Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic: Letters from Uganda [1st ed.] 9783030475222, 9783030475239

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxviii
The Missing Letters (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 1-5
Girls with Fast Legs (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 7-28
Women on the Move (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 29-45
Intersecting Trajectories (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 47-62
Questions of Belonging (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 63-81
Stories That Alter Life (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 83-102
Dying Poor (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 103-108
Feeling Stuck (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 109-124
Closeness and Distance (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 125-137
Knowing What to Hide (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 139-161
The Order of Secrecy (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 163-187
Shifting Secrets (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 189-207
Whose Responsibility: And What Happened to the Letters? (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 209-235
Moving On (Hanne Overgaard Mogensen)....Pages 237-241
Back Matter ....Pages 243-246

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic Letters from Uganda Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Series Editors Deborah Reed-Danahay Department of Anthropology The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic Letters from Uganda

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen Department of Anthropology University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-030-47522-2 ISBN 978-3-030-47523-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Aleksandra Baranova/EyeEm/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Kate Abbo and her sons, Okoth and Comfort and my children Silja and Zéphir

Series Editors’ Preface

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes explorations of new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. By introducing work that applies an anthropological approach to literature, whether drawing on ethnography or other materials in relation to anthropological and literary theory, this series moves the conversation forward not only in literary anthropology, but in general anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, ethnographic writing and creative writing. The ‘literary turn’ in anthropology and critical research on world literatures share a comparable sensibility regarding global perspectives. Fiction and autobiography have connections to ethnography that underscore the idea of the author as ethnographer and the ethnographer as author. Literary works are frequently included in anthropological research and writing, as well as in studies that do not focus specifically on literature. Anthropologists take an interest in fiction and memoir set in their field locations, and produced by ‘native’ writers, in order to further their insights into the cultures and contexts they research. Experimental genres in anthropology have benefitted from the style and structure of fiction and autoethnography, as well as by other expressive forms ranging from film and performance art to technology, especially the internet and social media. There are renowned fiction writers who trained

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as anthropologists, but moved on to a literary career. Their anthropologically inspired work is a common sounding board in literary anthropology. In the endeavor to foster writing skills in different genres, there are now courses on ethnographic writing, anthropological writing genres, experimental writing, and even creative writing taught by anthropologists. And increasingly, literary and reading communities are attracting anthropological attention, including an engagement with issues of how to reach a wider audience. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology publishes scholarship on the ethnography of fiction and other writing genres, the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing, and internet writing. It also publishes creative work such as ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative non-fiction, memoir and autoethnography. Books in the series include monographs and edited collections, as well as shorter works that appear as Palgrave Pivots. This series aims to reach a broad audience among scholars, students and a general readership. Deborah Reed-Danahay and Helena Wulff Co-Editors, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ADVISORY BOARD Ruth Behar, University of Michigan Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz Regina Bendix, University of Göttingen Mary Gallagher, University College Dublin Kirin Narayan, Australian National University Nigel Rapport, University of St Andrews Ato Quayson, University of Toronto Julia Watson, Ohio State University

Preface

The story I am about to tell is a narrative ethnography about the life of a Ugandan woman. It draws on letters, conversations and fieldnotes from fieldworks carried out in Uganda since 1995. In 1995–1996 I did one year of fieldwork in eastern Uganda. I settled with a family in a village and followed small children and their mothers in their daily lives. Other research projects have brought me to Uganda regularly since then. Over the years, my relationship with the family I lived with during the first year has deepened. Alongside other activities in the country, I have continued to follow their lives. My long-term involvement with this family-network and their movements within and outside of the country during the era of AIDS and the arrival of ART is the core material around which the story is told. The book is structured around the life of particularly one woman, Kate, and the ways in which our trajectories became intertwined. As our relationship evolved, I had to revise what I thought I knew about her and her relatives and I came to understand some of her most pressing concerns, though she claimed she had been trying to communicate them to me for years. The story therefore gives the reader privileged insight into fieldwork: how understanding develops over time, the challenges encountered on the way and ethical questions raised by the ethnographic method, demanding that you get involved in people’s lives only to withdraw in order to learn from this involvement.

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The story is also about the ways in which global questions of responsibility and solidarity end up in family networks and confront people with decisions about the life and death of their relatives and friends. It seems at first to be the story of somebody who was let down by people close to her, but it is also a story about the difficulties of those who have more than others do, in settings where most people have far too little. How do you choose between your relatives and prioritize the survival of some over the school of others? How can families survive facing these kinds of life or death decisions? And how can we (as anthropologists) stand by them in their struggle for a less devastating alternative? Kate and her sisters, who take centre stage in the story, grew up in a country that was haunted by violence and war (the 1970s and 1980s), then lifted by optimism and hope in the 1990s, but also devastated by the AIDS epidemic. I arrived in the southeast of the country during a time when the horrors of the past decades were still fresh in people’s mind, but which was also a period of peace and prosperity. Uganda was a lush and optimistic country, a thriving green spot on the equator characterized by joy of life and hospitality. It was also—and still is—a country where many people live in conditions that are hard to imagine when coming from the privileged north. By exploring how Kate and her sisters’ lives are shaped by other people, by historical events, political and economic circumstances and the AIDS epidemic, and how they each in different ways actively try to weave together connections in their lives, the book offers a fine-grained ethnography of existence under extremely challenging conditions and the ways in which the global phenomena of AIDS and ART have contributed to changing life in Uganda. Uganda gained independence in 1962. Idi Amin took power in 1971, and this marked the start of 15 years of dictatorship, political unrest, turmoil and violence. The country underwent a series of changing governments and civil wars before rebel leader Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986 and was later democratically elected as president. Uganda was in ruins by the mid-1980s but saw reconstruction, aid and economic progress after 1986. As I write this, in 2020, Yoweri Museveni is still in power, despite rising national as well as international criticism of his reluctance to step down and concern about the state of the Ugandan democracy. The resurrection of the country in the 1980s and 1990s took place in the shade of the AIDS epidemic, which has cost many lives and caused

PREFACE

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great grief in the midst of the otherwise optimistic reconstruction of the country. But the story about AIDS is in many ways also a success story. By the end of the civil war (1986) Uganda had the worst HIV epidemic in the world.1,2 The strong and diverse response to the epidemic in Uganda is often seen as exemplary, compared with many other African countries. AIDS was made a priority when other African countries were denying or ignoring it. One of the first national AIDS control programmes in the world was established in 1986 when Museveni came into power and a multi-sector approach was launched, including HIV prevention and care activities in all areas of public and private enterprise. Uganda became a pioneer in AIDS prevention and efforts to provide information and support to patients, and the first African country to report a decrease in the number of people infected.3 When treatment for people with AIDS first became available in Uganda it was far too expensive for most people. Then prices fell, and it came almost within reach, but the inequity of the situation was pulling families apart. In 2001 generics came onto the market. More people were able to pay for ART and in the years that followed more and more began to get them for free. During the first decade of this millennium, thousands of people in Uganda who should have died from AIDS got a second chance at life.4 The AIDS epidemic and the arrival of ART shaped the lives of Ugandans for three decades. AIDS is still a challenge, though it is now an epidemic with a very different face. Being HIV positive is today referred to as a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. But inequitable distribution of resources, nationally and internationally, and the challenges and dilemmas of those who have the responsibility to distribute resources in family networks persist. ∗ ∗ ∗ The style of writing used to tell the story about Kate is a combination of creative non-fiction and autoethnography, which I refer to as narrative ethnography. The line between fiction and ethnography has been debated within anthropology for decades.5 In spite of the Writing Culture debate of the 1980s,6 and the lessons we learnt from the postmodern turn, that ethnography is—like any other text—a constructed set of narratives, there is still a widespread tendency of anthropologists to aspire to empiricist

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ideals.7 What the Writing Culture debate should have taught us—as Clifford Geertz points out in his discussion of the anthropologist as author8 — is exactly that there is no clear dividing line between fact and fiction, no simple binary categorization of literature and ethnography. A more fruitful approach is to conceive of a ‘mutually influencing dynamic relationship between ethnography and fiction’.9 I employ literary modes in the writing of my ethnography. I am the narrator and the development of my insights over time, are part of the story. The text is structured around a plot, created through the selection of material but without changing what happened when and who said what. I have not made up events, but I have selected conversations, observations and situations, and ignored others. I construct—as authors always do—a particular narrative, and I have chosen to do so with the help of literary modes of writing. I have chosen a literary style in order to, as Gottlieb phrases it, engage emotions and senses as well as empirical facts, to ‘humanise distant Others’,10 and to explore ideas about the human condition that are inadequately expressed in the discourses of the social sciences.11 My text reads like a novel while it explores and exposes analytical points through the plot. The story of Kate is developed with inspiration from, among others Michael Jackson’s discussion of the potential of narrative— and of anthropology—to alter life.12 Together Kate and I set stories in motion that changed her view of the past, present and future and her possibilities of acting upon her life. She became the driving force in telling her story to me with the dual aim of using this opportunity of ‘becoming somebody’ whose voice was heard and ‘doing something’ to improve her life and, later, postpone her death. Over the years, I have recorded numerous stories about her life that have been transcribed and assembled in folders. But the story I tell in this book is not limited to what was said in these interviews and written by her in her many letters. The text is my retelling of Kate’s words and letters and of her attempts to use her story to act in the world. It narrates that which happened between us and between Kate and her relatives as a result of setting the story in motion. It shows that social relations are based on knowing something about one another, but also, as Georg Simmel has phrased it, on presupposing a certain ignorance of others and on recognizing the need to steer clear of the knowledge of that which others do not explicitly reveal to us.13 It also shows how mutual deception can provide the condition for the production of shared meaning.14

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The plot developed by me for this retelling is a result of insights from previous analysis of my ethnography. It implicitly draws on, among other things, theoretical discussions of narrative, subjectivity, secrecy in social life and pragmatist approaches to questions of transcendence and to the experience of illness and health care-seeking behaviour. The plot was developed in close interaction with the parallel process of more theoretical work based on the same ethnography, but in this manuscript, I have chosen to give primacy to the flow of the story without engaging explicitly with anthropological literature. Endnotes have been added, however, with suggestions for further readings about Uganda and the AIDS epidemic, with references to my previous publications and to texts that have provided theoretical inspiration for my work. Kate Abbo asked me to write her story and use her and her sons’ real names. Her youngest son only appears in the book as an infant. The oldest one, Brian Okoth, appears as a small boy and a young adult. He has seen the manuscript, approved of it and asked me to use his full name. He has informed me that not only is he happy that I have written this story about his mother, but he also wants to write his own version of it one day, and he has assured me that I, the anthropologist, will be in his story. He will call it ‘Living with Hope’, he says, and it will also be about the hopes raised by having an anthropologist in the family—and the sense of disillusionment that follows as they materialize into less than what one had hoped for. On the pages that follow is a story told by a privileged person from the wealthy north about people in the south, and the questions of guilt, inequality and responsibility raised in the process of collecting material for the story.15 I sincerely hope that Kate’s son will indeed one day retell this story from his perspective. Copenhagen, Denmark

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Notes 1. Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside, AIDS in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 149. 2. John IIiffe, The African AIDS Epidemic. A History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 71. 3. For an overview of the AIDS epidemic and ARV as historical event in Uganda, see Susan Reynolds Whyte, ed. Second Chances. Surviving AIDS in Uganda (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–24.

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4. See Whyte, Second Chances, for an in-depth description of the lives of those who got a second chance of life and the implications of the arrival of ARV for Uganda and the Ugandan health care system. 5. The issue was addressed in depth by Didier Fassin, “True Life, Real Lives: Revising the Boundaries Between Ethnography and Fiction,” American Anthropologist 41, no. 1 (2014): 40–55. 6. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 7. Ellen Wiles, “Three Branches of Literary Anthropology: Sources, Styles, Subject Matter. Review Essay,” Ethnography: 7. Online First, First Published 28 March 2018. 8. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives. The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 9. Paul Stoller, “What Is Literary Anthropology?” Current Anthropology 56, no. 1 (2015): 144–145. 10. Alma Gottlieb, “The Anthropologist as Storyteller,” in The Anthropologist as Writer. Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First-Century, ed. Helena Wulff (New York and Oxford: Berghanh Books, 2016), 98, 103. 11. Stoller, “What Is Literary Anthropology?” Current Anthropology, 144– 145. 12. Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), 15–36. 13. Georg Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 307–376. 14. Michael Houseman, “Dissimulation and Simulation as Forms of Religious Reflexivity,” Social Anthropology 10, no. 1 (2002): 77–89. 15. See Holly High, “Melancholia and Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 38, no. 2 (2011): 217–233, for a discussion of the huge gulf of inequality that often exists between an anthropologist and her informants, and the guilt and self-reproach that it brings along. See also Chapter 13 where this is unfolded, and for a discussion of the ways in which this sense of guilt shapes anthropological accounts.

