Chapter Six
I have no way of knowing what you understand about the bonds of family that are found throughout much of Africa. Perhaps you might be aware that we all appear to have countless uncles and aunts, and when you press us for clarification of those relationships, the answers are often quite confusing. The truth is that we see family slightly differently from the way many in the West view it.
Let me give you an example. My sister has a son, and we call him Cow Boy. That is because he comes from Rukungiri, and people there look after cows. Cow Boy is my nephew, but I would only ever describe him as such to a muzungu—a white person—because that is the language that person would understand. To anyone else I would say, “This is Cow Boy. He is my son.”
Your brother’s child is your own child. Your brother’s daughter is your own daughter. Even if your brother has abandoned that daughter, she remains your daughter.
You have to understand this about the strength and reach of the bonds of family to truly appreciate the horror of what happened to my sister. To betray your own child—whether she was born to you or your brother or sister—and hand her over to killers defeats common sense, defeats compassion, defeats all natural feelings that exist between parents and children. It is incomprehensible how someone would betray their own daughter. It is inconceivable, brutal, and wholly against nature.
You might now be thinking of images of Africans holding machetes. You might be reminded of the reports of genocide that emerged from my mother’s homeland, Rwanda, where neighbors who had lived happily side by side for generations became caught up in one hundred days of murderous evil. Among the stories of killings in churches and schools, there were tales of family members killing their own. Do not think that because Africa has bled heavily like this over recent years we are in any way used to it. Do not think that the trauma and the pain are any less intense. Do not think that we are numbed to grief.
The killing of my sister was the culmination of jealousy, envy, and a long-standing conflict that evolved into a violent hatred and ended in murder. It had been eleven years since my father abandoned us, almost thirteen since we attacked him as he choked my mother on the floor of our home. And the appetite for death was not satiated by the murder of Peninah.
When I saw her body stranded in the lake of slowly congealing blood, I did not know who had killed her, but my mind reached for someone to accuse. My father? He was two hundred miles away so it could not have been him. Eric? The fact that he was missing was interesting, but he could have been dead as well. Assassins? It was possible, but I discounted the idea. I thought it might have been robbers who killed her; after all, people knew they were a family who had money.
I could not be sure. All I knew was that I wanted to leave. I picked up Katherine from her mother’s side and walked out. Among the crowd I found an aunt of mine and handed the crying baby over. I did not think twice about it. This aunt would look after Katherine and the other children as if they were her own. That is the way things are in Uganda.
When my mother came to the house she could not find me. I had already left and walked away to kill myself.
The road from Rwanjogori to Peninah’s house at Kantare follows the Rushoma River as it flows down from Lake Kanyabaha toward the waterfall at Kisiizi. I decided not to turn left out of Peninah’s house and head back the way I had come, but instead turned right and continued along the river, crossing over to the other side to avoid being seen.
I tried a lake I knew of. But there were people around—washing clothes, tending cattle—and I discounted the idea of killing myself there. It was too public, and somebody was bound to stop me.
A little farther on, I came to a bend in the river that gave some seclusion. I used my sweater as a noose and tried to hang myself, but it did not work. There was too much give in the fabric, too little resistance to my neck.
I felt crushed, out of my mind. I crossed back over the river and bought a bottle of penicillin from a trading post with a view to swallowing it whole and having it choke me. But I thought better of it as I held the glass container in my hand; it might take a long time and be painful.
The name of the river—Rushoma—means “the one which swallows.” What does it swallow? The word can be applied to either people or things. I do not know who first named it this, but the waters are deep and steady. Yet whenever I thought I had found a place where I could drown myself, someone would appear and I would change my mind. At every stage I sat and wept. Some people would say hello because they did not know me or what had happened. It was surprisingly normal to sit there and talk to strangers while within me my head and heart craved death.
I thought about Peninah. I thought about my mother. I thought about my sisters. They had all endured so much, they had all become so well acquainted with pain … what use was there in my carrying on? Inside I was nothing but anger, bitterness, and shame.
As I have said before, my sister Peace had been forced to marry. She was studying to be a lay reader when, coming home one night, those boys had carried her to their friend. She had been defiled by the time we arrived, and the bride price was the only form of vengeance we could take. We left with all their cows—seven of them—and lots of goats, but it was no victory and no type of justice. The marriage has never been good, and after nine daughters and a second wife, her husband even tried to kill her with a machete.
Another sister—Justine—was raped and became pregnant, but the man who raped her would not marry her. She ran away and married an alcoholic, but he sold his land and drank his money. They eventually had four children, but when he failed to pay his taxes he was sent to prison and died there. The people who bought the land chased her away. We tried to help, and we brought her and the children back to the village. Years later she was ordained as a deacon and life is better now, but in the aftermath of Peninah’s murder all I could see was pain. There was so much of it in our family. We had no rights, no privileges, no voice in the village. Anybody could do and say anything to us. What clearer proof did I need than the corpse I had just left behind?
