3.

Isaac had no excuse to come into the world, except if you count his mother Nnamata’s backside, as illustrious as a 1957 Plymouth’s and as round as an earthen pot, a reason.

In the early 60s, Nnamata was her father’s favorite child because out of a litter of six, she was the only one with a “bright future.” Nnamata’s parents, Ssemata and Ziraba, were as ambitious as any Ganda commoners who had grown up under the British Protectorate. You found yourself on earth without design on your part and there was no option but to grow up. Along the way, you found out that there were three human species in the world and that you belonged to the worst. You were told that if you got baptized, then confirmed in church, you might have a chance. You got baptized in case the Europeans knew what they were talking about. Some children, mostly boys, had a stint in school. Royals, governors, and the children of proper Christians stayed on, while for commoners, for whom school was a waste of time, the only thing left to do was to get married. A woman then dropped as many children as she was fated. Every child was born with its peculiar luck. Parents showed their children the right way and watched as each child’s destiny manifested depending on how the child interpreted the world.

Ziraba and Ssemata abandoned rural life in the 40s for the opportunity of a better life in the city. But because Kampala was looking for skilled people, they fell into Katanga—a fissure between Makerere, Nakasero, and Mulago Hills—and formed a family. Whenever it rained and the water from the hills overwhelmed Katanga, Ziraba would say, “God is sweating. We’re armpit hair.” Katanga was so named by Makerere University students. To them, the valley was as rich in female flesh and cheap alcohol as Katanga Valley in the Congo was in minerals. Katanga serviced and watered the largely male students at the university.

For a long time, Ziraba gave birth to boys until Nnamata came along. Then, a friend led her to a traditional healer who “tied” her womb. All the healer, a woman, asked for was a pad soiled with menstrual blood. Ziraba never saw exactly what the woman did with the pad but she was eventually shown where it was buried in case she changed her mind.

After independence, Uganda—a European artifact—was still forming as a country rather than as a kingdom in the minds of ordinary Gandas. They were lulled by the fact that Kabaka Muteesa II was made president of the new Uganda. Nonetheless, most of them felt that “Uganda” should remain a kingdom for the Ganda under their kabaka so that things would go back to the way they were before Europeans came. Uganda was a patchwork of fifty or so tribes. The Ganda did not want it. The union of tribes brought no apparent advantage to them apart from a deluge of immigrants from wherever, coming to Kampala to take their land. Meanwhile, the other fifty or so tribes looked on flabbergasted as the British drew borders and told them that they were now Ugandans. Their histories, cultures, and identities were overwritten by the mispronounced name of an insufferably haughty tribe propped above them. But to the Ganda, the reality of Uganda as opposed to Buganda only sank in when, after independence, Obote overran the kabaka’s lubiri with tanks, exiling Muteesa and banning all kingdoms. The desecration of their kingdom by foreigners paralyzed the Ganda for decades.

As Buganda faded and Uganda started to take root, it became clear that education was paramount in the new nation. Attitudes toward the schooling of children among commoners started to change to the point where educating children was the same as putting money away into a pension fund. By the late 50s, fathers close to European civilization realized that an educated daughter made for a better pension fund than an educated son. Apparently, sons, after sucking their parents dry, fled the family nest without a backward glance. Ssemata and Ziraba tried to educate their children. However, term after term, their sons brought home uninspiring grades. One day, after looking at his brood’s school reports Ssemata said, “Only my girl takes after my sharpness, the boys opted for their maternal dimness.”

Ssemata’s sons, having been vexed by study, asked if every successful man in the world was educated. When the answer came back negative, they dropped out of school. Besides, education took too long to yield results. They could start trading slowly-slowly. Ssemata laughed, “I’ve put food on your plates but you couldn’t pick it up to eat: what makes you think that you will hunt, cook, and feed yourselves?”

“Nonetheless, it still rains in the desert.” Ziraba, accused of being the source of the boys’ dimness, now defended them.

And so the boys prowled Kampala streets looking for opportunity and luck while Nnamata sailed through the classes. At fifteen—they started primary school at nine in those days—she was in her final year of primary school. Ssemata planned to sell some of his land in the village so he could send her to a Catholic boarding secondary school for girls. There, she would be safe from the potential landmines of puberty. He was not a demanding father: Nnamata was only a girl. If she could become a nurse, a teacher, or even a secretary and catch a rich husband he would be content. Educated men now wanted their wives neither “raw,” without education, nor “well done,” with too much schooling.

