Chapter Two
I have many names—six in all. Like most people in my country I have a biblical or Christian name, only instead of Paul, Daniel, or David, my parents chose Medad—a minor character from the book of Numbers who prophesied to his fellow Israelites (Num. 11:26). My mother chose that name. It means “loving and compassionate.” Then there is Kanyarutooki, which means “born in a banana plantation.” I suppose it was an obvious choice for my mother as she squatted beneath the canopy of the trees, hoping that this next labor would produce the boy my father so desperately wanted. The women who helped her give birth saw I was a healthy boy and said I was Birungi, which means “good things.” My mother said, “I got this boy through prayer, and he is from Jesus,” so she called me Birungi-bya-Yesu, which means “good things from and for Jesus.” When I became a born-again Christian in the 1980s this name gained more meaning, and it was the one people used most when they talked about me. But I shorten it, so I am officially called Birungi. That is my third name. Like many pastors here in Uganda I am also called Jackson. It is just one of those cultural traditions that has taken root: If you think your son might end up being a priest, call him Jackson and it can only help. My father gave me two names as well—one nice, the other strange. He called me Barisigara, which means “the one who will stay,” and Zinomuhangi, which means “they have a creator.” This last name always confused me: At times I thought it was a reference to the incredible power of God, but knowing my father I think it far more likely he was trying to antagonize his fellow Christians by hinting that there might be more than one creator. I always preferred it when he called me Barisigara. I liked the notion that he felt he and I had a future together.
In our culture we believe that a name shapes a character. Years ago, before I was born, there was a habit among some people of burdening unwanted children with the most horrible of names: Bitanaki (vomit), Rwamiceeno (be cursed forever), Bafwokworora (let them die), Zinkuratiire (sorrow follows me), Zinkubire (trouble surrounds me).
Thankfully that practice died out with the arrival of the East African Revival in 1935. A lot of things changed at that time, and the ripples of the moving of God’s Spirit continued to be visible for many years to come. Years later, in 1982, they would even reach a young man on a bus whose life was in desperate need of change and revolutionary forgiveness. My own children have redemptive names: Barnabas Enoch Kiruhura-Taremwa (Jesus never fails), Joel Elijah Kiruhura-Akanyetaba (Jesus answered me), Festo Kiruhura-Nimurungi (Jesus is good), Esther Margaret Kiruhura-Akatukunda (Jesus loved us), and Omega Jabez Kiruhura-Nomwesigwa (Jesus is faithful).
And so I, Medad Kanyarutooki Birungi Jackson Barisigara Zinomuhangi, popularly known as Birungi-bya-Yesu, or just plain Birungi, would sit with my father at the trading post in the village of Kashumuruzi. My father, Boniface, would be drinking beer brewed from sorghum, while my head would drift down onto his lap, wandering off to sleep as he told me how I was his Barisigara, his one who would survive, his son who would remain and outlast all the others. He would boast about me to the other drinkers, calling me his little man, the one who, though only three years old, had a fine future to look forward to. He would get drunk on the beer, but his words alone were enough to make my head feel like the morning fog that sinks itself into the valley floor when the weather has turned a certain way.
He would carry me home on his shoulders, and I would feel like a king.
I doubt there is any truly royal ancestry within my ancient family history, but my mother, Fridah, was a Tutsi from Rwanda. For centuries the Tutsis and Hutus lived happily alongside each other, intermarrying and barely noticing their different tribal ancestries. But a century ago, when Belgian colonists looked for a way to control the country, they chose to divide and conquer by oppressing the Hutu and elevating the Tutsi to fill all the positions of power. Within fifty years the project was starting to come apart at the seams, and the Hutus were encouraged by the Belgian colonizers to exact revenge on their former Tutsi oppressors.
The genocide that ravaged my mother’s country in 1994, leaving over one million dead in just one hundred days, was not the first of its kind. There had been many acts of appalling violence against the Tutsis in the decades before, and my mother had fled her homeland in 1952, escaping across the mountains, heading sixty miles north on her own to the safety of Uganda. Behind her the machetes had claimed the lives of most of her family. She was sixteen years old.
In recent years, Uganda has been a safe haven for refugees from many countries—not only Rwanda but also the Congo and Sudan. Of course there was a time when people fled our own country as well, desperate to escape the brutality of Idi Amin, the dictator who brutalized my homeland throughout much of the 1970s. I was born in 1962, so I can clearly remember what life was like in those days. I still have the scars.