References Barnett, Tony and Alan Whiteside. AIDS in the Twenty-First Century: Disease and Globalization. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Clifford, James and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986. Fassin, Didier. “True Life, Real Lives: Revising the Boundaries Between Ethnography and Fiction. American Anthropologist 41, no. 1 (2014): 40–55. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

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Gottlieb, Alma. “The Anthropologist as Storyteller,” in The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First-Century, edited by Helena Wulff, 93–117. New York and Oxford: Berghanh Books, 2016. High, Holly. “Melancholia and Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 38, no. 2 (2011): 217–233. Houseman, Michael. “Dissimulation and Simulation as Forms of Religious Reflexivity.” Social Anthropology 10, no. 1 (2002): 77–89. Iliffe, John. The African AIDS Epidemic: A History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Story Telling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002. Simmel, Georg. “The Secret and the Secret Society.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. H. Wolff, 307–376. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. Stoller, Paul. “What Is literary Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 56, no. 1 (2015): 144–145. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, ed. Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Wiles, Ellen. “Three Branches of Literary Anthropology: Sources, Styles, Subject Matter. Review Essay.” Ethnography, Online First. published 28 March 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138118762958.

Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to people in Uganda who have shared their lives, homes, hopes, concerns and sorrows with me. Everyone knows I was there to write about Uganda and about their lives, but I have often found it challenging to explain the implications of this to people. Some have followed my work and have already read some of what I have written before. This time, however, the style of writing is different and they are in the text as persons, not just as ‘informants’ or ‘interlocutors’ whose contributions are turned into general statements. Kate and her eldest son are called by their real names. Other people’s names have been changed. This also applies to place names, with the exception of major towns. In a few instances people belonging to the same kinship category have been collapsed into one person for the sake of anonymity. Kate asked me to write her story, but others did not ask to be part of it. Still, they may recognize themselves in what I write. They would, undoubtedly, have told the story in a different way if they had been given a chance to do so. I hope they will agree with me that it is worth telling the story. I hope they will also see that even though it is primarily told from Kate’s perspective, as the story evolves, it becomes, in reality also a story about my own growing awareness of the dilemmas faced by people around her. The book is a result of my participation in various research projects over the years. The last encounter between me and Kate’s relatives referred to in the book took place in 2013, but my research in Uganda continues and I am still in touch with many of the people in the story. The bulk of the

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research has been financed by the Danish Council for Research in Developing Countries, now referred to as the Consultative Research Committee for Development Research under Innovation Fund Denmark, which has financed long-term collaborations between Danish and Ugandan universities since the 1990s. The Danish Council for Independent Research financed my Ph.D. research. The Fulbright Commission and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Frederik’s Fund funded research projects on lifestories and on the arrival of ART in Uganda, two projects that ended up becoming crucial for the shaping of this book. In 2015 I was awarded the Einar Hansen Price for Excellent Research within the Humanities for my work on Uganda, and my writing of literary anthropology in Danish, which supported follow-up visits to Uganda and reassured me it was worth continuing along the same path. I have had the great fortune to be part of research teams with Ugandan and Danish researchers since my Ph.D. studies, first through collaborations with the Child Health and Development Centre, Makerere University and later with the Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, Gulu University. The role of Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael A. Whyte in creating an ambiance of collaboration and knowledge sharing in these research teams cannot be emphasized enough. I am grateful to have had Susan and Michael as my supervisors and colleagues since the mid1990s, and to have benefitted from their dedication to the strengthening of research capacities in Uganda as well as in Denmark, their love for anthropology and for Uganda, their never-failing interest in people and their projects and their inexhaustible generosity with their knowledge and experience. Many people have read different versions of the manuscript, from my first attempts to write literary texts about Uganda in Danish (my native language) to later versions of the manuscript in English. I particularly want to mention Lene Blegvad, Tine Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Bettina Hjortshøj, Lotte Meinert, Morten Axel Pedersen, Karen Fog Olwig, Inger Sjørslev and Julaina Obika for their constructive comments and reassurance that anthropology can take many forms and that a literary text is one of them, and Helle Bundgaard and Cecilie Rubow, both for commenting on the manuscript and for our joint effort to discuss ethnographic writing and develop literary anthropology at the Department of Anthropology in Copenhagen. I also want to thank Menaka Roy for language editing. When I decided to become an anthropologist and do fieldwork in Africa, it was a foreign terrain, not just for me, but also for my parents,

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Agnete Mogensen and Vagn Overgaard Mogensen. Their openness, support and interest in this new world of mine, so foreign to them, were what, in the first place, gave me a sense of being constrained by the academic form and made me interested in exploring the use of genre without compromising the depth of the analysis and the insights obtained through fieldwork. Unfortunately, they passed away before the completion of this book, but they were there all along, visited me in Uganda and other parts of Africa and read earlier versions of the manuscript. Their love and support permeate the text from the beginning to the end. Most importantly, I would never have ventured into Africa in the first place, and maybe not even stuck with anthropology in the long run, had it not been for my husband and life partner, Quentin Gausset. We met while studying anthropology in Brussels, and his dedication to Africa and to anthropology shaped my way into life as an anthropologist. We have been through hardship and happiness together and apart in various parts of the world. His never-ending support to me as a person and an anthropologist has been priceless, and my deepest gratitude goes to him and the family we have together. Every day I am being reminded of how fortunate I am that he and our children, Silja and Zéphir, are in my life, and that I am here to see my children grow up. Thank you, Quentin for walking along with me.

Praise for Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic

‘This is a remarkable narrative ethnography of an anthropologist’s attempts to understand the complicated lives and deaths of people in Uganda that she has been close to for several generations now. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in East Africa since the 1990s, the author writes beautifully and incisively of the joys and sorrows of life, family, friendship, and existential hope and despair in situations of life-long poverty and precariousness. The story moves in compelling ways from biographical portraits, life histories, and letters sent from afar to reflections on the damaging consequences of war and violence, and efforts to combat sickness and disease with medical treatments. Hanne Overgaard Mogensen writes in altogether honest ways of the ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research with interlocutors in sustained and intimate ways, especially when the stakes are so high. For these reasons and more, the book marks a singular advance in the generative possibilities of narrative ethnography.’ —Robert Desjarlais, Professor of Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College, USA ‘This is a beautiful, sad, hopeful, thought-provoking book that reads like a novel and is one of the best texts I know on the intricacies of doing close-in ethnographic fieldwork. It is rare to find such rich ethnography together with such a superb account of how it was assembled. It sensitively considers ethical dilemmas of doing fieldwork with people who are poor, xxi

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PRAISE FOR SECRECY AND RESPONSIBILITY IN THE ERA …

sick and concerned with maintaining control over knowledge about their lives.’ —Susan Reynolds Whyte, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Contents

1

The Missing Letters

1

2

Girls with Fast Legs

7

3

Women on the Move

29

4

Intersecting Trajectories

47

5

Questions of Belonging

63

6

Stories That Alter Life

83

7

Dying Poor

103

8

Feeling Stuck

109

9

Closeness and Distance

125

10

Knowing What to Hide

139

11

The Order of Secrecy

163

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CONTENTS

12

Shifting Secrets

189

13

Whose Responsibility: And What Happened to the Letters?

209

Moving On

237

14

Index

243

About the Author

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She has published broadly on international health, poverty and access to health care in Africa, and on the moral world of anthropologists both inside and outside of academia.

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Abbreviations

AIDS ART ARV HIV TASO UNAIDS WHO

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Antiretroviral Treatment Antiretroviral (Drugs) Human Immunodeficiency Virus The AIDS Support Organization United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS World Health Organization

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Hanne Aketcha

Fig. 1 Kinship diagram

Woman

Man Deceased

Kate Suzy Jane Sorrow Hope

Sally Okoth Comfort

Nelly

Alexine

Married

Divorced

Aketcha

Siblings

Jacob

MamaJacob

CHAPTER 1

The Missing Letters

‘This is the story of my mother who loved my younger brother more than me. Life was not easy, but I am a survivor’. He knew I was watching him. The words on the screen were written to me. I told him he was wrong. ‘It’s just a story’, he murmured, eyes aimed at the dusty cement floor. ‘But you’re wrong’, I repeated. ‘I have your mother’s letters right here in my computer. Read them and you will understand how proud she was of you’. The many letters had made Kate, Okoth’s mother, stand out from the crowd. One day in 1995 she had moved into the house that I shared with her mother, Alexine, in a village in eastern Uganda. It took some time before I understood that Kate lived with us and that she was the one who rose before sunrise, rolled up the mats in the living room and lit the charcoal stove behind the house to prepare millet porridge for all of us. Even after realizing that Kate and her small sons had joined our household, she continued to be one of the crowd for some time. One of those family members who came to seek a bit of shelter and food before they returned to their lives elsewhere. She moved around silently, she almost hovered along the walls like a shadow you sense without noticing. When she sat on the floor next to me and cautiously served herself from the same dishes as me, I admired her straight back, high cheekbones, the tightly braided hair that twisted around her head in neat patterns, and the tattoos on her © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_1

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cheeks that gave her face a cat-like grace, which was underlined by her sweetness and silent elegance. She was there, and yet she was not, like a cat, with slender, flexible limbs, which sometimes wants your company, but which, suddenly, silently and without explanation, leaves again on soft paws, in favour of its own world. I got to know her during the year we lived together in the village, but I also learned that she was not somebody whom one easily noticed. She never hissed. Then one day she started writing. She sent me long letters. Numerous dense pages in each envelope. The flow of words, both on and between the ruled lines and in the margins, gave her voice and shape in a way that one year by her side in the small grey house had not managed to do. She stepped out of the silence and obscurity with her vivid and intense texts, written in Ugandan English. Phonetic spelling and no punctuation, but sparkling with sincerity and vitality. Cautiously and somehow frightened, I put the letters away, wondering what to do with them. Kate looked down when others were present, but she looked straight ahead when she held a pen in her hand, and her letters set a story in motion that has only just begun. A story that is not just about her, but which was also her way of acting in the world. ‘Comfort always got more food than me’, said her now 15-year-old son, Okoth, to me, after I had commented on the sentence he had typed on the computer. ‘But she didn’t love your brother more than you,’ I replied. ‘It was me that she sent away. Comfort continued staying with her.’ ‘Honestly, Okoth, don’t you know why?’ ‘Anyway, it is just a story’, he said again, and started deleting the sentence, one letter at a time. He refused to look at his mother’s letters. Silent tears rolled down his cheeks as he slowly and painstakingly started a new sentence: ‘Gulliver set out to find freedom’. ‘Do you remember?’ had been his first words, when I had found him in his grandfather’s compound in a settlement in the middle of a field of sugarcane in central Uganda. The car had scrambled along the muddy road winding through the green light of the tall sugarcanes, until it reached the small dilapidated sheds of wood and tin, and occasional cement or reddish bricks. Everything was reddish-brown from red mud, dust and rust. Garbage piled up along the road and between the sheds, but inside the grandfather’s house were soft couches, only slightly odorous from sweat and children’s pee. Through the back door I caught a glimpse of a carefully swept courtyard with cackling chickens and pots and

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plates drying in the sun on racks of sticks, raised above the hard-packed red soil, out of reach of chickens and goats. I waited in the dim light inside the house. His grandfather—the head of the household—had called me earlier on my mobile phone from somewhere in northern Uganda to let me know that I was welcome to take Okoth to Denmark with me. I told him that it was not what I had come for and continued waiting for Okoth to turn up. I was dazzled by the bright sunlight and crashed into Okoth as I stepped out into the courtyard to look for a pit latrine. The water drops glistened on his black skin. He had wanted to take a bath before greeting me. Dark, much darker than his mother, muscular and slim, closely cropped hair, long and straight nose. I noticed that he had the same vivid, curious and determined eyes that he had always had. ‘Of course I remember,’ I replied. ‘Do you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, and tried to shake my hand while still holding the dripping basin. I remembered that ten years ago, in 1995, when I was living with his mother’s relatives in the eastern village of Saya, he was a lively fiveyear-old boy, lying on the porch of the small grey house, drawing, while keeping an eye on the beans on the charcoal stove. I also remembered that he fetched water on an adult-sized men’s bike with his baby brother tied to his back. His small feet on the pedals and the body twisted around the upper bar of the bike. Strangely enough, he managed to keep his balance along rough muddy paths with a brother on his back and 20 liters of water in a large yellow jerrycan tied to the luggage carrier with rubber strips from a used bicycle tube. He remembered I had bought shoes for him because the wound on his toe refused to heal as long as he ran around in the dust on bare feet kicking soccer balls made of inflated condoms and banana leaves. He was now 15 years old and had completed seven years of school in one of the country’s ill-equipped village schools, with a far better result than what one might expect from a boy like him who had looked after cattle more than he had been to school. He now spoke English, which is the language used in Ugandan schools. I asked if he wanted to come with me to find a boarding school where he could continue his schooling. ‘Yes’, he replied, without giving it any further thought. He had probably expected me to come for just that. He immediately crammed his scarce belongings into a tattered little backpack and placed himself in the corner behind the couch, waiting for me to finish my conversation with

