New Daughters of Africa

by Margaret Busby

  Nchekwube

  Mmeri runs her hands over the pair of wings in her lap. She has known that this day would come but she has tried to live like it would not. She cannot, she tells herself, let Nchekwube go. The girl does not understand.

  You’re just a lonely, sad woman! Nchekwube tells her mother. All the other girls are getting their wings and you won’t let me have this one thing? I am turning eighteen and you want to keep me at home? What am I, a prisoner? You never let me do anything fun! You hover around. All. The. Time. You suffocate me! She lists all the other things her mother would not let her do: go to a pajama party at Nwamaka’s for her tenth birthday (she had to hear the next day in class how everybody had fun, swimming in Nwamaka’s parents’ outsized pool all night long and camped out in their backyard where they were served croissants and moimoi and akamu in customized plates in the morning for breakfast); go on a school trip to Osumenyi (her classmates had stayed away an entire weekend and visited the nation’s only floating museum); go to school by herself once she turned twelve and everyone else walked to school alone (which made her a laughing stock at school for a long time). The list of wrongs is long and each remembrance is steeped in bitterness and flung angrily at her mother.

  Mmeri, the mother, accepts the words thrown at her. She feels their sting. It is as though a hundred bees have colonized her body. She is not unaware of the irony: that she who would love more than anything else to slide her daughter’s wings over her on her eighteenth birthday (in a few days! What trepidation!) was being held back by love (for fear is a kind of love too!)

  There are things she wants to tell her daughter but she does not know how to begin. From the beginning? From Godwin who loved Nchekwube before she was born but could not stand her afterwards? She has never met her father, does not even know his name. Yet Godwin had wanted to be a father more than Mmeri had wanted to be a mother. When she became pregnant, she felt guilty for not matching her husband in enthusiasm, and worked into that enthusiasm by throwing herself into preparing for the birth: painting the nursery, buying baby supplies, tussling over names with Godwin. After a while, that enthusiasm didn’t need to be worked on anymore. She had willed it into being. When Mmeri went into labor, Godwin, on his way back from a trip abroad, was devastated to be missing the delivery. I’ll come straight from the airport, Sweetie, he said. I’ll rent a hovercar. Don’t want to get delayed by traffic just to save a few bucks. Can’t wait to see you!

  When Nchekwube was born, she had slithered out so swiftly and smoothly that the doctor said had he not been quick she would have fallen straight onto the cold hospital floor. In all his decades of catching babies, he said, none had come out quite as rapidly as Mmeri’s albino baby did. And had the baby fallen straight onto the tiles of the hospital room, it might have been an incidental act of mercy. It would have freed you from making the choice, he said to Mmeri, his voice soft like cotton, and in his eyes, something like compassion. The doctor placed the wriggly, slippery baby on Mmeri’s chest. It was as if someone had stolen into her womb and rubbed lubricant all over the baby. Mmeri had to hold on to it with both hands so that it did not slide off her body.

  What are you going to do? The doctor asked Mmeri, unfolding his words carefully, softly, while sprinkling talcum over the baby to provide traction, so that Mmeri knew that he was on her side. That he would not force her but that he trusted her nevertheless to do the right thing. And the right thing to do would be the merciful thing. She looked down at her baby, and even through the white powder covering every inch of it, making it look like some small-scale simulacrum of a fearsome mmanwu from a long-gone era, that yellow brightness of her sort was unmistakable. Babies like these were not allowed to live. And if they did, no matter how much you protected them, no matter how much you tailed them, one day they invariably strayed and ended as chopped-up body parts for a moneymaking ritual. How could any mother, the state governor said, when he first announced his plans for albino babies, want to put a child through that? Mmeri remembered her parents nodding their heads as the governor spoke. If she closed her eyes now, she could still see her father (dead in a canoeing accident thirteen years ago) nodding, dipping his hand into his eba and soup, and her mother saying, No woman ever wants to carry a pregnancy and lose the baby. Mbanu! But this—what the governor is suggesting is kinder than the alternative.