My mother crossed the border in the lush mountains near Kabale—a region known for its mountain gorillas, beautiful hills, and cool climate. People call it the Switzerland of Africa—because of these last two, not the gorillas. Once in the town of Kabale she became a house girl for the general secretary of the district, the Honorable Ngorogoza, a man who had power and influence. He did not pay her, but by allowing her to work for him and live in his compound he granted her a degree of security that she badly needed. While she was working there she met my father.
There has been a phobia of the Rwandese for many years. There is real hatred for them among us Ugandans, and the common racial stereotype has put them down as travelers: rootless, penniless, jobless, barbaric, backward, primitive. Many Rwandans have been forced to take desperate steps in order to survive, and in those days of exile and genocide there were stories of men handing over their daughters to marry less-than-respectable men just so they could receive a dowry that would allow them to eat.
My father was not an educated man at all, and I have already told you how he was a trader in animal skins. But he was not prejudiced. In my mother he found someone who was truly beautiful, intelligent, and spirited. Being a businessman he knew that at two cows, the bride price for Fridah Mary Tibanwenda made her a bargain.
By the time they married and moved to my father’s home in Rwanjogori it was no longer a place crawling with maggots. It is a fertile land, like the rest of western Uganda, and the climate is perfect, offering three harvests a year. The sorghum grows twice as high as a man, its plume like that which crowns the crane that sits in the middle of our national flag. Sorghum is good for making porridge and alcohol as well as for thatching houses. It is not the only crop we have: Pumpkins, red peppers, Irish potatoes, beans, eggplant, matoke, towering avocado trees, chili peppers, berries, bananas, and marijuana are all intercropped, seemingly scattered and sowed at random. In truth each plot of land is well known by each owner, and just as we know what grows where, we also know where the land boundaries are. Graves are often marked by small, low-growing plants that would probably look to you like weeds. But we know how to read the story the land tells.
Looking after all this land is generally considered a woman’s job. It is hard work, but my mother had been used to it all her life. Nevertheless I do wonder whether she had hoped for something better from my father. When they were first married, my father would leave home for a month at a time, taking his skins with him on the back of his bicycle. He had different women in the various towns and cities he would stay in, and my mother knew some of what was going on. I do not know whether he tried to keep it a secret from her or whether he saw it as part of his rights as a man. His own great-great-great-grandfather, Ruhiiga, was the one who had taken thirty-six wives before he died and left over one hundred children. Perhaps polygamy was in his genes. Or perhaps that is just an excuse.
Either way, my mother had no right to complain. She was alone in Uganda, with no parents, no brothers, no sisters, and consequently nowhere to run. That meant my father could do what he liked to her and she could never escape. While he was not racist, his family were prejudiced, and my mother was despised by her in-laws, particularly his sisters, for being a Rwandese. Even today many people blame the Rwandese for any problem that surrounds them. Blame it on the Rwandese, they say. Only today it just sounds hollow and foolish on their lips. Rwanda is one of the best-organized countries on the continent, with great leadership that has dealt well with corruption. They are getting their prestige now.
Being my father’s first wife, my mother found life good at the start of their marriage—or, at least, it was better than it was to become. They had about ten acres of land to farm, and my father was able to make good money selling his animal skins around the country.
Yet my father was a drunkard, one often with too much money in his pocket, which is always dangerous. He started drinking more and more when he was away on his business trips, and there is truth in the saying that alcoholism and violence sleep in the same bed. In a culture where women have no rights, a man who fathers only daughters sees himself as something of a failure. With three girls before me, my father was full of rage. Part of that was expressed in his drinking, part in his affairs, neither of which pleased my mother. As she heard more of the details about what he was up to on his business trips, she would fight back. She would tell him that it was wrong, that she did not like it. The Tutsis had been the leaders in Rwanda, and their children grew up as independent thinkers, used to speaking their minds. My mother may have been a woman and a refugee, but in her head and heart she was an individual worthy of respect and with something to say. But she had married a man who expected that if he spoke twice, his wife would speak only once. There was great conflict between them. He wanted absolute submission; she wanted respect.
What brought them together initially? My mother wanted to marry a man who was not married to anyone else. She may have left her family’s bodies unburied in her homeland, and she may have been utterly alone in a foreign land, but she did have some self-respect. And in my father she found someone who, generally, was a nice man. He was clever, generous, and friendly. He was an extrovert by nature, and short, slender, and handsome in appearance. But he did not want anyone to boss him about. He did not expect that anyone would question his drinking or his spending, his philandering or his violence.
Domestic violence in our culture never goes by that name. We call it “discipline,” but whatever you decide to call it, the rift between my parents soon became a chasm, one that was full of darkness. Just as he rejected his wife, so my father rejected the children she bore him. And having rejected his family, he then decided to start again with another wife. Violence became a familiar feature of home life.
