the time when my father passed away, no, because I didn’t know whether she was crying or not at that time, but the time my grandmother died and the time she had the toothache.” Emmanuel gave an embarrassed laugh, then quickly went on. “So when we asked about our father and my mum went inside and came back and her eyes were red, I knew there was something horribly wrong. So we didn’t bother asking my mum about our father again. But even though she never sat down and told us intimate things about our father . . . about how he carried us, how he was at home, whether he mistreated us or was sweet to us, or brought us presents or not . . . she did tell us where he came from and who his relatives were. She gave us information about him. That was the only thing that we got from her. Anyway, when my father passed away, or rather, disappeared, it was left to my mum alone to make sure that we safely left that village, because we were not from there. Our presence alone would raise eyebrows, because westerners—especially those from Rwanda, the migrants—were called cowboys.”
Emmanuel had touched on one of Africa’s oldest problems—the troubled coexistence of pastoralists and sedentary cultivators. It echoes the story of Cain and Abel, post-Neolithic conflicts between townspeople and itinerants, and age-old Asian struggles between valley kingdoms and hill peoples.2 As settled populations struggled to protect themselves against mobile and marauding outsiders, nomadism became a synonym for barbarism. Seen to belong nowhere and everywhere, the nomad was stigmatized as the antithesis of civilization. As I write (November 2011), a spate of rapes and assaults in northwest Cameroon is being blamed on Akuh cattle herders, with whom Aghem cultivators have long been in dispute over rights to land.3 In Rwanda, Hutu farmers claimed that their ancestors had generously given land to Tutsi seeking pasture for their herds. But the Tutsi allegedly tricked the Hutu into servitude, and the very word “Hutu” became a synonym for slave.4 Elsewhere in Africa, pastoralists also tended to be in the minority, supplying cattle (for bridewealth and sacrifices) to farmers in exchange for access to grazing land. But as populations grew and herders migrated from drought-stricken lands, ancient cultural or religious differences were invoked to justify radical separation. In the Kumi district of eastern Uganda, many Tutsi refugees reestablished themselves as cattle herders, though most, including Emmanuel’s father, were obliged to work for chiefs or wealthy men on stock contracts.5 Among the Iteso, cattle were sources of bridewealth, prestige, and political power. It was often said of a heavy-set man that he had grown fat on the milk he had in his home.6 But owners feared and resented the outsiders to whom they entrusted their herds. They said, “We can’t allow these people to continue keeping our cattle; we have to keep our cattle ourselves.” Moreover, Emmanuel explained, “those who had sided with Amin assumed that the cattle keepers were aligned with the rebels.” And so, as his mother told him much later, “we had to leave that area because my father’s tribe was not accepted there.”
“I remember a very big truck. We were put in the truck and covered with banana leaves—literally covered, that’s what I remember, because I thought they were covering us from the sun or rain or something. Later on, I told my mum, ‘I have a fading memory about how we left Kumi. Why did we leave in a big car?’ My mum said, “No, we were hiding. We were being removed from a place where we could be harmed, and there were roadblocks along the road, so we had to be kept under cover.’ We went straight to the village where she had been born . . .”
“Mbale?”
“Mbale is a large town. My mum’s village is Busiu, which is about thirteen miles south of Mbale on the road to Tororo.”
“That is the Bugisu area?”
“Yes, mum is Bagisu.”
Mbale is a market town, famous for its arabica coffee. It lies at the foot of Mount Elgon, the oldest and largest solitary volcano in East Africa. The Bagisu occupy a broken landscape of hills and narrow valleys on the western and southern slopes of Mount Elgon. Tradition relates that their ancestor emerged from a hole in the mountain, though they probably arrived in eastern Uganda from the Uasin Gishu plateau in Kenya. In anthropological parlance, the Bagisu reckon descent patrilineally (through one’s father and his father and his father ad infinitum), and when a woman marries she customarily resides with or near her husband’s family. When the family moved from the area of Uganda where his father had made his home, Emmanuel found himself not only fatherless and without contact with his patrikin; he was now subject to the authority of his matrikin. Ordinarily, Emmanuel would have expected to find affection, care, and freedom among his maternal kin. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. Moreover, in the absence of a husband to support her, Emmanuel’s mother had to become the breadwinner, and Emmanuel was obliged to assume a role that would normally be assigned to an elder sister.
“So when we came to Bugisu, we came to a village where my mum was born and raised, only to face a new set of problems there. I had to grow up fast—not physically, but in understanding that life is not easy. My mum was pregnant when our father died, and she gave birth to a baby girl in 1980. I was nine years old. Because I was closest in age to Barbara, I had to take care of her.”
“But you had other siblings, didn’t you?”
“My elder brother Deo had been living with an uncle in the city for many years. My younger brother Peter lived with one of our mum’s uncles, three miles from Busiu. And then there was Mariam, my other younger sister, who lived with me and my mum in Busiu.”
“You were saying that life was not easy there.”
“My mum’s sisters and the older women in her family did not concern themselves with our well-being. They were focused on their own survival, and they did not want to sit down with us anyway because we were from a different part of the country. I didn’t know any other life. Not like now. But life in that village was not easy for me. It was horrible. Looking back, I would have preferred to be in prison. A prison in Uganda would have been better because you would know you had done something wrong and were being punished for it. But from the word go, people started telling me, mainly because I was so outgoing, so ready to help, ‘No, no, you can’t do this, you can’t come in here, because you are this and this . . .’”
“The fact that you were your mother’s son didn’t count?”
“No.”
“You were considered a stranger, because you were from your father’s part of the country?”
“Exactly. I was not welcome, and by the way, what made it worse is that, traditionally, when a girl left a village to go and get married, she’s not meant to come back. So you see, my mum coming back with us meant sentencing us to some horrible punishment.”
I found it ironic that though Bugisu and Kumi had been equally opposed to the Amin regime, Emmanuel’s family was nonetheless regarded as outsiders and ostracized. Emmanuel agreed, pointing out that most members of Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) hailed from Bugisu. But political affiliation counted for much less than customary determinations of identity and belonging.
“They should have protected us, really, but they didn’t care that we were on the same side. That was not important. What mattered was that we were from the wrong place, that we came with our mother and lacked a father. I’ve been avoiding the word ‘bastard,’ but it is actually used more in our culture than it is here in Denmark. Here it is used as a figure of speech, a way of annoying you. There it is well defined. If you lack a father or if your father and mother are not married, you are basically a bastard, and so you are not welcome. Worse still, my mum was not staying with any man by then because my father had passed away, and most people didn’t even know who my father was. This might sound a bit complicated, but in my culture relations with in-laws are a big deal. A husband doesn’t visit his wife’s home that often. He has to be invited, or he has to send a message that he is coming, so the in-laws have time to prepare. And he doesn’t stay with
