Introduction by Kathryn Tobin
I
The day Nelson Mandela came to Uganda in 1991, we lined up to welcome him along the streets under the bottlebrush trees of the International Conference Centre, like bouquets on display. It rained heavily that afternoon, sweeping away the burgundy dust that usually covered the streets. We stood shivering along the sidewalk, without sweaters because the teachers ordered us to appear smart, and sweaters would hide our school badges. We waited for three hours in the cold for the African hero. When his convoy passed, he waved at us, and we shouted in excitement, our voices sounding louder than the police sirens that escorted his convoy. He hadn’t noticed our badges.
Naboro wished her father was an African hero, not the tall, stooped man in the arched doorway, a silhouette of himself. This was a man she was afraid to call father—or even to acknowledge any relation to him, save for living in the same house. This man lived 25 years back in time and insisted on wearing bell-bottom trousers, which men of his generation had long abandoned; he could have walked out of a photograph from the 1970s. This was a man recently released from Luzira Maximum Prison as a pardon from the President. This was a man, the papers reported, on death row for the last 25 years “for atrocities . . . committed against the Ugandan people during his time as Idi Amin’s henchman.”
When he appeared in Naboro’s life the day he was pardoned, her mother only said: “You were born nine months after he was taken away. It was the beginning of the end of my life.” She went right on stitching a client’s dress.
“What happened?” Naboro pushed. “I need to know.”
All she said was this: “The Tanzanian army and Ugandan rebels overran the government, and all top officials were arrested. The people said the terror had ended.”
Later, Naboro hunted for family pictures of him, looking for a thread to connect her to this man she was supposed to call father but couldn’t form the word. There were gaps in the family albums where his pictures should have been.
Naboro sat on her bed, not knowing what to say. She felt her heartbeat quicken. She still felt uncomfortable around him. Their eyes met. He looked at her like he was searching for something he had left behind when he was arrested 25 years ago. She involuntarily dropped her gaze and heard his hollow sigh. He took to sighing each time he looked at her. When she looked up, she met his eyes still resting on her regretfully. Her gaze, in turn, searched for something that might connect them. Something that might make this awkwardness between them lighter. She moved a little on her spring bed, wringing her hands. There was nothing to say. If she wanted to talk, she wouldn’t know where or how to start. That she despised him? That he should have refused the pardon and stayed in the prison like the other men had done? That their lives were running smoothly until he interrupted the embroidery of peace they had woven around themselves?
“May I come in?” he asked, breaking the silence.
She shrugged. “It’s supposed to be your house,” she whispered like the wind had carried her voice away before she let it out of her mouth.
He stepped cautiously into the room, as though afraid of being followed or ambushed. His tall form filled the narrow room. It had originally been a store and was painted a drab grey, which made it appear smaller than it actually was. The reluctant, late-afternoon sun seeped in through a small window and rested on her father’s stooped form. Today he wore a flowered shirt and grey checked bell-bottomed trousers. These were the clothes her mother kept locked away for a long time in the silver trunk—she had devotedly cleaned them every morning for 25 years. The trunk sat in the corner of her mother’s room, and she never opened it in the presence of Naboro and her brothers. They always wondered about the colossal trunk’s contents. Naboro imagined gold jewellery and other fancy things inside, not these flowered shirts and bell-bottomed trousers.
The spring bed sunk in as he sat down beside her. She held her breath. She had lived without a father in her life and couldn’t react to this one. She noticed her mother anxiously stealing glances in her direction. And she sensed her discomfort. For her mother, he could have been the one love of her life. For her? He was the missing card discovered too late at the end of the game.
“Can we talk?” he spoke in a voice like a whistle. Naboro cringed. She was silent.
“About what?” she asked. “Maybe we can talk about the song composed about you, the one about dead babies and their mothers?”
She didn’t want to be part of this man. She wished she could cleanse her blood or trade it for someone else’s. She jumped to her feet and rushed to the door.
“I want us to talk about that,” he said, stopping her in her tracks.
“You did what the song says?”
She thought she saw him nod before she dashed out of the room. She crashed into her mother.
“Where are you rushing to?” she asked.
“I’m running.”
“Why?”
“That man . . .”
Naboro was tired of the house. The song about that man played in her head:
Nasser prohibited the wearing of slippers/anyone wearing slippers was like one who wore a mini/and had to be punished/Nasser made them eat the slippers they wore/He burnt them with melting jerry cans/
The song rang in her mind as she hurried from the house, wanting to get away from him—and from the eyes that made her think she was looking at herself, the beseeching eyes that begged her to understand and to talk. She didn’t want to make friends with him; she didn’t even want to know him. She had learned enough from the newspaper archives at the university library.
