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Published: April 9th 2008
It takes close to an hour to negotiate the traffic of downtown Kampala and make it out of the city, but soon the country opens out around us: lush, undulating, endless, with sheets of smoke rising from the burning crops in the distance. It’s a beautiful, bumpy drive. We stop in small towns for passengers to get off: men with battered suitcases, women with burbling, bleary-eyed babies on their backs. Young boys approach the bus waving skewers of goat meat and packets of peanuts; women suggestively wag a few bananas or bunches of small red onions. I grin and wave but would rather hold off till we reach Fort Portal; there don’t figure to be many bathroom breaks for upset stomachs. Tea plantations cover the hills, broken by small bursts of banana plants and clusters of eucalyptus trees, tall and regal and rocking in the wind. Streams of people walk along the road’s shoulder, hauling bundles of firewood or jerry cans full of water. Dark, straining men push bicycles loaded with charcoal or banana leaves uphill. I doze off and wake up and watch the trees scroll past the window. We blow a tire and stop to change it. Young kids
surround me on the side of the road, pushing their curious faces forward. We get onboard again, driving west, west, west, until the towns we pass are just a few clusters of mud-brick huts swallowed by the dense vegetation.
We reach Fort Portal late in the day. Outside, surrounded by eager
boda drivers pulling at my arms and my bags, I feel a reassuring hand tugging me to safety. It’s a man I met on the bus, a bookish young guy with a wiry moustache and thick-framed glasses perched crookedly on his nose. He helps me heave my bags away from all the commotion and says, “Just ignore them, and they will go.” We wait for them to shuffle off, looking surly and dejected toward the bags at my feet. He asks where I’m going, and I tell him the name of my hotel.
“It is not very far,” he says, gesturing up the road. He offers to walk with me, taking my small backpack on his shoulder.
We’d struck up a conversation on the outskirts of town, as I’d fiddled with my iPod and waited anxiously for the bumpy ride to be over
with. Curious eyes followed my thumb as it whirled around in circles and punched out playlists, working obscure miracles with my deft touch. In these parts, the magic of portable technologies requires a certain reverence. If I’d decided, at that very moment, to pull a heavenly choir from my asshole and strike up Handel’s
Messiah, I suspect no one would’ve been surprised. Yet the man by the window was sharply inquisitive. He asked about the storage capacity, and we soon got into a heated discussion about file sharing and intellectual copyright law. This was not, I suspected, your typical conversation on the bus to Fort Portal.
On the way to my hotel, hearing that I’m a writer, Colin professes his admiration for Truman Capote. He’d read
In Cold Blood years ago, and had heard stories of the author’s legendary Black and White ball. Soon Colin - a dairy farmer living ten kilometers from town - shyly admits that he’s something of a writer, too. We shake hands and part warmly and make plans to meet later in the week. For the first twenty minutes, Fort Portal is not at all what I expected.
But for the
next few days, it’s exactly what I expected. Sitting near the foothills of the Rwenzoris - the silhouette of their blue-gray ridges rising sharply on the horizon - Fort Portal is a middle-of-nowhere town best known for its leading role in last fall’s ebola outbreak. Once a busy hub for colonial administrators in western Uganda, it now seems content to shuffle along in a sleepy torpor, rubbing its eyes and looking up now and then to wonder what time the British left.
It’s a lovely place, with acres of tea plantations sitting in neat parcels on the hills around it. While there’s nothing at all to do around town, and power cuts are a daily ritual from just after sunrise to just before sunset, I’m happy to spend a few days strolling down dirt roads and waving to naked kids ducking behind the banana plants. I stuff my face with rolexes - Uganda’s ubiquitous chapati sandwiches, packed with eggs and onions and tomatoes - and eat heaping plates of beans and rice at the Little Rock café. It is, all things considered, a fine couple of days.
Later in the week I meet Colin on the steps
of the public library. He’s waiting for me in the shade, reading through a newspaper folded into tidy quarters. He asks if I want to take a look inside before we go, and I spend a few minutes poking through the darkened aisles full of old science texts and musty periodicals. In a corner of the building, paid for by the US government, is a small selection of American literature and battered old PCs. Advertisements for the Peace Corps and USAid cover the walls - cheery posters of young Americans digging wells and hugging little grinning African boys. I look through the books neatly lined on the shelves, picturing the young bureaucrat as he rifles through stacks of black literature at the Barnes & Noble, checklist in hand.
Native Son? Check.
Black Boy? Check.
Their Eyes Were Watching God? Check.
Outside, when I make a few quips about the American section, Colin gets a mischievous twinkle in his eye and says, “That is how America wins hearts and minds.”
We buy some muffins and cartons of mango juice from the supermarket and get on the back of a
boda, puttering down the street. We turn once
and then twice and then we’re on a rough dirt road stitched through the hills. Tea plantations and coffee farms are sandwiched on either side of us, cows lowing and goats chewing industriously on the grass. Colin explains the economics of local agriculture: how tea yields a wide profit margin when planted on a large scale, how coffee is easy to maintain on a plot of just one or two acres.
