenty girls from several wives, he might get two cows for each of them as dowry when they wed. Forty cows were a rich man’s wealth.
Rurinda, like many men in our community, did nothing to help his wives. His only task was to decide which wife he wanted to sleep with on which days — and occasionally he would act as a marriage counsellor for other families. People believed that a man with many wives must be intelligent and that this qualified them to settle marriage and family disputes for others. Of course, Rurinda and men like him always advised wives to respect their husbands and never talk about what happened within the home. I promised myself I would never be any man’s second wife, and if my husband married another, I would end our marriage. I would also forbid my husband from paying a dowry for me because I didn’t want to be traded like a commodity or have my worth measured in the value of a cow.
Mama was terrified that my father would beat her again as soon as we returned to the tent. We knew no one would help. My maternal grandfather was perhaps the nicest person I knew, very quiet and loving. He loved his children, and he never treated Gramma the way my father treated my mother. But he was a product of our culture. He turned against Aunt Janet when those men raped her, and as much as he loved my mother, he never said a word about my father’s abuse. My father paid him the dowry, and she was no longer his daughter. She belonged to my father.
I felt strongly that as long as the two families lived near each other and as long as Dorosera continued to manipulate my father, it would be only a matter of time until my father killed Mama. And then one day Mutesi and I were in a heated argument and she threatened to tell her mother on me. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about the last incident when we had your mother beaten,” she said, and then she bragged about how her mother had sent Eugenia to get the money just so that my father would beat Mama. She actually laughed as she told me that my father had asked her mother and Eugenia if they’d taken his money and they denied it.
Daforoza overheard everything. She told my father, and he confronted Mutesi. She admitted to what had happened. He then did the unimaginable. He sent Dorosera and her children to live in another village in the camp, fifteen minutes away from our tent. Dorosera remained his favourite wife, however. I prayed that he would stay with his second family and never return. If that happened, at least we could sleep well.
Bosco was the firstborn, and he felt pressured to get married. There was nothing else to do, and everyone his age was getting married. No one wanted to die without experiencing the affection and physical pleasures of romantic love. That was especially true of girls, since sex before marriage was forbidden to them. Boys had no restrictions, and it was normal for them to have lots of sex before marriage. Bosco was handsome. His brown skin was so light that he could pass as white. People often called him Kazungu, meaning that he looked like a white man. Light skin was so prized that some people would spend what little money they had on skin-bleaching lotions like Caro Light or Caro White instead of purchasing food.
Bosco fell in love with a girl in the camp named Betty. Every evening, he went to Betty’s tent and helped her parents. Betty had no idea Bosco was in love with her; she was only around fourteen, much younger than Bosco, and not ready for love or marriage. Bosco knew that if her parents said yes to his proposal, Betty couldn’t refuse. He worked hard to please her parents. Betty rejected Bosco’s marriage proposal, claiming she was in love with someone else and they had plans to marry soon, though this was a lie. Three days later, she became a victim of guterura: another man, someone she had never met but who also had his eye on her, sent hoodlums to kidnap Betty, and she was married by force to a stranger.
When Bosco found out about Betty’s marriage, he was heartbroken. He became an angry man, and he openly lusted after anyone in a skirt. He turned his attention to a girl named Vestine. She was fifteen or sixteen years old and a smart fifth-grader (the war had interrupted her schooling, putting her behind her age group). Her father was one of the few parents that wanted his daughter to be educated, and she planned to finish high school. My brother found this attractive. But instead of trying to impress Vestine and her parents and risking rejection, as had happened with Betty, Bosco decided that he would have Vestine kidnapped. I knew of his plans because we slept near one another in the tent. I overhead him talking with the men he hired while I pretended to snore like a deep sleeper.
I wished that I could run to Vestine’s house and warn her what was about to happen. I knew that if I dared open my mouth, all manner of punishment would rain down upon me. Fearing Bosco’s wrath, I kept my mouth shut. I also knew that I couldn’t have saved Vestine. Even if I had warned her, she wouldn’t have been able to hide forever. If I had told her father of the plan, he could only have protected Vestine by staying by her side constantly, which would have been impossible. People would have shamed Vestine’s father if he confronted Bosco. “Oh, are you going to marry her then?” they would have asked. Guterura was an accepted practice.
