to have come to his own reckoning with the past. I had been so troubled, however, by the echoes in Emmanuel’s humiliations in Denmark of his maltreatment and marginalization in his mother’s village, that I had interrupted his story about his schooling in Uganda and now suggested we go back to his boarding school years.
“Initially,” Emmanuel said, “I didn’t perform very well. Too much of my time was taken up with appeasing my classmates and catching up with the schooling I had missed.
“I was much older than the average student. At least two to three years older. So by the time I began secondary school, I had to deal with the pressure of meeting my basic needs and the pressure of being older but not yet able to convert that into being better or the best in class. I failed to do that. Why? Because I was spending more time solving the basic needs thing, getting something to eat from others, appeasing them. And though I passed my O-levels with a poor performance, considering my abilities, I now faced new pressures because of the opposite sex. There was an understanding in the school that every boy should have a girlfriend. Those who had girlfriends were good at sports or studies, or they had money or were popular. I didn’t know how I was going to survive this new experience. I was the oldest in the class, every class I was going to, and all the boys had girlfriends except me. The girls communicated with me. But I was afraid of them. I had no money to buy them presents. And I was spending all my time amusing and appeasing the other boys. So there it was, silently killing me, and since I really wanted to be like the other boys, I also wanted to have a girlfriend. And that brings me to my second most memorable situation in secondary school. When I reached the third year, I was suspended from school—for a full month. I was sent home because I had been working so hard to get a girlfriend that I ended up being caught sitting with a girl.”
“How did everyone else get away with having a girlfriend?”
“That’s the point—they knew the system. Me, I was a newcomer, and you know, I had never developed a sense of having relationships with the opposite sex. I learned later that the others did it by avoiding being seen, because even touching a girl’s shoulder warranted expulsion. They would hide at night, get out of the dormitories through windows or whatever, and go and meet their girlfriends in the bushes. I thought it was, you know, okay if I did that too, so one evening I was sitting with a girl, and I got arrested and suspended. The problem was, how do I go and explain to my mum that I had been suspended from school because of a girl? She’s struggling to pay fees and everything, so I didn’t tell her, I didn’t even go home, I went and hid at my friend’s place. The problem is that my mum got a letter. The school was very wise. They give you a letter of suspension, and they also send one to your mum [Emmanuel laughed]. So when you go back to school after the full month, you are required to come with your parent. So how do I convince my mum? I went around and found a friend. I had become so good at making friends, amusing them with stories, entertaining them; I had made friends with a full colonel in the military, and by then, in the ’80s, having a friend who was a soldier, a colonel—[Emmanuel whistled to emphasize this value of this connection]. So we had become friends, and he is the one I took to school as a ‘parent.’ But they didn’t allow it. They said, ‘Emma, I thought you said your father was dead? So who is this?’ Of course they caught me in the lie. I couldn’t explain—”
“You really are a trickster!”
“That was the problem. When I started secondary school, I didn’t tell anybody that my father was dead. Nobody knew. Because being an orphan was a very negative thing.
“A stigma?”
“Yes, indeed. And so I had told lots of stories about my father.”
“And you had to turn up with someone?”
“Yes, I had to come with someone. But I was so occupied with trying to convince my friends that my father was alive and was a soldier or something, that I forgot that when I registered for school I had actually registered as an orphan [Emmanuel laughed at his entanglement], so I was caught in the lie. So they told me, ‘Go back and bring your parent.’ I had to go to my mum. That was the first time that I had approached my mum with a problem. What has helped me a lot in life is knowing that when you have no alternative but to do or say the wrong thing, things will only get worse unless you go back and correct your mistake. So if I lied about something, I would immediately start thinking, ‘Oh, what lie will I have to use next?’ So I usually went back and corrected my mistake. I went straight to my mum and told her, ‘Mum, for the last month I have been away, suspended, and I’ve been living with so and so. When I went back to school, I went with somebody that was not really my parent. I didn’t want to bother you, but the school knew I didn’t have a father, and they sent me away to collect a parent. I told them I would go and collect you.’ I didn’t know what to expect from my mum. My mum just kept quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘Okay, when do they want me?’ I said, ‘They want you tomorrow.’ So my mum never reacted. And Michael, that was new to me, because one thing my mum was good at was appeasing, but another thing she was good at was punishing, though my mum would never punish you for what you had not done. I think that is why I love my mum. By the way, when I talk about punishment, where I come from it is part and parcel of growing up—being caned and being punished for what you have done. So my mum did not punish me—she just asked me, ‘So when do you want me to go?’ That almost killed me. It was something I did not expect from her. She just told me, ‘Okay, they want to see me tomorrow? Now go home, go eat, something is there for you to cook. Then bathe and prepare for tomorrow. I will be coming later in the evening.’ She gave me transport money to get from town to where we stayed. I went home, but I can tell you, I was unsettled. I was home, I bathed, I cut my nails, I made sure I didn’t give her an excuse to punish me for anything but being suspended from school for a month. I was waiting for my mum, but by the time she came home in the evening I was sweating, I was panicking, everything I touched was falling, and she comes back home and says, ‘So have you eaten?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I had lunch.’ Then she asks the girl who used to help us cook. ‘What are we having for supper?’ Then she says, ‘Emma, come, we’ll go and buy sauce.’ To tell you the truth, I thought Mum was planning to bury me alive. I don’t know [Emmanuel laughed], it was so unlike her. So we went to the butcher, came back, prepared the sauce, and ate. In the morning we woke, prepared, and went to the bus stop and on to school with all my things. She went to the office and talked. When she came out, she gave me some pocket money, two hundred shillings. Most of my friends spent two hundred shillings in a day, but that two hundred shillings was supposed to last me for half a term. You see [Emmanuel laughed again], it was a bit tricky to survive on that. So she gave me money and then said, ‘Okay, I hope you don’t get suspended again!’ Then she left.”
“Seems like your mother had a sense of humor too!”
“Yes.”
“Could your stepfather have helped out in any way, when you got into that jam?”
“He could and he did. He was probably the one who told my mum, when they got the letter. My father has always raised us from a teacher’s view on child development. He’s always been like that with us. At home, my father has been like an angel. And this is strange, to have a stepfather who basically does not behave like a stepfather. I grew up in situations where my friends had stepfathers who punished them on a daily basis, but with us, no, it was our mum who punished us, not our father, though he had the authority to do so. At school, he also had the authority to cane us, and he used to cane us when we failed or did something wrong, but if we got caught doing something wrong somewhere else, he would not let anyone else cane us. He’d say, ‘You call me. I don’t want anyone to touch my kids.’ So he was the only one to cane us, and immediately he was finished, he’d say, ‘Go to class,’ and then he’d come after maybe an hour and say, ‘Emma, come,’ and also my brother if he was there, and he’d take us to a stall where they sell bananas, ripe yellow bananas, mangoes, and, oh, it was heavenly to be bought a full cluster of yellow bananas—it was like being
