he gave us. He had this policy, he never wanted to punish us and mum knew this. So he would come home and say, “Uh, by the way, Jen, Emma and Deo did this and this today, but I punished them and everything is okay.’ My mum knew of it. At home the coolant was our father. Whenever our mum was burning up, he would say, ‘No, no, Jen, take it slow, there could be a reason why he did this, can we ask him why he did this?’ And then they’d ask us, and we would explain. My father would say, ‘You see, Jen, even if he’s lying, at least he has an explanation for it.’ So that’s how they raised us. Even though they are no longer together, my stepfather and my mum, he is the closest thing I’ve had to a father, and he is the closest adult friend I have had. So I usually go to him, and we talk, we argue, we discuss. Our behaviors are mostly copied from him, because he has never drunk, he has never smoked, he was always a hundred percent sober at home. If he punished you, it was because he was sober and able to understand your problem, not because he wanted to vent his anger or frustration on you. That was only at school. Never at home. He would always ask you to explain why you were doing wrong. And my father could convince my mum not to react immediately. He would always talk to her.”
By the time Emmanuel left secondary school, he was at the top of his class. “I did nothing but study,” he said. “I didn’t care what anybody else was saying, I didn’t care about food, I didn’t care about anything, I just read books.”
“You stopped being the joker?”
“I’m telling you, I stopped totally making fun. People began to be afraid for me. They said, ‘Eh, Emma, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Be quiet, I’m reading. There were four streams, and I was the best student in stream three.”
“What drove you to work so hard at academic success?”
“What pushed me is the way my mum reacted. My mum never abused me, never pushed me. Instead, she was very positive.”
“So you felt you owed her a positive result at school?”
“Exactly, a good report card. And when I brought it home, my mum was so happy she bought me my first pair of shoes, yeah. By the way, Michael, I didn’t tell you, but that was the first time I put on a pair of shoes.”
“You wore sandals until then?”
“Yeah, plastic ones, like these.” Emmanuel got up from the table, went to the front door, and returned with a pair of cheap plastic shoes. “See, they were made like this. Open here, on the sides. But I can tell you one thing, believe me when I say that you would rather put your feet in the fire than wear these plastic shoes in Uganda. We had to wear them from seven o’clock in the morning up to six in the evening. The problem was, at six you were supposed to remove those shoes and go to sleep, but you couldn’t remove them in the dormitory—you had to go and sit outside because the smell was worse than a dead cat. You literally got rotten feet in a day, and when I say rotten, we Africans are good at handling awful smells, but this you couldn’t stomach—your feet stank like a dead cat, so bad that you had to sit out there for two or three hours.”
“And the other kids? They had leather shoes?”
“Yes, they had good shoes. Some of them had normal sandals like the ones I’m wearing now, but me, I was in those ones. They were plastic and too small for my feet. So my feet really got burned. The signs disappeared as I grew older, but my heels used to be white and my toes . . . here, some of the scars are still here . . . after twenty years. Yeah, my feet were totally burned. And whenever you remove them at night, the smell comes off them and you have to take them outside, then put your feet inside your blanket because of the smell. I used my sheet and blanket to cover my feet. The top part of me had no cover. And then I had only one pair of socks. That is, until my mum bought me a pair of shoes from Bata—”
“I remember Bata shoes from Freetown—”
“Shoes from Bata were not real leather, but at least they were better than those plastics. They were made by a company, a foreign company that came in from Europe, I think. So these guys from Europe were making these shoes, and we bought them because they were cheap and well shaped, but I don’t think our parents knew how bad these things were. My feet almost got deformed, because even though your feet were paining you, and you are dying in your heart and your brain is burning, in the compound you had to pretend to walk normally. So when I got my shoes, I was very happy, and I finished senior three and went on to senior four. Then, three months into the second term, I messed up again. I left school without permission to escort a friend who was leaving for America. I didn’t know we were supposed to get permission. We got caught up in the emotions of Teba Henry going to America. Anyway, we got caught off the school premises, and I was expelled for a term. I went straight home. I thought they had expelled me for a reason that was so flimsy. I thought they would be more kind and understanding, with our friend leaving us in the middle of the term to go to America. So I went home, knowing my mum would understand, which she did. I did most of my schooling at home, then, right up to my O-levels at the end of senior four.
“Next year, my mum took me to a new school. Maybe she was angry with me or had given up on me, but she took me to a school where no one in his right mind would take a child. The school had no toilets, no latrines. There are some tribes in Uganda where latrines are not allowed. It is not allowed to shit in a latrine or toilet. It’s not that they don’t have toilets; they just don’t use them, that’s their culture.”
“They go in the bush?”
“Yeah.”
“But they must designate areas in the bush, otherwise—”
“I think so, yeah. Some of them don’t really care. They consider shit to be part of nature, manure for the land. And this part of their culture—I don’t know whether I’m using the word ‘culture’ properly here—this was part of the school’s culture too. It was a boy’s school. I was put in there. I didn’t understand anything. So when I woke up in the morning and said I needed to use the latrine, people were laughing. I said, ‘Why are you laughing?’ They said, ‘Ah, Emma, you don’t know? You’re supposed to go to Beirut’ [Emmanuel laughed]. Yeah, the place they went to shit they called Beirut! So they said, ‘Ah, everybody goes to Beirut, man, you’d better go there.’ So I went with a group of people in the morning. We walked, we walked, we walked across the school, and I asked, ‘Excuse me, where is Beirut?’ So they say, ‘You’ll find it.’ And sure enough, just as I step outside the main compound of the school I step into a minefield of shit. That’s what they called it—mines. Everyone was using military language. The shape of a shit indicated whether it was a machine gun, a certain caliber bullet, a missile, or—how do you call it, that gas, that chemical they spread in war zones? They used to name everything according to how it looked. Now they told me, ‘Yeah, you’re a new fellow, you’re going into the minefield, and the rest of us are going to the gun ships.’ These were places where the ground was still clear, and you could squat down all right. But where I was, there was nothing but mines. First you had to place your leg, and then—”
By now, Emmanuel was in stitches, and I was laughing too. I did not need to be convinced of his ability to transform a potentially degrading situation into slapstick comedy.
“Well, you get the picture! You had to be careful not to bring more shit back from that place than you took there! And then it would rain! You know what tropical rain is like? Ah, you leave that place in the morning, and you’ve completely lost your appetite. You’re hungry—food is hard to come by, but you can’t bring yourself to eat. And then later in the day, you have to go back. Nature is calling!”
“I’m laughing, Emmanuel, but I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time.”
