that situation was no joke. No, no, no. When I told my brother-in-law, who is actually Ugandan and has been to secondary school, he could not believe it. I even told my brother, Deo. He couldn’t believe it. A secondary school, senior five, A-levels, where you are preparing yourself to go the university, and you don’t have a latrine!”
“What was the quality of the teaching there?”
“Actually the reason I was sent there was historical. Like a prince going to Eton, then twenty years down the road sending his son there. My school was called Katchonga Senior Secondary School, and my father remembered his older brother having gone there and later getting a very big position in government. Also, Charles Onyango-Obbo went there.23 By the way, that is what mostly influences people. They look at who has been at a certain school, then say, ‘Ah, that’s the school you should go to.’ But the school I went to was not the school they thought it would be, and I stayed only a year and a half before leaving.
“Did you finish your A-levels there?”
“No, I decided to go to a day school, even though my mum wasn’t keen on it.”
“How old were you when you finally finished your A-levels?”
“I finished them in 1994. I was twenty-three years old, four or five years older than anyone else in my class.”
“Yet considering your circumstances, that was quite an achievement.”
“I had to work terribly hard. I didn’t want to repeat or fail a class. With my very poor primary education, I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to work out a system for studying. Coaching and extra tutoring became central. Some of the teachers who helped me have remained friends to this day. One of my main helpers was also called Emma. I could not have passed without his help and advice. I was very good at some subjects, like mathematics, and so I took mathematics, economics, and geography as my specialized subjects for A-levels. But I still didn’t have enough points to go straight to university, and I had to find a college in Kampala. I spent two years there doing a commercial course and paid for my education by doing odd jobs. I was thinking I would become a teacher like my father, so when I finished the courses I got a teaching assistant’s job at my brother-in-law’s school. I used to help in accounting and commercial courses, marking and helping students who were not understanding in class. It was actually my brother-in-law who suggested I go to university.”
“This was Mariam’s husband?”
“Yes. Mr. Kitez. He’s the one who actually said to me, ‘Emma, you have this certificate, why don’t you use it to enroll at university?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that would be okay.’ He said, ‘I can help you get in contact with a university. Would you go there if they offered you a place?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m willing.’ I went to my mum and presented my suggestions to her. My mum was excited, but the university was private and funded by an Islamic organization based in . . . I think . . . the United Arab Emirates. It sponsors Islamic universities in many African countries. This one was in Mbale, where I came from. The dream of most people in Uganda is to go to Makerere. Makerere is like Oxford in the U.K., or Harvard in America. But even though it would have cost no more to go to Makerere, I really wanted to go to IUIU.”
“Can you explain why?”
“Commitment of the teaching staff. Let me say they are not drunkards—there are no unserious people there . . . no professors and lecturers who look at you and want to give you less marks because you may have shorter hair than someone else. The standards at Makerere University have fallen, because politicians got involved and academics became corrupted. I wanted to go to an institution that was seriously concentrated on helping students, an institution that allowed students to develop their own understanding of things rather than being forced to think in only one way. It was there that I was brought out of limbo. I was happy to be there. If professors gave you 20 it was because you had earned 20; it wasn’t because you were a Christian or a Muslim. And the girls didn’t have to show their breasts to get more marks, like at Makerere. Also, I didn’t want to get distracted. There were no bars, no dance halls at IUIU, so you could focus on your academic work.”
“And no expectation that you should be Muslim?”
“No, no one ever came to me in the three and a half years I was there, no one asked me, ‘Emma, are you becoming Muslim?’ In fact, Muslims don’t do that. They want you to actually admire what they are doing, so you become a Muslim because of their deeds. We mistakenly think that Muslims are like Pentecostals. But they don’t try to convert you at all. I almost married a Muslim girl, but she never once asked me about becoming Muslim. She was willing to accept me the way I was, though probably her family could not have done so. But this is the thing, I was comfortable at the Islamic University because they let you be who you are. You have only to follow the rules: don’t come drunk to school, don’t smoke in class, don’t kiss or fondle females or do anything that makes people lose their concentration. These are rules that would apply anywhere. Anyway, I liked Islamic University because there was nothing to drag me from my goal, and so I succeeded in performing quite well. When I finished my bachelor’s, they actually wanted me to continue with a master’s there, but then I came to Denmark.”
THE SCAPEGOAT
Emmanuel’s story brought to mind René Girard’s work on the scapegoat. I had already noticed the close kinship between Emmanuel’s narrative and the folktale, for despite the deeply personal nature of what was being recounted, the minimalist and austere style of the folktale prevailed, as if Emmanuel were recounting his experiences from afar or through a lens that lent objectivity to what might otherwise have been an unbearably intimate and abject catalogue of misfortunes. It was perhaps this paradoxical juxtaposition of the idiosyncratic and the stereotypical that gave his story a quasi-mythical dimension, as if it were an allegory of Everyman.
In calling a story mythic, Girard means that private, historical, or geographical details play a secondary role in what is essentially an archetypal form, in this instance “a persecution text,” examples of which can be found in all human societies. Girard’s insights into the conditions under which such persecution texts are born and his argument for why certain elements recur in them are directly relevant to Emmanuel’s story. First, Girard notes, stereotypes of persecution tend to draw on a cluster of closely related words that suggest deep affinities linking critical events to criminality and condemnation. Thus the Greek verb krino, meaning “to judge, differentiate, and condemn a victim,” is the etymological root of our words crisis, crime, criteria, and critique.24 It is worth observing, therefore, that during the critical period in Emmanuel’s childhood, when, following the death of his father and the family’s exodus from central Uganda and migration to Bugisu, Uganda was suffering civil unrest, widespread famine, and the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic. Moreover, from as long ago as the mid-twentieth century, Bugisu had the highest density of population per square mile in Uganda, and in the 1960s increasing pressure on scarce land meant a growing intolerance of the landless poor, who were not only resented but often accused of witchcraft and thievery.25
In 1980, despite post-Amin turmoil, the first elections for eighteen years were held. But in many parts of the country, only half the population was self-sufficient in food, and infant mortality rates had increased tenfold.26 To keep his baby sister alive, Emmanuel fed her small balls of moist clay, while he survived by drinking cattle urine and eating leaves from bushes. His mother, who had traveled far and wide in search of work or money, returned to the village on one occasion to find Emmanuel so weakened by starvation that he was hospitalized, unable to walk, and for two long weeks it was not known if he would live.
When the world falls apart, people are typically thrown into panic, despair, and rage. These emotions tend to be projected
