Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  ‘You mean we’re brother and sister?’

  ‘Same clan: we can’t fall in love.’

  Unfortunately, Carl could not say Mpony’obugumba. When she said M-po, M-po Mponye, he said Pony. She said nye, nye, he said niye. Try Mpona. He said Poonah. She became Poonah.

  Carl brought her to Britain with the enthusiasm of a British subject giving the British establishment the middle finger. For three and a half years he looked after her like an older brother but held her like a wife in public. Three of those years, Poonah worked and saved. When she was ready to hunt for herself, Carl let her out in the British wild. By marrying her and guiding her through the maze of British systems, Carl raised Poonah, her three children and mother back at home out of necessity. That was far more than what the G20 achieved in a year.

  Poonah left her children back home because British Ugandans warned that to take children to Britain was to tether yourself to the doorknob. What is the use of going to Europe if you can’t leave the house to work? And if you do, childcare wolfs down your earnings. Besides, children used to African strictness get to Britain and, because they can’t handle the kind of freedom Britain gives them, run wild. You chastise them, they call the police—parents’ hands are tied: you either dance to your children’s ntoli or Social Services takes them away.

  Poonah did not need to be told twice. She told her children, ‘You know what, stay here with your grandmother. I am going with Uncle Carl to find work so we can have a good life. Be good, be grateful and study hard because this world is tough. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

  But there were people who brought kilemya, the kind of negativity designed to dishearten. We hear you’re going to Bungeleza, but do you know what they think of us over there?

  Poonah asked them one question: ‘Are their thoughts bullets? As long as their thoughts don’t take food off my plate or the roof off my house, as long as when I work I get paid, I don’t care what they think.’

  That attitude saw Poonah rise through the ranks. In the beginning, she sorted apples in a factory-like building—Gala from Pink Lady, russets from golden, Braeburns from Granny Smiths—on a conveyor. Soon she started to work out the British system (manager, team, team leader, minimum pay, overtime, National Insurance). Then she worked out the English language, how and where it discriminated against its own native speakers. Poonah decided to acquire the Mancunian twang. You don’t do menial jobs and speak posh English—colleagues isolate you, claiming you have airs. Poonah climbed out of the factories into care work. For two years, she looked after old people in two nursing homes. In one, she worked nights Monday to Wednesday. In another she worked daytime Friday to Sunday.

  From there she joined a company providing support to people with mental health problems. She worked seventy-two hours a week until she sprouted premature grey hairs. She cut back to forty hours and offered to do bank work occasionally. By then she had so mastered the rhythms of the Mancunian dialect you would have thought she had grown up in Moss Side.

  After four years of support work and a few NVQ certificates, she applied for this job at the airport and became an ASO, an Aviation Security Officer. She registered for overtime and built a reputation of reliability. She planned, between 2008 and 2010, to join university to do a BA in social work. Afterwards, she would do social work in Britain for five years to boost her CV and then return home.

  It was on account of her upward mobility and job training, besides the free medical care—letters from the NHS reminding her to go to breast screening—that Poonah couldn’t stand Ugandans bad-mouthing Britain. You criticised Britain in her presence, she asked you Why don’t you go back home?

  • • •

  She arrived at the concourse in Terminal 4 and the buzz of passengers queuing to check in was deafening. As she reached the lifts below the escalator, a woman lamented, ‘I swear, passengers check in their brains when they check in their luggage!’

  Poonah turned. A member of Monarch Airlines ground staff pointed at a family—a horrified woman and a guilt-ridden man—dashing across the concourse. Behind them, two teenagers ran after them grudgingly.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He left the urn with her mother’s ashes in the toilets.’

  Poonah said what a Briton would say: ‘Says it all, doesn’t it?’

  Father and son disappeared into the gents while mother and daughter waited outside. Poonah was about to walk away when the woman asked about her shift.

  ‘The big one,’ Poonah said, ‘Six to six.’