Usually when a man takes a new wife, the previous wife gets rejected. And when he takes another, the air turns heavy with gossip, slander, and competition. As each wife tries to shore up her position and gain just the slightest advantage over the others, the atmosphere around the compound becomes toxic. The children are often the victims, with blame being heaped upon them as wives escalate petty disputes in the hope of scoring points over a rival. And because all of the wives and children share a compound and farm land, the potential for conflict is great.
My father ended up marrying five wives and had many children: twenty-six girls and six boys. With each wife we lost him a fraction more—losing what little we had left of his favor, his support, his money. And the more he slipped away from us, the easier it was to write him off. Eventually we stopped trusting him altogether. In time he became a foreigner in our home. And that was when the violence increased.
Our father would beat us as often as he wanted. A week would never go by without violence, and sometimes we would be given extra. The smallest of mistakes was enough to cause his eyes to narrow, his breath to turn shallow, and his hands to reach out for whatever weapon was closest. If a stick was at hand, he would use it, but failing that he might improvise with a stool, an iron bar, or just his hands. Like us, my mother was not allowed to defend herself. She had just two choices: either run away to hide in the thickets of the banana trees (and postpone the beating for another time) or cower in the corner, raise her arms above her head to protect her neck, and hope the blows would soon come to an end. If we crouched quietly and did not attempt to shout or look up at him, he would often be finished within about ten minutes. He would beat our mother until his wrath was satisfied. Sometimes he had a lot of wrath to satisfy.
All of us have scars on our bodies that came from those days, each one the result of our father’s anger. If we were late bringing back the water or firewood, we were beaten. If he saw my sisters with a boy, they were beaten. If we dropped something, we were beaten. At times he would tie us up in the granary—a raised wooden structure in the compound that allowed us to keep our provisions off the ground and out of reach of animals. Our father would tie us by our hands, bound at the wrists, hoisting us up so that we were hanging, defenseless. Those beatings were particularly painful, and I remember hearing my father shouting at us as his palms, fists, and the backs of his hands struck pain into us. “Your mother cannot help you!” he would scream as she stood by, watching, helpless.
When my father was beating my mother we would make uproar and call the neighbors to come from across the valley. They were happy to come, thank God. They would talk to my father, and my mother would run and hide among the trees. At times we would know that his violence was about to erupt, particularly when we would hear him coming home after drinking down at the trading post. He would shout and curse, and my mother would tell us to be quiet, strain her ears for the faintest sound, and then send us out to hide. If we were too late and he came back to find us eating—or the meal cooking in the pots—he would kick whatever he could, scattering food across the floor. If he was not too tired, and we had run away soon enough, he might chase us out into the trees. My mother learned how to make a shelter that would help us remain hidden in the darkness as well as protect us from the rain. She would get banana leaves and bend them over to make a small canopy that we would all sleep under. At least we were safe from this predator, even if we were exposed to many others: cobras, hyenas, jackals.
If we were at home and my father came back but did not want to beat us, he might want us to sing for him. He would wake us in the middle of the night and demand that we sing him to sleep. It could take a long time, and even after he did eventually pass out we would sleep around him because if he woke up and noticed that we had stopped we would have to start up again quickly or suffer the consequences.
It must be said that, if a man behaved like this today in Uganda, the police would arrest him. But in those days, there was little that anyone would do. My mother begged the local leaders to intervene, but they never helped. In their eyes this was just a case of a man doing what men did, and of a Rwandese woman having an over-inflated sense of her own self-worth.
She thought about taking us back to Rwanda, but life was getting even harder for Tutsis back there, and no matter how cruel the beatings, they were better than the threat of death by a machete-wielding mob. It was not until 1999 that I first went back to Rwanda, in search of any of my mother’s relatives. I could not find a single one.
And so we had no choice but to endure the abuses of my father. I still do not know quite what caused his bile, but his rage was horrific. It was not limited to physical acts either. He also employed verbal violence, using abusive language all the time. Those sorts of words delivered to a child can really affect self-esteem, and for us they added emotional insult to physical injury. I still tell people that in those days it was as if he had a degree in Teargasology: Just as he proved when he staged the dramatic rejection of us by the pickup trucks, he was capable of unleashing verbal bombs that would leave us stunned and in tears, almost completely helpless. It created chronic negativity, and it took me years to begin to recover. Later the physical and emotional abuse were joined by financial abuse. Despite the fact that we were trying to live without salt, sugar, or school fees, our father would be drinking every day.