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his grandmother and aunts. The aunts—his father’s haughty sisters—who had driven Kate away from here. I had heard so much about this place and these sisters over the years but never been here before. It was here that Okoth was born. It was here that his mother had met her first great love, and it was also here in the midst of the sugarcane fields that she had lost faith in love. I thanked them all in the customary way for their hospitality, for taking care of the home and of Okoth, and for carrying out their daily tasks. They thanked me for having arrived safely, for taking Okoth with me and added a series of other thanksgivings as is befitting when somebody is about to leave. Okoth shyly pushed the tattered backpack under the seat of the car. I bought him a new one and equipped him for a new life in one of the best schools in the eastern part of the country. I also took him on a trip to the capital, Kampala, and put him in front of a computer to teach him how to write emails. That was when he wrote the abovementioned sentence. ∗ ∗ ∗ The previous year, Okoth’s aunt, Jane, had taken me to one of the many small internet cafes that had suddenly sprung out of Kampala’s red soil. Kate had often told me about her younger sister Jane, but I had only met her a few times before the summer of 2004, when I asked their uncle to help me find her. The first time I met her was a week after my arrival in Uganda in 1995. One morning she suddenly stood in the doorway of the small grey house in the village in eastern Uganda, where I lived with her mother Alexine, and where Kate later moved in. Jane scanned me, wondering yet indifferent towards me. She must have been around 16 at the time, born in 1979, because she was also called Alwenye, ‘born during war’—the war when the Tanzanians had chased Idi Amin out of the country, her mother told me. I assessed her sceptically, expecting that she, like so many others, was there to ask for money and I had a hard time navigating the sea of boundless needs in which I had landed. Jane was tall. Gleaming black skin, straight back and full-bosomed under a close-fitting short t-shirt—as if she had suddenly grown in several directions at once. But she had grown out of her clothes with strength and dignity. Confident and lush, encircled by the sunlight behind her while I sat on the dusty floor, preoccupied with my notebook and whether she

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was there to ask me for money. I did not exchange a word with her that day, the next day she was gone again and she did not become part of the story at that time. It only happened many years later, when I found her on the outskirts of Kampala working as a maid in the home of a revivalist preacher. She knelt for me—as women do when they greet— with the same dignity as she had stood in the sunlight and dust many years earlier. She asked if I had received the many emails she had helped her older sister, Kate, write to me. Again and again they had sent the same message. It said, ‘Please come? I need medication’. They had forgotten a dot in the email address. Jane also showed me the dirty and torn drafts of letters that Kate wrote to me during the last months of her life. Letters that had never reached me. On one of the sheets I read how proud she was of her son, Okoth, about her hopes that he would have a good life, about the way he had cared for her during her illness. But a year later, when I wanted to show him these words, now typed into my computer, he refused to read them. On another of the torn sheets she had written: ‘Thank God for my uncles. They have helped me so much and tried so hard to get treatment for me’. ‘I really do not understand why Kate wrote like that about the uncles’, Jane said, when we went through the letters together in her muzigo, a small one-bedroom house, in one of Kampala’s alleys. ‘It isn’t true at all. They just came and threw her right there outside my door every time she had been to their place’.

CHAPTER 2

Girls with Fast Legs

One of the things that Kate clearly remembered from her early childhood was when she and her sisters, Nelly and Suzy, ran on fast thin legs, full of expectation, scrubbed and dressed in their best clothes, along the narrow paths in the millet fields to attend the biggest social event of the week. They sat on the earth-packed floor in the shade of the red bricks and iron sheet roof that constituted the local Catholic Church and listened and sang and clapped their hands for hours. Small children rocking on the mothers’ hips, slightly larger children dancing on their bare feet in the red dust. Or mud. Depending on the season. It was the best day of the week. Kate and her sisters Nelly and Suzy were some years older than their half-sister Jane, whom their mother later had with another man. The three older sisters grew up in their father’s home in the part of eastern Uganda called Padhola. It was in the 1970s. Idi Amin had assumed power, and their mother, Alexine, had left their father a few years earlier. He was married to wife number two, their mother’s co-wife, whose arrival had caused Alexine to pack her stuff and leave. But the girls knew nothing about that. For many years, they believed their stepmother was their real mother, and Kate’s memories of Amin, Obote and all the others who fought for power over the next few decades coalesced in her memory. Kate did not know when she was born. The white ants had eaten her birth

© The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_2

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certificate, but Alexine believed she was born just before Amin assumed power in 1971. When I got to know Kate and her family in the mid-1990s, Uganda was still recovering from nearly two decades of the political turmoil and civil war that had ruined the country’s economy. Yoweri Museveni had been in power since 1986, when he and his rebel movement won the war and replaced the horrors of Amin and Obote in the 1970s and 1980s with a kind of peace and stability that made Museveni the darling of development agencies in the Western world in the 1990s. He was praised for his attempt to reinstall democracy and decentralization and his hospitality towards donors and their development projects, and not least his openness about the AIDS epidemic, the country’s new challenge, which most other African countries still refused to face at that time in history. When I met Kate she was in her mid-twenties and a mother of two. She was not used to having anyone ask her to tell about herself. But she gladly did so, sitting on the cement floor in the small grey house where we lived together, back straight and legs stretched out in front of her. Or walking slowly by my side with her youngest son, Comfort, on her hip, all of us swathed in Uganda’s warm soft air, tall millet stalks, gently swaying axes, and the heavy thumps from large wooden mortars and pestles in nearby compounds, pounding millets and groundnuts. Thatched roofs of small huts popped up here and there above the swaying millet as we trudged around on the small paths between the dwellings. She always looked down when talking, unsure whether she really had the right to tell her story, but happy that someone wanted to hear it. Especially when that somebody came from that distant part of the world where everything is better and where one hopes to be able to go to one day. Kate and her sisters were now and then sent to Amin’s military barracks outside of Tororo, the nearest provincial town, to sell cassava to the soldiers or swap it for beans. Being so close to the soldiers was a little scary, and they always hurried back afterwards. But the soldiers never did anything to them. They always made it back through the tall grass with bundles of beans on their heads without anybody bothering them. No one told them that they had a mother who worked as a school teacher in the barracks. They just knew that they had a mother back home. Someone whom they called mother, because that is what you call the wives of your father. Children of a man’s different wives are all siblings, not full or half siblings, just siblings, just like one does not distinguish between one’s own and one’s brothers’ children. A half-sister and a cousin are also sisters. You

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use the same word to refer to all of them. When speaking English, you can say cousin sister or cousin brother so that the muzungu (the word used for people of European descent) does not get totally lost in translation. It is difficult enough already for the muzungu that people are both addressed and referred to in kinship terms instead of their names, and when these kinship terms cannot even be translated directly into European languages, then one can quickly lose track of a conversation. In sum, all the children in the clan from the same generation are siblings. In theory. But Kate sensed that something was not quite the way it should be. Or could have been. Their mother was not good to them in the same way as she was to the smaller children. That was how Kate remembered it later in life. But she did not remember how old she was when she began noticing this. When she returned from school in the afternoon with Nelly and Suzy, their smaller siblings had already had their lunch. Often there was no food left for the three big girls. Still the stepmother made them work as soon as they got home. They were sent to fetch water in clay pots so big and heavy that they could not even lift them to their heads or take them down again by themselves. Not that there was anything wrong with having to work. All children work. But it was the way the stepmother treated them. She would sometimes let them stand in the hot sun with the pot on their head until they were about to drop down. And if they dared try lifting it down by themselves, and if they spilled the water or worse, smashed the pot, consequences would be dire. It happened a couple of times for Kate, and the blows that followed left marks on her body and her memory. One day when Kate had put water on the fire to cook millet, she was scolded like mad by the stepmother for having put too much water on: ‘Tell me, do you not believe that I am your mother, or why do you allow yourself to gorge on food like that?’ She was the one whom they knew to be their mother. Whom they called mother. But when Kate later talked about those years, then she recalled growing up with a feeling of not really being wanted. Their father was not at home very often. He was a schoolteacher. He had attended the Teachers’ Training College with Alexine, whom he had fallen in love with and made pregnant. First came Nelly, then Kate and finally Suzy. He worked as a schoolteacher for some years, but at some point he stopped teaching and starting trading, or rather smuggling, coffee to Kenya. Padhola is near the Kenyan border, and when Uganda’s economy collapsed in the 1970s, one could sneak across the border and exchange coffee for goods that had disappeared from the Ugandan

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market. Amin threw Indians, who had dominated the Ugandan economy, out of the country and tried to restore the economy by taking hold of the coffee production without compensating farmers. Smuggling coffee soon turned out to be far more profitable for Kate’s father than the slim and uncertain salary of a schoolteacher. He was good to his daughters, said Kate. Sometimes. When he was there. Unfortunately he wasn’t there so much. But when he was there, he sat on his three-legged wooden stool outside his round thatched hut and asked them if they had had enough food and told them that he would make sure they could go to good schools. He also asked them what they would like to become in the future. Her voice had a soft dreamy air to it when she talked about the good but rare moments with him. It sounded a bit like when she spoke to her 9-month-old son, Comfort, sitting on her hip and carefully listening to our talk. Nelly and Suzy said they wanted to become schoolteachers because they liked school so much, and Kate said she wanted to become a police officer, because she liked police uniforms. Her mother’s father had also been a police officer, but she didn’t know that at the time. She didn’t even know her birth mother yet. One day something happened at the weekly church gathering. An elderly woman approached them and gave them small gifts. Maize cobs and peanuts. She didn’t say a word. She just smiled at them and nodded her old, gentle, wrinkled face, as if she expected them to know who she was. Next time she saw them she started talking to them. She told them to come and visit her and her sister. Her sister was their grandmother, she said. And she missed them. They told their father about the old woman. They knelt down in front of him, as is customary when one addresses one’s father, looked down and told him about the maize and peanuts. He got furious and yelled at them that they could have nothing to do with their mother’s family. Then they understood that they had another mother somewhere. But they were still too young to find her on their own, so they continued going to school in the morning and returning home to fetch water in heavy pots, collect firewood, cook millet and go digging in the field. And it was not a bad life. Not as bad as life later became. Their father had many things. A big radio, a bike, many plates and many other things, more than what Kate and her mother had when I got to know them twenty years later. There had been peace in Uganda for almost ten years, when I met them, but people’s living standard was not yet comparable to what it had been before the economy collapsed under Amin.

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They never starved at their father’s place. People in rural areas still had enough to eat, unlike people in the city, whose wages had either been withheld or lost their value due to inflation. And when living close to the Kenyan border, it was possible—as Kate’s father discovered—to cross the border with one’s coffee and return with all kinds of goods. Kate remembered it as a time when they had what they needed, including a father who had dreams on their behalf and made plans for them. The old woman continued smiling and nodding her old wrinkled face when she saw them in church, and one day she told them that their mother and grandmother were now living with their mother’s brother in Tororo, together with their younger sister, Jane, and that they should go and visit them. She explained how to get to the housing estate of railway workers. Their uncle had a house with quarters for the domestic staff in the back of the compound where their mother now lived. She had stopped working in the military barracks after the Tanzanians had chased Amin. The small girls had grown bigger and the next time they worked in the field, Nelly, the eldest, decided that they should leave the hoes on the ground and run off to Tororo to find their mother. They ran on their bare feet, anxious but curious, uncertain of what they would find. Down the road with the purple jacaranda trees, and then left along the railway line. They found the uncle’s house, but not their mother. Alexine was on the train, heading north on one of her many business trips while their grandmother looked after the house and their baby sister Jane. Their father arrived at sunset. He went straight into the bedroom, which is one of the most humiliating things a man can do to his motherin-law. He dragged out three frightened girls from under the bed and started beating them with a thick stick. Off they went, back to the village, the girls sprinting along narrow paths, their father right behind them on his bike, beating their heads and shoulders with his stick. He did so for their own good, believing that he could beat their disobedience out of them. But next time they were sent to the field, the girls tossed away the hoes again and ran back to Tororo. Again they were picked up by a father on a bicycle holding a thick stick. All in all, there were many runs along small paths and many beatings, but they got to know their mother and grandmother. If Kate was born before Amin assumed power, and the runs to Tororo started after Amin had been thrown out of Uganda by Tanzanian soldiers, and their mother had left the military barracks to try out life as a business woman in Tororo, Kate must have been about 10, her older sister Nelly

