no, I wasn’t in school.”
“When you said before that you were not strong, what did you mean?”
“I was not strong enough to protect Peter and Mariam.”
“From what?”
“From the bullying at their school. But I developed a sense, a trick or ability to make friends, and I started making friends that I thought could help protect my brother and sister. I started finding ways of getting friendly with the bullies, so they could actually save my brother and sister, or let them be. And I also developed a trick of making friends at the school where I went, because it was the only way.”
“What was the trick?”
“The trick was complicated, rough, but to me it was very simple. I stole some of the things that we came with from Tanzania, things we came with that were very rare in the village. I stole them from home. My trousers, the shirts we were not allowed to wear because we would look strange in the village. I would carry them, hide them, and take them to the bullies so I could buy them off.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I literally bought them off, you know. Things like spoons, the things we had before we came to Bugisu. I gave them out, and mum has never recovered them, even now.”
“But she must have known they were disappearing.”
“In the beginning, no, because they were locked away, and she was never there. So I had a way of breaking the box on the side. I could pull out one thing at a time and take it to buy off those people. It was the only way I could survive the bullying. I bought them off with those small things we got when we left the village where my father disappeared. And I did the same thing to help protect my brother and sister, right up to the time we all left my mum’s village and went to the same primary school.”
“When was that?
“Around 1984. My mum was still working as a cleaner in Mbale, and she had met our stepfather, who was a primary school teacher in that area. We all moved to where he lived, and he encouraged me to go back to school, even though I had to begin again at primary five. Most kids were starting secondary school at my age, but I was far behind. The prime of my life, I lost it. But my stepfather helped me with my English, so now I began to understand most of the things the teachers were saying. Although he is my stepfather, we have always called him father—so my father got me tutoring with other teachers, for other courses, and I ended up performing quite well with that assistance, so when I reached primary seven, I was under his wing and he tutored me, trained me, and we became very close. It is in that period that my mum got pregnant and had twins, though one of the twins passed away. He had a hole in his heart, and at that time, of course . . . money, issues of knowledge, and so on . . . we didn’t know that could actually be repaired. So David passed away, though Paul is still there, our sixth in the family. That is why we say we are six. So I became a babysitter for Paul as well as the others. I was very good at looking after children, and Barbara and Paul grew up without much age difference between them. They became my kids, and I paid their school fees right up to the time they finished their schooling. Even when I started working and came to Denmark, I continued paying their fees.”
“Can I backtrack a little and ask you to talk more about the changes you experienced when you moved from your mother’s village to live with your stepfather in Mbale?”
“For two years, from primary five to primary seven, I hardly ever got punished for anything. I mean, I could get punishment if I got a lower mark than I was expected to. I accepted caning as part of the system. I didn’t care so much about caning. I developed a mechanism in me whenever I was going to be caned. You could actually tell me to lie down and you could cane me, but I would just allow very little pain to go in. I learned how to do that because there is no way that I could take being caned every day. Basically, some teachers make it a point that if you cry out, they add to the punishment. If you talked or said ‘Ow,’ you’d get two more strokes. So you learned to be a corpse as a way of dodging the pain. I also learned to accept caning as a punishment for low marks or laziness. I used it as a way of pushing myself to do better.”
“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
