Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

A few hundred meters from SIMC was a small primary school, kickstarted for the sons and daughters of the area who could not afford better Muslim schools. Behind the compound was a small, dilapidated mosque, where the faithful held prayers on Friday. The imam, who taught Koran education at the school, lived nearby and ran both places. Looking at the rough mud walls and the leprous roofing set in a bare, pebbly compound chipped out of solid rock, one would think that nothing good could creep out of this wretched environment. Compared with dear old SIMC, and the Catholic school and church not so far away on the same ridge, the place looked dismal and oozed decay. It seemed like a sandy island awaiting the storm that would blow it to oblivion. At break time, however, the joyous screeches of the children filled the air, and their pink uniforms fluttered in the wind like so many large flags. They played and sang almost as hard as the imam drove them to memorize the Koran and the Arabic texts he wrote on the chipped blackboard.

On school days, he would strut from class to class, stick in hand, a frown on his face, and woe to anyone found messing around. The secular teachers who found themselves at the place often gave him a wide berth, not because he would beat them too, but because he believed in respect and discipline more than the teachers did, and he was not into theoretical discussions. “I am a man of action,” he always said. If pupils did something wrong, they got punished on the spot. They could plead, and maybe even get a reduced sentence, but the punishment came all the same. “Action, character, responsibility, is all I teach,” he always said before and after dishing out punishment.

A friend who taught at this dusty place to supplement his SIMC salary asked me to accompany him to the school. It was among the prancing, rope-skipping, screeching multitude that I first saw Jo Nakabiri. I stared. Her dark face was gleaming in the sun, as though she had used too much facial cream that morning. I looked at her limbs and frame, and I found myself wondering if she was Lusanani’s sister or cousin. Her wasp waist and solid bum had me bursting with excitement. Sweat broke out in my armpits. I was intrigued by the uncanny feeling that I knew this person, had at least seen her somewhere before. But where?

We found her shouting at a group of little girls, and when she saw us, her voice dropped, as though we had caught her saying obscene words. It was then that I saw her eyes: large orbs full of bottomless joys and sorrows and mysteries I suddenly felt eager to explore. She extracted herself from the group with the stiff grace of one being watched, then came and greeted my friend and me, in that order. They ignored me for some time as they recited the litany of inadequate salaries, unfulfilled plans, impending holidays, local weddings and the like. She seemed uneasy, as though talking about school affairs, the imam and the pupils in the presence of a stranger were a breach of trust or a form of betrayal. I kept looking at her and at my friend, camouflaging my desire to look only at her. I was already thinking that I had enough money to take this girl away from this place and maintain her in relative comfort.

My impression was that she was working here for respectability, and probably because it was her profession. If so, who was paying her bills? Ten government dollars, which came after three months, was hardly enough for a tenth of monthly expenses. It was likely that she had a man or was living with her parents. If she was a refugee, there was a big possibility that Husband had joined the guerrillas and was somewhere in the Triangle facing the elements, the Katyushas, the helicopters and the army. The idea shook me up a bit. Some of those guys returned with bloodlust in the head and the maddening suspicion that their wives had been screwing all over the place, and they would not think twice before putting a bullet between another man’s eyes. In a few of those cases, the woman never divulged that she had a husband; you only saw the fellow standing in the doorway furious as hell and lethal, like a wounded buffalo. Maybe her man had died in action and she was a young widow. There were many juicy widows walking around these days, some from the Triangle, and since they wore no distinctive dress, few people got to know who they really were. I would not mind dating a young widow, or a woman whose husband was fighting in the bush, as long as she told me the whole truth from the beginning.

I decided to ask my friend. Friends helped each other out in this way, even if it was their sister in question. He knew something about her; they lived in the same area. He owed me for bailing him out of endless financial problems.

He told me the little he knew. Yes, she had come from the Triangle two years back and now lived with her grandmother. She had been married once, but no one knew the whereabouts of Husband or whether there had been any children. I would have preferred to hear that the man had died, since now I did not know whether he was alive and still interested in her. That type was quite dangerous: they first mistreated the woman, and when she left them, they realized what they were missing and tried to get her back. When, in many cases, the wives refused to go back, the men grew bitter. Some turned to sending emissaries or to witchcraft, some to stalking or writing threatening letters. What about the other possibility? Maybe this girl was ill-mannered, loose and mean-tempered, and her man had got tired of her bad ways and moved on. Maybe she was the one trying to go back to her old life. In which case the man was waiting and making her stew a little bit longer in the juices of her iniquity.

The campaign to win Jo took many weeks. She rejected all my friend’s efforts, saying that she was through with men. I did not believe her. If it had been true, she would have been in a convent flagellating herself and removing devil hair with her bare fingers like the Padlock of old. I wrote her letters, but she returned them unread. Taking into account the ease with which Triangle girls surrendered themselves, her behavior was annoying. I asked my friend to give up the assignment, but he was determined to see it through. He finally succeeded, after I had given up hope. He got her to invite me to the end-of-term concert given by the children of her school.

I sat on a bench behind her and watched her as she watched her pupils’ performances. I kept thinking about how my friend had pleaded with her, saying that I was a decent person and that she was making a big mistake by treating me like dirt. She had countered with her suspicion that I had many girlfriends, but my friend had denied it vehemently because he did not know of my Triangle girls. He kept saying that I had just broken up with a bad-mannered girlfriend and that Jo was making my suffering worse by rejecting my sincere courtship. Jo said that she had no intention of being used as a stepping-stone to another relationship. To which my friend swore that my intentions were honorable.

At the end of the concert, she had to talk to some parents who were inquiring about their children. I waited. As the sun was going down she finished, and we walked down the road to SIMC. We sat on the veranda of the two-story building, with the school compound stretched out in evening silence, and talked. She told me that her father had died when she was young, and that her mother had brought her up. At seventeen, she had got pregnant with a daughter, whose whereabouts she refused to divulge. At nineteen, she had gone to the teacher training college to become a primary school teacher. Then the troubles in the Triangle began. Her school closed down and was later occupied by the army. When the guerrillas attacked, she, together with most people in the area, fled. She explained that, earlier on, she had not been playing hard to get, but that she wanted to date only serious people.