New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  Nyana waits for the rebels to appear, her heart beating fast but not wanting to hide anymore. What happens disappoints her. Every sound eventually dies until the only loudness is the emptiness.

  “Bastards,” she says, with renewed anger, and moves to rouse those in hiding.

  She lays a hand on Modesta’s shoulder. Modesta recoils in terror.

  “They’re gone,” she says.

  “Jesus,” Modesta cries in relief, then stands on her feet and shakes the dirt off her body.

  Nyana finds Hillary lying on her back. She taps on her stomach and it makes a tom-tom sound like a bongo drum. It hadn’t occurred to Nyana that with such a tummy, Hillary might have difficulty lying on it. She taps on it again but suddenly withdraws her hand, horrified. Could she be heavy with a rebel’s baby and not worms? What could be worse? She avoids looking at her face and goes to Margo.

  Margo is weeping softly. Nyana picks her up and carries her to the women. Kizito refuses to acknowledge the pat. Rebels employ all sorts of tricks, he thinks. If they imagine you’ll be scared with prodding, they’ll prompt you nicely and when you open your eyes they’ll whack your brains out. Nyana turns him over, and he remains rigid. Stone dead.

  “Kizito,” she says, “it’s Nyana.”

  Eventually he rises.

  The rest of the day, Nyana walks aimlessly, the fisted hand close to her lips and her tongue kissing the stone. It occurs to her that her family might be protecting her, wherever they are. If they’re dead, they’re saints praying for her. She perforates her stone and weaves through the hole a string to wear around her neck. When darkness approaches, she’s far from the camp. A crescent moon comes out, resembling a tambourine. Nyana imagines a woman’s profile shaking to music only she can hear as the moon moves. After several hours walking in step with the moon, she arrives back at the camp, goes to her bed and crashes.

  That night the women decide to make tea before the crying hour. They awaken the children tenderly and pass out the cups. Nyana remains in the fetal position.

  “Give it up, child,” Modesta says. “Release your body so your people can freely move.”

  Nyana shakes her head.

  Modesta strokes her fisted hand. It no longer holds the stone. There’s anger in her fist, and the stone is around her neck.

  “You have to imagine them safe in you but they cannot breathe, walk or move with you curled like that. Do you want to suffocate them or to keep them alive?”

  “I want to keep them alive.”

  “Then ease up and your people will live.”

  “They’re here and here,” Nyana says, touching her chest and forehead.

  “Good,” Modesta says, and ambles back to her bed.

  Nyana relaxes and remembers the half moon with the dancing woman. The woman becomes her mother and she has company. She is dancing the conga with baby boy, Papa and Olga. They move swiftly like beads along the thin line of the moon. Nyana begins to laugh, softly at first, then with bold joy.

  Jackee Budesta Batanda

  A Ugandan writer, journalist and entrepreneur, she runs SuccessSpark Brand Limited, an educational company that offers writing classes and ghost-writing services. She was the Africa Regional winner of the 2003 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and her stories have been performed on the BBC World Service, BBC3 and radio stations throughout the Commonwealth as well as appearing in various international anthologies. She has written for publications including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, The Guardian (UK), the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), the Sunday Times, Sunday Independent (SA) and Al Jazeera. She was the recipient of a 2010 Uganda Young Achievers Award, shortlisted for the 2012 Trust Women Journalist Award, named by The Times (London) in 2012 as one of 20 women shaping the future of Africa, and in 2017 was named one of the top 40 Ugandans under 40. The Africa39 initiative named her among 39 writers under 40 from Sub-Saharan Africa likely to shape the future of African literature. She is the winner of a Continental Award for 2018 from the Most Influential Women in Business and Government programme.

  You are a stammerer!

  It is sunny this break-time. It is my first or second day at Kiswa Primary School. I am six years old, triumphant that I have crossed over from kindergarten to the primary section, where my older siblings are. The sound of children’s laughter in the compound is like the busy hum of bees. Those who have already made new friends run around me playing in the sun. I am standing alone in the compound when a girl from a higher class comes over. She smiles and asks if I am Sam’s sister. I nod, in awe that a big girl is talking to me. She asks where he is.