Could I take my vengeance on these people who had hurt us all? Could I fight back and hurt them? I could not. What power I had was limited. And so I tried on suicide plans like a young girl tries on a scarf, but I knew I was only playing. I followed the river all the way to the place where it tears over the rocks. I was tormented, worn out, crying, weeping; I had lost all my senses and felt as though I had no purpose in life. Death was my only option.
Nature is an intimidating force. The waterfall at Kisiizi is just as fierce today as it was then. There is a hospital at the bottom of the two-hundred-foot drop, a very good hospital that has been there for years. But when I was seventeen, as I walked up to the top of the waterfall and perched on the low wall, preparing to throw myself over, I was not thinking about the doctors below. I was thinking about the many, many people whose lives had ended there. I was hoping to join them.
All kinds of desperate people, from victims of robberies gone wrong to unmarried pregnant girls, have been thrown over the Kisiizi waterfall from that low wall. It is a place where death has reigned. Each month throughout my childhood, one or two bodies would wash up in the foam beneath.
I was not alone as I looked down on the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall. A woman I knew had approached me. Aidah Mary Tasiime Entungwaruhanga was an old friend of my mother. She had been there when I was born in the banana plantation. In fact, she was the one who named me Birungi. She used to carry me on her back whenever she visited my mother when I was a small boy. She was an amazing Christian and loved me dearly. She taught me Christian songs for children and many Bible stories.
She had seen me approaching the falls and called out to me above the noise of the water hurling itself down onto the rocks below. She had obviously heard about Peninah.
“Your mother is in grief, your father is gone, your sister is dead. What are you doing?”
I did not answer, but we both knew why I was there. She spoke again:
“Your mother lost every relative in Rwanda. She has the horror of trying to live without family around to support her, and she was with her husband who mistreated her and abandoned her. But she stuck to you children. How will she feel when she finds out what you have done? You are her only hope, her only eyes. What will she feel when she learns of your body on the rocks below?”
I told her about Peninah and about the pain and about how my chance of education was now gone. I told her that my life was already over.
“My son,” she replied, “there are so many people who are educated who are useless, but others who have no education but whom God helps. Why throw away your life for education? Peninah is killed but Jesus is not dead. Was it not Jesus who took care of you while your father abandoned you?”
Mary left, and I was faced with a choice: Would I still consider suicide, or was there another path ahead of me? I stayed at the wall, the noise becoming increasingly overwhelming. I cried and cried and remembered the words about me being like a duck and a pig. I remembered the Sunday school verses about what happened to Judas. I searched within but could find no hope, no future, no purpose, no protection, no security. Life was simply over. Enough was enough.
But I also knew that I would not kill myself. I did not want to hurt my mother any more. I did not want to go to hell like Judas. I wanted others to take my place in death. I would return as a murderer, a killer, an angry man, with hatred in my heart. At that point I think I must have become a killer in my heart, like so many men who had stood there and smiled at death.
It was agony to do so, but I abandoned my plan of suicide. In its place I made a vow to live until I took revenge and killed those who plotted Peninah’s death.
I see now that I walked away with a civil war going on inside me. I understand today that bitterness is food for demons, and I can see from that point on I felt like a different person, incapable of controlling myself. Bitterness is one of the most crushing mental problems in a person’s life. It is a deadly poison that needs to be brought into the light and addressed, but instead too often we feed it, like a crying baby, holding it close and giving it strength.
The way we conduct our funerals in western Uganda changes from region to region, but in general we will have a period of public grieving that lasts about eight days. In the middle there is the funeral, and on either side all members of the community must visit the grieving relatives as they sit in their house. There are many tears and many, many people around. And at the end of the eight days, the public tears are over.
It did not take long for us to understand that Peninah had not been killed by robbers. As we sat in her house—in the same room in which she had been murdered—and received visitors, people began to talk. By the time we buried her, midway through the eight-day mourning period, we knew that she had been killed by hired thugs and that those thugs were paid by people we knew.
Some people, when they know their guilt has been exposed, will beg for forgiveness. Some will try to retreat and hide. Others will hold out their chests and revel in the knowledge that their exploits are now common knowledge. This is what some of my relatives chose to do. As we sat around the fire at the funeral, we heard them talk in the crowd:
“See them come down from their high places. Ha! They thought they were so great, but look at them now!”
