8.

On May 21, 1971, Ruth woke up in the middle of the night. She was sure she had felt pain in the back, around her waist, but it was gone. As she fell asleep again, the pain struck again and she sat up. It came and went as fast as a flash—no lingering pain, just a mild need to open her bowels. She remained sitting up in the dark wondering whether it would return.

The toilets were outside, shrouded in the coffee shamba at the back of the house. Then the pain came back. It was as if a tiny metallic fist had punched her in a nerve. This time she was sure she needed the toilet. She decided to wake up one of the older girls to escort her.

They lit a hurricane lamp. Two children, who needed to relieve themselves, joined them. But when Ruth squatted on the latrine, nothing came out. As they walked back to the house, she did not tell the others that she had woken them up for nothing. She blew out the lamp and she prayed that the pain would not come back.

She had fallen asleep when it hit again. This time it was so intense that she ran outside without a lamp on her own. She squatted on the latrine again. Nothing came. She decided to stay on the toilet until the new pain came. In the meantime, her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. When the pain came, she stood up and grabbed the door instead of opening her bowels. As it subsided she squatted and pushed. Nothing.

She walked back to the house, found the matches, lit the lantern and took it to her room. It was as she sat on the bed that the thought crossed her mind. Perhaps the baby was coming! But wasn’t it three weeks too early? Perhaps she should wake Bweeza up. The problem was that the pain felt like diarrhea. It would be stupid to wake her up for that.

She did not go back to sleep. Whenever the pain came she was sure she should wake Bweeza up but when it went away she did not want to fuss. For a while Ruth hovered in the corridor between her door and Bweeza’s until a no-nonsense pain gripped and wrung her nerve. She gripped the door and ground her teeth. As it let go, it spread all over her stomach. Then her innards, as if made out of butter, were melting on a fire. She ran to Bweeza’s room and shook her, “Ssenga Bweeza, Ssenga Bweeza, Ssenga Bweeza!”

“What is it?” She sat up.

“It is my stomach. I think it is the bisa pains coming. It might be diarrhea but when I go to the toilet nothing comes out.”

Bweeza yawned. “How does it feel?”

“Urgent.”

“Urgent where? Is it in the back, in the front, or all over?”

“In the back first and then all over.”

“Is it a pushing pain, as if you must poo all your intestines?”

“No.”

“Well then, there is nothing to worry about. Could be something you ate. Don’t worry. You will eventually open your bowels, probably not tonight though. Get one of the metallic basins and put it in your room. When the pain comes, squat on the basin. Don’t go out to the latrine again.”

Ruth felt stupid as she walked out.

“Tell me if anything else happens.” Bweeza was already settling back to sleep.

Bweeza did not go back to sleep as she had made out. She had not been asleep when Ruth woke her up. She had heard her waking the girls up to go to the toilet. And when she ran out again, Bweeza had got up and kept an eye on the toilet. But she was not about to let Ruth know that the baby was coming because daybreak was still far away and, according to the intervals, she was still far off. Let her think it is just a stomachache, Bweeza told herself. I am not going to entertain hysterics for the rest of the night. According to the doctors at the hospital, Ruth was three weeks early. Bweeza sucked her teeth in contempt.

At about five o’ clock Bweeza got up, had a bath, packed a bag with a few kangas, a razorblade, and other things she would need if they did not make it to the hospital. Then she made breakfast.

Ruth would not eat.

At around six o’ clock Bweeza said, “OK, Luusi, time has arrived.”

But instead of hysteria, Ruth said, “I knew it. I am getting fed up with this pain.”

“Come and show me how far gone we are.”

Ruth ran to her bed and spread her legs. She was glad that her aunt was taking a look.

“Hmm . . .” Bweeza said as she turned her head to have a better look. “Good dilation . . . things are moving properly . . . yeah, you’re doing fine.” She patted Ruth’s legs. “Now get dressed. Someone in there is getting ready to come out.” She spoke as if the whole thing was a mild headache.

Bweeza asked a lad to come along with a bicycle in case they needed it. She had arranged for Bwanika to come around by the due date but the dates were wrong! Now she insisted that instead of riding on the bicycle, Ruth walked. Walking would hasten the birth. She put their bags on the bicycle’s carrier and they set off for hospital.

