Mary likes what she re-reads about herself. Her Life now exists outside her head, outside her body, which has lived it. She likes the low hum of her laptop’s engine, which reminds her of her beautiful fridge, at home. Here in London, she’s inventing Uganda, for as she writes, her life becomes different.
I was a clever girl, rarely given the cane. My parents sent me to boarding school because the local school could no longer teach me. I passed senior school with thirty-five points, the highest score the school had ever had. Being clever did not help me to make friends with the others, but I did not care, I lived for the holidays when I came back to my friends in the village. And then I finished boarding school.
My father decided I had to marry, but my mother was strong, she stood up for me. “If she’s educated, the world will be hers.”
“She should marry,” my father said, sternly.
“You want her to stay here all her life? You want her to stay poor, like us?”
“You want her to be a shrivelled woman who nobody wants, with a womb like a groundnut?” My father rarely shouted. My mother murmured something soft. I lay awake listening, willing her on.
Night after night the same row broke out. I knew my father was torn in two. He had been approached, by an old friend, on behalf of a boy from the next village, good people, with many cows, and the bride price offered was a good price.
Cows now, or cows in the future? My mother saw a blue distant sky raining cows.
I am the child of good parents. In our village, there was no better father. He called me to him after a week of storms. “Daughter, will you marry Mwanje?”
“He is quite nice,” I said, looking down. “Thank you for asking me, father. But I don’t want to marry him.” At first he shouted, but not for long. He made me promise to work my hardest, and let him arrange my marriage later, but he did not look at me when he asked, and I did not look at him when I promised. Both of us knew I was going away.
I went to the kitchen and helped my aunty, but I watched him sitting out in front of the house, a long time, alone, before he came inside.
I went to the city, to Makerere, and in the village they were all impressed. “Asoma e Makerere. It is the best university in Africa.” (Yet once you have been there, you know it could be better.) Instead of gaining cows, my father sold chickens to give me money for food and paper. Books I queued to read in the library; even Makerere had not enough books, and now I hear many shelves are bare. I came home on the taxi, most weekends, racketing along on the broken road, walking the last five miles on foot.
My second year in the city, life seemed strange and oppressive. I was far from home, and we were maddened by rumour. Obote was driven out by Museveni. We hoped for better things, but change makes you afraid. The city filled up with jeeps of happy soldiers, hooting loudly, returned from the bush. Ugandans had all grown used to fear, under Amin and Obote, and we didn’t know then that the new lot would be better.
But the city grows into you, little by little, like creeper, silently up from the ground. I became careless, like the other girls, and no longer wanted to go home to my family. It grew into me; I grew used to it, the pavements with only small breaks and holes, the shops with electric light inside, the askaris in uniform, carrying rifles I thought at first would be used to shoot me, the vendors selling fake gold chains, the big dirty taxi-vans everywhere, out of which men shouted and waved their hands, the hotels being built up to the sky, the hurrying people in their new smart clothes, busy women with square mannish shoulders and shoes with heels like blades of knives, the new cinema telling wonderful stories with colours and sounds as sharp as daylight (though quite soon I no longer bothered with films — the American directors did not know my story), the sweet perfumes in glass bottles, the powerful, hissing sprays against insects, the whispering voices of the professors, the way they smiled behind their glasses and pressed against me in corridors, the dirty old karoli swooping over the city, with their rusty black feathers and hanging goitres.
I worked very hard and did well at my studies, but my father’s money was never enough, and I was ashamed to ask for more. I got a job, working in the Plate Cafe, washing dishes and wiping tables. I never told my parents this. It was hard and tiring and I missed assignments.
My professor asked me what was the matter. I will not write which professor he was, because I know some people would blame him. In fact, he had always been kind to me. I had a feeling that he liked me. I told him the truth, and he made a soft sound, a tongue-and-teeth sound that meant he was sorry. “I’ll buy you a meal tonight if you are hungry, and we can talk about your problems.” I was overwhelmed. He was kind, like my father!
He took me to a restaurant some way out of town. I didn’t know the people there. I had a large glass of beer with my food, because I was nervous of talking to him. I wasn’t used to beer. I told him, “You’re kind. Thank you for being kind to me.”
“Will you be kind to me?” he replied. He looked in my eyes. His were soft and hot. “I’m an old man, but I think I can help you. We could be good friends, and help each other.”
I wanted to cry, but I felt excited. Besides, at least he had bothered to ask me. There were others who forced themselves on their pupils. That night was painful, but I did what I had to. I knew it would help me if I made him happy. When he found I was a virgin, I think he was sorry. He said, ‘God forgive me’, when he had stopped pushing. But he wasn’t sorry until he had stopped pushing.
We remained friends for nearly a year, and I didn’t go back to the Plate Cafe. He lent me books, which was wonderful. I read everything, both serious and funny. Dickens, Thackeray, Rider Haggard, PG Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe, and the endless wailing of Virginia Woolf, thin terrible books where nothing happened. But still I was happy to have read her. I loved the professor for his books. He had studied in UK, and knew everything. But he wasn’t young, and his breath was like a goat’s. I didn’t look at his chest like a woman’s, his round soft belly, the grey hair on his back. There was kindness, though, from both of us. And whatever he looked like, he was a good lover. He taught me things that young men don’t know, as I found out later when I slept with one. The boy looked cute, but he finished in seconds. (Later I will delete all this.)
I quarrelled with the professor when I became too clever. With his help, reading over my essays, I started to get the best marks in the class. My subjects were English, Politics, — . (I will not specify, in case the man sues me.) My friend said he didn’t know about——, so he didn’t help with those particular essays, yet my marks in that field began to improve. They improved so fast that my friend became suspicious.
“The Professor of——has many girlfriends,” he said one evening, as he did up my dress. “One of them is sick. What do you know about this?”
“I heard the same thing,” I told him, shrugging. His fingers were rather hard on my neck. “I think she is ill because she stopped eating. She had an abortion. Now she is too thin. ”
I myself had round breasts and a behind like melons. Many men wanted to be friends with me. Of course this other professor liked me, in the same way as my first professor. The second professor called me into his office and said, “You are clever as well as pretty.” I wouldn’t let him touch me under my skirt, but maybe I had plans for him in the future. He was younger and bolder than the first professor, and had a blue car with shiny paint-work that he steered boldly through the dirty old taxis. (He smoked Marlboro Lights. Now I know their smell. They smelled of America, and those were the days when I thought I would go there, somehow, anyhow, and be a rich American woman; the days when I thought I could do anything. And perhaps I will still become rich, and fly over, but I no longer want to be American. Uganda already has enough Coca-Cola. Every village is covered with its big red signs.)