  I open my mouth but nothing come out. In my mind I am saying, I don’t know, but the words are teasing me, refusing to be spoken. I stand there with my mouth wide, breathing hard and stamping my right leg, in an effort to say the three words. And when I finally say, I-I-I-don’t know, she is shaking in fits of laughter—the kind that brings tears to the eyes, stitches to the stomach and makes you pee a little in your panties.

  She walks off and leaves me standing alone this break-time, even though the compound is bursting with children from all the classes. I stare down at the dirt ground. My heart is racing fast. I hold back the tears. I have recently joined primary school because I am a big girl and big girls don’t cry. When I walk back to class, I stumble as the tears I am fighting blur my sight.

  Later at home, Sam asks whether I had a chat with his friend. I nod quietly. He says she told him that she met me and spoke to me. She said I was funny.

  I first learn the word from my cousin Kate. She lives with us sometimes. Her mother, Aunt Mary, is one of my father’s younger sisters. Kate has come home for lunch. She studies at City High School, a low-level day-school in the upscale Kololo area. She is dressed in her uniform: a white shirt, smartly tucked into an orange pleated cotton skirt. She is a big girl and reads big-people books and maybe has big-people conversations.

  We are seated at the new black mahogany eight-seater dining-table the company my father works for has recently added to the household refurnishing. Everything is new except, in the corner, the old non-functioning black telephone that sits majestically on a small side-table as decoration. It is the late eighties, the days when getting a phone connection comes with more bureaucracy than trying to meet a president. Life is more comfortable not trying to get the phone reconnected.

  The sun seeps through the window and lands on the table. You can see a thin layer of dust if you look closely at the table surface. I am speaking to Kate. I don’t remember what I’m saying. I remember sitting across the table from her, my feet dangling, when she announces in a matter-of-factway:

  “You are a stammerer!”

  “Www-haat is a ss-ss-stammerer?” Even as I speak, I am not sure I want an answer.

  “Oh, the way you talk. You repeat words and take long to speak, so you are a stammerer. That is what you are,” she says, and continues eating her food.

  I sit back in the chair and stare at her. She has just shattered my world by giving my affliction a name. The word makes me fill with shame. I want her to take it back. But it cannot be unsaid. The word has grown its own body, comes to sit beside me and mischievously whispers, I am finally here, mate. Now you know my name, let’s get on with it.

  My mother maintains there is nothing wrong with me. When I tell her the children at school laugh when I talk, she says I should tell them that stammering is “contagious”: that if they laugh, they too will stammer. I realize that she is only temporarily consoling me. I notice the classmates who continue to laugh at me never, ever stammer.

  Years later, I am in a new school, Nakasero Primary School, in primary seven. My mother has been dead four years now and I have made it this far without transferring the stutter to the people who laugh at me.

  It is a hot afternoon. I hate afternoon classes. I would rather be sleeping or playing. The Social Studies teacher stands in front of the class. He is one of only a few plump teachers at the school, with an egg-shaped h
ead and very short-cut hair. He never tucks in his dark shirts, so they hang over his extended belly like a too-short dress. I don’t remember his name now, though I can remember all my other teachers’ names; I think my mind blocked his name after the incident.

  We know he is tough. He talks with slaps. That is his language. He seems always angry about something. So when he asks a question, all hands shoot up in the air, whether we know the answer or not. We have learned the trick: when you raise your hand first, he never chooses you. So even if you have no idea what the answer is, you’d better be among the first to raise your hand.

  Then he has this moment where he stares around the class and circles about us waiting to pounce on his unfortunate prey. We stare back at him, making it like a staring contest. All sixty pairs of eyes carefully watch him with bated breath as he searches for an unsure face before triumphantly calling out the name of the unfortunate who must answer. As soon as he calls out a name, all the other hands go down quickly in relief as if in a choreographed move.

  I have raised my hand.

  He meets my eyes in the staring game and bellows out, “BATANDA!”

  Oh, God, my heart sinks. I sigh. I know the answer but know I won’t get it out soon enough.