My sister Godance and I were with Vestine and her friends when she was kidnapped. We were on our way home from fetching firewood. Without warning, a group of young men emerged from where they’d been lying in wait and charged at us. We dropped our firewood and ran, but one of them, Kagenzi, caught Vestine and pushed her to the ground. They tied her hands and gagged her so she couldn’t scream. Vestine’s muffled cries for help were barely audible as Kagenzi carried her away across his shoulders like a hunter’s game.
The kidnappers took Vestine to a small house that Bosco had secretly built. It had walls of grass and a thatched roof. Kagenzi and the others left Vestine and Bosco alone in the house and waited outside to see if Vestine would lose her virginity.
All through the night, Vestine refused to have sex with Bosco. When victims of guterura refused to submit and fought off their husband’s advances, his friends would hold her down. This practice was called kumviriza, and the next morning the friends would tell stories about what had happened to the girl the night before. This is what happened to Vestine. Kagenzi entered the house to hold Vestine down for Bosco. Vestine finally gave up. She cried while Bosco’s friends cheered him on, celebrating that he had finally become a man. At that moment, Vestine became Bosco’s wife. To this day, my culture has no concept of marital rape.
When Vestine’s father learned of his daughter’s forced marriage, he was furious. He went to Bosco’s house to take back his daughter. “I need my daughter!” he shouted. “You cannot just take my daughter like that. I only have girls, and I have plans to send them to school. My daughter is everything to me!”
A crowd soon gathered, and several people offered their unsolicited opinions.
“That’s not right, Katabarwa. You can’t take her back!”
“If you take your daughter back to educate her, who is going to marry her when everyone knows that she already had sex with a man?”
“Katabarwa, you are wasting your time. Your daughter is now a woman.”
Everyone advised him to stop embarrassing his daughter and instead approach my parents for Vestine’s dowry. The dowry should have been about two hundred dollars or the equivalent in goods or livestock, but my parents had no money and no possessions. They promised they would pay if their situation changed. Vestine’s father died a couple of years later, so no money was ever exchanged.
A new bride goes through a transformation from girl to woman. Bosco had purchased slippers and some kitenge for Vestine. No longer could she have girls as friends or wear skirts like them. From this moment on, she would need to keep the company of married folks and wear her kitenge, indicating that she was a married woman. She also had to grow her hair long.
Vestine was required to stay in Bosco’s makeshift house for three weeks during this transition while girls from the village came to visit. Although these traditional visits were supposedly about pampering the new bride and helping her to look beautiful, they really made it possible for girls to ask questions about the bride’s sexual experience. It was their chance to hear about sex from a friend. With each passing day, the house teemed with girls eager to hear stories of how it felt to eat the forbidden fruit. Now I can only imagine Vestine’s discomfort at entertaining these questions when my brother had forcibly subdued her and she felt no love for him.
Vestine was completely unprepared for the responsibilities that came with entering womanhood at such a young age and so violently and abruptly. She worried about the risk of childbirth and the difficulties of raising children, particularly in a refugee camp. The hospital was far enough away that women often had their babies en route. If a pregnant woman began delivering her baby on the way to the hospital, the men carrying her on an ingobyi would pull the baby out, hoping to save the child and the mother. Every pregnant woman travelled with sharp blades to cut the umbilical cord and thread to tie it. Quite apart from the pain and fear they endured, women who delivered babies this way were humiliated and embarrassed at having displayed their private parts in front of strange men.
My brother’s actions were reprehensible to me, but he was a product of the extreme patriarchy of the culture we grew up in. Vestine’s life with him illustrates the sad state of women’s rights in Uganda. She was robbed of her bright future. She got pregnant within months of the marriage and has borne multiple children since then, none of whom have been able to pursue an education. Her relationship with Bosco was always fraught. Having learned from our father’s example, he was never faithful to Vestine. He’d impregnate her, leave her for long periods, and then return to impregnate her again. The idea in our culture that women who stay with their husbands are brave and honourable endures and explains why Vestine refused for many years to leave Bosco. Only when Bosco contracted HIV and passed it to her did she cut ties with him. Now she is alone, looking after four children and vulnerable to getting even sicker from HIV because Uganda does not have the health care to help her manage her condition. She is frail, giving up money she needs for food to pay for whatever HIV medication she can afford. It’s a tragedy.