  Mmeri held on to her baby and wondered what sound a baby’s skull made as it shattered. If it made any sound at all. Perhaps it was as silent as the splintering of a heart. She told herself that letting the baby live would be selfish. Who had ever held on to an albino child for longer than twelve years? No one in recent memory. The doctor said what mothers in her position chose to do—if they did not want to use the smothering blanket—was to let the baby starve. They cleaned up and walked out of hospital so they did not have to see the babies die. Which was a gentle way to let go. They could carry on as if nothing ever happened. There were others who held on for a few days and then handed the babies over to the hospital to be smothered in the special blankets the government provided free of charge. Some mothers wanted keepsakes, footprints and pictures, but that just made things difficult, he thought. Easier to let go once and for all. Mmeri had a baby guinea pig as a child. One day while she was feeding the guinea pig, a carrot fell out of her hands and hit it smack on its head, killing it. She remembered crying for days. She could never imagine letting that guinea pig starve to death. A tear slid out of her eye, carving a line down to her chin. It dropped on her baby and she could swear the baby smiled at her. Toothless pink gums showing through red lips, as if they were the embers of a dying fire. Mmeri held on tighter. She could not imagine letting go. She might have held on too tight because the baby began to cry softly and then caterwauled, its mouth so wide open Mmeri swore she could see into its soul. The doctor stood beside her saying nothing. I can’t let go, she snivelled. I haven’t even given her a name yet. She missed her mother, practical and sensible, who would have given her the strength to do what she must do. But her mother had died parachuting from an airplane seven years ago.

  When Mmeri was a child, hardly a day went by without a news report of an albino abducted and killed for juju. In cities and villages all over the state, albino bodies with missing limbs turned up in ubiquitous police raids. Sometimes only the heads were found. Even her nextdoor neighbor, Mercy, an albino girl Mmeri’s age, whose eyes darted when she spoke but who squinted her way through excellent grades in elementary school, was carted off by two men on her way back from school. Mercy’s brother, one year older at ten, ran behind the men, and when he could not catch up, ran shouting all the way home. They’ve taken Mercy! They’ve taken Mercy! By the time her parents contacted the police, the men had long vanished into the city’s mist. Everyone knew that many of the state’s wealthy wanting to get wealthier paid a lot for albino body parts. Even though the punishment for kidnapping was twenty years with hard labor, the rewards were tempting. As more albinos disappeared, the state sprouted new millionaires and flashy mansions sprang up like acne.

  Mmeri’s mother once told her that in her youth, the state had been a tourist paradise: the people came from far and near to admire one of its two waterfalls or to walk through the green parks of the city. Their city’s zoo had been the best in the world—thousands of animals from across the globe and 150 acres of exhibits and gardens. It was now a sprawling estate with a huge shopping mall, the green parks destroyed to make way for casinos. In those days, her mother said, albino children were neither abducted nor killed. They were just like any other children. In fact, one of the state’s best-known comedians and most successful womanizer was an albino called Cowboy Joe. A journalist asked him how many children he had and Cowboy Joe tilted his hat, gave a large grin, and said, I’d be lying if I said I knew!

  Between the mother’s youth and Mmeri’s own, some juju priest had had a revelation that pulverized albino bones and secret incantations magicked money out of thin air. At first only two albinos
went missing, one of whom was a homeless man so nobody cared. The second was a young woman who never returned home from shopping. It was thought that she had run away because her relationship with her parents was rocky. Her parents put up huge posters promising her they loved her. She never returned. It was not until two little girls went missing within days of each other, and the head of one (still with its newly beaded braids intact) was found in an abandoned warehouse, that people began to take notice. Mothers of albino children pulled them from school, and even then, all it took was one second of unwatchfulness for the children to be spirited off. Body parts turned up all over the state like pawns in a macabre treasure hunt.