  ‘Ouch, it’s gonna hurt, I can tell you that, what with foreign students going home, sun-chasers on the move, stag and hen parties in bloody Benidorm, football fans travelling to Germany for the World Cup and—she winked—that on top of the two notorious air carriers.’ The two notorious airlines were PIA (Pakistan International Airlines) and Air Jamaica. They carried some of the most airport-nervous passengers.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Poonah remembered, ‘they both fly on Wednesdays.’

  ‘I finish at ten and I’m out of here before hell breaks loose.’

  Poonah walked downstairs to the restrooms. She was not really worried about the busy shift ahead. At her job, busy made time fly. You didn’t want to stand there counting the minutes. She arrived at the restrooms and swiped at the door. After clocking in, she decided to eat breakfast. If it was going to be as busy as the woman had suggested, she would not get a break for four hours. She sat down to open her bag and her belly sat on her lap. The lower buttons on her blouse gasped. She sucked in her stomach but it hardly shifted. She sucked her teeth and blamed eating and sleeping at irregular hours because of shift work. It messed with her metabolism.

  Just as she finished her breakfast, she heard the Nights coming down the stairs from the search area to clock out from their shift. As their voices drew near, Poonah picked up a Metro nearby and pretended to read. There was a rift between Days and Nights. One of those feuds you walk into on a new job and take sides without realising or knowing why. All she had heard was that Nights were a nasty bunch.

  They lined up outside the swipe machine and waited for 5.45 a.m. to clock out. At 5.50 Poonah grabbed her bag and started towards the search area. Members of her group, five other ASOs, walked ahead. She was not buddy-buddy with them because today they smile at you, tomorrow they pretend not to know you. You meet a colleague in a supermarket and he looks away like he’s ashamed to know you. Then there are those who are nice and expect you to suck up to them. The worst are friendly when no one is about but find them in the company of other ASOs and they look away. Soon, Poonah stopped playing along and glared everyone away Ugandan style. They declared her a nasty piece of work.

  She arrived at the search area.

  From the sheer numbers of ASOs there even Administration anticipated a mad day. All five X-ray machines and walk-in metal detectors were open. Each X-ray was manned by at least seven people—one on loading, helping passengers put their bags into trays before feeding them into the X-ray, one sitting down screening the bags and five stood at the back of the X-ray doing bag searches. There was a queue of passengers at each point of entry already.

  The walk-in metal detectors were manned by four ASOs—two male and two female—‘frisking’, as body searches were called. As Poonah looked for a space to insert herself, Hannah, the team leader, came up.

  ‘Can you do bag search on the third machine, Poonah?’

  She walked across the search area and stood at the back of the third X-ray machine. Trays, loaded with passengers’ bags, slid out of the X-ray and the ASOs at the top pushed them down the rollers towards the bottom, where Poonah stood. She picked them up and arranged them on the search tables ready to be collected by passengers.

  Soon, she was at the top of the queue receiving bags out of the X-ray machine and pushing them to the bottom where passengers picked them up. She searched a few random bags and it went on until she was at the top of the line for the fourth time. The ASO screening the bags st
opped the X-ray to scrutinise an image.

  ‘Can you find out what this is, Poonah?’ He indicated an image on the screen. It was coiled, with both organic and inorganic material. He let the tray with the bag out.

  Poonah picked up the tray and turned to the passengers waiting across the machine. ‘Whose items are these?’

  A priest, very tall, fortyish, put his hand up.

  ‘Could you step over to the search tables, please?’

  Poonah started with the routine questions: ‘Did you pack this bag yourself?’ The priest nodded. ‘Did anyone give you anything to carry for him or her…Did you leave the bag unattended at any time?’

  The priest shook his head at both questions.

  ‘This is a specific bag search; there is an object in your bag we could not identify: do you mind if I look?’

  ‘If you must.’

  This prompted Poonah to whisper, ‘Do you by any chance have a whip in here?’ hoping to spare the priest embarrassment.

  ‘I beg your pardon: I am a man of the cloth!’

  Poonah emptied the bag—mobile phone, wallet, shaver, car and house keys, a pair of socks rolled into a ball, a camera, a pair of sunglasses. She put each item into the tray until she got to the bottom of the bag. There, coiled like a snake, was a whip—black, leather.

