hut:
this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a grass-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of space had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces.
My husband was hacked to death as I watched:
this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked by a man with a panga coming out of a banana plantation. The attacker, while he hacked and chopped, accused the husband of being a polygamist. So—in addition to possible resentment from the husband’s first family—there was some Christian feeling here. After the husband was killed, the attacker turned to the woman. He chopped off one of her hands and would have done more, but he ran off when a
boda-boda
cyclist with a bright cycle light appeared. The woman was taken to hospital and there her other hand was amputated. Without hands, she has to be fed by other people. She told the newspaper, “I do not know where I am headed with these children, and now that they are going back to school, who will feed me?”
Accused of burying her son alive:
again, this is from the same issue of the newspaper. A thirty-three-year-old casual labourer, a woman, workingat a flower farm (of all places), is accused of burying her eighteen-month-old son in a potato garden. The child had been wrapped in a sack and his legs had been tied. The photograph of the mother shows a woman undone and helpless. A neighbour tells the paper that people so desperate should be allowed to take their unwanted children to any police station. And in the description of the buried baby—the sack, the tied legs—there is a strange echo of the witchdoctor’s advice to a seeker to make an offering of something very dear to the seeker. As though the poor woman had heard of this advice and was trying to do it all by herself.
So much for the pain of the poor. But for better-off people, even people of a royal clan, there is an equivalent kind of distress.
“We had independence and we lost it. We have never recovered from the years of destruction that followed independence. Twenty years of it till 1984. Traditions are fading away by default. Are you going to Mbarara? You should go there and see the destruction with your own eyes. See the deserted palace with weeds growing there because of the politics. Once you remove cultural restraints you have chaos and anarchy. People put under this will do anything to survive.” This was like the point Prince Kassim had made. “They will do anything and at the same time they want the technological advances of the world. The race for these technological luxuries has replaced culture. Our religion was not savage. It was based on the veneration of the ancestors. If your father dies you venerate him. You give a libation to the ancestors before you drink. The destruction of traditions and the lack of cultural restraint, especially for people who have been brought together by a colonial power and told to form a nation, could only bring disaster.”
And from someone in the middle, an educated woman, not poor, not of a royal clan, and from quite a different part of the country, someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots: “Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there
this is an item from the north, from an internally displaced persons camp. The name of the camp suggests the tensions. Within that, a family quarrel: a man settling accounts with his estranged wife. It was a grass-thatched hut; after it had been sprinkled with petrol it would have burnt fiercely. Seven of the ten people killed were children; some of them belonged to other families; shortage of space had caused them to be brought to this particular hut. A photograph showed the little charred bodies in the burnt-out hut, lying together, for that little bit of last-minute comfort, and lying face down, instinctively protecting their faces.
My husband was hacked to death as I watched:
this is an item from the same issue. It was a second marriage for both parties. The husband had fifteen children from his first marriage, six from his second. They were returning home from a trading centre when they were attacked by a man with a panga coming out of a banana plantation. The attacker, while he hacked and chopped, accused the husband of being a polygamist. So—in addition to possible resentment from the husband’s first family—there was some Christian feeling here. After the husband was killed, the attacker turned to the woman. He chopped off one of her hands and would have done more, but he ran off when a
boda-boda
cyclist with a bright cycle light appeared. The woman was taken to hospital and there her other hand was amputated. Without hands, she has to be fed by other people. She told the newspaper, “I do not know where I am headed with these children, and now that they are going back to school, who will feed me?”
Accused of burying her son alive:
again, this is from the same issue of the newspaper. A thirty-three-year-old casual labourer, a woman, workingat a flower farm (of all places), is accused of burying her eighteen-month-old son in a potato garden. The child had been wrapped in a sack and his legs had been tied. The photograph of the mother shows a woman undone and helpless. A neighbour tells the paper that people so desperate should be allowed to take their unwanted children to any police station. And in the description of the buried baby—the sack, the tied legs—there is a strange echo of the witchdoctor’s advice to a seeker to make an offering of something very dear to the seeker. As though the poor woman had heard of this advice and was trying to do it all by herself.
So much for the pain of the poor. But for better-off people, even people of a royal clan, there is an equivalent kind of distress.
“We had independence and we lost it. We have never recovered from the years of destruction that followed independence. Twenty years of it till 1984. Traditions are fading away by default. Are you going to Mbarara? You should go there and see the destruction with your own eyes. See the deserted palace with weeds growing there because of the politics. Once you remove cultural restraints you have chaos and anarchy. People put under this will do anything to survive.” This was like the point Prince Kassim had made. “They will do anything and at the same time they want the technological advances of the world. The race for these technological luxuries has replaced culture. Our religion was not savage. It was based on the veneration of the ancestors. If your father dies you venerate him. You give a libation to the ancestors before you drink. The destruction of traditions and the lack of cultural restraint, especially for people who have been brought together by a colonial power and told to form a nation, could only bring disaster.”
And from someone in the middle, an educated woman, not poor, not of a royal clan, and from quite a different part of the country, someone overtly Christian but with a love for her roots: “Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. In the Lango tradition when there
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