“In the past, I would’ve made you comfortable at home, called a few friendly women, and we would have sat and waited with you. Now we have to go to the specialists.” She threw her arms in the air.

Ruth did not respond.

And it was like that throughout the journey; Bweeza conducted a one-sided conversation because Ruth was in her own world while the lad wheeling the bicycle watched Ruth nervously.

“You are a tough girl, Luusi,” Bweeza said. “Me, I’d be howling by now.”

Either Ruth did not hear or she was saving her energy.

“When you feel it coming on, stop and grab me or grab a tree until it lets up.”

But when pain gripped, Ruth would go down on her knees and Bweeza would pull her off the ground saying, “Hang on me, the ground is dirty.”

The lad would stop wheeling the bicycle, grip the horns, and look into the bush. When it let go, Ruth would run past him as if she had not been dying a few moments before.

“See you at the hospital,” she would say.

“Isn’t this a party?” Bweeza panted as she tried to keep up with her. “Here is a story to tell, young man.”

“Had I known it goes like this I wouldn’t have come.”

“Oh, it goes like this, young man. Remember that next time you make a woman lie on her back.”

When they arrived at the hospital, Ruth was examined by a nurse who determined that the baby had engaged. She was taken to a large ward where women in all forms of pain and states of undress were kept. Still, between the throes of pain, the women managed to ask Ruth how old she was. As soon as Ruth’s pains started again, she began to push as well; she screamed, “Something is coming, it is pushing!” but the nurses did not rush as she had expected. One of them brought a wheeling bed and took her to the delivery room.

“Primigravida, fourteen years old?” A no-nonsense nurse asked as she pushed a trolley with all sorts of instruments laid out on it toward them.

The nurse wheeling Ruth nodded.

“Strap her in! I am not going to have her holding my hands and throwing herself about.”

Ruth did not care what the nurses did to her. She just wanted the thing out of her because, at that point, she had decided that whatever was inside her could not be human.

She was helped into a chair with straps on the armrests and footrests on its legs with straps too. Her hands were strapped on the armrests, her legs spread wide and tied at the ankles on the footrests.

“When the pushing pain comes, push. No playing around in this place!”

Perhaps it was the nurses’ attitude—If she is still a child, why was she sleeping with men—toward her that made Ruth strong. The pushing pain came once and the second time a baby boy was out.

By evening, the nurse suggested that Ruth and the baby could go home if they wished. Magda went to the roadside and hired a car. On the way home, she made sure that there were no roadside stoppings by curious women. As soon as they arrived, she fed Ruth and put her to bed. Then she performed all the birth rituals she wished for the child. By the time word got round the village that Ruth had unknotted and women started streaming in, Magda had protected the baby against any conditions, deliberate or accidental. The following day she asked Ruth, “Do you know his name yet?”

“Yobu.”

“Ah, after your twin?” Magda was surprised. Most girls would give their child a fanciful name or name them after the boyfriend. “I like the Ganda version better,” Magda smiled.

In the first two weeks, Magda would wake Ruth up to nurse the baby, have a bath, eat her porridge, and then go back to sleep. There were so many eager hands in the home yearning to carry Yobu and to do the laundry but Ruth wanted to keep the baby close. She insisted on putting him in her bed, she checked on him if he slept too long, and she looked anxious as he was moved from one set of hands to another. However, Bweeza was insistent: Ruth’s task was to recover.

Bwanika and his other wives arrived when little Yobu was three weeks old. They brought baby clothes and money. They also brought chicken and meat to celebrate.

“I heard that my European wife was brave and I wondered: do my wives howl just to make me feel horrible?”

Bwanika called Ruth his muzungu wife because she grew up in the city and did not understand traditional things.

Bwanika’s wives went straight for the baby. The Ssemuto wife, the one who kept livestock, whom the children called Maama Ssemuto said, “We heard about the newborn and we thought what a perfect excuse to visit!” as she reached into the Moses basket to pick up Yobu. When she saw the baby’s face the woman added, “What a neat nose: there’s Tutsi blood in your family, Bweeza, don’t deny it.”

