Before any journey to a far-off place, the long road to Kampala most of all, my father would ask that we pray for safety on the road. We prayed too before the things that called for favour, like the first day at a new school, a national exam, or an interview.
This was a man I mostly saw from a distance. He left each morning for a world I was never shown, a government officer in a kaunda suit with a briefcase, sometimes on foot, sometimes collected by a car. While he was gone, the house ran loose, but the hour before his return brought its own quiet panic, the lot of us scrambling to finish abandoned homework, hide what we’d broken, and get our stories straight about the day’s small disasters, so whatever he walked into would give him nothing to punish.
He was not soft with me. But before a journey, he would gather himself, and humble himself, and pray, and it was the one time the powerful, reserved man became small in front of something larger than he was. I have never forgotten the sight of it.
I was an only child in those early Entebbe years, in a house busy with a helper and relatives who had come to live with us. The rule, for a long time, was simple. Don’t be a nuisance, or you’ll be punished. We didn’t talk much. What my father gave me instead of conversation was tasks. When he judged me capable of something, he’d bring me into it and teach me by correcting me as I went. He was always a “learning by doing” advocate. The one thing that could pull a flood of words out of him was messing up. Do something that made no sense to him and you’d earn what the family still calls a Lecture, not a telling-off, but a long, winding talking-to about why a thing has to be done the way it’s done, and why the world holds together when you do and comes apart when you don’t. I sat through them like sentences to be served.
I see now he was a philosopher, testing his theory of everything on an audience of one. The earliest I remember was ferrying our belongings by bicycle, load by load, from a small worker’s village in Ntenga to a unit near Lugazi town, so we could have a shorter school commute. I figured out fetching water on my own, and he let me, which I now understand was also a lesson. Almost nothing was explained. Almost everything was implied. You learned the world by being handed a piece of it and told, mostly through your mistakes, how to hold it.
Now and then, something forced him to put words to it. Mark was about two when a malaria bout we had taken to be ordinary began to turn. He couldn’t keep anything down, then the vomit went yellow, and the fever got worse, and his small body started to convulse. Mum knelt over him with a wet towel at his forehead. She was our household chemist, a shelf of Aspirin and Panadol and Quinine and Cod Liver Oil, a remedy and a dose for whatever ailed you, but this was well past her shelf. I heard my parents pass the words “cerebral malaria” between them in low voices, and beneath the words, the question with no answer in the house, where to take him, when there was no money. Mum went out to find a nurse or anyone who would come treat him at home. Dad stayed at home with us.
He called me into the bedroom and asked if I could hear the cooing at the window. I could. A housemaid had once told us that an owl that comes and coos through your night is a witch, and a sign that something bad is on its way. Dad asked me to go out and drive it away with stones and sticks, and after a while he came out to help me. I have wondered since whether he truly meant to chase a witch from his sick son’s window, or whether he needed to hand the hovering older boy a job to do with his fear. Probably both. It was one of the only times I saw the floor of his certainty give.
The owl left. A few days later the fever broke and Mark was himself again. Mum has never quite let it go. To this day she says she always knew that fever went to his head.
And there was the bicycle. I once took it to the market without asking. While I was hunched over haggling for a good deal on a pair of Eveready batteries at one of the roadside market stalls, a tractor hauling cane swung wide to dodge a collision, and a long stalk of cane sticking out of its trailer caught Dad’s bicycle by the handlebars. It dragged the bike under and ran over the front wheel. The big tractor tyre crushed the edge of another stall, damaging a row of mousetraps and grabbed a dress as the driver gunned away before the crowd could lynch him. The police took the bicycle, and when I protested that I couldn’t go home without it, they threatened to take me too. I gave in. I came home slowly, rehearsing for a beating, my stomach in my throat the whole way. Instead, for the first time I can remember, my father asked whether I was hurt. Not about the bike. About me. When I said I was fine, he told me not to worry and that we would go and collect it the next day.
In the morning, he woke me before dawn. Before we set out, he prayed for us, the way he did before any journey. Then he told me we had to be on the road before the women. It was one of those old Banyoro beliefs, kin to the one that keeps women from eating chicken. A woman met first on the road at the start of a day was thought to turn your luck and pull your focus from whatever you’d set out to do. Hunters, fishermen and blacksmiths were also advised not to spend the night with their wives the day before they went to work for the same reason. There was no logic to it, and I have never found one, but that morning I wasn’t looking for logic. If we met a woman, we would turn back and wait until she had passed, because we needed all the luck and blessings we could carry into Kawolo Police Station. We walked there, me at his side, carrying his bag and following every instruction he gave. There was nothing for me to decide and nothing to fear. I stood behind my father while he took charge of the situation. I don’t think I have ever felt safer.
He taught me Scrabble, and it was the one place our silence turned into a game. We would bend over the little wooden tiles, and I still remember the rare, unhurried pleasure on his face when he set down a word that beat mine. For a man who handed me tasks instead of talk, those tiles were the closest we came to a conversation. I would get competitive, and sometimes I cheated, and when he caught me he was never harsh, only kind, steering me to really challenge myself instead. At ten, the wrong of it barely lands, and that gentleness did more than a scolding could. I understand it now from the other side of the board. Delvin tries the same on me over Scrabble, and I find myself answering the way my father did.
He once told me about the scholarship to Syracuse University that he gave up. It would have trained him as a medical doctor, one of the revered professions of his day, the kind that set a man up for life. He let it go because America could not be squared with staying close enough to look after his sisters and their families. Years later, when I was starting high school, he came home thrilled with a dissection kit for me. As we labelled the parts together, he told me he had confidence in my intuition for the sciences, that I had a knack, and that if I stuck with it I might one day walk the path he hadn’t, into medicine. I could feel him steering me towards his dream, and I didn’t understand then why it mattered so much to him. I think now he was trying to hand me something. He carried that hope lightly enough that it never crushed me, and heavily enough that I never doubted it was real.
Sarah came to live with us in Entebbe when she was seven or eight. Until then, she had been with our grandmother in Fort Portal. She was Mum’s daughter from before Mum and Dad, and a joining like that can bring out all the quiet malice that attaches to a child who isn’t quite yours. Amooti had none of that. He gave Sarah his name and the same opportunities the rest of us were given. Ours was a household stitched from more than one family, and the thread that held it was that name. Whatever else we were, we were all Nyakanas.
Years later, grown and wanting her independence, she and Dad went through a hard season over her leaving. Even when Sarah made some strong, untrue claims about how fairly he had treated her, he did not argue her down. He told her he was sorry for any hurt, that he had never meant it, and that she was free to go and just as free to come home whenever she needed to. I watched it and could hardly believe the grace of it. No one would have faulted him for holding the door shut. But that is Amooti. He offers you his generosity exactly when you have earned the opposite. She went, and in time she came back home and took up her old place, and not one of us said a word about it. He had let her go without letting go of her, and the door was still open when she needed it. That is the closest thing to wisdom I have known. To this day he asks the important questions and wants to hear your thinking before he offers his own.
It would take me most of my adult life to understand what a man like that hands down.
Questions to carry
Who did you grow up seeing mostly from a distance, and what small ritual, if any, ever let you see them up close?
What did a parent teach you without once explaining it, by handing you a task, a game, or a silence?
Whose quiet sacrifice cleared the ground for your life? Have you ever named it to them?