  He walks over to me and says my name again. I open my mouth to speak, but there are no words even though my mind is screaming the answer. My mouth is open when he slaps me on the cheek. It is a hard slap, so loud it dims every other sound in the room. I feel heat building up in my cheeks. I hear the unison wince of my classmates. I stare at him and tell myself not to cry. I vow not to give him that satisfaction, so I stare at him coldly and close my mouth. I stop bothering to try to get the answer out. He moves on to the next person, who answers swiftly and flawlessly.

  I sit hunched at my desk, feeling the sting of his slap on my cheek. For the rest of the lesson, my eyes are focused on my exercise book where I doodle away. My friend sitting adjacent to me, Yvonne Collins, whispers to me that she can still see the mark of his fingers on my cheek.

  Years later when I learn that he has passed on, I feel neither sadness nor loss. I remember the slap.

  The reason I love singing is that is the only time that my tongue loses its heaviness. I can belt a tune non-stop. It is the only time my mind relaxes and words come flowing out of my mouth without hesitation, as if they really want to come out in a melody.

  My brother, Sam, asks me why I do not stutter when I sing. I tell him I don’t know, because I don’t.

  My father’s big brother, Uncle Sam, after whom my brother is named, pays my siblings and me for our singing when he visits. We are always excited about him visiting; it is a chance for us to show off our singing skills and get paid.

  This time, our captive audience is Uncle Sam and our embarrassed parents. We move to the living-room, where we sing in flat monotone the boring songs we’ve learned at school. Swaying our bodies from side to side while moving our hands, we smile brightly as our school choir mistress has insisted.

  Uncle Sam is a kind audience, the type every serious artist dreams of. He applauds loudly, then opens his black briefcase; he pulls out a wad of cash and carefully peels off a few banknotes to hand over to each of us, while praising our singing. He is overly generous with his compliments and we sparkle in them.

  It is the early nineties when CNN first comes to Uganda. We, as a family and country, are excited. Paul Kavuma, the local anchor, always reports right in front of the swanky Sheraton Hotel with his trademark signoff: “Paaaulow Kaayvuumaaa, reporting for CNN in Kampala, Uganda.” He speaks with what we call an American accent, rolling the words round his tongue. He is a “summer”, as we call people who have lived abroad.

  I am a teenager and easily impressed by Paul’s accent. I begin to watch more news reporters on the little black-and-white TV of my childhood, and imagine myself reporting for CNN.

  War is happening in the Balkans. Our shock at there being a war in Europe is fuelled by Christiane Amanpour’s reporting. At the highlight of conflict, I grow to adore her, watching her for hours on our fourteen-inch black-and-white Sony television. Most of the homes in the neighbourhood have moved on to the more popular colour TVs, but we cannot afford one. Her voice provides enough colour for me.

  I announce that I am going to be a television journalist—a war reporter like Christiane Amanpour—and work for CNN so I can travel the world regaling people with news stories. It is my brother Sam who wakes me up from my dream.

  “But you stammer! You cannot be like Christiane Amanpour.”

  I agree; and resort to writing. No one will hear the stutter in my writing. Writing becomes my way to speak fluidly. I start writing for my high-school newsletter, which is very rudimentary—handwritten pages pinned on the main noticeboard. It is a weekly paper, covering the school’s mundane stories in an (embarrassing) tabloid manner. It brings me a fan-base but also makes me lose friends because of the exposés that I pen. I am too busy enjoying the writing to realize what I am losing.

  But I dream of reporting like Christiane Amanpour. In my mind I have clear and fluid conversations and can speak as eloquently as she does.

  I dream of meeting her to tell her how she inspired me into journalism. The closest I have come is following her on Facebook and Twitter. She still inspires the fourteen-year-old girl in me.

  “Should I wear a sad face?” he asks. His name is Gamali Adolph. He is an asylum seeker from Burundi and has lived in South Africa for over six years. We are seated in the shade of an acacia tree in a carpark in Pretoria. I am interviewing him for an article on the government’s expenses in policing migration. I want to know his experiences with South African authorities since moving into the country.

  “No”, I say, “I’m not writing for international development aid agencies. This is a story about your life that needs to get out. I want to capture you in words and pictures.”