“Tea is very hard work,” he says. “Very, very hard. You must always care for it. You cannot leave it for a day.”
We pass a dairy farm and Colin gestures to the plump, handsome cows flicking their tails on the hillside. “This is, I think, the best dairy farm in the district,” he says, his voice warming with appreciation. “They have very nice cows. Pure Friesian - a very nice breed. From Europe.” We admire their mottled flanks basking in the sunlight. Then we pass through a small town of brick storefronts and wooden shops. A group of men stop working on a bicycle to smile and wave at our dust. Women in colorful print dresses, stooped over cooking fires, straighten their backs to
watch us go.
We stop to buy sugarcane from an old man standing beside a roadside shack; he breaks the stalks across his knee, grinning, bobbing his wrinkled head. Then we putter through a colonnade of tall, swaying eucalyptus trees. Colin shakes his head bitterly, explaining that the trees drink too much water from the ground. “One tree will take twenty liters a day!” he says, which I admit sounds like a whole lot. Because so much of the region has been deforested, and the best wood for building - mahogany,
mavoule - has been used up, people will plant eucalyptus trees that can be harvested in just five years.
“But they don’t know what they are doing,” he says. “In twenty years, I promise you, there will be no water in the ground here.”
A half-hour after leaving town we pull up to his farm. Colin’s cows - lean, scruffy, not-at-all Friesian - bury their faces in a trough; a neighbor in a baseball cap and overalls waves across the fence. They stop and exchange the news. The day is hot and still; when a breeze comes, it’s an act of mercy. We
stop outside the house while Colin fidgets with the locks. It’s a modest bungalow surrounded by bright, flowering plants: by western Ugandan standards suggesting wealth - or at least, the absence of poverty. Colin leads me into the kitchen and we sit across from each other, folding our hands on the table. Empty cabinets and bookshelves line the wall behind me. A gust of wind blows outside, branches thrashing against the windowpanes.
He opens the mango juice and passes me a muffin and asks about my travels. We talk about my long odyssey since leaving home. He smiles and sighs and shakes his head as I describe Barcelona and Beirut, London and Damascus. About the Middle East he’s especially curious: gesturing to the transistor radio on the table, he explains that he closely follows the news on BBC. Then he tells me about his own odyssey five years ago, when he quit his job as a lawyer in Kampala to travel through Africa. He went south, through Rwanda and Tanzania, making it as far as Malawi. Soon he was low on money. He grew lonely.
“It is all the same, wherever you go,” he says. He called his sister in Kampala to send money. Soon he was back in Uganda.
But he had had enough of city life - “the rat race,” as he calls it. He came west to look after his father’s farm. It was a hard life. Money was scarce; often, he had to ask his sister and an elder brother for help. The neighbors were guarded, suspicious.
“They see this house, and they think we must have so much money,” he says. Even years later, he has few people he can trust. He wonders about the neighbors’ motives.
“I know I cannot leave for one minute. They will be in here like that,” he says.
It bothers him to see people - friends and neighbors - hobbled by bitterness and petty grudges. “We have a saying:
nohandika ha maiise,” he says, tapping each syllable on the tabletop. “It means ‘like writing on water.’” He laughs at this, amused and resigned. “You cannot change how people are.”
We go outside and he shows me around the farm. It’s a small plot of land; in just a few minutes we’ve crossed through the brown stalks of maize, pausing to stop in the shade of a flowering tree. It’s a sunny afternoon, the heat rising from the dry grass crunching beneath our feet.
“I live alone, and it makes me sad and lonely sometimes,” Colin says, shaking his head. There aren’t many guests, and when he alludes to a few fleeting romances through the years, his voice trails off. We walk through the sunlight and pause beside a small clearing paved over with concrete, where he gestures to three graves lying side by side. The names of his mother and his father and his father’s father are chiseled into the gray tombstones.
“Here you die, you’re put in your plot,” he says. “In America, you do not have this sentimental attachment to your land.” He stops briefly and then steps across the lawn, his strides short and brisk, as if the balm for his loss might be waiting somewhere across the yard. Again we come to his cows, thin and skittish, nuzzling against each other in the shade. He takes a few light-hearted stabs at their meagerness.
“I’m sure you’re used to udders that sweep the floor when the cows walk,” he suggests, though I have to admit that, as a New Yorker, I’m not really used to udders at all. He pats a few of the cows with tenderness; for one - the youngest of the group - he’s especially fond.
“I watch them feed, I just…” His voice trails off and his eyes grow slightly misty. He makes a face of sadness and longing, of feelings he can’t find the words for. “I feel so…I don’t know what it is,” he says, resting a hand on his chest. We watch the cows rubbing flanks by the trough, nudging each other out of the way, then scampering off to relieve themselves against a shed. Colin smiles, sighs, shakes his head. And then again, turning, leaning forward, slightly imperious, he marches back toward the house.