But before Nnamata got to the nuns’ boarding school, puberty set in and upset Ssemata’s plans. She rounded out into a body made for pleasure. Her skin smoothened and shone. Her rear was generous and provocative. When she walked, it rose in such sharp challenge and then dropped in scornful regret. Men, convinced that she shook it on purpose, twitched their legs as she walked past and swore under their breaths, “If I ever get my hands on her . . .”

Katanga was not the place for a young girl to possess that kind of body if she wanted to put nature on hold. Some men still thought that to keep a girl in school past the age of fifteen was an act against nature.

Ssemata watched this dialogue between Nnamata’s body and the men with a sharp eye. First, he put her in long shapeless skirts, then under curfew. He made it known all over Katanga that he kept a sharp machete at the ready by filing it publicly every evening. Once, he chased a lad wearing just his briefs. The lad, thinking that Nnamata was bathing in the communal bathroom, had put his case to her in poetry. Ssemata had listened in silence. When he could no longer take it he had whispered, “Wait there, I am coming.” He barely managed to get into his briefs and pick up the machete. He chased the lad down Katanga’s muddy corridors swearing, “I’ll kill someone if you don’t leave my girl alone.”

As clever as she was Nnamata was not strong in mathematics. Mr. Puti Kintu, the math teacher at Bat Valley Primary School, offered to give her free private tuition.

“Nnamata is our star student this year,” he had told Ssemata on parents’ day. “But math is a problem. I am ready to sacrifice an hour every day after school if she can stay behind.”

Ssemata bowed and bowed in gratitude, forgetting that teachers were not shepherds, that even if they were, once in a while shepherds had been known to eat the lambs in their care. To Nnamata, Mr. Kintu was a teacher, a grown-up, and he was helping her. So when he pushed her against the wall breathing, hmm, you girls always say no. Yet you shake your buttocks like that? Respect, gratitude, and fear paralyzed her. Afterwards, the math lessons continued and Nnamata kept quiet. Normally, silence washed things like that away, but this time it watered it and the deed grew. It was not long before Katanga was laughing, and, like everyone else in Katanga, her father did not buy Nnamata’s story of rape. If he raped you, why didn’t you tell us?

At first, in private negotiations, Ssemata said to Mr. Kintu, the math teacher, “I am a fellow man: I come to you with understanding.” But Mr. Kintu thought it was ridiculous that he should be asked to pay a father and marry a girl who had not completed her primary education. He would look after his child, no doubt about that, but there was no way he was marrying a slum girl. Mr. Kintu did not realize that the issue had nothing to do with defiling a minor. Rather, it was about theft from a pension fund. Had Mr. Kintu paid the money to the wronged father and married his daughter, Ssemata would have congratulated Nnamata for pulling a teacher so easily. When he did not, Ssemata, at last, believed that Nnamata was forced. By 1961, when Isaac was born, Mr. Kintu was serving time in Luzira Maximum Prison. Contemplating his children after the tragedy unfolded, Ssemata spat, “Such wasted sex. I should have slept instead!”

The English saying that a man shouldn’t place all his eggs in the same basket suddenly made sense. A few months later, Ssemata left Ziraba to find another basket in which to place his eggs.

Ziraba had another daughter, Tendo. The pregnancy took her by surprise. When she asked the friend who had taken her to the healer what happened, it was put to her that sometimes a determined child can hoodwink even the strongest medicine.

Nnamata, whose last lesson in school was on the law of gravity, named her child Isaac Newton. Because her math teacher was Mr. Kintu, she baptized him Isaac Newton Kintu. In the name Isaac Newton lay all Nnamata’s vanished dreams. But Isaac Newton was an ugly baby. Even Nnamata agreed with her brothers, “Yes, mine’s the ugliest child the sun has ever shone on.” For a while, assured by her mother that all newborns are hideous, she waited for Isaac to transform. Six months after his birth, when Isaac Newton failed to turn into a cute baby, when Nnamata could not find anything on the little body to anchor her love, she ran away into the night.