The Man Died by Katasi Masembe
I will die this year and join everything that has died already
Last month, maama was stoned to death in a hailstorm as she gardened outside
I’d never seen ice before until I found maama outside, beside her, crushed too were the tomatoes she’d just picked for supper and the balls of ice,
The weather is different now, so different
It’s the rainy season and it's not rained once
Maama died harvesting the last of the food from the garden from the cracked dry earth that should have been mud but was steel
Maama died in a hailstorm in the driest rainy season anyone can remember
We used to sing as we weeded. Nakato and I flinging clumps of mud at each other’s heads as maama tutted, ordering us to put the food into the many sacks we had brought
We would laugh as Nsibambi was chased by the enraged maama hens he loved to agitate. His little legs would pump as he screamingly, laughingly ran from the brave furious charge of the chickens in their daily battle with the little giant.
Placidly the cows chewed cud and the goats screamed for reasons known only to their little goat brains. Life was predictable, safe and happy.
We would break for lunch, eating mangoes off the trees and steamed cassava maama had packed in the banana leaves.
We would pray over our food and look around at our slice of Uganda that we tended and that tended to us in return.
Maama would ask us about school and I would braggingly tell how I was the best at English in the whole school and I was always chosen to read the Bible at assembly by Sister Justine Paul.
Babirye would smile at me before pinching me when mummy looked away.
The man died yesterday.
The Hutu man died who would bring us milk every day.
We would hear him coming from miles away as he jangled the little bell on his bicycle as he approached our home.
Nakato, Nsibambi and I would run through the dew-laden grass, Umoja slippers slapping wetly and loudly towards him
Smiling his shy familiar smile, he would cycle the beaten murram path to our house and lower the steel canister that held the milk
The man was Ugandan by way of Burundi and he would bring us milk every single morning from his long-horned milking cow, Arinaitwe
He had moved from Burundi in 1994 with his two calves and a goat and had settled in our village to begin his life
The man was Hutu in Bujumbura in 1994 and that tells a story of its own in these parts
Maama would speak gently of him to the children of how he had seen more than a child should see and more than a man can outrun,
Maama would pray for the Hutu man every night even as she prayed for Nsibambi to learn to speak and for her mother to heal from old age,
In 1994, the man walked from Bururi to Gitenga to Muyinga to Busia to Us leaning on his long-horned cattle and weeping all the way,
The man had known war and wanted to plant his life in this place and every day, he would milk his cattle and try to forget the bleeding family he could not stop seeing,
The man would bring us milk every day and maama would give him matooke, doodo, cassava and eggs.
When maama left and the gardens died in the dryness of the rainy season, the Hutu man still brought us milk every morning
Wordlessly, he would get off his bicycle and hand us the much-lessened milk and touch Nsibambi’s much-lessened shoulder and mine and head back in the choking clouds of dust that surrounded us all these days
Every day he would touch our shoulders and grieve wordlessly with us, this our Hutu Ugandan brother who could cry no more.
I think he was happy here. Every day, he shared and every day he forgave and every day he healed.
Yesterday, the man died.
The sun that had blessed us and the sun that had given, scorched the man and his Ankole long-horned cattle to ashes.
The rain fell that day, downpours that washed away our little village school. Rains so heavy and destructive it was clear the skies were crying for a man who had not cried since March 1994.
Maybe the anointing destructive rain finally washed the blood of the war from his eyes even as it killed Musisi’s widow 3 kilometres away.
The rain filled and overflowed the cracks of the land left by the sun. Cracks made outside our borders really, but that deepened the most outside our little huts.
The man died slowly and alone but for his prized long-horned cattle.
He looked all round-this man who had known war-at his hut ablaze, at the invisible enemy abroad, and the bones of his cattle (Birungi and Arinaitwe-his oldest friends who had seen him cried dry) and wondered at the absence of a just god
At the trial of God, Tushemereirwe swore, he would ask after his light and why his light mattered so little to the murderer of himself, my mother and our land
As Tushemereirwe rose from his body and floated away from Uganda his home, he saw the unmarked graves of himself and others dotting the land in droves of unearned death and uncelebrated living. And he thought-this man who had known such war and brutality, “Ruhanga wangyee, my God, it is happening again! And this time, they will not report on the African on African savagery as they kill us in our sleep. They are our killers, your chosen people and they will not remember Tushemereirwe nor will they weep for his blameless life snuffed out for their comfort. Ruhanga wangye it is happening all over in places they cannot envision and so cannot care for. Outside our Uganda, they tear us apart, they break us asunder so so casually. Killing and smothering us with so little thought. Do they care that the grave digger and coffin maker are as rich as they were during the war? Do they care that the earth they put us in is harder than the shards of the hardest diamond and does not readily accept our bodies after they have murdered us? They live happily during our extinction, eating and laughing just at they always have, after all, what is one more dead African. Let Africans mourn Africans for we have the same cracked heels. Ruhanga, is it evil if it is thoughtless?”
“Thank God for neighbours that live like family.” Tushemereirwe thought as he floated away, an old young Hutu who found peace and died in agony despite everything.
