Tombstones and Banana Trees (6 page)

BOOK: Tombstones and Banana Trees
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Some people gathered round and started screaming and crying. Isaiah continued on the way I had come to tell my mother and my sisters, while I walked on toward Peninah's house.

I spoke to no one on the way. My steps were slow, but I do not remember much more about it than that.

Eric was a businessman, and at the front of their house was a shop. They lived around the back, and even before I passed along the side of the house I could tell there were many people in the yard that separated the rear of their home from the Rushoma River beyond it. It was down this side path that the soldiers had walked, and it was across this river that Eric had fled.

Later I discovered what had happened. Eric's first wife had formed the plan and had gained support from our enemies. Together they had raised seventy thousand Ugandan shillings, which would today be in the region of five hundred dollars. It was a large sum of money to find, but the hatred among them was intense. The soldiers had been summoned to one lady's family one night, where she fed them and paid their money. She then showed them the house where Peninah lived and gave them the final order to go ahead and kill her. The soldiers could have so easily killed Eric, but that is not what his first wife wanted: Only her rival was to be killed.

When I arrived I found about one hundred people waiting on the square of land at the back of the house. Some were crying, some shouting, some staring, while others chatted away happily. They were all waiting for something to happen. The police had not yet arrived to take fingerprints and look for bullets, and the crowd had not yet crossed the line between the yard and the inside of the house.

I walked in. It was dark, but it did not take long for my eyes to find my sister. She was lying on her side, eyes open and fixed on an invisible point at the top of the room. She was lying within a pool of blood. Her blouse was soaked. And there, in the middle of all this blood, was her eight-month-old daughter, Katherine. As I stood there, motionless, I watched this infant. When her crying subsided a little she would try to suckle at her dead mother's breast. Finding no comfort there, she would soon become upset again.

What I was seeing was too much for me and I could not absorb it. I felt the pressure of the whole world as it crumbled over my head. Peninah's other children were there as well: her five-year-old daughter, Allen, and her son, Edson, who was just three years old at the time. These children came and gathered around me and cried and cried, but I was helpless. I was like Mary and Martha when their beloved brother, Lazarus, died. I could do nothing.

I remember how precious Peninah was. She was so very good, so caring, so young; only twenty-six years old. She supported the church, and had she survived she would be so strong now. The fact that she did not die a natural death made matters even worse; we felt as though we had not done our part, that we were robbed of the opportunity to stand in front of death and attempt to slow its advance. There was nothing I did to try to save her, no part I played in helping her. I was left with such bitterness and anger.

There is a line in Scripture where God tells Ezekiel that He is about to take away something he is fixing his eyes on: his wife. We did this to Peninah. We worshipped her; we adored her. We felt as though we could not do anything without her. We fixed our eyes on her. And now she was gone. Everything had been taken from us.

Chapter Six

Our Friend Has Fallen Asleep

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.

BOOK: Tombstones and Banana Trees
3.37Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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