We prayed in those days. We prayed for him to die. The government cared for widows and orphans, but we did not count. My father was there in body, even though he was financially and emotionally useless. We used to feel jealous when we heard about other children losing their parents, and we dreamed of the day when we could bury him. You must know that he tried to kill me before I was born, aiming drunken kicks at my mother’s pregnant belly. Nine times during her pregnancy my mother lost blood. Nine times she thought I was dead. He even refused to give my mother money to travel to the hospital, leaving her no choice but to squat beneath the banana trees and hope that from her bruised belly would come a healthy boy.
There is a proverb from Nigeria: If your face is swollen from the beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Perhaps I might agree with this a little more today, but as my father’s rage, drinking, and number of wives increased, smiling was the last thing we were going to do. By the time I was six my sisters and I knew he was getting out of control, and his attacks on our mother were particularly savage. We realized that if they were allowed to continue, then she would surely end up dead. And where would that leave us? We would either be killed too or thrown out of our home and left to take our chances in the wild. Either way, we knew that our mother was the only person on earth who could protect us. We must protect her as well.
We made a pact that if it appeared that her life was in danger, we would do all we could to step in. This might not seem like a controversial plan today, but in our culture, in those times, a child who fought his parent was an abomination of nature. We had endured so many hits and punches and abuses, called for help so many times, and nobody had even once told us to fight back. It was simply an unthinkable option.
We knew that it was a risk, that if we fought our father there would be consequences for us all—severe ones. But doing nothing and allowing the violence to escalate would lead us to death anyway. What choice did we have?
The time to act came one night. We knew he was going to kill her. I do not remember what started it, and it never really mattered anyway. His rage was an inflamed sore that took only the mildest glance to prompt a reaction. What I do remember is seeing my mother—my beautiful mother—lying on the ground inside our house. Her feet were twitching and thrashing like snakes in a sack. My father sat on her chest, his hands around her neck. No sound came from her other than a strange choking noise. She would die if we did not act.
As one, my sisters and I launched our attack. We picked up every weapon we could: a stool, a cup, a plate. My sisters were biting him, forcing him off my mother, who was curled up on one side. They had him on the ground now, and I saw a stick that was halfway into the fire. I pulled it out. I held it with two hands and all my strength as I stuck it into his thigh. I do not know how long it was there—perhaps a few seconds or as long as half a minute—but I do remember the smell of burning flesh.
It was not the alcohol that made him slow to react. I do not believe he was as drunk as he made out. I think it was the shock of his children fighting back that made him pause. Soon he backed off and disappeared for the rest of the night.
We were left with our anger subsiding and our doubt beginning to rise. Yes, we had defended our mother, our only hope, our only eyes, our only encouragement, but at what cost?
Our father went to his sisters and told them what had happened. They nursed him and listened to his account of the story about his terrible children and his abominable first wife. He went from house to house, showing his wounds and telling his story. With every visit, our status in the village slipped a little lower. To the outside world Boniface was a good man—only our neighbors knew the truth about the violence. What kind of curse were we to treat him this way?
Soon he left our mother’s house and never came back again … but not before he told us that he had made a vow: One day he would teach us a lesson. It was a threat we did not take very seriously at the time. We were just relieved his exit meant that, at last, we might be about to enter a period of peace. During this period when he was in self-imposed exile we were happy because at last we got to sleep in the house and to eat food without being bitten, and we lived a life without intimidation or violence.
It was a year and a half before he came back to our house and stayed with us. During that time he appeared in our village only twice. He had traveled a long way west and found land in what is now Queen Elizabeth National Park, in a place that today is called Bunyaruguru. It is a good place to go on safari today, but thirty-five years ago it was an untamed wilderness. The animals were savage, and nobody lived there. The land was cheap, but it was incredibly fertile, even by western Ugandan standards. If our father was going to settle there, then he could not do it alone, even though his own family was so large; he would need others to join him, and his trips back to Rwanjogori were his attempts to recruit settlers. I remember him holding sweet potatoes that were twice as big as normal, holding them up and amazing the crowds with tales of even greater riches on offer.
Eventually he came back and settled once more in our compound, though not in our house. He brought another wife with him, but at least he did not eat our food. We could eat without fear that he would come into our house, and yet in a strange way his presence comforted us; we had a father figure around. Now we were protected from other people who might have abused us.
He became very friendly. As well as large sweet potatoes he brought cloth and sugar with him. As he told us about his plan for a mass migration of our family to this new land, we all agreed that it was a good solution to our problems. He sold his land and his cows and gathered the village together to come and say farewell.
We packed those pickup trucks with such joy and excitement. We had no idea what his plan was. We had no way of knowing quite how bad life was about to become.