Kampala: On a village called 'City'

Meet Katerwaho, a second generation Ugandan of Kiga descent.

Second generation – because the overseas British province named Uganda was only conjured in his father’s lifetime, making him only the second tier of Ugandan citizen in his family line, despite having ancestors buried in his native Kigezi homeland stretching centuries back.

At the start of the 80s, just after University, Katerwaho secured himself a comfortable berth in the accountancy office of a leading NGO in Uganda’s capital, where his brilliance fast catapulted him through the ranks to head the department.

As is only natural, with seniority came benefits, pecuniary and non – and Katerwaho soon had a dapper young chauffeur at his beck and call, a slate of domestic hands to launder his assortment of three-piece suits, and sons who received Baccalaureate instruction at a reputable International School in Kampala.

Katerwaho’s weekends were almost as busy as his weekdays – spent coasting up and down the Kampala-Kabale highway in a state-of-the-art Merc, superintending over chicken and piggery farms, among a litany of business interests invested at his childhood home.

Otherwise snuggled up in clover, the only source of apprehension in Katerwaho’s universe was the notorious outfit of armed bandits who were reportedly making gains against government forces in the wildernesses of Luweero.

He prayed the government would do its damned job and crush the miscreants.

Fate, however – who takes instruction from no mortal, wasn’t strung-out just as yet.

She still had a number of counter-moves tucked up her sleeve and soon showed her matronly hand, cruelly reminding the presumptuous Katerwaho who wore the petticoat in the marriage.

Tragedy struck in the form of an office call one cloudy morning, informing the plump-cheeked Katerwaho that his elderly father had successfully crossed the great bridge, and was flashing a gap-toothed, wispy-bearded smile as he waved to relations on the other side who were too busy weeping to acknowledge, let alone return it.

As certainly as night follows day, the vultures homed in on the carcass, and in a few months, the armed bandits had overrun the capital and captured the state, going on to formalize their banditry in the country's succeeding three decades.

Katerwaho only had time enough to hurriedly pack a few T-shirts and safari shorts, before scampering across the eastern border to join his haggard wife and petrified sons who’d been sent ahead to Nairobi, from where the family made its way to Toronto, expending their last few dollars in bribing Kenyan officials at the Canadian asylum office.

***

The next two decades were spent on the edge of existence, as Katerwaho and wife struggled to find gainful work, transiting regularly from one menial station to the next.

The family moved from one unsafe low-tier neighborhood to another, oft thrown out for failure to pay rent dues.

The children could only attend a refugee school run by a charity group, and as soon as they were old enough to work, dropped out to find casual jobs.

A few inevitably went into drug dealing and petty crime, winding up penned in state prisons.

Katerwaho, who previously had trouble fitting in his size 58 trousers – was now at risk of being blown away by the strong autumnal gales, in his gauntness.

Truthfully, they had very little going for them in this 'land of promise'.

As if being refugees wasn't bad enough, they were also black. 
And as if being black refugees in a white-man's world weren't an already sufficient burden, they were further condemned to carrying the infinitely heavier cross of poverty. 

Perhaps the only comparative advantage Katerwaho and family possessed was their Kiga ancestry. 

For where feebler mortals would've succumbed to trepidation and lost all phalanges to frostbite, the Katerwahos were sweating profusely and fanning themselves in the coldest months of Canada's frigid winters.


                                                           ***

Much to his initial puzzlement and eventual embitterment, Katerwaho watched former colleagues and ex-golf-club-mates back in Kampala, getting by much better in their ‘new home’.

They had loads of cash to spend, had set up thriving businesses, still drove fancy cars and even sent their children to private Canadian schools.

He eventually mustered the courage to ask a chap he once fired from work for incompetence, back in the days of executive office, to lend him some money.

‘‘You fat cats were busy wasting time setting up farms in the village when you had money, as if Obote would save you when the time came. 

We knew the government would fall, as all African ones eventually do, and decided to save our money abroad. Every man must eventually confront his decisions.’’

The fellow refused to part with a dime.

A few years later, Katerwaho learnt of the ignominious death in Lusaka of his former President and childhood hero, Milton Obote, who was rumored to have spent the exile years surviving on handouts from his host and friend – Kenneth Kaunda.

It appeared that Obote had also failed the clairvoyance test, forgetting to stash his foreign accounts with emergency funds.

As if this were the final blow to his Canadian dream, Katerwaho began taking a keen interest in developments back home, watching for the slightest signs of reversion to normalcy.