My lust for revenge flared as I heard these words. Could I pick up a knife and kill them? Could I get just one of them and make them pay for their hatred? I was too small to fight or kill, and I had no father or older man who would support me if I was fool enough to attempt it. So I chose otherwise. I chose to avoid them at all costs, to never visit them again, and to curse the day I was born. They had murdered my sister, and in my heart I had killed them, too.
But that was not the end of it. Gradually I started to dwell on another thought: What if they wanted to kill me as well? Why stop at Peninah? Why did I think this was the end of the matter?
My past was dark. My future was dark. My present was nothing like it was supposed to be. I had gained a place at high school, but without the funds to cover the fees and other costs, I was left with no option but to stay at home. Eric had no more contact with us. On the instruction of their employers, the soldiers had warned him not to continue supporting my mother, and he stuck to their instructions. I had no status in society; my age-mates had long since started at high school and even completed it. They had moved on, yet I remained. Strangers seemed to despise me. Even the trees laughed at me. I felt abandoned; first my father, and now this. Nobody was there alongside me, and the only voices I could hear were of those who taunted us for our short-lived improvement in fortunes.
My plan was clear. I made a list of the people I would kill in order to avenge the death of my sister and the betrayal by our father. The list had nineteen names on it. All I needed was some time and a gun, and I would wipe them out.
As my younger classmates went off to high school, I stayed at home. For a whole year it was very difficult. I felt unloved, cheap, and small. I was dying every day, thinking about school all the time. It was as if the real me died that year. Slowly, through a thousand cuts, my empty life was locked into a cycle that served only to remind me of my father’s brutality.
My self-esteem was completely crushed, the pain even more acute as the sight of schoolboys reminded me that I was not an academic failure but a financial one. I felt hated, rejected, useless, without purpose. I remembered all the things people had said about me and went into a deep depression. It caused me to drink heavily, but whenever I was sober I could see that the problems were just the same.
I developed a volcanic anger, such that anything small made me fly off into a rage. In a way I believe I lost my mind. At times I would become so distracted by my inner civil war that I would miss a particular turn I was meant to take and end up a mile or two away from where I wanted to be. I would talk to myself as I walked, ranting in particular about my father. Even later on in life I would have anniversaries of bitterness, and whenever a significant date came around, like Peninah’s death or the time our father left us, I would go back into the depression.
I heard that my father and his wives and children celebrated my sister’s funeral. My anger only increased. Two of my brothers, James and Robert, fell into such a depression after my sister’s death that they became alcoholics and later died because of it; James died of liver cancer and Robert died of alimentary canal cancer. The story of the impact of my sister’s brutal murder on my sisters and brothers would fill another book.
The pain did not stop. Some of my sisters were raped during this time, and it was devastating. I was enraged yet powerless. I knew the people in my village who were attacking them, but I could do nothing to stop it. They used my sisters as toilet paper. The Bakiga (my tribe) was a male-dominated society, fiercely patriarchal. The cultural laws favor and defend men while supporting the oppression of women. Women are treated as second class, and because a dowry is paid before marriage, many are treated like property. They are oppressed, enslaved, segregated, and treated as beasts of burden. They are sex machines without rights, not empowered financially, intellectually, or politically. They are vulnerable and exposed; domestic violence against women is so deep—even in Christian homes—that there is no political will to stop it. We would need another book to talk about that as well.
It was such a hard year in my life, and it set in motion the habits of a destructive lifestyle: drinking, being angry, shouting at people, not greeting them, killing people in my heart, seeing death all around, spending energy I had within me on vowing to kill.
My behavior began to have an impact on the rest of my family, so much so that eventually my mother devised an audacious plan to transform me. She would work even harder than she had been—as if that were possible—and raise the money to send me to school. She worked so hard, as did my sisters and brothers. They dug crops, they brewed alcohol, and they sold whatever they could to raise money. My sisters even prostituted themselves. I will never forget the sacrifice they made for my education.
They had nobody to defend them, and they were fighting to improve life for somebody else. They made so many sacrifices that invited such pain into their lives. I did what I could, raising money by trapping moles or burning charcoal. Within a year we had raised enough money to send me to school.
You cannot fight the sort of shame or humiliation that comes from prostitution. Some of my sisters became pregnant and some had abortions. Their actions showed me that I was not alone, but it also reinforced my understanding of the world as a place where pain, suffering, and abuse were as omnipresent as the hills that hemmed us in.
As for me, I was a powder keg. Later I gained a glimpse of my future. I met some soldiers fighting to support the exiled opponent of Idi Amin, a man called Milton Obote. I joined the youth wing of his party and was told that if I completed my studies, I could join the army, where I would be given my own gun. This was it, the key to my plan. Once I had a gun and a soldier’s badge, I could work my way through my list, from one to nineteen. The blood would flow and justice would be done. This was how I would gain revenge.