  After many unsuccessful attempts to curb the scourge, the state governor met with his advisers and landed on the genius idea that he announced on TV on that rainy Sunday afternoon when everyone was sure to be home. Fellow citizens, he began in the firm, rich voice that won him the elections years ago. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand about the goings-on in our state. Tourism has been greatly impacted. Investments have fallen. Revenue allocations have been cut. Our state relies on all three. We have a solution to our problem and I hope that you all, fellow citizens, will see the value in it . . . Killing albino babies at birth was the only way to stop the rampant abductions and clean up the image of the state. Mothers, especially, had resisted at first. How could they give the state permission to kill their young? Even animals protected their young, some woman protested on Facebook. But soon the protests died down. There was nothing, Mmeri’s mother used to say, that one could not get used to. Women who had albino babies learned to leave the hospital with empty arms. In families with a history of albinism, many expectant mothers did not start painting rooms or setting up cots until the baby was out and was not melanin deficient. It was easier to deal with if one did not have to return to a room all set up for a child who would never use it. With no albino children to kidnap and kill, the state began to forget that it had ever had such a problem. Trade boomed once more and everyone said what a wise man the governor was and he could stay in power for life.

  Mmeri has succeeded in keeping Nchekwube alive by keeping her close. How to let go? “Everything I have done, I have done for you,” she tells her daughter. She sounds like a cliché, she knows, but she cannot bring herself to burden Nchekwube with the anxieties that have plagued her for years. What sort of life would her young daughter live if she carried the fear of attack every time she left home?

  The first time Godwin laid eyes on his new baby, he flung the flowers in his hand away and let out a loud, long moan.

  He held his wife and said, I am so sorry, as if the albinism were some mischief he had deliberately conjured up. He would not hold the baby when Mmeri held it out to him. Let’s go, he said, his voice heavy with tears. The doctor is waiting.

  Mmeri shook her head. And then with a tremendous effort, she said, Godwin, the baby’s coming with us. She had not known until she said it aloud that that was what she had been thinking. But now it was out, her spoken wish solidified and she knew she would not be leaving hospital without this baby she already loved.

  What . . . How? Godwin stammered.

  We can keep her safe, Godwin. Maybe even send her abroad. We . . .

  Mmeri. Sweetheart. Please. Give the baby to the doctor.

  Godwin’s voice was broken but firm and it was then that Mmeri knew that he would not support her. She had to choose: her beautiful new baby or her husband. The infant began to cry and Mmeri thrust a nipple in its mouth. She could not give it up.

  Godwin stood undecided, and then his shoulders slumped and he walked out crying.

  Mmeri wanted to call out to him, but the baby looked at her as if it already feared for its future. Nchekwube, Mmeri whispered into its ears. Hope. Hope destroys fear, she read somewhere.

  How can I protect her once she gets her wings, free to go and come as she pleases? Mmeri thinks. A line from a poem suddenly flits into her head. Hoping in the face of mountains, is a form of love too. She begins to dust the wings.

  Ayeta Anne Wangusa

  A Ugandan writer and creative thought leader, she is the author of a novel, Memoirs of a Mother (1998), and short stories published by FEMRITE—the Uganda Women Writers’ Association. She is also a founder member of FEMRITE. She is currently the Executive Director of Culture and Development East Africa (CDEA), a creative think tank in Tanzania which hosts a Pan-African Writers Lounge with a focus on providing a platform for visiting writers to attend writing workshops and hold public conversations and readings in Dar es Salaam. She has participated in many international literary festivals and served as a judge on literary panels.

  My Mouth Carries Few Words

  The First Dream

  The scars on my body are baskets that carry the memory of the past. Keeping tales that have, over the years, sluggishly escaped through the gaping holes. Holes created by sunrays digging into the walls of the baskets. The story of my past is hidden in the blank spaces between the reeds. Sieved by His story and kept in the blank spaces that give the baskets an oblong shape. These scars were born when the reeds and blank spaces embraced one another to create baskets. Baskets that carry the tales of the Bamasaaba.

  When I slide my long fingers over these scars, I feel the stretched patches of skin, firmly pinning my spirit inside my body. Patches of skin that were grafted from my backside.

  My navel is the deepest scar on my body. It is a tunnel that traces my mother and her mother’s MOTHER back to the crater on Mount Masaaba. A tunnel which connects my father and his father’s FATHER to the depth of the earth; the one who crawled out of a hole on the mountain with a woman by his side.