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a little older and Suzy some years younger. Kate laughed when she talked about the runs and the beating. But it was not a happy laugh. It was rather a ‘you-see-the-kind-of-life-I-have-been-living’ laugh. She combed her mind for memories that worked in support of the story about the caring father and the good life that once was, and she did recall glimpses of happiness among the beatings and heavy pots on her head. But even though her father had loved them and had had plans for them, as a child she did indeed often wonder if it were better to be dead than alive. She frantically pulled out straws from the mat we sat on while she told me this. Her voice was so soft that at first, I did not hear her. I had to ask her to repeat it. A much longer run began a few years after they met their mother. Kate was usually not aware of the exact year that something happened in her life, but she did remember that the long run commenced in 1984. They were at school when a boy shouted through the open windows that someone had set fire to their father and stepmother and her newborn son. Terrified, they ran out of the classroom and saw heavy clouds of smoke in the distance. They were scared to approach their home and hid in the bush at some distance from there. All day the three sisters sat trembling in the bush, holding tightly on to each other, convinced they would be burnt if they returned home. Their schoolteacher found them later in the day and told them that their father and stepmother had managed to get away. Those who had come to kill their father had disappeared and they could go home now. All the huts had been burnt: the huts of the father, the grandmother, the stepmother, the children, the uncle, the uncle’s wives and their children. Everything. When they entered the homestead, they saw that chickens, goats and all their lovely things had also been burnt. The radio was broken. All the plates had been smashed. Neighbours gathered to look, and it was as if this was Kate’s strongest recollection. That they, the neighbours, just stood there. Or rather, that they began roasting dead chickens and goats over the embers of the burnt huts. Her life turned into embers, and the neighbours preparing food on it. The odour of fried meat still brought back to her a sense of emptiness and abandonment. The neighbours told the girls that they had seen the father and stepmother run away with their newborn brother, but that the uncle had been captured by the attackers. No one ever heard from him again. He probably died in a prison or somewhere along the road. Nobody knew who the attackers had been. In those years there were many attempts to

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throw out Obote, as Kate put it, without saying that it had anything to do with that. But anything was possible. Obote had lost control of the army, no one understood who fought against whom, and if one had a grudge against somebody, one could easily pay to have him assaulted. Kate thought the attack may have had something to do with a disagreement between her father and his half-brother. Others believed that Kate’s father had been known to support the rebels who were against Obote and that it was Obote’s soldiers who had come by to punish him. Everyone knew that in those years, disagreements could easily spin out of control and cost lives. It was hard to trust anybody and impossible to know who sent who against whom. It could very well have been Obote’s soldiers who had been hired to interfere in a local disagreement under the guise of chasing rebels. The girls found their way to their stepmother’s parents’ home, and they stayed there until a message reached from their father that he was in central Uganda where he had found a place to settle. They set out for central Uganda with their stepmother and all of her young children. But soon after leaving Padhola, Kate decided to also leave her childhood behind. They starved in the new place, she said. She wavered when talking about that period. She didn’t remember a lot of details. Didn’t want. She remembered that she and her sisters were no longer sent to the field. They were just waiting for something to happen. The family had settled on land that their father had been given by some relatives, but all their possessions were gone. They didn’t have any seed or tools and didn’t know where to start. They were asked by the stepmother to go and beg for food and they never returned to school. The father was nowhere to be found. He had again been threatened by somebody, had hidden somewhere, then appeared at some point in the trunk or a car, alive but bruised. He disappeared again before the girls had had a chance to see him. Kate and Nelly, who had by then become used to running away, decided to try to find their mother and grandmother. They felt old enough to take their lives in their own hands. They didn’t say anything to anyone. They just disappeared, like they used to when they tossed their hoes aside and ran off to Tororo. Suzy was smaller, too small, Kate said, so they didn’t take her with them. ‘I was abandoned by my older sisters’, Suzy said with a hint of bitterness, when I got to know her many years later, ‘and I missed them so terribly’. Their father was in jail for two years before he returned to the family, and in those years, Suzy had spent months starving and begging for food together with her stepmother and her small children. When her

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father finally returned, he tried to comfort Suzan and tell her that her mother and her sisters would also return one day. But it never happened. Nelly and Kate set off in the back of a truck that could barely move, travelled through a country in ruins inhabited by people accustomed to terror. They set off to search for their mother, who they believed lived a good life in a house near the railway in Tororo. For the now 14-year-oldor-so Kate, it felt as if life was about to begin. She and Nelly had taken matters into their own hands. They knew that Alexine had for some time had quite some success with her business trips to the northern part of the country. She lived in the quarters meant for domestic staff in her brother’s house which had cement walls and iron sheet roof, and she had both clothes on her body and something to eat, most of the time. They knew that there was only one road going east and that they could easily find the jacaranda trees by the railroad if only the truck could get them to Tororo. Their father disappeared from their lives. When I met them in 1995, they had not spoken to him since that day in 1984, when their home was set on fire. I thought they did not know where he was and whether he was still alive. But they did. They just weren’t in touch with him any longer. Alexine was not in the house near the jacaranda trees when the girls arrived. She had repeatedly been assaulted and robbed by soldiers and had therefore stopped trading. They found her in the village, living with their grandmother’s sister, the old gentle woman who had approached them in the church with her maize and peanuts. She was the first wife of a kind and rich man who had died several years ago and who had left her with a large piece of land and a number of sons, most of whom had gone to school and now worked in the city. She therefore had room and land for relatives like her unfortunate niece and her sister, Alexine and her mother, both of whom were divorced. One of the older woman’s sons visited them one day while they stayed there, and he suggested to his cousin sister, Alexine, that he could take Kate back to Kampala to stay with him and his family. He said he would send her to a good school if in return she would help out a little in the house and with their young children. It sounded wonderful to Kate. From fire, flight and hunger, an inconsiderate stepmother, and a father with a thick stick, to a life with a rich family in Kampala. They had to be rich. They lived in Kampala and the man, her uncle, was so well-dressed. She started waking up in the morning with a smile on her face. She was so much looking forward

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to eating well, sleeping well and staying in a nice place. She had never been to Kampala before. She thought she had to travel by plane to reach there. Maybe God himself lived in Kampala. She was dying to see all the lovely things people had told her about: red and green lights in the streets that she had heard could make the cars stop, machines that could make juice and chips by themselves, washing machines, beautiful houses with many floors. She did see the remains of the traffic lights when she reached Kampala, but at this time in history they no longer worked. She was also a little surprised when she discovered that the kitchen appliances she had heard so much about did not just prepare the juice and chips by themselves but had to have a person prepare it for the machine. And washing machines, yes, there were some who had those machines, but not the family that she stayed with. It was her job to wash the clothes of all the family members in a small basin in the backyard of the house, which was fenced off by a tall wall. She laughed at the thought of her own naivety when she told me about it. She hardly ever left the house in which she stayed in Kampala, unless the family went somewhere by car, and she was fortunate enough to be allowed to go along. Not that Kampala didn’t make any impression on the young girl: tall buildings full of bullet holes, lots of cars, different kinds of people in multicoloured clothes. White people, black people and even Indians from Kenya who came to Kampala to do business, even though it was dangerous for Indians to be in Uganda in the early 1980s. Still, Kampala was not quite like she had imagined when she woke up with a smile on her face in her grandmother’s sister’s round thatched hut. She was also confused about the soldiers when she first came to Kampala. She had imagined Kampala as a peaceful, rich and beautiful place. A place of green lawns, flowers and well-dressed happy people. A place where you need not be afraid. But it turned out that war was even worse in Kampala than in the village. In the village, at least one could run away when the soldiers came. In Kampala you had to stay put while the bullets flew in the darkness. You sat quietly in the dark house looking at the red flames in the sky. The cool breeze and the scent of gunpowder entered through the window frames since usually they had no glass left. Those were also the years when Kampala sometimes went ‘running’. Something happened somewhere in the city. Gun shots were heard, and somebody started running, others joined, and suddenly it seemed like the whole of Kampala was running. Her stomach turned as she stood behind the wall and washed clothes, listening to Kampala running on the

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other side of the wall. When many years later she told me about that the running and the turning of the stomach, she did so with stoic calm. Her voice did not change like it had when she talked about her father. Prior to Museveni’s takeover of power in 1986, there was a lot of fighting in the streets of Kampala. Soldiers regularly broke into her uncle’s house. They said he was a rebel, stole his things and put him in jail. But he always came back home after a day or two because he knew some of the officers. Kate was not more scared in Kampala than she had been in the village. But fear was still there. After a couple of years, the family could no longer afford to pay school fees for her. She told me that they had then asked her to stay and look after the house and the children while they tried to search for money so that she could go back to school. It was a good time. Kampala had become a safer place after Museveni’s takeover in 1986. The family treated her well. When they bought gifts for their own children, they also bought gifts for her. When they took their own children somewhere, they also took her. The uncle flew to London now and then for business and one of the most wonderful things in the world was to go with the family to the airport to send him off. They would drive along the blue waters of Lake Victoria, admire the airplanes that were so incredibly huge, and they would see so many white people gathered in one place. Sometimes they stopped by the shore of Lake Victoria and dipped their feet in the water. At the airport they were given French fries and a soda. The smell of French fries still reminded her of these lovely trips to the airport. She did not worry about the future at that time. She enjoyed life, ate well and had lots of clothes. God did not live in Kampala, but it was the closest she had ever been to him.1 Suddenly one day the sweet life in Kampala was over. Somebody was jealous that Kate was living the good life and had therefore lied to her uncle that her father would report the uncle to the police because he had stolen his daughter. Kate told me. so. Suzy told me many years later that it was because Kate had been lazy and spent too much time sitting on her uncle’s bed in her nice clothes while flirting with the neighbour’s houseboy. In any case, the good life came to an end. One day in the late 1980s, her mother, Alexine, whom she barely knew, picked her up and took her to the uncultivated sugarcane fields in Kakira, outside Jinja, halfway between Kampala and Tororo. Alexine had lived there since Kate had left for Kampala. Alexine’s mother (Kate’s grandmother) also stayed there and so did Kate’s older sister, Nelly, and their younger sister, Jane,

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who was born during the war. Suzy was still with their father. Nobody had heard from her since the day that Kate and Nelly set off. It was in Kakira, many years later, that I found Okoth, in the middle of fields now again covered by sugarcane. An entrepreneurial Indian by the name of Madhvani came to Uganda in the early 1900s and bought land in Kakira. He started with a small cotton production, but quickly switched to sugarcane and produced almost 100,000 tons of sugar a year in the early 1970s. The Madhvani family’s businesses played a central role in Uganda’s economic development—until Amin took over, threw the Indians out of the country and nationalized their property. Production fell steadily over the next 10 years and stopped completely in 1983. Large areas of land lay undisturbed, and women with nowhere to live and no entitlement to land elsewhere, such as Alexine and her mother, came from near and far and settled in Kakira in the 1980s. Sugar production resumed some years later when the Madhvani family returned to Uganda. They got back their property but until the early 1990s, Alexine and many others were allowed to cultivate the land around Kakira. Here Alexine gave birth to two more daughters, while her older daughters also started having children. While in Kakira life started going downhill. Kate didn’t talk much about that period when I first met her, but over the next few years, thanks to her letters, and to her sisters, I started getting a picture of their life in Kakira. Nelly was only there during school holidays. One of Alexine’s brothers still paid school fees for her, and during the term she lived with him and his family in Kampala. But holidays are long, and Kate enjoyed spending time with Nelly again. Their mother and grandmother grew millet and beans on the former sugarcane fields and made a living fermenting the millet and turning it into millet beer, an opaque brownish alcoholic drink, consumed through long straws or tubes, inserted into a large clay pot. For centuries, people have gathered around the pot to discuss family matters and the general state of affairs. As long as people remember, they have gathered around the pot for weddings, funerals, Christmas, Easter and other important events. But in Kakira, it became a habit for Alexine, her mother and their customers to meet by the pot every day and often from early morning to late night. Kate and Nelly were ashamed of their mother and grandmother. They themselves preferred to go to a bar at night, buy a soda and sit and talk. Sometimes a man would join them and offer them a Nile Special, a bottled beer, and maybe he would suggest that they go out and eat, find a place to dance and maybe even spend a night in a hotel room. There was no privacy in the small sheds, where the whole family