  We both laugh. Our laughter echoes above the sound of traffic in the distance. He obliges, and I engage him in further conversation. When he is free in his own skin and does not wear the sad face, I click, click, click, and click away.

  I interview Voda from the Democratic Republic of Congo. We meet in a park in Rosettenville. After the interview, I get his permission to take his photograph. He sits and stares at the camera, but before I start clicking, he asks whether he should look sad and miserable. I tell him I want to capture his lovely smile. His baseball cap covers his eyes. When he smiles you can see the gold cap on his teeth.

  It is nineteen years since I made peace with myself about what type of journalism to pursue: writing. My writing is my tool to connect with the world. I want to dig out the stories no one cares about.

  I have previously covered stories in Uganda about refugee women living in the capital, Kampala. I have covered stories that never make the headlines of international media, about young Africans returning home from the diaspora to rebuild their countries.

  Now based in South Africa, I document migrant narratives. I have had 6 a.m. breakfast with homeless asylum-seekers in Pretoria, spent the afternoon with women in informal settlements outside Johannesburg, spent the late morning with North Africans in Fordsburg. As they carefully weave their stories for me, like a multi-coloured reed basket, I have listened. I have laughed with them and when sad memories are brought back, I have paused with them. Moments of silence are what bring us together.

  Ironically, what draws my interviewees to me is what has long embarrassed me. I start the interview, pausing on some words and breathing deeply—techniques I learned from a Nigerian I met at a conference in Harare back in 2004, who told me the trick of working through a stammer is to talk slowly and take deep breaths. If I stumble over words, I look the interviewee in the eyes and pause. That lingering moment always seems to form a connection. Interviewees interact more. I even let them complete my sentences, as seems to come naturally to many people when I falter. Their stories tumble out as from a loosened floodgate. Sometimes they pause and say, “Th
is is off-record,” in which case I turn off my digital recorder and just listen. These people who live under the radar of South African life willingly share their dreams and journeys with me, and as I write I know they will not die with their stories still hidden in them; each story adds understanding to our universe, coming from the inner spaces of hearts and souls.

  Some speak of their ingenuity surviving in a country hostile to foreigners: “It’s like we were thrown in the water and didn’t know how to swim.”

  My writings capture their small beginners’ swimming strokes, and the advanced butterfly strokes of those who have lived here for many years.

  I listen as they talk, stories spiralling from the abyss where they have been buried too long.

  Jacqueline Bishop

  Born in Jamaica, she is now based in the US. Her most recent book, The Gymnast & Other Positions, was awarded the 2016 OCM Bocas Award in Non-Fiction. She is also the author of the novel The River’s Song (2007), and two collections of poems, Fauna (2006) and Snapshots from Istanbul (2009). She has received awards including the Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short-story writing, a year-long Fulbright grant to Morocco, and a UNESCO/Fulbright Fellowship to Paris. She is an accomplished visual artist and has had exhibitions in several countries and is an Associate Professor at New York University.

  The Vanishing Woman

  She tired of being a graduate student, tired of being a doctoral candidate. Was she even getting tired of the woman who came to visit every night in her sleep? Some days Denise found herself wondering if it was worth it, all this education. She was unlikely to get any big-time job, since there were so few positions in academia these days. Most of all, she tired of the quarrels over foolishness she kept having with her advisor. Why didn’t Noella just write the damn dissertation and call it her own? Denise found herself wondering, as she crossed the street in downtown Kingston, near the Institute of Jamaica, where she was conducting research. It had all taken over her life, and she wanted her life back, to be the carefree girl who would go dancing most weekends. But these days so many women, so many voices, had taken up residence in her head, she could barely sort out her own thinking. This is what getting a PhD did to you. This latest dust-up with her advisor was so silly. She wanted to title her dissertation “The Vanishing Woman”, but Noella kept insisting it should be “The Disappearing Woman”, because disappearing implied you had a presence to be recouped. Denise was sure it was vanishing and not disappearing that she was after. The woman who came to her night after night to insist that Denise tell her story was not there when she opened her eyes in the morning. This nameless woman indeed vanished with the sunrise. But Denise could not explain this to Noella, who, when Denise first told her about her research topic had laughed.