  Poonah retrieved it and showed it to the priest. ‘Is this yours?’

  The priest’s face went scarlet. Passengers who had been sneaking peeks looked away. Poonah picked up the bag with the tray and showed the whip to the ASO screening bags.

  ‘Naughty, naughty.’ He twirled his chair, saw the priest, turned back, sniggering, ‘Oi oi, vicar!’

  Poonah put the bag and tray with all the other items back into the machine for extra X-raying. When they came through, the screening ASO nodded his satisfaction.

  Poonah walked back to the priest. ‘I’m afraid you can’t take the whip, Reverend. It’s not allowed in the cabin.’

  She threw it on the heap of confiscated items. After repacking the bag, she smiled. ‘Have a nice flight, Reverend.’

  As she put back the tray, one of the female ASOs on the frisk asked Poonah for a swap. She accepted reluctantly. ASOs hated the frisk. It was at the frisk that passengers staged their most devious resistance. She walked to one side of the metal detector and said hi to Alison, the other female ASO.

  All went well for the first twenty minutes—women stepped through the metal detector and she and Alison rubbed down passengers who set it off to make sure they were not carrying items of threat onto aircraft.

  Just then Poonah pulled a woman: ‘Could you step over to me, madam?’ Because the passenger had not set off the machine, Poonah explained, ‘This is a random search, madam,’ even though her randoms tended to be every tenth female passenger. ‘Do you mind being searched here, or would you rather go somewhere private?’

  ‘You’ve pulled me because I am black. You think I am carrying drugs because I am Jamaican.’

  Poonah wanted to say I thought you were African, but instead smiled. ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s not the first time. We blacks are the worst to each other.’

  Poonah ignored it. Every passenger had a reason for being pulled. Irish, Asians, blacks, Muslims, goths, people with tattoos or piercings, men with ponytails, all were persecuted by airport security.

  She had done the passenger’s neck, arms, under the breasts, back and stomach. She was reaching into the back of the waistband, bringing the passenger very close to herself, when the woman exclaimed, ‘Eh, are you a lesbian?’

  Poonah ignored her.

  ‘I can tell a lesbian when I see one.’

  ‘You mean you’re so irresistible all lesbians want to touch you?’

  ‘No, but I mean…’

  Poonah started on the legs, but no matter how wide the woman stepped Poonah could not search between her thighs. She reached for the handheld metal detector and passed it around the passenger’s front and back. She had squatted to rub the ankles when the woman let loose a fart on top of Poonah’s head. Poonah stood up and stepped away:

  ‘Oops,’ she giggled. ‘I am so sorry: it just escaped.’

  ‘I am going to treat that as an attempt to obstruct me from searching you. Come’—Poonah pulled out a chair—‘take a seat. Take off your shoes, belt, bracelets, ring, and danglers from your ears, please.’ By now ASOs stole amused glances. They loved it when black people gave Poonah grief.

  The woman pulled them off and dropped them into a tray. Poonah took them back for extra X-raying. Then she told the woman to get up and walk through the metal detector again without them. There was no need, but Poonah felt like it. As she gave back her belongings she smiled. ‘Have a nice journey.’

  Before she could get back to her post and whisper her outrage to Alison, a woman stepped through the detector and set it off. Poonah motioned to her. ‘Step over to me, madam.’

  ‘Did I set it off again?’ The passenger looked up at the machine where it flashed red. ‘I always do: too much iron in my blood.’

  Alison rolled her eyes.

  Luckily, the passenger knew the drill. She stood legs apart, arms stretched out to the sides without prompting. Then she sighed. ‘I’m glad I changed my knickers.’

  Poonah had long decided that body searches were so intrusive that some passengers said to themselves If you’re going to touch me everywhere you might as well hear my life’s story.

  As soon as Poonah started rubbing her arms, the passenger went frolicsome: ‘Uhhhh, I haven’t been touched in years.’

  Poonah kept a straight face.