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slept on straw mats next to each other, and where Kate might even risk having her mother or grandmother vomit in the corner and then pass out next to her. The stench of fermented millet and vomit clung to the walls of the shed. Kate much preferred to sleep elsewhere, to feel young and beautiful and to dance all night to Philly Bongoley Lutaaya’s hit album, ‘Born in Africa’, hoping to meet her future husband on the dance floor. Soon, ‘Born in Africa’ was followed by Philly Bongoley Lutaaya’s songs about being alone and frightened. He was the first prominent person in Uganda to publicly declare that he was HIV-positive, and before he died of AIDS in 1989 he had made a series of widely popular songs that helped in giving the AIDS epidemic a human face. Kate loved his music. Many years later she helped me buy a tape with his songs, including her favourite song: ‘Alone and Frightened’. She wanted me to get a feeling of just how wonderful it had been to go out dancing all night, she said. Posters, radio programmes, theatre groups and other means of informing about AIDS and condoms were found all over Kakira, encouraging people to be open and to care for the sick. Once a week, the largest nationwide newspaper had a section on sex and HIV that was aimed at young people. The newspaper, ‘Straight Talk’, was popular reading, even for Kate, although she couldn’t afford to buy it herself and didn’t really worry about the disease. She still had so many clothes that she, as she described it, could just keep changing clothes and be smart all the time. She was noticed on the dance floor for the understated elegant shaking of her hip, her fine face and light brown skin colour. She knew she was attractive and that men noticed her, she said. She lived the good life that she knew from Kampala, had hopes for the future and had not yet understood that it would become a problem for her, that she he had not gone very far in school. She also did not worry about the fact that clothes could get worn out. When Okoth was born, she hardly had any clothes left. She had nothing even to wrap the little boy in.2 Okoth’s father was a nice man. A tall, handsome Acholi from northern Uganda with a slim, strong body, straight nose and clear eyes. He lived nearby and they went dancing in the same bars at night. She was very much in love with him, but he was a womanizer who used to make women pregnant and then leave them for another woman. Kate did not know any of his other children, but she had heard people say that they were there and that he had even made an Indian girl pregnant. They had been together for over a year when Kate became pregnant. He also had other lovers during that period. She knew that, but it was Kate that he

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loved. She was the one he would have married if it had not been for her mother—her drunk and crazy mother. She was sure of that. When Kate stayed overnight at her boyfriend’s place, her mother would come running in the early morning hours with her hair in disarray, dressed in her dirty gomesi, a particular kind of dress that most women in Uganda own. The gomesi was designed as a school uniform for girls back in the 1940s. With its floor length, short puffed sleeves and sash placed over the hips it had become a beloved clothing for women, used both for celebration and everyday life, depending on the material and wear and tear of the cloth. ‘Love is when the man gives the woman a gomesi for Christmas or Easter’, as a woman once told me, and most women I knew did indeed have several gomesi. The newest and nicest was the one used for special occasions. The most worn and faded one could be used in the field. It was an embarrassingly worn out, dirty and faded gomesi that Alexine wore when going to Kate’s boyfriend’s house, barely sober, shouting into the cool morning air like a confused person, that her daughter should not marry an ugly and poor Acholi. But he wasn’t ugly. And his family was not poor. His father was a police officer. He had lost his job with the police, but he later found work in a factory in Jinja. Or maybe it wasn’t all Alexine’s fault. Kate could see that now many years later. His haughty sisters had also done their best to destroy their relationship. When she was about to give birth, her boyfriend sent her a letter telling her to go to his parents’ place, and that they could live with his family while saving up to find their own place. She gave birth the day after she got there, and he gave her a soft towel for their newborn son, oil for his skin and some clothes. He was a good man, but his sisters were not nice. She heard that they said things like, ‘Imagine our brother marrying a Padhola without education and whose mother has bad manners’. They thought she didn’t understand when they spoke Acholi together, but Acholi and Dhopadhola are closely related languages, and she had become familiar with Acholi, even though she mostly spoke Swahili with her boyfriend. He wasn’t rich, but he had plans. He worked near Jinja, about ten kilometres away, and sent money and small things to her and her son when he was not around. She trusted that they would get married, that her life as an adult had started, and that it would be a good life with a man with plans. ‘It almost makes me laugh that I believed him’, she later said, but at that time she didn’t know yet that men can fool you, and that men’s sisters can treat you so badly that you cannot even manage to stay in your husband’s home. ‘That is what happens when you don’t

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have a father that can make the husband’s family pay the bride price. If they have not paid for you, they don’t care whether you can stand it at their place or not’. And then one day when Okoth was only a few months old, his father went missing. Someone had heard that he had applied for a passport and there were rumours that he had travelled to South Africa. No one has heard from him since. Kate and Okoth moved back to her drunken mother in another part of Kakira. Alexine now carried ‘Born During Sorrow’ on her back—the girl that she gave birth to around the same time as Okoth was born, and who was named after her grief, since she had buried two children prior to the arrival of Sorrow. They had both died before their first birthday, and neither Kate’s nor Alexine’s story contain anything about these children or their fathers. They just state that Sorrow got her name for that reason. ‘Your bad manners have ruined your sister’, her mother yelled at Kate when she returned with Okoth in her arms. Nelly had disappeared. No one knew where she was. She had been away for some months by then. She had run away without telling anyone. Like she had done many times before, but this time she had done so without Kate. One day in the middle of the school year she turned up in Kakira and said that her uncle was no longer able to pay her school fees. Alexine had sold three bags of beans and some maize to be able to send her beloved Nelly back to school. She felt strongly attached to her eldest daughter, more than to Kate and Suzy, said Kate, because she had not yet been married to their father when she had had Nelly. Nelly took the money and left for school. Or so they thought. But a few days prior to the arrival of Kate and Okoth the uncle had come to see them. He said that he had not stopped paying school fees. Nelly had become pregnant and had been thrown out of school, and no, he didn’t know where she was. Alexine was shaken. Nelly was the one for whom things had not yet gone wrong, who had reached 10th grade, who was her favourite but who had now disappeared, apparently pregnant, infected by Kate’s bad behaviour. For days, Alexine drank nonstop while her mother remained sober and cooked millet porridge for her great-grandchild and grandchild, Okoth and Sorrow. Kate felt paralyzed and spent most of the day staring at the bubbling porridge, pondering over her future and how big Okoth had to be before she could leave him with her grandmother and start looking for a job as a maid with a rich family. That was the only kind of work she knew how to do. And she would soon need money. Okoth would need to put on clothes one day.

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And if he got sick she would need money for medicine. And for food when the mother and grandmother ran out of millet, which was already about to happen. Within a few years, Kakira had become a lively, messy little town, inhabited by people from far and wide, living in more or less permanent sheds built from mud, iron sheets and occasional bricks. People had come to Kakira to access land. When the sugar production resumed in the second half of the 1980s many of them started working for Madhvani. Kate’s life in Kampala had been confined to her rich uncle’s house and occasional trips in his car. But she had felt safe, content and fortunate. Now she barely knew what to dream of and hope for. Days went by. Kate just sat. Doing nothing while her mother went out drinking. But then one day Nelly suddenly came wandering towards the house with her young daughter, Sally, sleeping on her back, wrapped tightly onto her mother’s body with a piece of cloth. The curly hair was arranged in small beaded twigs though she was only five months old. She was born in Kenya, Nelly said, but she had decided to return to Uganda with her. Why Kenya? Nobody knows. She never explained why. Where and with whom? Nobody knows this either. It had nothing to do with the child’s father. He lived near Jinja and was very black and very ugly, according to Kate. Kate was proud to have light brown skin, not black. Nelly was even lighter and had freckles. The money her mother had given her from the beans and maize had made it possible for Nelly to travel to Kenya, to give birth, and to come back with her child as if nothing had happened, other than having given birth to a daughter. Once in a while you may have to disappear and come back without further explanation. This took place years before mobile phones were introduced, but there is no reason to think that a mobile phone would have made any difference. People still disappear and reappear. It was great for Kate that Nelly was back. Now there were two of them seated, doing nothing. Two who had become mothers and still hoped for a good life even though they didn’t know what kind of life they dared hope for. But it didn’t last long. Nelly decided to go and stay with her daughter’s father’s family in the bush. The very black and very ugly man’s family. So far out in the bush that even cars didn’t reach. Kate again had to gaze at the bubbly porridge all by herself. Then one day another young woman approached their shed in the noonday heat. She was darker than Kate. Seven years had passed since they had left her at their father’s place. Their mother had told them that she had been sold to an old man: ‘You

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are so lucky that my brothers have helped me give you a good upbringing. Your sister Suzy was sold to an old man, after you left’. That was what she told them. More than once. But Suzy now approached their shed, hesitant, perhaps burdened by the heat, but also as if she were in doubt as to whether they would recognize her and welcome her. Not until she was right in front of them did Kate see who it was. Then she embraced her and gave way to tears. Their mother sat by a pot of millet beer somewhere nearby, and when she came home and saw Suzy and Kate sitting together in front of the house, she resumed drinking. To celebrate the arrival of Suzy, she said. Suzy had no idea that her mother had been pregnant four times since she had last seen her and that she now had two younger sisters, Jane and Sorrow, and a nephew and a niece, Kate’s son Okoth and Nelly’s daughter Sally. She had had no news about them all these years. But she had not been sold to an old man. Her father had returned and had worked hard to rebuild a home for her and the growing number of children he had with his second wife. He had conscientiously paid for her school, as he had promised her, seated on the three-legged stool in front of his thatched hut in Padhola. Suzy had reached 10th grade. But that was as far as he could manage. Several bags of millet and beans had to be sold to keep a child in school in 11th and 12th grade. The number of mouths her father had to feed was high, and the small children’s school fees also grew more expensive each year. He couldn’t afford to pay for Suzy to do her A levels (grades 11 and 12). He had helped her find her mother, in the hope that she or her relatives could help Suzy. But Alexine’s harvest of beans was already gone, and her brothers were tired of helping her daughters. Nelly had disappointed them. The cousin brother with whom Kate had stayed had not lived up to his promise to pay Kate’s school fees. The brother in the house near the jacaranda trees in Tororo had a second wife and a new bunch of kids, and they were also growing and in need of school fees, so he couldn’t contribute either. Both Suzy and Kate eventually found domestic work with families in Jinja. Kate with an Indian family. Suzy with a Ugandan woman with her own shop and a lot of money. Alexine got saved, backslided and began drinking again. Then she got pregnant, this time she named her daughter Hope. Alexine’s mother took care of Okoth and Sorrow, both of them barely two years old. She also prepared the fields for another round of millet and beans, even though there were rumours that they

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would not be allowed to remain on the land until the crops were ready. Sugar production was expanding. It was as if Alexine woke up the day she heard that Nelly and her newborn son were dying, far out in the bush where they were staying with the ugly black man’s family. Heavily pregnant with Hope and virtually sober she boarded a boda boda, a bicycle taxi, to the main road where she managed to get a lift with a car to Jinja to find Kate and Suzy. Kate couldn’t leave work, but Suzy, who was good at speaking up for herself, was given permission to go and the family she worked for even let her use their bike. With her heavily pregnant mother on the back she made it through Jinja’s traffic and far into the bush. They found Nelly, weak and exhausted, with a 3-month-old son in her arms, for whom she had neither clothes nor soap. She never recovered after giving birth to him, she said, and the baby was born small and thin. The man had begun drinking, and he had also been sickly for a long time. He was often out all night. Recently he had come home and emptied the house, sold everything they owned, even their mattresses. And then he had left again to drink for the money. They got Nelly to sit on the back of the bike. Alexine carried the boy in her arms, and Suzy pulled the bike to the nearest health centre. Their story does not say anything about the boy’s sickness and the kind of examinations done in the health centre. What they do say is that he died while they were there. They ran away during night when they discovered that he was no longer breathing, because they didn’t have the money to pay the bill. They buried the little boy under the banana palms near his father’s home, without a coffin and without even saying anything to his father’s family. Then at least the little boy’s spirit would be at home, together with his ancestral spirits, and not be wandering restlessly around disturbing living people. Nelly and her now almost 2-year-old daughter, Sally, moved in with Alexine again. And, yes, the sisters said, we did think about it back then, that the whole family looked as if it was sick, that it was as if the black ugly man had already given up. But Nelly recovered and did well for several years after this. She never returned to the ugly black man, and they forgot about it for some time. She started working in Kampala. Sometimes her daughter stayed with her. Other times, Sally stayed with Alexine, Okoth, Sorrow and Hope.3 The children’s legs and liveliness continued growing, and one day they were playing in front of the shed when a police car stopped next to them. A fat woman got out of it and pointed with her thick fingers at the kids. ‘There’, she said, ‘that is mine’. Suzy’s former employer accused her of

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having stolen children’s clothes from her home. Suzy, on the other hand, accused her former employer of not having paid her for her work, but she was the one who was imprisoned. Suzy’s new employer paid 20,000 shillings (20 USD) to get Suzy out of prison, but the police just ate the money. Her former employer must have paid even more. Suzy told me that her sisters had asked her to get the clothes for them. Kate told me that she had never seen the children in the smart clothes that Suzy was said to have stolen from the fat woman. But that’s what it is like with stories. There are many ways of telling them. The bottom line is that Suzy ended up spending 6 months in prison and that she does not remember that anybody from her family ever visited her there. According to Kate, she visited her sister several times in prison. Daily life in prison started at 5 am with a little bit of maize porridge and ended late at night with a little bit of soup from cooked beans. In between these two meals, prisoners worked in the field and were beaten when too slow. ‘You cannot imagine how happy I was when they finally let me go’, she said when years later I asked her to tell me about that time. ‘Happy, but thin. My skin was completely dry and rough’. It wasn’t a story that anybody else in the family wanted to talk about. Alexine’s brothers found it embarrassing to have a family member who had been to prison. They did refer to it occasionally, though, to remind me that they had done better as uncles than Alexine’s former husband had done as a father. While things fell apart for both Nelly and Suzy, Kate was happy. She told me in a bittersweet voice how in love she had been with a wonderful man from Kenya during that time and about all the things they had done together. He was a big man. Not of size but of importance. ‘Engineer. That was what he was’, she said. She pronounced the word with difficulty. ‘He had a contract in Uganda’, emphasizing the word ‘contract’, which, like ‘engineer’, suggested something big and important. While she was with him she had dared dreaming again. He took her to good restaurants. Sometimes they stayed at expensive hotels. He took her to concerts with musicians from abroad. They went on long walks, drank sodas and had their photos taken together. She showed me some of them. Photos picturing her alone. She had thrown away the ones with the two of them. In these pictures she wore smart muzungu clothes. In some of them, she even wore trousers. In others, she had expensive extensions braided into her hair, held a ghetto-blaster in her arms or sat on a motorcycle. These were pictures of the life she would have liked to have.

