Mary Tendo
Leaving again. I am leaving my country. The plane climbs unsteadily up through the clouds. It can’t seem to get clear. Perhaps we shall die. I keep my seatbelt on, remembering my father. So proud, so afraid when I first left Uganda.
Once I hardly knew that I lived there.
When I was a child, I lived in the village. My village was the whole world to me. But I saw it was not, when I came to Kampala.
Then I left the city, and saw my country, and all the golden land around it.
Now there are no more clouds below us. I peer down, and see tremendous spaces. Trees that stretch away like a sea. And in the distance, yellow desert. And all these lands are African.
That was what I saw, when I first left home. Although England is famous, it is very small. I saw, from thousands of miles away, that I had come from Africa. That I belonged to Africa. I was Ugandan, and also something more.
So I am who? Baampita ani? I am an African woman, thanks be to God. It extends behind me, the mountains and forests that air travel allows me to see. The green and the gold going on for ever.
The valley of time, stretching back to Adam, as I read in a newspaper headline in London: “ADAM AND EVE WERE AFRICAN. Rift Valley Origins of First Man.” So Adamu and Eva belonged to us! I carried the cutting in my handbag till the paper was yellow and dropped into dust.
It helped me to see their littleness. The little lives of the rich bazungu. They are rich and clever, but they are like nsenene, swarming insects that cover the sun. They will fall away, as the insects do.
Thank God I am an African woman.
PART 2
11
When Mary Tendo flies into Heathrow it is a cold clear evening in mid-September and she is nervous about Immigration. She checks her passport once again, and her pink notebook with Miss Henman’s number. Her fingers leave damp prints on the cover and she wipes them on the hard webbing of her seatbelt, telling herself, “In a few hours it will be over.” Yet looking around her, on the plane, at the anxious faces of younger Ugandans, licking their lips, staring out of the window, she guesses she’s one of the very few with a job to go to and a place to stay. For her, getting a visa was not impossible. Her bank statements could pass the test, with a cash injection from her friend the accountant, and of course Vanessa Henman, at the other end, was a doctor, a householder, a college lecturer, which made Mary’s paperwork look good. In time, the agency issued the visa. Yet the process has left Mary feeling like a criminal. They even took prints of her index fingers! When she first went to London, all those years ago, everything had been so much simpler.
Why have the British grown afraid of her?
And having the visa is no guarantee. Mary knows that even with a visa Ugandans are turned back at Heathrow airport. If that happens, she will be paid nothing. She half-wishes she had stayed at home.
It happened to a boda boda man Mary knew, one of the hundreds of men in Kampala who rent out the pillions of their scooters to passengers, lining up on street corners near the big hotels. After a mile on the bumpy roads, most passengers are glad to get off. This man was kind; he was nicknamed ‘Smiler’, and sometimes he gave Mary a lift home for nothing, because she was pretty, and looked tired. Smiler always wanted to better himself. His father had died when he was seven, and Smiler had had to try and work the farm. First he grew maize and cassava, and sold his harvest until he could afford to buy coffee. Then he planted coffee and sold it each year until he had enough money to buy a bicycle. Then he used the bicycle to take loads of green bananas to Kampala, where he sold them for a big profit. He did that for four years in a row (though he was so thin he could hardly keep the bike steady, weighed down by a great curving anchor of bananas) until he had enough money to buy himself a second-hand boda boda. Then he got it in his head that he must move to England, to pay for his five younger siblings in the village. So he sold the scooter he’d spent years saving up for, to pay for his visa and airfare to London, where several cousins had promised him work.
He was back in Kampala the day after he left, rejected by Immigration at Heathrow, without an explanation, without his scooter, without the money he had spent on the airfare, without any hope of getting entrance to England, fifteen years of his life blown in a day, too shocked to take in what had happened to him. Mary saw Smiler alone on the pavement, his pupils grown small and stunned with loss. She bought him lunch at the Curry Pot. Soon he had managed to rent another scooter and was back on the street, but his eyes were still different, and she always paid him, and tipped him well.
Now Mary, too, has taken a risk. She has sub-let the flat she loves so much to a second cousin whom she thinks she can trust. But she hasn’t given up her good job at the hotel. She has told the manager a small lie to the effect that she has a female condition, something delicate (so her male boss won’t pry) and serious, so she needs some time off. If things don’t work out, she will be magically cured! In the meantime, her job remains open.
But the loss of her flat preys on her mind. She was happy there. Her life made sense. Things were going well with Charles, her kabito, and they were talking about marriage. Has she risked all this for the chance of making money?
Besides, her last memories of the UK are not rosy. They run through her mind as the plane circles lower, roaring awkwardly through banks of white cloud that stream fitfully across the blue English sky.
When Omar left her, Mary’s life fell apart. She’d gone back to Uganda with almost nothing, for she had put everything into the marriage, both the money she earned so hard by cleaning and the hours she cared for her family unpaid. She knows that in Kampala people thought she was a failure, a returnee who came back with nothing, a nkuba kyeyo who did not manage to earn enough money to change her life. This time Mary will have to do better. No wonder she is sweating as she steps out of the aircraft, though the London air feels cold on her skin.
Miss Henman has said she will be there at the airport. Mary wonders if Justin will be well enough to come. In any case, would she recognise him?
All at once her heart lifts with happiness. She feels certain she will recognise Justin. Of course she will be able to help him. She is not in UK just for the money. Jesus, I thank you for bringing me back. God will make Justin well again. Mary rejoices to be back in London.
Now she looks at the long slow queue of non-EU nationals, snaking heavily along beneath the harsh airport lights, in the vast concourse, a great vault of plastic ten times as big as Namirembe Cathedral, the dark red Anglican cathedral in Kampala. Mary joins the slow queue. Disdainfully, because she is almost a Londoner, she has married and given birth in London, and lived with its citizens for nearly a decade. She does not want to be lumped together with these village virgins, these foreigners, who are gawping around at the airport, awed, because they have never been beyond Entebbe.
In the end she gets a limp, pale pink immigration officer who has the regulation unsmiling face. He stares at her photo, and then at her, then, frowning, back at the photo again. Mary is ready for what comes next. “Is it really you?” he says, with raised eyebrows. “This photo doesn’t look like you.” She knows she must not get upset, or show anger, so she makes herself smile and says, “Yes, it is me. Perhaps I was younger.” He does not smile back. “You are married?” Mary says, “Yes,” without thinking, and dare not correct herself in case he thinks she’s lying. Just for a moment, her heart beats hard. But she only hesitates for one split second when he asks if her husband is in London. The answer ‘He is in Libya’ would probably detain her for several hours. Instead, she says, “He is in Africa.” She finds herself staring at the man’s lower teeth, which are grey and uneven, patched with off-white. British teeth which have seen better days. Fortunately, before his next question, one of the hard-eyed solitary men who stare at all incoming passengers comes hurrying over with an urgent message and the pale, bespectacled man loses interest, yields up her passport, waves her on.