Inside, sitting at the kitchen table, he offers to read me a story. He rifles through a weathered accordion file, pulling out a couple of legal pads and reams of wrinkled looseleaf. When he begins to read a story, he prefaces it with apologies and asides - nervous, he admits, what a “real” writer might think of it. After a few false-starts, backtracking, revising on the fly, he grows frustrated and changes his mind. The story is too much of a work-in-progress, he explains, and he would rather read me a poem.
“Let me try to pick the least worst,” he says, adjusting his glasses and burying his nose in a pile of papers. Finally he straightens his back, squares his shoulders, and gently clears his throat.
“Deception,” he says.
I saw a spider
perched high up on the ceiling in its web.
It looked down
and saw
flies, on a clear blue surface,
and it said to itself,
“I will let myself down on my thin silky thread
and have a meal.”
And it did.
And it sunk!
For the flies were floating dead
on the surface of water in a blue basin.
I saw a man
bearing the face of peace,
speaking with the voice of calm,
holding his person with humility.
When he died,
his father said to me,
“The devil has died.”
And I then knew
behind the face of peace
behind the voice of calm
lay the real man
whom the father had encountered
at birth
as the brat he had raised
as the adult thug who had terrorized the village
and as the devil he had buried.
He sits back, smiling, awkward, lapping up my praise. Gathering confidence, he reads another, and then two more. On the table are dozens of poems written in his small, neat hand. He explains he’s also working on a handful of stories - even a play. It dawns on me that Colin Kisembo is, without question, the most prolific writer I know. But when we talk about publishing his work, he wags his hands with vigorous disapproval. Though a friend in Kampala helps to publish a literary journal, and Colin often thinks about submitting his own poems, he still hasn’t worked up the nerve.
“I am afraid,” he says. “What if I am rejected?”
Rejection, I explain, is part of the writing process. In all my years of writing, rejection has been one of the few constants. And while you never quite get used to those dismal letters and emails - or the attendant feelings of self-doubt - you certainly learn to negotiate them as part of the landscape.
Colin, still doubtful, considers this. “It will be an act of great courage,” he admits, eager to change the subject.
He turns the talk to politics, and the post-election crisis in Kenya, which provides fertile ground for both of us. I’ve been following the violence closely for the past six weeks, and Colin - raised during the turbulent era of Idi Amin - seems wearily resigned to the dysfunctional democratic process in the region.
“We Africans have not figured out that a political discussion does not have to end in violence,” he says.
For all the flaws of our own system, he’s awed by the vigorous debate during the American primaries. Yet he can’t come to terms with the curious place of God in our public discourse - how a country’s leaders can be so eager to invoke higher powers in their speeches, but equally eager to keep religion out of the classroom. What is Christianity, he wonders, if not a moral compass to point us in the right direction en route to good, noble lives? Why
wouldn’t we want Christ’s teachings scribbled on the blackboard and fretted over at the dinner table? And if Muslims want the Koran to be taught in their own classrooms, and if Jews want the Torah, so be it! More God for everyone! After all, the verdict is still out on where our official atheism has gotten us (early returns - from
The Biggest Loser to Meat Loaf’s
Bat Out of Hell volumes 1, 2 and 3 - are hardly encouraging). Why not give God a go?
It’s easy for these questions to make a New Yorker of a certain liberal slant profoundly uncomfortable. But Colin, earnest and faithful, leans across the table. He asks about my soul, about salvation and the afterlife. In the story he’d begun to read, the main character, Lazaro, was inspired by the biblical Lazarus. Did I believe my own soul would play Lazarus and rise from the grave? Scientists, he points out, had found that the body loses 22 grams immediately after death. Could that 22 grams be the weight of one soul? Could any of us be saved?
He adjusts his glasses on his nose and eats a muffin in silence. I drink some mango juice and watch the shadows dancing across the wall. It’s late in the day, and soon the
boda will be back to take us into town. Colin stares distantly out the window. When he finishes his muffin, he leans forward and folds his hands on the table.
“You have traveled around the world,” he says softly. “Is there any purpose to this? Or are we just trudging through life, waiting for time to pass?”
The wind shakes the banana plants outside, rustling the leaves. It’s a question, through all my travels, I doubt I’ll ever get closer to answering. I’m not sure what to say, and soon Colin, slightly embarrassed, wags his hands and gets up from the table. We wait on the porch outside, insects humming over the grass, sunlight falling through the trees. Then we hear an engine puttering up the walkway.
On the back of the
boda, with the sun falling toward the horizon, everything is drenched, golden. The wind roars in our ears, and we shout to make ourselves heard over the noise. It’s a beautiful ride. I hold tightly onto Colin’s waist, afraid for every bump and jolt that almost sends me flying. Maybe we are just waiting for the time to pass, and maybe there’s no purpose to any of it. But we’re still here, passing the time as best we can, and if there’s any point to all of this, it might be in who we find along the way to share the ride.
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leah
non-member comment
beautiful
Hi, I just happened to read your blog, and I just wanted to say its one of the most beautiful pieces I've read in a long time. Good luck in your travels and writing.