outraged that you should turn up on their doorstep, because, in effect, it was as if your father had appeared uninvited and unannounced to impose on their hospitality?”
“Yes, we were strangers in that place. We had no right to be there. And what made things worse was that we didn’t know the local language—we didn’t speak Lugisu; we were speaking Swahili and a bit of English. We knew Swahili because we went to preschool in Tanzania, and we spoke Swahili with our father. In Kumi, in the Teso region, we didn’t know the Teso language, and so the only language we spoke was Swahili. So language became an issue for us too. I had a problem learning the local language because I had no one to speak with, and if you spoke with anyone they would actually laugh at you, and so you shut up and gave up. I felt the same way when I came to Denmark. People made no allowance for the fact that I was from another country and could not speak their language. It had the effect of making me feel like a stupid child, just as I felt back then in Uganda.
“The problem was, we had to go to school. With the benefit of hindsight, I think nobody really cared what we were going to experience at school. They just herded us off. ‘You are going to that school,’ they said. We didn’t know Lugisu, we didn’t even know much English, but they just put us there. Now came an additional difficulty. From years five to eight, classes are taught in Luganda, because the Baganda, the largest tribe in my country, influenced the education system. Just imagine, you speak Swahili, you know a little English, you don’t know your mother’s language, and then they go and teach you in yet another language that it is impossible to understand!”
WHEN KINSHIP IS NOT ENOUGH
Emmanuel’s story not only underscored the ways in which cultural ascriptions can be radically destabilized by the impact of social violence and enforced migration; it raised the question of whether any identity is immune to the exigencies of life. Consider kinship, the prevailing idiom in rural Africa for placing people and determining how they should relate to one another. “Kinship is like your buttocks,” they say in Bunyole. “You can’t cut it off.”7 “Kinship cannot die,” say the Bagisu.8 The consternation among Emmanuel’s maternal kin when he and his family turned up in Mbale, effectively as refugees, indicates how inflexible people are when faced with an anomalous situation. But the fact that Emmanuel was fatherless, obliged to follow his mother to her natal country and become a surrogate mother for his little sister, reminds us that even the protocols of kinship can be traumatically disrupted, though they are regarded as immutable and natural. Nor is this necessarily a contemporary aberration, a repercussion of ethnic conflict in a neighboring country (Rwanda) and Idi Amin’s despotic government in Uganda. The history of Africa’s peoples is a history of upheavals and migrations, every one of which must have entailed the kind of disorientation and suffering that Emmanuel experienced. Under such circumstances, the idea of normativity is more like a consoling illusion, a source of security that people fall back upon when the gap between actuality and ideality becomes intolerably wide.
There is wisdom to be had, therefore, in approaching the social through the biographical. Although the notion of the human subject is construed very differently in different societies and through the history of European thought,9 it is in the experience of persons—not of groups, animals, or things—that the world makes its appearance, albeit fragmentarily and fleetingly. The whole world does not exist for anyone. It is an idea. What exists are worlds within worlds, and the more we penetrate these microcosms, the more we come to question the generalizations we make concerning the hegemony of the macrocosm, whether this is conceived historically, culturally, or ethnically. It is therefore the indeterminate relationship, the lack of fit, the existential aporias between a person and the world in which he or she exists that become the focus of our anthropological concern.
ALL I COULD DO WAS USE SIGNS
“So they push us to school. To tell you the truth, Michael, my first years of school, probably up to when I was eleven—I have no memory of them. Either I intentionally shut them out or something like that, but I don’t remember anything good or interesting because I didn’t understand anything the teachers were saying. All I could do was use signs. I would just sign, ‘Oh, where are they going?’ and go there. ‘What are they doing?’ I’d do that. Games—I couldn’t play games because I didn’t know what anyone was saying. Somebody tells you to run across. I didn’t know what he meant. So I’d be excluded from doing that, whatever it was. The worst thing was, I couldn’t tell anybody about my problems because, if I did, I’d be punished for trying to get out of going to school. So I kept quiet. It took me a long time to be as talkative as I am now. It wasn’t until I was in secondary school that I began to speak a bit, because by then I’d made some friends and learned a bit more English. But even then, I wouldn’t say much. I was a bit hesitant about communicating with people because of my fear of making a mistake or saying the wrong thing.
“Those primary school years were also difficult because before going to school in the morning, I had to work in my grandmother’s garden, the shamba. You had to go dig before you did anything else. You’d wake at five o’clock in the morning, then go with your grandmother and dig, and after tilling the land you’d come back home and go off to school. You didn’t have time to clean up or wash off the sweat. The problem was that the school was three kilometers from the place where we were staying, and if you were going to get there on time you’d have to run. If you walked, you’d be late and get punished. And so, you leave the shamba and run to school. No time to bathe, and anyway, to bathe you’d have to fetch water from the river, which was four kilometers away—the Manafa, as it is called. So after coming from the shamba you only had time to clean your hoe. The rule was simple: you are not supposed to leave sweat on it because it could rust. So you are supposed to clean the hoe and leave the hoe clean. Cleaning yourself didn’t matter. So you run to school. And then you are caned. I don’t remember any day during that period that I was not caned.”
“By the teachers?”
“Yeah, it was like breakfast.”
“Because it was a daily occurrence?”
“Truly. Every day. It only stopped when I was sixteen and went to secondary school. Up to then I don’t remember a single day that I was not caned. The reason could have been because I was dirty every morning, or I was late (because I was late almost every day), or I was sleeping in class (which also happened every day). Now I know it was because I was tired and hungry, but at the time I didn’t understand. And the beating was not like someone coming along and giving you a rap or a smack. No, no, no. Beating was like an activity on its own. Teachers set aside a time to do it. I mean they could set aside half a period of teaching just for punishment. And I was almost always the first to be beaten because I was late, dirty, or had been caught dozing. Minimum every day I would receive six strokes of the cane. You had to lean over with your hands on the table, and they caned you at the base of your spine. Six for being late, six for being dirty, and six for not answering questions correctly. For me, the problem was that I couldn’t even understand what the teacher was saying. I couldn’t understand the questions, and I couldn’t give the answers. And then there was after school, when you were supposed to run home, meet grandma, get your hoe, and go back to the garden for more work until seven o’clock, when it is too dark to do any more digging.”
“Without having eaten anything all day?”
“Not always, because you’d often get the chance to take some leftovers from home, like a piece of sweet potato, cassava, or millet bread. You would hide it in your shorts or in your armpit, because no one would want to eat it if it had been kept in one of those places. Or you could spit on the food when everyone was looking, and so keep it until break or lunchtime without it being taken from you. The problem was that whenever you came to school with food, you reeked of it, and there would be those small, young boys waiting for you, waiting to take it away from you. So I would get used to going without food during the day, from eight in the morning to four or five in the evening. Sometimes I would be able