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She worked for the Indian family while she was together with the man from Kenya, who became the father of Okoth’s younger brother, Comfort. They paid her a good salary, 15,000 shillings (about 15 USD) a month, which was 5000 shillings more than her previous employers. Indians demand more from one than African families do. They would, for example, ask her to wash the women’s bloody underwear, even though Kate tried to explain to them that Africans don’t usually do that. Also, there was a woman in the house who had just arrived from India and who was always shouting at her. But Indians are reliable employers, the salary was good, and Kate was in love for the second time of her life. She was with Comfort’s father, the man from Kenya, for about a year. The day she went to see him to tell him that she was pregnant, he was gone. His friends laughed at her. They said he had returned to Kenya, and they wanted her to know that he was married and had gone back to his wife and children in Nairobi. Kate was crushed and returned many times to look for him in the hope that they had just tried to deceive her. She pleaded with them to send him a message, but they just laughed at her. He had told her that he had delayed marrying because he wanted a wife from Uganda. Kenyan women do not respect their husbands the way Ugandans do. Ugandan women respectfully kneel down when they greet a man or a person older than themselves. The thought of going to Kenya had brought a lightness into her life, similar to the one she had experienced as a young teenager, when she went to live with her uncle in Kampala. People always told such wonderful things about Nairobi, that it is easy to find work there, that salaries are good, that everything is cheap, that Kenya is a rich country, like Europe. And when people return from Europe, they always bring so many lovely things with them: clothes, shoes, tablecloths and lots of money. She stood in a corner of the shop of the Indian family that she worked for and gawked at the boxes full of goods, with ‘Kenya’ written on them. When her stomach grew and the demanding woman and the bloody underwear became too much for Kate to handle, she left the job. But it had been a good job, and she persuaded them to hire Suzy instead. She had recently been released from prison and needed work. Shortly afterwards, Jane had to give up school due to lack of fees, and she also joined the Indian family. Kate set off for Kampala to find a cousin sister who had said she knew what to do if one day she needed to abort. It had been so hard to be left alone with Okoth, and it made her so angry that another father of a

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child of hers had vanished into the blue. She didn’t want the baby, but she couldn’t afford the abortion either. ‘Maybe it was God who stopped me’, she said several years later, cuddling Comfort in her arms. She had tried to save up money for the abortion, but fell sick. Chest pain and cough. After weeks of illness she decided to go and see one of her uncles in Kampala. He gave her two tablets, and then contractions started even though she wasn’t even eight months pregnant. No one in her uncle’s home knew she was pregnant. She wore loose clothes and wasn’t all that big. She had not planned to tell them. She decided to go into the bush and find a place where she could give birth, sheltered by the grass, and then leave the baby outside a health centre. Fate willed it that a man crossed her path and told her to go home. And then she went back to the uncle’s house. As she arrived Comfort was born. She didn’t want to keep him. Didn’t like him. Not immediately. Only after a few days. But she didn’t know where to go with him. She thought of going out into the streets of Kampala, wander around in the fumes from cars, disappear into the haze, roam around in the crowd of people until she found a white person she could tell all her problems. Or she could wander around carelessly so that she would be hit by a car and the driver would have to give her some money in compensation. She had also heard that there are women who can write smart letters for you if you tell them about your problems, such as having children with no father, and then they can send the letters to someone who can help you out. But one must start with the local council ‘number one’, that is, the locally elected representative of Museveni’s political movement, and go all the way up to the fifth level of the administrative structure, which Museveni had installed throughout the country after assuming power in 1986. You have to pay a lot of money to get the letters and take them all the way up through the system. And then you have to have a passport and it must also have stamps in it. But she had not quite understood how to do all this and where to find those who write those kinds of letter. She tickled Comfort under the chin to make him smile and lifted him from her lap into a warm tight embrace while talking. She had also considered putting on old dirty clothes, she continued, and go begging in the streets with Comfort in her arms, but she had changed her mind. It would have been embarrassing if one of the uncles had discovered her. They had, after all, tried to help her. As far as she knew, they had never had dreams on her behalf, like her father had once had. But they had given her a roof over her head and something to eat whenever she turned up at their place. Instead of going begging in

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the streets, she decided to go to another uncle’s place where she knew that she could find Nelly. ‘And while I was there, I heard that my mother was working with a muzungu out in the village, and one day you even came to Kampala together with her. I then decided to join you and my mother in Saya’.

Notes 1. For further reading on the crisis in Uganda see W. Senteza-Kajubi, “The Historical Background to the Uganda Crisis, 1966–86,” in Beyond Crisis: Development Issues in Uganda, ed. Paul D. Wiebe and Cole P. Dodge (Kampala and Los Angeles: Makerere Institute of Social Research and African Studies Association, 1987), 25–40; Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, eds. Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development (London: James Currey, 1988), 1–82; and Christine Obbo, “What Went Wrong in Uganda?” in Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: James Currey, 1988), 205–223. 2. For a discussion of the multi-sector approach to AIDS intervention in Uganda see, e.g. Justin O. Parkhurst and Louisiana Lush, “The Political Environment of HIV: Lessons from a Comparison of Uganda and South Africa,” Social Science and Medicine 59 (2004): 1913–1924. 3. It is common in Uganda as elsewhere in East Africa that children live with relatives other than their parents for shorter or longer periods, not just out of necessity but also to nurture links with relatives, see, e.g. Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael A. Whyte. “Children’s Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda,” Africa 74, no. 1 (2004): 76–94; and Susan Reynolds Whyte, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Jenipher Twebaze, “Families,” in Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, ed. Susan Reynolds Whyte (Durham: Duke University Press), 104–117.

References Hansen, Holger Bernt, and Michael Twaddle, eds. Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London: James Currey, 1988. Obbo, Christine. “What Went Wrong in Uganda?” In Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, 205–223. London: James Currey, 1988. Parkhurst, Justin O., and Louisiana Lush. “The Political Environment of HIV: Lessons from a Comparison of Uganda and South Africa.” Social Science and Medicine 59 (2004): 1913–1924.

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Senteza-Kajubi, W. “The Historical Background to the Uganda Crisis, 1966–86.” In Beyond Crisis: Development Issues in Uganda, edited by Paul D. Wiebe and Cole P. Dodge, 25–40. Kampala and Los Angeles: Makerere Institute of Social Research and African Studies Association, 1987. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, and Michael A. Whyte. “Children’s Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 74, no. 1 (2004): 76–94. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Jenipher Twebaze. “Families.” In Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, edited by Susan Reynolds Whyte, 104–117. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 3

Women on the Move

I met Kate’s mother, Alexine, before I met Kate. Alexine and two other women, dressed in their best gomesi, had quietly brought dishes with food and placed them in front of me on my first night in the village. They had then backed out into the darkness again without uttering a word. That was in 1995, when I had just arrived in Saya, the village in eastern Uganda where I ended up spending a year. Alexine’s brother, Peter, had taken me to the village to inspect his small grey house so that I could assess the suitability of his house and his ancestral village for my fieldwork among the Jop’Adhola (Adhola’s people). Millet, rice, sweet potatoes, peanut sauce, chicken and the green leaves of cowpeas made up the festive meal that the discreet women served to the distinguished guests. At one point Peter asked his sister, Alexine, to stay for a moment. He sat across from me in the armchair without cushions. She knelt by his feet and looked down as he spoke. He explained to her that the muzungu was going to live in the house with her for some time, and asked her to be my language teacher and interpreter. She tried to keep up the reverent expression on her face, but a slight stir in the wrinkles about her eyes revealed her elated surprise. ‘Yes, I can do that’, she said quietly and humbly, and then she backed out again, still looking down, but with a hint of smile on her lips. That was the beginning of our year together in the small grey house in eastern Uganda. Eventually I grew closer to her daughters, Nelly, Kate, © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_3

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Suzy and Jane. Especially Kate. But I first met Alexine, and I first heard Alexine’s story about their life. Later the stories of her daughters complemented it in ways that were both contradictory and concordant. Together these women’s stories paint a picture of life on the margins of—yet at the heart of—a clan and of Ugandan society. The other women who brought food that first night in Saya were Peter’s sisters-in-law. Peter and Alexine’s two other brothers worked in town but had a house with cement walls in their ancestral village, where some of their wives and children stayed. Next to the brothers’ homestead were the homesteads of their cousins on their father’s side. And their second cousins. And third cousins. Their clan. The Nyapolo clan. Most of them without salaries and cement walls. They lived in round thatched huts and from what they could grow on the land. They were the descendants of Nyapolo, son of Adhola, who walked down the Nile with his people, but who had a wound—adhola—on his leg that prevented him from moving on further. He therefore decided to settle by the swamp behind Saya, where the forest was less dense and water easily accessible. His walk down the Nile is also said to have come to a halt because his wife’s pregnancy was as heavy as the sky, polo, which is also why they named their son Nyapolo, ‘child of the sky’. Nyapolo had four sons, and now their descendents are many. Two to three hundred thousand Jop’Adhola live in eastern Uganda. Historians believe that even though they may not all descend from Adhola and that Adhola may not be a historical person at all, the Jop’Adholas are correct in saying that their ancestors arrived as part of the migration waves of what is today called the Nilotic people. Nilotic people walked from southern Sudan down along the Nile over centuries, settling in various places along the way to Lake Victoria. They still speak closely related Nilotic languages, which is a family of languages very different from Bantu languages, spoken by the majority of Sub-Saharan Africans, the so-called Bantu people. The Jop’Adhola are a small Nilotic enclave in south eastern Uganda surrounded by four ethnic groups, speaking completely different languages.1 The border between the Jop’Adhola and the neighbouring Bantu group, the Banyole, is just a few hundred metres north of Saya. On the other side of the rice paddies in the swamp just outside the village.2 The first small groups of those who were later called Nilotic people probably reached this part of Uganda four or five hundred years ago, but when people sit around the fire at night they still tell stories about the long walk, the arrival of their ancestors, the dense forest and their

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ancestors’ struggle to prepare land for cultivation. Trees still rise majestically from the ground here and there but the British taught people that the mvule tree (African teak tree), which can reach a height of 50 metres, can be cut down, sold and used for timber, so only a few of these impressive trees remain. Other trees have survived, such as the jacaranda with its light purple flowers, the flame tree with red flowers that glow against the clear, pale blue sky, and the cassia tree, with luminous yellow flowers that shine like little lanterns when the sky gets its dark cobalt colour just before the rain pours down, and whose flowers later turn into pods that cows and goats devour. Life in Padhola is no longer a fight against the forest. Rather, it is a struggle for firewood at the risk of doing away with the last bit of forest. The remaining trees are in constant danger of being made to contribute to the family income. As a woman once told me, while sitting in the shade of her awe-inspiring large tree close to the road, on which I had painted a blue cross so that I knew where to branch for the Nyapolo homestead, her children’s future swaggered above us. When one day she would no longer be there, they would be able to cut down the tree and pay their school fees. I moved into the little grey house in Saya and spent the next year there with Alexine, who also lived in Peter’s house during that period of her life. At night we sat together in the shade of the kerosene lamp and ate from a plate of kwon, an ugali-like dish made from millet, but much darker, harder and sourer. Okoth and Sally, her grandchildren, accompanied us and so did her own two daughters, Sorrow and Hope. Four children between the ages of three and five. When the children fell asleep on the floor, she gathered the remnants of kwon and cowpea leaves and placed them in a pot to protect them from rats until the next morning, when she and the children would have them for breakfast. Then she sat down on the cement floor with legs stretched out and folded hands, and started recounting the walk of the Jop’Adhola down the Nile with a dreamy voice, or talked about the best time of her life, that time when her father was still alive and married to her mother. That was before she had started school, and before Uganda became independent in 1962. Her mother was the sister of her father’s first wife. When Alexine’s mother came to visit her sister, her sister’s husband decided to take the younger sister as his wife as well. Or maybe she was a cousin sister, or a sister of different mothers, somebody told me many years later, but that didn’t matter so much. The point was that they were from the same clan and that he therefore only had one clan of in-laws to pay respect to. Alexine’s mother had