  She found a mobile phone in the passenger’s trousers and told her, ‘This is what set the machine off.’ She put the phone in the machine to be X-rayed. After the search, she handed the phone back to the passenger and wished her a good flight. The woman leaned in and whispered, ‘I’ve heard that you blacks are good at this sort of thing, but I had no idea!’

  By the time Poonah recovered, the passenger had gone.

  Alison was seething. She whispered, ‘I bet she left that phone in her pockets on purpose, I bet she wanted to be frisked, perv! You get all sorts in this place. We call them lesbos in this country. They disgust me. You Africans are right; don’t let them destroy your culture.’

  To her, the passenger was not necessarily gay. Desperate, maybe. On the frisk, passengers said all sorts just to rattle you. One time after being frisked, this woman smiled at an ASO and said, ‘I hope you enjoyed that more than I did!’ The ASO was having none of it. She whispered back, ‘Trust me: you’re not all that!’ Another time a camp Somali lad walked through and set off the metal detector. Being Somali and camp was one thing; being terribly ticklish was another. He was so unprepared for being frisked that, as he was rubbed down, he yelped, hopping from one leg to the other as if walking barefoot on hot embers. Afterwards, as he picked up his tray, tears running down his face, an ASO turned to another and whispered, ‘You mean they can be gay too?’

  Poonah paused to catch her breath, and froze. Across from her at the back of the main machine stood Nnamuli. Poonah lost her rhythm and stood for too long. In the background, she felt a current of excitement run through the search area. She glanced towards where the commotion came from, but only to make sure that Nnamuli standing in the search area was not a dream. Wrestlers had arrived, but Poonah looked back to Nnamuli. Nnamuli still stood in the search area, not as a passenger but as a new ASO. Poonah called the next female passenger through.

  As far as Poonah’s shifts in Security at the airport went, this one had been so far unremarkable—until Nnamuli arrived. Nnamuli was not just another Ugandan; her family had once employed Poonah when she first arrived in Kampala, an A-level dropout from Buwama looking for a bright future. At the time, Nnamuli’s dad had been an MP, not yet a cabinet minister. They had had a supermarket along Jinja Road. They had employed Poonah as one of the three shop attendants. Because the shop closed late, Poonah, the youngest of the shop attendants,
slept in a room above. Sometimes, after closing, Nnamuli’s father would come to the shop to balance the books. After letting him in, Poonah would go to her room. He would call as he left and Poonah would lock the door.

  One day, Nnamuli, who was the same age as Poonah, had come to get something from the shop and was shocked to find her father there balancing the books. Soon after she had gone home, Nnamuli’s mother had arrived angrier than a cobra at midday.

  ‘Pack your bags and get out.’

  Poonah asked why.

  ‘I said, get your stuff and get out.’

  Poonah remembered that her husband was downstairs and understood. This was a world where women suspected that men were so blind with desire they would cheat with anything. Denying it was a waste of time. It was a wife saying to her husband Watch me throw the object of your desire out of this place. And the husband’s silent contemptuous silence of Go on: see if I care.

  When Poonah stepped outside, Nnamuli’s mother waited for her husband to finish and locked up. She took the keys. Husband and wife got into separate cars and drove off, leaving Poonah spluttering into her hands outside the door. They hadn’t even paid her.

  That was the Nnamuli standing in the search area.

  Luckily that night, Mutaayi, a special hire driver, had still been on the taxi rank next to the Diamond Trust bank. He was the only person Poonah knew in the city. The other person was her aunt who lived in Matugga, twenty miles away. Too late to find taxis going there at 11 p.m. Mutaayi had once taken Poonah out for a meal but all he had talked about was my goats, my pigs, my chickens, my land back upcountry. Poonah had left the rural specifically to escape goats, pigs, chickens and digging. Then he had taken her to the Pride Theatre, where he had kept a running commentary on the performance. At the end of the evening, he had looked at Poonah like I’ve spent all this money on you, what do I get in return? When he had realised she was not sleeping with him, Mutaayi had sulked. Poonah had avoided him since.