so you go and get those peelings and eat them. They were actually very fine and sweet.”
“Would you eat in the evening, then, when your work was done?”
“Yeah, but you could never be sure of that meal either, because visitors would often come, and they had priority.”
PUNISHMENT, PERSECUTION, AND PERVERSION
Food sharing is at the core of kinship. Providing succor and support to those who are dependent on you for their very existence is the moral basis of family life, and commensality affirms the mutual well-being of the household. However, throughout East Africa, men have migrated from rural villages to find work in towns, and lives have been lost to HIV/AIDS, leaving countless children orphaned. Grandmothers have had to bear the burden of growing crops and feeding the orphaned grandchildren who now depend on them. Not only is food in short supply and farm labor exhausting; competition for scarce resources breeds resentment and ill will. As Erick Otieno Nyambedha observes in a recent study on western Kenya, “The sharing of food, once a token of warm relations between grandmothers and their grand-children, has now lost its charm and beauty and become a frugal part of day-to-day survival in a grim world.”10 One might also note that denying food was a traditional way of punishing children for being lazy, though deliberate starvation of children would not be tolerated.
It is also worth noting that among the Bagisu, physical punishment was a precondition for the attainment of manhood, and initiation (imbalu) was a kind of graduation ceremony for boys who had proven their ability to with-stand extreme pain. Each boy had to stand stock still while his foreskin was cut and subcutaneous flesh stripped from around the glans penis. “The degree of pain entailed is never underplayed; the most commonly used descriptive phrases being ‘fierce,’ ‘bitter,’ and ‘terrifying.’ Only those who have faced this fact and overcome their fear can undergo the ordeal successfully.”11 Given the high value placed on male strength (kamani) and self-determination in Bagisu society, it is possible that Emmanuel’s ordeals were seen as a necessary preparation for manhood. Certainly, his growing ability to endure painful beatings without complaint, achieving complete detachment from the ordeal, resonates with conventional Bagisu ideas about the need to dissociate oneself from emotions of fear and humiliation to attain transcendence. In Bagisu parlance, initiatory ordeals were forms of “punishment,”12 not for an offense committed but to stir the neophyte into developing metaphysical power. This power consisted in being able to control one’s emotions rather than being controlled by them.13 Manhood was therefore a matter of deciding to submit oneself to the ordeal rather than shrinking from it. As one initiate put it, “No one has asked us to do it. No one is forcing us. We ourselves have overcome our fear. Now it is my heart itself which wants it. No one is forcing me. Father has not ordered me. It comes from my heart alone. Let me explain it this way, even though I am here talking with my friends I feel like a [disembodied] spirit-shadow (cisimu).”14
Clearly, Emmanuel achieved this dissociation and disembodiment. But where Bagisu initiates gained metaphysical power from mastering their emotions, Emmanuel gained nothing. His personal fortitude was not recognized by others, and therefore gave him no social advantage. Proving himself capable of withstanding hardship entailed no redeeming transfiguration, no new social status, no right to assert himself. He remained like a child, unable to act and without a voice. He could do nothing except bow to the will of others, following their orders, doing what he was told, enduring their punishments. Reduced to the status of an object, he gradually became desensitized to life as if he was, indeed, a mere thing—without will, without consciousness, without feeling. In a sense, he was already a migrant, adrift and disoriented in a foreign environment, ignorant of the local language, lacking a place he could call his own.
Dismayed that there seemed to have been no one he could turn to, no place of refuge, I asked Emmanuel if any of his mother’s brothers showed concern for his plight.15 “No. In fact, they were avoiding us. And that’s another problem I have with my uncles, by the way. I don’t like my uncles because of that. By that time, my mum had got a job as a cleaner in the municipal offices in Mbale. She was living in town, and I was left behind in the village with my younger sisters. There was no one to protect me from my uncles and aunties. I was living with them, but they never liked us, no, no, no.”
“So you were staying in your grandmother’s house?”
“Yes.”
“And your grandmother was the person taking care of you?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother was how far away?”
“Uh, let me see. Thirteen miles.”
“How often did you get to see her?”
“At first, she went early in the morning and came back in the evening. But it was expensive, transportwise, so she rented a room in the city center. We used to see her over the weekend, when she came back. But she was away most of the time. The problem for me was that I was stuck in my grandmother’s house, and her sons and daughters were coming there regularly. You couldn’t avoid them, even if you wanted to. They would come and eat supper with us. It was a kind of millet porridge, halfway between porridge and bread. My grandmother would break a big piece off behind her hand and hide it in a cloth. She would give my sister and me that piece later, because she knew we had not got enough to eat, because my uncles and those relatives would just grab food very fast, and we were very slow and young. So she used to give us that food afterward when we were alone, when we were sitting somewhere. We didn’t have electricity in the village, and the only source of light was a candle that was actually powered by kerosene, and kerosene is very expensive, so she used to blow it out and say, ‘Eat, eat this fast before they come, eat.’ So that’s how we used to survive. And then there were days, of course, when we used to sit at home and she would prepare lunch. The problem is that when she prepared food, we had to eat it alone, because as soon as my uncles and the others came, that was it, you weren’t going to have food. These big people wanted to eat, and they didn’t care much about the rest of us. My mum was not told about any of this. And we did not dare tell her because the problem was, if we told her she would ask my grandmother, and if she asked my grandmother, my grandmother would ask the brothers and the sisters, and we would end up having even more problems.”
Emmanuel tended to move between past and present tense, as if the events he recalled from twenty-five years ago had the force of something that had occurred only yesterday. There was a similar slippage between “I” and “we,” as if he was mindful, as he spoke of his own tribulations, that they were shared by his younger brother Peter—when he returned home on visits—and his younger sisters, Mariam and Barbara.
“Yet they punished us, and when I talk about punishment it was not just a matter of refusing to give us food, no, these relatives would go drinking, come back drunk, and then unloose their sorrows on us. They’d just call us, saying, ‘Line up and lie down.’ Being beaten was not a problem for me, but my sister Mariam and my brother Peter, that was too much for me, so—I don’t want to use the word, but I hated them from that point. These are kids, you know, I was ten years old, eleven. I could take it, but the two kids could not.”
“What kind of abuse was it?”
“Actually, the name they called us was a name they called the cattle keepers. They called them ‘bararo.’ It was a term of abuse, like the word ‘nigger.’ The way I understand the word ‘bararo’ is the same way I understand the word ‘nigger.’ Originally, it was negro, meaning black, and not really a term of abuse at all. It was like calling someone ‘Asian.’ The same with ‘mulalo.’ It defined a people who came from a particular place, people who herded cattle for survival, but then ‘mulalo’ became a term of abuse.”
“You