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been to the school at the Catholic mission, run by Italian nuns, and she had learnt how to eat bread and sugar, drink tea from a cup and eat from plates, cover herself with a blanket, be clean and smart, and things like that, and Alexine thought that this was why her father liked her mother better than he liked her sister, his first wife, a woman who used banana leaves and bark cloth to cover up her body. Uganda was a British protectorate in the 1950s, when Alexine was born, but they didn’t see much of the British out east. There were no European settlers in Uganda, unlike elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa. Only missionaries ventured into these rural parts of the country. Anglicans reached it in the 1870s. Catholics soon followed, and together they made Uganda into a religious and sometimes bloody battleground, the aftermath of which can still be felt. The religious divide that emerged in Uganda in the late nineteenth century has survived in the two dominant political parties that have been fighting for power since independence.3 This fight was interrupted by Idi Amin’s dictatorial regime and his attempts to Islamize Uganda in the 1970s, and by Museveni’s attempts to create a democracy without political parties in the 1980s and 1990s. But it is a religious and political divide that is reappearing in the growing opposition to Museveni. In addition, American revival preachers have joined the struggle for Ugandan souls. They see it as their responsibility to save people in a country like Uganda that has been through so many ordeals, and where people have been subjected to outspoken sex talk during the AIDS epidemic and accustomed to such sexual tolerance that even homosexuality was somehow tolerated for some time. One of the souls that has been saved is Alexine’s. I soon found out that she was ‘saved’ and a dedicated member of the local Balokole congregation, a term previously used to refer to the East African Revival Movement of the 1930s, but which is now more commonly used to refer to the Pentecostal born-again Christians.4 The struggle for Ugandan souls thus continues, but the children of Saya are glad that neither the Catholic priests nor the revival preachers have fought too hard against condoms, since they can be used to make supple and springy banana-leaf footballs. In Padhola the Catholics initially won, built schools and churches, taught children to drink tea and put on clothes, translated the Bible and thus gave southern Nilotic peoples, including the Jop’Adhola, a written language. The missionaries disagreed on whether juok, the Dhopadhola word for ‘that which is beyond our comprehension’ should be translated into ‘God’ or ‘the devil’, but gradually it came to be mostly used about

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the devil and not about the Heavenly Father whom they are now all devoted to, whichever congregation they have joined. The British educated people from central Uganda to work as government officials, but they left the army, police and prison services to people from the north and east, and thereby they contributed to yet another division of the country, which was not ethnically based either. Together these divisions laid the foundation for later conflicts and civil wars. Alexine’s father was one of the men from the east who got the chance to become a police officer and thus to extend his horizon beyond his clan, cattle and millet. Alexine and her mother travelled with him when he was posted in different parts of the country. Meanwhile, his first wife, Alexine’s mother’s sister, lived with her three sons in Saya where the family still resides. Alexine told me with nostalgic warmth in her voice that her father made sure she had clothes and ate well. When he received his salary, he gave her some money and said: ‘“Go and buy some bread or something else that you like”, and you know, at that age, it’s kind of nice to be told so, and bread was a rare thing. It was something the white people ate. The smell of freshly baked bread was the smell of happiness. It was a good time. They were happy together and they loved me’. ‘Then what happened?’ ‘I don’t know. My mother quarrelled with her sister, who was now her co-wife, and then my mother left. But fortunately, the two mothers did not differentiate between the children, so my mother’s sister was good to me when I stayed with my father and brothers in Saya. And when my mother dies, she will be buried here, because this is where she was married. And when I die, I will also be buried with my husband. That is how it is. We, the Nilotes, we endure marriage. When we marry, it is forever. Bantu men do not pay a proper bride price for women, just small things like sugar, soap and maybe a chicken, but not like us, the Nilotes, so they have no reason to hold on to the woman if she wants to return to her parents. But we, the Nilotes, we pay cows for the woman, and Nilotic women know how to endure marriage. As you can see, my brother’s wife, MamaJacob, still lives with us in Saya and she still digs on her husband’s land, even though he now lives with another woman in Tororo, in the house by the jacaranda trees. She belongs here, no matter what. But I don’t. I am married and I belong to my husband’.5 She picked up the children from the floor and carried them to the rush mat next to her bed. She covered them with some of her own clothes. With darkness may come a slight breeze, and the air can be a little cooler

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at night than during daytime. But it is never unbearably hot or freezingly cold in Uganda. The average temperature, day and night, all year round, is between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius. Alexine swept the food remnants on the floor out to the goats, chickens and rats in the dark. ‘Excuse me’, she said after putting away the broom, folding her hands, straightening her back and her face, ‘now the Holy Spirit has come to me’. I got up and sought shelter under the mosquito net above the large comfortable bed that I had had made for my room. ‘Tell me about your husband’, I said one evening, as Alexine sat leaning against the wall, full and satisfied, legs stretched out in front of her. She had yet to tell me about the father of her children, who was no longer part of her life, but who apparently anyway was and always would be. Because once you are married and the cows have been paid, then you are forever married, whether you are together or not. ‘I met him when I was young. When I was at the Teachers’ Training College’, she began. She then paused for a moment, closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap. The children’s eyes glowed in the faint golden gleam from the kerosene lamp. They were all quiet and silent, piercing us gently with their curious but respectfully restrained gaze. I was bursting with curiosity about what was going on inside these well-disciplined little kids, whose eyes testified to a desire to know and do so much more than what they were allowed to. ‘When I came back to the Teachers’ Training College after the holidays, they examined me and saw that there was something growing in my stomach. Funny, right?’ Alexine looked at me for a moment, but closed her eyes again and continued without waiting for my reply. ‘The teachers liked me because I was so humble and responsible. I was the one taking care of the school’s small shop, so the teachers were very sad to discover that I was pregnant. They said I should go home and give birth and return to school afterwards. So, I went home to my mother’s place and gave birth to Nelly. My mother said that Nelly belonged to her since I was not married. If a woman is married, her children belong to the man’s clan, but if she is not married, then her children belong to her parents. That is how it is. My father said to me: “First you finish your education and then we can talk about marriage”. That was also what I thought. So, I returned to college and got pregnant again. We were like children, knowing nothing, and then suddenly pregnant once more. This time with Kate. Funny, right?’ ‘With the same man?’

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‘Yeah, it’s kind of funny, right? With the same man. The one I married. This time he kept me. That kind of marriage, you know’. ‘What kind do you mean?’ ‘Suddenly pregnant and then we had to marry. Because of fear maybe. At least that was what people expected of us. But yeah … I liked him. We were in love. Young and in love, and we got married with cows and rings on our fingers and everything. I loved him and he loved me. That was how it was’. Her cheeks flared. She still remembered what it felt like to be young, in love and hopeful. The children dozed off as we talked. One by one they slid down onto the cement floor and fell asleep. Alexine wet her hand and cleaned their shiny mouths and faces, but left them to sleep on the floor. ‘We were happy at first, but his mother didn’t know how to treat a daughter-in-law properly. She told him all sorts of fake stories about me and then he started punishing me. He had the habit of just grabbing whatever was close at hand, a cane, a chair, whatever, and be hammering at me with it. He was not a patient person. Once it was serious indeed and I got really scared, so I reported him to the police and he was put in jail. But he quickly got out again and continued beating me. So, I decided to set off with Nelly, Kate and Suzy and went back to my brothers’ place here in Saya’. That was the story I heard that night in Saya, in the calm and warm darkness and sweet scent of bats mixed with a faintly sour smell of children’s urine. Alexine often told me how she had struggled through the years to provide for herself and her girls: ‘I work in other people’s fields, sometimes from early morning to late evening. I have raised six children. I have buried three. Life is not easy for us women here in Uganda’, she proclaimed one night when I had suggested that she did not have to beat up Okoth just because he did not want to eat the meat I had bought. ∗ ∗ ∗ For long I thought that she had lived in Saya, in her brothers’ homestead, since she left her husband with the three little girls, who were now grown up and mothers of Okoth and Sally. ‘What happened to you and the children when you left your husband?’ I asked a few months later, after realizing that she had only moved into the house in Saya shortly before my arrival in the village. We were in the car with Okoth, Sorrow and Hope in the back seat, returning to the

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village after a trip to Kampala. I was concentrating on bypassing or passing through bumps and holes in the road in the small and far too low car that we had borrowed to replace the four-wheel drive that I had left in Kampala to be straightened out after it had been crushed between two other cars on a busy road in Kampala. The children tumbled around in the back seat as the car crawled along the bumpy road. ‘What happened to the children when you left your husband?’ I asked again since she did not answer the first time. I knew by then that children belong to their father’s clan and should remain with him if the mother leaves, though they may stay with the mother while they are still small. I was confused about what had actually happened with her daughters when she left her husband. ‘Well, I couldn’t just sit and do nothing, so I started teaching again. I got a job in there’, she said, nodding at the military barracks outside of Tororo, that we were passing while slowly finding our way around the holes in the red dirt road. The rows of cheerless grey staff quarters were almost concealed from view by the tall grass, but I knew that these barracks still gave people bad memories from the time when you faced an uncertain fate if you bumped into a soldier on the road, whether he was from Amin’s army in the 1970s or Obote’s in the 1980s. Now the barracks were not that scary anymore. Museveni’s army had a reputation for being well-disciplined at this time in history in this part of the country, compared to what had previously been the case. ‘Was that where you stayed before I came to Saya?’ ‘What? No, that was long ago. I left my husband years ago. When my older daughters were still small. Idi Amin had just assumed power when I left’. The country that was known by the British as the Pearl of Africa due to its lushness, magnificence and variety of form and colour, later became known for Idi Amin’s reign of terror. After Amin and the subsequent civil war had finally given way to peace and order in most of the country in the mid-1980s, Uganda became known for its galloping AIDS epidemic. But the outside world also still remembered Uganda for the eccentric, erratic dictator who was in power from 1971–1979. Amin is remembered for the expulsion of the Indian population. Indians arrived in East Africa during the British reign, and they controlled much of Uganda’s trade until 1972, when Amin decided to throw them out and confiscate their property. Amin is also remembered for his support to Palestinian hijackers who were allowed to land their plane at Entebbe airport in 1976. And he is notorious for his brutal killings. At first, he killed political opponents, but

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eventually he hunted people for being well-educated or coming from a different ethnic group than his own or a religion other than Islam, which applied to more than 80% of the population. Fear, terror and torture became part of everyday life during and after Amin’s reign. Amin was chased in 1979 by Ugandan rebel groups and the Tanzanian army, and another seven years of political unrest, economic collapse and civil war followed.6 Some of the terror had taken place right here in the barracks that we had just passed on the road between Tororo and Saya. And on the road itself. Soldiers stopped people on the way home, looted, beat, tortured and killed them. Eastern Uganda was not the worst hit part of the country, but people here had not entirely escaped fear and terror either. Not that I knew much more about this now than I did before coming to Uganda. People didn’t talk about it. Life went on. Alexine sat quietly in the car with folded hands, looking out the window while I dealt with bumps and holes and tried to imagine her life in Amin’s barracks.7 Twenty years of Alexine’s life, and fathers of several of her children, had not been mentioned yet. She left the man, who was still her husband, and on whose land she would one day be buried, two decades ago. The children sat quietly in the back seat, as Ugandan children do when they are told to, or maybe just always do when adults are present. Wearing their best clothes, freshly laundered and ironed. Five-year-old Okoth’s watchful eyes were as vivid as always. ‘Were you not scared?’ ‘Yes, I was very scared of my husband. That was why I left him’. ‘I mean, were you not afraid to live in Idi Amin’s barracks?’ ‘In the barracks? No, that was a good life. We had a roof over our heads, a good salary and there was plenty of everything. I had more by then than what I can now offer those kids’, she replied, nodding her head in the direction of the children in the back seat. ‘The soldiers came from all over Uganda, but most of them were from northern Uganda. You know, people from the north speak Nilotic languages, which are similar to our language here in Padhola, so I could talk to them. And the soldiers also spoke Swahili, and I had learned Swahili when I travelled from town to town with my father, so it was easy for me. If I had tried to work outside the barracks, my husband would have stopped me. But the soldiers protected me. They behaved properly towards those who worked for them. Many of them had wives and children in the barracks, and we were a group of ten teachers working for them. They did not assault us the way they did with other people. They respectfully addressed me