So when the military junta, perhaps now secure in its unrivalled political ascendancy, finally unfurrowed its brow and gave the green light for Ugandans in the diasporas to return home, Katerwaho wasted no time in pawning all his worldly goods at a flea market, (just short of his wife and kids), and hopped onto the next Africa-bound flight.

Crestfallen, thinned and penurious – the family winced as they stepped onto the rutted tarmac at Entebbe in the scorching summer of 2004.

Because their upscale Kampala villa had long been confiscated by the junta on behalf of ‘‘the people’’ – the family hired a rickety minivan which slowly creaked its way along to deposit them, two days later, in the terraced hills of Rugamubano Village, Kabale District.

***

Where once stood a resplendent homestead, abutted as far as the eye could see with lush farmland and verdant pastures in which the content mooing of heifers was chorused by the squawking of a thousand chickens and the arrogant grunts of obese hogs – there was now only rubble and a lone decrepit hut through whose multiple perforations the wind’s children whooshed as they played hide and seek.

As the family stood transfixed in disbelief – a frightful death rattle punctured the eerie silence, and an emaciated, half-naked figure emerged shakily from behind the sackcloth curtain draped over the hovel’s entrance.

Their first instinct was to bolt for dear life, convinced that a long-dead ancestor had arisen from the now bushy family cemetery, or that perhaps, in their absence, their village had served as a reverse-evolutionary microcosm in which prehistoric man had re-surfaced from later forms.

On closer inspection, Katerwaho realized that the humanoid relic standing before them – making curious gestures and creasing its face in something akin to a smile betokening familiarity, had the markings of a relative.

Lurking somewhere under the exoskeleton of this ghost in flesh, was his uncle, Mzee Kagwisankuba.

A teary reunion followed shortly – with tears falling more from the realization of the dawning of an assuredly bleak future, than from the family’s mercilessly rough handling at fate’s hands thus.

According to what little Katerwaho could gather from the half-dead, early-man-like creature purporting to be his uncle, selfish relatives (with the convenient exception of said uncle) had sold off all the family property to a rich army colonel close to the first-family, migrating to Kampala where they were, from hearsay, engaged in all manner of odd jobs.

The colonel planned to develop the land soon, and had issued all remaining ‘‘squatters’’ with an eviction notice enforceable within the year.

Katerwaho’s uncle said he didn’t expect to live that long anyway, attempting to laugh and only succeeding in triggering a violent coughing paroxysm.

From the olden days, Katerwaho recalled the colonel as a rowdy youth with a violent streak, who’d been expelled from the village for rampant goat theft.

He had eventually joined the rebel ranks, and had been rumored killed in his first sortie with government troops.

Either rumor is unreliable, or the dead are rising – thought Katerwaho.

Convincing a neighbor to take on his wife and kids as farmhands, Katerwaho made his weary way back to Kampala where after numerous failed attempts at securing 'dignified' work, he eventually became a taxi driver.

Painstakingly, he saved up enough for a small piece of land in the outskirts of the city and erected a small dwelling, before sending for his now jigger-infested and callus-palmed family.

***

It’s been ten years since they set foot in the village, let alone attempted to invest any of their money there.

Like many urbanized Africans of his generation, Katerwaho learnt his lessons the hard way.

Since the expected and unmourned death of his uncle, he has 'officially' and completely cut links with the village and its ‘unattractive investment atmosphere’.

Just the other day, after he’d had a gourd too many of millet-beer at his favorite shebeen, following a day of sweating and shouting in the raucous taxi park, Katerwaho was overheard summarizing his accumulated wisdom to a young acquaintance –

‘‘Never put any money in the village, or set up a business there. If you do, your relatives will cheat you or sabotage it.
That's if your're lucky enough and they don’t sell it off altogether.

I know a fellow who returned to the village for Christmas after sending money all year long for the building of a house, only to find a Chinese condom-factory in the place.

Son, keep all your hard-earned cash here in Kampala where you can pick it up and run in case of anything.

Actually, I don’t blame our president and his ministers who keep all their 'assets' abroad.

To them, the whole of Uganda has become a village, and they know once power changes hands, they’ll lose everything.

In this way, Uganda’s middle class who have come to town and refused to go back to their villages are no different from the country’s leadership.

For while the middle-class fears ungrateful relatives, the political-class fears ungrateful successors.’’