After the old young man died, the dead and dying alike buried him in the unyielding soil of the dry rainy season,
These casualties of a system that had never given them anything, wrapped Tushemereirwe in the traditional precious bark cloth of a Ugandan burial,
As they struggled to break the ground, they candidly discussed their own preferred deaths to the loud metronome of the death of the earth and their own impending deaths,
These farmers, schoolchildren and dreamers, old and young alike talked louder and louder to be heard over the howling winds the kicked up so much dust and constantly filled their mouths with so much choking dirt that they no longer noticed,
how muffled their words were as they buried and were buried as they stood and spoke to their desire for painless deaths,
Nalweyiso, mother to Nalumansi, prayed for cerebral malaria that would mummify her in senselessness that she could not see the end coming,
Mwebe, a recent returnee from the city, prayed for a car accident. He had seen a fishmonger struck by a lorry on the Kampala-Masaka highway on his way to the city and the suddenness of the man’s death that had so appalled him a month ago now appealed to him in a way he could not really word.
The village priest sat speechless unable to castigate any of them and unable to defend life in any way that defied the stark reality of what remained of their lives. Where was God?
Later, he would be buried alive in a mudslide as he returned from Tushemereirwe’s internment in the hostile earth. As his mouth and ears filled with wet mud and plastic rubbish, he would keep his eyes open in the stifling death filled earth. Where is God? Katonda Oliwa?
The old men and women at the graveside would keep silent. They were the lucky ones.
They had lived through Obote and Amin and lived lives corroded by the atrocities of African war and yet, they had lived lives to the end. They had seen what man can do to man, and yet these invisible tentacles that dug into their earth from across the universe terrified them and left them hopeless and glad to have lived so long and not much more.
What do you do when the earth and lands of your ancestors rain death and misery upon you and you don’t know how to stop it? What if no matter how well you live, your life is in the hands of people who do not even think of you as they laugh, eat, drive and fly... their deadline extended as they stand on your invisible neck? You have walked everywhere your whole life, and your cracked bleeding feet, your nkyakya that rip your thin cotton sheets nightly so that your mattress is covered in little more than shredded cloth will attest to this. Your little grandchild Nakato’s feet are similarly covered in nkyakya as she has walked everywhere her whole life. What have you done to deserve a rejection by the earth that holds your entire bloodline and will soon intern you?
The age of men is ending, starting with you.
The animals and forests watch the funeral processions and feel no pity,
They have been dying and weeping as loudly as they can for some time now,
trying to warn us all.
They too have heard the trumpet calls of extinction
and know that where they go, we will follow, however blameless.
Away from the Hutu man’s burial, the rest of the world mourns, for a man that has died,
They cry, gnash their teeth and rip out their hair
They write elegies for a man who fell to the earth in an explosion of flaming metal debris, petrol and plastic,
“It’s a tragedy I can’t even begin to comprehend!”, they say on podcasts, global stages, telecasts, twitter, et cetera
They are devastated.
A popular podcaster, audibly holding back tears tells a touching tale of a man who upon realising that he was spending so much more time in the awful LA car traffic than he was with his beloved children, decided to take helicopter rides to and from destinations so as to spend more time with his children. A heartbreaking tale of a father’s love for his children and his very understandable transportation decision to spend more time with them and how he is gone because of it.
A man has died
They weep and mourn his shocking death from the fall of his helicopter from the sky.
A man has died
Elegies and tributes are written for a life cut short.
An unexpected and blameless death,
a tragedy for a man so young,
retired at 41.
A man cannot be blamed for taking helicopters to avoid traffic to see more of his children.
You would do the same.
In Shinkolobwe, seven-year-old Tshiluba has died, cracked heels facing the dirt, tattered basketball jersey clogged with mud, clutching a few pellets of cobalt, mouthful of blackened broken teeth, 3 feet away from his father who is sifting still, unknowing that Tshiluba is gone. They are going to buy chapatis and sumbusas on the way home, for supper with the rest of the family. Tshiluba is full however and will never be hungry again.
In rural Nateete, the Hutu man has died and the dead and dying bury him, hoping that someone is left to wrap them in bark cloth when their time comes.
They hope for a quick death even as the private helicopters and aeroplanes of the wealthy choke them and wrap them in poisoned air, slowly killing them as they live.
They will never retire and their heels will always bleed as they walk everywhere they need to live.
In a long dried river bed, Nakato plays jump rope alone,
Nsibambi, Babirye, Tushemereirwe and Maama are long gone.
Monotonously, she plays with her sisal knotted rope to distract from her hunger
her rapidly beating heart on her visible ribs.
Maybe relief workers will come soon.
Maybe she can go back to school soon.
On her cracked, bleeding feet, Nakato at 9 jumps in the dry riverbed.
She plays in what remains of her dying poisoned world
She sings an offkey rendition of one of the songs Sister Justine Paul taught her at school in their dead world
By the end of the month, Nakato and the rest of her village will all be dead. No one will mourn for no one who cares will be left. Even the orchestrators of their demise will not mourn for they will not notice. They will be too busy crying over another dead millionaire who while he lived, daily poisoned the air Nakato finally choked on. After all, dying on the periphery of the spotlight in a burning world not of your creation deserves much fewer tears than you would think.
Dear Nakato, next time try to die closer to a camera
or even better,
try taking a private helicopter to the well every day,
maybe then your death will be noticed and mourned.
Maybe then, they will wrap your body in barkcloth
their tears will soften the earth you are interned in at 9 years old.
In Dodoma, men fall to locusts.
A biblical plague earned on their behalf,
The Nubian bystander dying for the Pharaoh’s sins.
Away from here, they weep for a man who fell from the sky in a private helicopter that he took everywhere so he could spend more time with his beloved children. Tragic that a life so young and fulfilling was ended so soon. Let us pray.
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com
Image Credit: Darran Rees http://darranrees.com