Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

One late afternoon, while he was on his way home, he heard turkeys croaking and preening inside a closed compound. It struck him: poultry farming was what he was looking for. During the shopping frenzy that saw the Indians off, Uncle Kawayida bought a secondhand pickup van which the desperate owner had decided to set on fire. His friends jeered at him, saying the van would collapse carrying only two turkeys. He laughed. Using his land as collateral, he borrowed some money and hired a place which he filled with feed before going on the hunt for turkeys.

At the end of his efforts, he had little money left, but enough resources to keep the birds going for a year. He installed troughs and lights, and the birds ate day and night. During office hours, his wife took over. When he returned home, he cleaned the troughs, stirred the sawdust to cover the droppings, refilled the troughs and proudly watched his birds.

By the time the euphoria induced by the departing Indians had subsided and people had begun jostling for the shops, he was selling his birds to hotels around town. By the time most traders had settled into their new businesses, he was already experimenting with growth formula to make the birds grow faster and heavier. Soon the first batch of broiler chicks arrived.

That was the start of his prosperity. He expanded his broiler and turkey operations. The walls vibrated with the calls of frustrated turkeys which could not skip the fence to go and terrorize the women who passed outside their house. The pens filled with the tolerable stench of chicken shit, and at peak hours the rafters and the iron sheets rattled with the calls of chickens competing with one another for feed. The market for chickens and turkeys, contrary to prediction, expanded because very few individuals had taken the risk of investing in poultry farming when the old farms collapsed.

The journeys to buy supplies and sell birds liberated another trait in Uncle. He felt oppressed by the need to multiply and spread himself around. A single child, he felt he was one of a kind, threatened with extinction, impelled to reproduce himself. As though intent on imitating his late father-in-law, he went after beautiful women in town with the fever of obsession. Uncle’s reproductive rate, however, left much to be desired. It led some to say that his wife had bewitched him. They overlooked the strong possibility that he was dealing with worldly-wise women who knew the secrets of drinking azure blue, taking overdoses of aspirin or inserting bicycle spokes up birth canals to induce termination of pregnancy. They may also have been experts at tying their cervical necks, eating pills or going to the likes of the Vicar for traditional birth-regulating herbs. Uncle Kawayida never looked into that; he was an eternal optimist in that sense. Each time he hoped to win. For all his troubles, he produced only three bastard children, all girls. His wife had four girls already.

Uncle’s wife had grown up around children and did not find it hard to do a good job raising all those girls. She sometimes cried because she could not have a son. She envied Padlock for having so much of what she craved: sons. She could not help idealizing sons in her daydreams, but much as she called upon all her gods, sons evaded her yearning womb.

At one time she became consumed with the fear that one of her sisters was going to give her husband a son. How could she trust any of those girls? She thought about putting spies on them, but could not trust her would-be spies. She was her own best spy. She invited her two suspect sisters to stay with her in order to calm her mind with the reassurance that under her watchful eye, they would not commit the ultimate outrage. A son from an outsider was more acceptable; a son from either Naaka or Naaki would give her a heart attack. The girls, unaware of things, could not believe their luck. How generous and nice their half-sister had become!

Barren women and women seeking to influence the sex of their next child receive and take a lot of advice. Uncle Kawayida’s wife was advised that the key might be in the diet. She took up eating in the hope that her body’s constitution would change favorably and aid her in her quest for a son. She went to bed with food on her mind, and woke up with food steaming in her thoughts. As a consequence, she started expanding. Her body swelled like the turkeys they sold. Her head grew smaller, and her legs labored under the new burden of her weight. Her ankles swelled. She started wheezing and sweating profusely at all times, and especially during the act of trying to make a baby boy. She employed a housegirl and, left with less to do and so much to eat, swelled even more. At first people said it was money, well-being, but eventually they realized that it was a disease, a burden.

She asked her husband to build a family house. The money from the barracks took care of that. Entry into the new house came with another worry: heart disease, which was common in her mother’s family. It was at around that time that Uncle had his first son, with Naaka. She had moved out, because her sister had monitored her so much that she had become disgusted with her hospitality and decided to pay her back by falling in love with Uncle. Uncle swore Naaka to secrecy, afraid that hearing of the birth of the first son in the house might indeed give his wife a heart attack.

In the meantime, Naaki, who had stayed behind and entered the new house with the family, got enchanted by Uncle’s stories, his easy manner and generosity. She followed him round the house with her eyes. She polished his shoes and smelled his socks. She ironed his clothes and made his bed. She made him snacks. She lingered in his presence. Her eyes misted over when he entered the room, but he resisted her charms for some time, even going to the extent of trying to fix her up with one of his cronies. For the girl, there was no turning back. She was determined to give him the greatest gift she could offer: her love and the promise of a son. Uncle caved in. They did it in front of the turkeys when he went to see them for the last time at night and she sneaked out of the house to meet him. Uncle and Naaki took their love to the chicken house too; the stupid broilers were too busy eating and drinking to mind. When Uncle’s wife sent her sister to the shops, they did it in the famous old van, and in an unmarried crony’s house. For fear of rumors, they never went to hotels, but did it in the dressing rooms behind the football pavilion where Uncle, a sponsor, had free access. Uncle stopped philandering. The sisters had him under their spell. He felt happy to be inside their loving triangle. The secrecy, the cunning, the planning involved, spoke to his mind. He loved it. He loved wearing one hat with his wife and another with the two sisters. One moment he was concerned with his wife’s heart murmur; the next he was playing, laughing, romping with Naaki, or Naaka and his son. For a long time, he felt he was the happiest man alive.

At the start of the eighties, guerrilla war began far away in the Luwero Triangle. Throughout this time, Uncle was having the best of three worlds: his wife’s, Naaka’s and Naaki’s too. He had little to complain about. His business was running, his wife had accepted herself and he was having children with the two young women.

Around 1985, the guerrillas came and assimilated the town into their sphere of influence. Peace and security reigned. Just like the Obote II soldiers, to whom he had also sold birds, the guerrillas never bothered him. He had long ago stopped going to Kyotera. The town was now in the grip of a bone-grinding nightmare. People were dying of a mysterious disease, the so-called muteego —an incurable, evil spell which had the power to kill the perpetrator and his entire family. He was happy that he had not joined the cross-border smuggling frenzy, and that there was no chance that any Tanzanian would want to inflict the muteego spell on him.