  I am that woman who crawled out of Masaaba with Mundu by my side, at a point in my mind when there were no words spoken. A time wrapped up in mist, stored on a shelf in my mind, when the universe was a world with no words. Mundu and I came out of a crack on one of the icy ridges of Masaaba.

  Mundu was frozen to the toes, so we held each other close, our legs interlocking, keeping away the cold that was rising up the veins in our legs. Our mouths had been filled with silence. But breathing through our mouths, gasping—we broke the silence with our breath. Our bodies rubbed against each other like two ancient rocks in the quest for fire. He thawed the frost in my veins with the warmth of his body and together we were ablaze. The sun melted the frost on Masaaba’s mountain and we bathed in Manafwa as she flowed from the crater; the source of our life. Our defrosted bodies were tributaries joining Manafwa River. We held onto each other, lying on one of the rocks as our entwined feet dripped into the river. And we talked to each other with our eyes. We bathed in solitude by the riverside, after an invisible hand had moulded the sun, moon and stars.

  I did not talk to Mundu or the birds that circled above us or the wild animals for they ignored us. Each day I cupped my hands below my chin and blew my breath into the calabash that my hands had built. I breathed in and absorbed the smell that had come from me that now squatted in the calabash. I did not like the smell that had come from my mouth, the one that spread its arms wide in the calabash. I did not like the taste of my saliva in the mornings. So, I rinsed out the stale taste of my silence from my mouth using the broken waters from Manafwa’s birth canal.

  I savoured the clean breath around my tongue, which the sugarcane I had chewed had left behind. I rolled my tongue over my two front teeth and cherished the smooth surface. The sugarcane had eroded the food that had slept in my mouth overnight. I was tired. I lay back to rest on the grass, as I waited for Mundu to come lie down and rest, after he had cleared the bush around our cave.

  He lay down beside me.

  I watched the big brown bulge that had created the first distance between Mundu and I. I lay on my side, looking into Mundu’s eyes as we waited for the next sunrise. As the half and full moons rolled over our heads, we watched the bulge I carried push Mundu further away from me. The bulge felt like a pod with a pea inside, moving and occasionally bumpi
ng on the walls of the pod. I wondered what it was. I wondered, with my hand cupped over the deepest scar on my body.

  That scar, which had healed from a rope that had connected me to the pit from which Mundu and I had crawled. We had crawled out and when we reached the cliff, I had picked up a sharp stone from the side of the cliff and cut the rope. Mundu had done the same with the rope that connected him to the deep Ogre he had come out of, with me by his side. The spiral rope had snapped back into the valley of life, and we had moved on, with our navels healing, drying under the sun.

  The pea inside me became as heavy as a stone. It could no longer float in the pot of water I was carrying below my navel. It started sinking, moving towards my thighs. It began to press harder, anxious to germinate, wanting to fall out and start its new life on the soil upon which I was standing. The pea was a stone grinding the bones inside me. It began to push the bones apart, away from my body. Mundu could see the pain in my eyes. He could see the tears that had settled around my mouth. The thing inside me was pushing me wide. Tearing me apart. Mundu could not stand the anguish around my clenched toes. He stood up, started walking away from me. Facing me but walking away from me. It was time for the thing inside me to get out, so I tried to get up from the bank of Manafwa and walk. I could not. I crawled to the river. I could feel it. The thing inside me had a pointed knife. It was hacking a road out of the rock of my body—then sawing me like a carpenter dividing a piece of wood.

  On my knees I crawled to the river. The river rushed towards me. It reached below my navel. I burned with pain. I needed to ease the sting by soaking my body in the small river that had grown out of our feet. The river that now fell into Manafwa. The wind was sucking breath out of me. I lifted my head towards the noise of the rushing waters ahead of me and drank the fresh air that the big river breathed out. My weak eyes rested on a giant rock ahead of me. I limped towards it and lifted my arms to place my exhausted hands on the smooth rock that jutted out of the water. The thing inside forced me to breathe out and in . . . Breathe in and out . . . until the tunnel, that the thing inside me had been digging, was wide enough to create an exit.