Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

MOSES ISEGAWA

ABYSSINIAN CHRONICLES

Moses Isegawa was born in Kampala, Uganda. In 1990, he left Uganda for the Netherlands and is now a Dutch citizen. This is his first novel.

Mugezi: narrator and principal character

Serenity: Mugezi’s father ( also called Sere or Mpanama )

Padlock: Mugezi’s mother ( real name Nakkazi, also called Virgin or Sr. Peter )

Grandpa: Serenity’s father

Grandma: Grandpa’s sister, Serenity’s aunt

Tiida: Serenity’s eldest sister ( also called Miss Sunlight Soap )

Dr. Saif Ssali: Tiida’s husband

Nakatu: Serenity’s other sister

Hajj Ali: Nakatu’s second husband

Kawayida: Serenity’s half-brother

Lwandeka: Padlock’s youngest sister

Kasawo: Padlock’s other sister

Mbale: Padlock’s eldest brother

Kasiko: Serenity’s concubine

Nakibuka: Padlock’s aunt, Serenity’s mistress

Hajj Gimbi: Serenity and Padlock’s neighbor in Kampala

Lusanani: Hajj Gimbi’s youngest wife, Mugezi’s lover in Kampala

Loverboy: client of Padlock’s (real name Mbaziira)

Cane: Mugezi’s friend in primary school

Lwendo: Mugezi’s friend at the seminary

Fr. Kaanders: librarian at the seminary

Fr. Mindi: treasurer at the seminary

Fr. Lageau: Fr. Mindi’s successor

Jo Nakabiri: Mugezi’s lover in Kampala

Eva and Magdelein: Mugezi’s lovers in Holland

boubou: a kind of wide garment for a man (West Africa)

busuti: a kind of woman’s garment (central Uganda)

kandooya: torture method whereby one’s elbows are tied together behind one’s back

Katonda wange!: My God!

kibanda: black market

Kibanda Boys: Kampala mafia

mamba: poisonous snake

matooke: plantain

mpanama: hydrocele

mtuba: an African tree

muko: brother-in-law

muteego: AIDS

nagana: a tropical cattle disease

panga: large cleaver

posho: corn bread

shamba: plantation

THREE FINAL IMAGES flashed across Serenity’s mind as he disappeared into the jaws of the colossal crocodile: a rotting buffalo with rivers of maggots and armies of flies emanating from its cavities; the aunt of his missing wife, who was also his longtime lover; and the mysterious woman who had cured his childhood obsession with tall women. The few survivors of my father’s childhood years remembered that up until the age of seven, he would run up to every tall woman he saw passing by and, in a gentle voice trembling with unspeakable expectation, say, “Welcome home, Ma. You were gone so long I was afraid you would never return.” Taken by surprise, the woman would smile, pat him on the head, and watch him wring his hands before letting him know that he had once again made a mistake. The women in his father’s homestead, assisted by some of the villagers, tried to frighten him into quitting by saying that one day he would run into a ghost disguised as a tall woman, which would take him away and hide him in a very deep hole in the ground. They could have tried milking water from a stone with better results. Serenity, a wooden expression on his face, just carried on running up to tall women and getting disappointed by them.

Until one hot afternoon in 1940 when he ran up to a woman who neither smiled nor patted him on the head; without even looking at him, she took him by the shoulders and pushed him away. This mysterious curer of his obsession won herself an eternal place in his heart. He never ran up to tall women again, and he would not talk about it, not even when Grandma, his only paternal aunt, promised to buy him sweets. He coiled into his inner cocoon, from whose depths he rejected all efforts at consolation. A smooth, self-contained indifference descended on his face so totally that he won himself the name Serenity, shortened to “Sere.”

Serenity’s mother, the woman who in his mind had metamorphosed into all those strange tall women, had abandoned him when he was three, ostensibly to go to the distant shops beyond Mpande Hill where big purchases were made. She never returned. She also left behind two girls, both older than Serenity, who adjusted to her absence with great equanimity and could not bear his obsession with tall women.

In an ideal situation, Serenity should have come first — everyone wanted a son for the up-and-coming subcounty chief Grandpa was at the time — but girls kept arriving, two dying soon after birth in circumstances reeking of maternal desperation. By the time Serenity was born, his mother had decided to leave. Everyone expected her to have another son as a backup, for an only son was a candle in a storm. The pressure reached a new peak when it became known that she was pregnant again. Speculation was rife: Would it be a boy or a girl, would it live or die, was it Grandpa’s or did it belong to the man she was deeply in love with? Before anybody could find out the truth, she left. But her luck did not hold — three months into her new life, her uterus burst, and she bled to death on the way to the hospital, her life emptying into the backseat of a rotten Morris Minor.

As time passed, Serenity crawled deeper into his cocoon, avoiding his aunts, his cousins, and his mother’s replacements, who he felt hated him for being the heir apparent to his father’s estate and the miles of fertile clan land it included. The birth of Uncle Kawayida, his half-brother by a Muslim woman his father was seeing on the side, did not lessen Serenity’s estrangement. Kawayida, due to the circumstances of his birth, posed little threat to Serenity’s position, and thus attitudes remained unchanged. To escape the phantoms which galloped in his head and the contaminated air in his father’s compound, Serenity roamed the surrounding villages. He spent a lot of time at the home of the Fiddler, a man with large feet, a large laugh and sharp onion breath who serenaded Grandpa on the weekends when he was home.

Serenity could not get over the way the Fiddler walked with legs wide apart. It would have been very impolite to ask the man why he walked that way, and Serenity feared that if he asked his children, they would tell their father, who in turn would report him to his father for punishment. Consequently, he turned to his aunt with the question “Why does the Fiddler have breasts between his legs?”

“Who said the Fiddler had breasts between his legs?”

“Have you never noticed the way he walks?”

“How does he walk?”

“With legs spread wide apart as if he were carrying two jackfruits under his tunic.” He then gave a demonstration, very exaggerated, of the way the man walked.

“It is very funny, but I have never noticed it,” Grandma said, humoring him the way adults did to get out of a sticky situation.

“How could you not have noticed? He has large breasts between his legs.”

“The Fiddler has no breasts between his legs. He is ill. He has got mpanama.”