“How can I?” Magda laughed happily. “This child is proof.”

Bwanika and his wives stayed the weekend, cooking, eating, talking about the children, and gossiping. There was a sense of festivity especially when hordes of village women started to arrive and more cooking was done and the women stayed longer than they had intended. Each put money into Yobu’s tiny hands. When he gripped it, they laughed in admiration. “He recognizes money, doesn’t he?” as if Yobu was the cleverest newborn they had ever seen.

“May you have strong hands to earn your living,” they prayed.

“May you have luck the way millipedes have legs.” Ruth smiled happily as women wished her child good luck and cracked jokes.

Magda was in her element telling the women how, because of her vigilance, the baby simply slipped out, “No complications and none of that stitches nonsense.” The women decried the hospital midwives. “They don’t give you a chance; they snap and slit and stitch at will.” And the women agreed that the lazy midwives who did not allow a child to arrive in its own time were perfect for the lazy city women who lie on their backs as soon as they fall pregnant.

“I am going to replenish Luusi’s blood and help her body repair itself before I send her back to her parents. I doubt that that mother of hers knows what to do,” Magda told the women.

Ruth’s face darkened at the mention of her mother. Magda, misunderstanding her, quickly added, “But the human in me cannot blame Faisi. My brother’s wife has never known blood relations. She grew up in an orphanage.”

There was a moment of silence as Ruth looked up in surprise. The women squirmed in discomfort but Magda carried on regardless. “It must be hard not knowing who you are. But it’s no excuse to drive away your husband’s relations.”

“Sometimes when we lack something, those who have it seem to flaunt it at us,” a woman explained.

Ruth smiled to reassure Magda that she was not offended. Still, she was surprised to hear that Faisi came from nowhere but an orphanage. She had presumed that her mother, like her father, had discarded her relations. In any case, even if Faisi had relatives, she would have thrown them out of her life if they were not Awakened enough. In the past, before Magda was mentioned, their extended family were the Awakened. But the Awakened were controlled. They did not visit each other unnecessarily and they did not fuss over each other’s children. The church was like a bus and brethren were passengers on their way to heaven rather than a family. Ruth remembered the last time Faisi talked to Kanani’s uncle who had brought news that the most senior clan elder had died.

“We don’t have relations that don’t walk in Christ. Don’t come back here telling us there’s this funeral rite or that death. Our Lord said, “Let the dead bury their dead!”

Ruth, who was six years old at the time, had watched the old man climb the steps from the compound into the road. She had felt sad for a man who was already dead going to bury the dead.

“I would like to wait before we tell my parents,” Ruth told Magda. “Until I am fully recovered.”

“You do?” Magda could not contain her gladness. Ruth might have as well have said she preferred Magda to her parents.

That weekend, Ruth noticed that some of Magda’s children resembled the other wives but she could not be so rude as to ask. Life in Nakaseke was not as simple as it had seemed. Counting how many children there were in the house was to invite death because only death counts people. You don’t ask visitors whether they will eat or have tea because you are telling them to say no. It was taboo to ask who was cousin, niece, or nephew. Only Ruth was niece in the house and only she called Bweeza aunt.

On Monday as the two wives and Bwanika drove away in his Opel, Magda could not contain herself. She whispered to Ruth, “Did you see how possessively elder wife sat in the passenger seat?”

Magda made stiff motions with her neck as if the elder wife were a turkey. Ruth looked at her with surprise because she thought they liked each other. Magda relented and said, “They are generous, my fellow wives, but Maama Kapeeka always wants to show that she is the first wife.”

Ruth and little Yobu soon fell into Nakaseke’s rhythms. In the morning, when the children were at school, she looked after him. But as soon as they returned, Yobu disappeared. They attempted to plait his slippery hair. Village girls lingered saying, “We’ve come to carry the baby for you.” Sometimes Ruth sent them away, “Come back later, he is sleeping.” Magda, seeing Ruth worry would say, “Let them enjoy him while he is still here. It is good for him to be loved by so many.”