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as Mwalimu, which means teacher in Swahili. Sometimes they arranged parties for us. They slaughtered a cow and served millet beer and rice and played music, and I had not been saved yet, so I liked to drink and party. And the soldiers arranged trips for us and the children. Once they took us to the zoo in Entebbe. It was such a nice trip. And the shop inside the barracks was packed with cheap stuff: mattresses, sheets, lots of them, cheap, cheap. When you got your salary, you bought as much as possible and went into town to sell it for twice as much. That way you doubled your salary. So, it was me who supported the family’. ‘I have heard that people were terrified when having to pass by the barracks back then’, I continued after an interlude, where the bumps and holes had again demanded my full attention. ‘Other people, you mean? Yes, some of the soldiers stole other people’s stuff. If they saw someone with a bike or a watch that they desired, then they would pretend that they wanted to shoot him if he didn’t give it to them. I sometimes got a lift with them to go and sell the items I had bought in the shop in the barracks, and I saw that this was how they behaved. I felt sorry for people that it happened to. I did. But I had a good life. I was able to take care of my family during those years’. A herd of cattle crossed the road near the Catholic mission in Nagongera, founded in 1913. That was where Alexine’s mother had gone to school in the 1940s. The imposing church built in the early twentieth century, and now surrounded by gigantic trees, must have looked stunning and overwhelming to a girl from a small round thatched hut. But according to Alexine, her mother and future husband had been more impressed by the tea in the cups, the cleanliness and the clothes. A man walked his bicycle with two goats tied to the luggage carrier. I gazed at the goat as I listened to Alexine’s story and waited for the cattle to pass so that we could continue. ‘How many of the children were there with you?’ I asked. ‘The children? Jane. But she was still very small’. ‘Who was Jane’s father?’ ‘He also worked in the barracks’. ‘So, he was a soldier?’ ‘No, he was a construction worker. He built houses for them’. ‘So, you were not with Nelly, Kate and Suzy during those years?’ ‘No, they were with my brothers. Or they were with my husband. I cannot quite remember where they were. In the barracks they were very

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strict. They would not let anyone live inside there who didn’t work there … It was a good time. It really was. But then war came’. ‘What war?’ ‘The Tanzanians came and wanted to chase Amin and kill everybody in the barracks. I had just given birth to Jane when they started shooting at us. I had to flee with her in my arms. I packed my most important belongings in a sheet and ran away with the bundle on my head and Jane in my arms until I reached my brother’s house in Tororo. That is why she is called Alwenye, “born during war”. Alwenye’s father was also killed in that war. They checked here, on people’s shoulders’, she explained and lifted a hand to lower one of the puff sleeves of her gomesi, ‘and every person with a mark on his shoulder, which showed that he had carried a gun, was shot. He tried to escape, but they took his shirt off and saw the mark on his shoulder, and then they shot him’. ‘But you just told me that he was not a soldier’. ‘Did I?’ She briefly turned her head towards me. ‘Well, but he worked for the soldiers, so he had a gun and had to flee. But they caught him and killed him’. The herd had reached the meadow the other side of the road. The man with the goats on the bike had set in motion, and we also continued our slow ride through the holes and bumps and Alexine’s life. After fleeing the military barracks in 1979 with the newborn Jane in her arms, she moved into her oldest brother’s house in Tororo, near the jacaranda trees. The house had an annexe meant for domestic staff, but usually inhabited by relatives. Alexine’s mother also lived there. She looked after Jane while Alexine worked as a trader. Those were the years when the three oldest daughters started visiting her. When Alexine talked about that time, it sounded as if the girls were living there with her. When they talked about it themselves, they told about leaving the hoe in the field and running off to town to visit their mother and grandmother and about their father turning up at night with thick stick. They remembered that their mother was often away doing her business, but that they would usually find their grandmother and Jane in the annexe. Alexine admits that she was moving about a lot during those years. She took the train from Tororo to Lira and Gulu in northern Uganda, where she bought millet, sesame seeds and sorghum, which she then sold again down south. Sometimes she managed to sell her goods at the station itself and jumped right back onto the train to collect more goods up north. She made good money and she was able to provide for the children, buying food and clothes for them and paying their school fees. She remembers that it was

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she who cared for all of her children during those years. And she proudly told me how good she was at it: ‘I know how to calculate. I was always good at that. And I was not weak. We were not weak, those of us doing that kind of work’. Alexine was looted on several occasions during those years. Soldiers came in the middle of the night and stole everything she had, so that she had to start over. But she refused to be defeated. She was convinced that it was her husband who sent the soldiers to plunder her, which may well have been the case. Soldiers could indeed be hired to do a job like that, but they could also loot people without the instigation of vindictive husbands. It became increasingly difficult for Alexine to get by as a trader. The war intensified. There were only a few battles inside Tororo town, but when it did happen you had to stay put for days. And when Alexine travelled up north she was often in danger. In 1986–1987, right after Museveni had assumed power, Alice Lakwena, who fought against Museveni in the name of the Holy Spirit, ravaged large parts of the country with her followers.8 Sometimes the train was attacked, and one time so many of the passengers were shot that they fell on top of each other inside the train. Alexine lay somewhere in the middle of the pile of dead people without being hit, but after that her brother told her to stop her travels up north. That she had to think of something else to do to support herself. Peace was gradually restored in the south, but money lost its value, Alexine said, and everything became expensive. One could no longer trade without a permit. You had to buy a license and it was too expensive and complicated for Alexine to get such a license. While the rest of the world believed that things were improving in Uganda, when Museveni became a donor darling and restored peace and order and economic progress, and made preparations for the reintroduction of democracy, things went downhill for Alexine. But she did not want me to think that she had always been impoverished and dependent on others. She used to be a strong woman who managed on her own and at times she even supported several of her family members, both her brothers’ families in Saya and her own children. It had started going downhill for her when she moved to Kakira after Museveni had assumed power. And it wasn’t until months after we had met that she opened up about her time in Kakira. ‘Life in Kakira was not a good life. Not before I was saved. I drank, got drunk, didn’t care about my body and my clothes. It was as if I was

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trying to finish my life. I had no job and no contact with my relatives. And I felt they didn’t care’. ‘Why was life so hard? The war was over. There was peace for the first time in many years’. ‘I think it was because my children had grown up and I could see that they were not doing well. That was what made me so worried. Those were the years when Nelly and Kate started having children without being married’. ‘You also had children during those years. And you were not married either’. ‘I am still married. My husband has not returned the cows. And I knew that I could take care of children. I had been doing so for many years. No, it was my oldest daughters I was worried about. Not myself and the small ones. I went mad from worrying about them. Life was not easier after the war. There were so many new temptations for young people. And for me. My mom and I had a millet field and brewed millet beer to make a living. And then I drank too much of it myself. But one day I got so tired of taking orders from customers that I thought: “If I were saved, I wouldn’t have to listen to all those drunkards anymore.” Then I got saved. The first thing I did was to stop selling beer. But after getting saved, life was still hard, so I backslid and started drinking again. Then one day I spoke to a woman who was also saved and who said that there was no point in doing things half-heartedly. It was either or. And then I stopped drinking completely’. ‘How long have you actually been saved? Was Hope already born when you got saved?’ ‘Well, let me explain. Sorrow was born and then I got saved. But then I backslid and gave birth to Hope. But I repented. I regretted having become pregnant with her and then I got saved again’. ‘Who is her father?’ ‘He was a nice man. But lazy. We were only together once. We never repeated it. You know, sometimes you do unexpected things when nature forces you. Yes, nature forces you now and then’, she said with a knowing woman-to-woman-laugh. ‘Didn’t you tell him you were pregnant?’ ‘I did’. ‘But he never helped you with Hope?’ ‘Not yet’. ‘What did he say?’

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‘He accepted that he was the father. He was married but said he would agree to marry me too, but I did not accept. After so many years alone, I couldn’t settle into a married man’s home and get used to having a new co-wife’. ‘Have you never considered getting married again?’ ‘No. I do not know why. Maybe someone has bewitched me, but I never wanted to marry again. For many years, I thought I would end up returning to my husband. But time passed and I never returned. When I was a trader in Tororo, I was a free woman. I had my children with me, and I had my own money. I got used to having my own home so how could I move into another man’s home? Also, I had become saved … Being saved is like a miracle. When you are not yet saved, others pray for you that God may show himself to you. They come to you and say that God loves you, that you can choose to either repent or perish, but that God wants the best for you. After hearing these words, they penetrated my heart and I thought, “let me try,” and I saw that it was good … God’s word has changed my life’. ‘When I heard that Kate was pregnant with Okoth, I got scared. I knew that people would stop respecting my daughters if they had children without being married, and I really wished that my children would not end up in the same situation as me. That was why I got so worried. But I comforted Kate and said: “Be patient until God helps you bring the baby into the world.” I also said that if she knew who the father was and if he was faithful and responsible then she should marry him, otherwise she should leave the child with me. She was terribly worried herself. She cried and couldn’t eat, so we were very careful with her and comforted her and reassured her’. ‘When I heard she had also given birth to Comfort, I was just about to collapse. I almost regretted having had children myself. I thought I had really failed as a mother. That was the time when you had just arrived in Saya. But I didn’t say anything to you about it. I had been through a difficult time myself just before coming to Saya. It was as if I had gone mad. I began to hear voices telling me that I was going to die, that there were snakes surrounding me and trying to move into my stomach. I stopped eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom. Then my brother took me to Mulago Hospital in Kampala. They examined me and asked me what my problem was. I told the doctor about my worries. While I was talking to him, I suddenly said: “Ah, I have a heart.” Funny, isn’t it? But the doctor replied, “Yes, you still have your heart. Otherwise, you wouldn’t

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be alive.” I remember hearing the doctor say to my brother that I could stay in the hospital for a few days, but that afterwards I would need to go to a place where I could relax and stop worrying so much. I first stayed with Peter in Kampala, but after improving a bit, he took me out here, and then you came … I will never forget the day you came. I had stayed for a long time with no money and nothing to do, and then I was taken to the village to live with my sisters-in-law who also had nothing. Nothing to eat, no soap, just green leaves and millet. But then you came. When my brother said: “She’s going to live in the house. Can you translate for her?” then I thought he meant just that day. But then you started talking about salary, and I understood. I was so happy. I could not believe it. It was like a dream. I really mean it. You cannot imagine how happy I was that suddenly a muzungu had shown up and offered me work. Imagine having been so low and then to rise all the way to the top – from one day to the next. I thank our Lord that you came to Uganda and found us in our hour of need. I thank our Lord for my salvation’.9

Notes 1. The Jop’Adhola, their oral history, religion, and kinship have been described in a number of publications, e.g. A. C. K. Oboth-Ofumbi, Padhola (Nairobi: East Africa Literature Bureau, 1960); A. B. C. OchollaAyayo, Traditional Ideology and Ethics Among the Southern Luo (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1976); Bethwell A. Ogot, History of the Southern Luo. Vol. 1 Migration and Settlement 1500–1900 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967a); Bethwe1l A. Ogot, “Traditional Religion and the Precolonial History of Africa: The Example of the Padhola,” Uganda Journal 31, no. 1 (1967b): 111–116; Bethwell A. Ogot, “On the Making of a Sanctuary: Being Some Thoughts on the History of Religion in Padhola,” in The Historical Study of African Religion, ed. Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 122–135; Randall Packard, “The Significance of Neighbourhoods for the Collection of Oral History in Padhola,” Uganda Journal 34, no. 2 (1970): 147–162; O. P’Bitek Religion of the Central Luo (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971); and Anne Sharman, “‘Joking’ in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control,” Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 103–117. 2. The Banyole have been described in a series of publications by Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael A. Whyte, see, e.g. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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3. Holger Bernt Hansen, “Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda,” Research Report, 43 (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977); Holger Bernt Hansen, Mission, Church and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890–1925 (London: Heinemann, 1984); Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, eds. Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period Since Independence (London: James Currey, 1995); and Dan Mudoola, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics in Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1993). 4. Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, eds., The East African Revival: History and Legacies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 5. Local variations in patrilineal kinships systems and more specifically a comparison of Nilotic and Bantu marriages is made by Aidan Southall, “On Chastity in Africa,” Uganda Journal 24, no. 2 (1960): 207–216; and Thomas N. Håkansson, “The Detachability of Women: Gender and Kinship in Processes of Socioeconomic Change Among the Gusii of Kenya,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 3 (1997): 516–538. 6. Holger Bernt Hansen, “Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 83–103. 7. Senteza-Kajubi, “The Historical Background to the Uganda Crisis, 1966– 86,” 25–40; and Hansen and Twaddle, Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development, 1–82. 8. Heike Behrendt, Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 (London: James Currey, 1999). 9. Ugandan women have sought economic independence for long, see e.g. Christine Obbo, African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence (London: Zed Press, 1980); and Hanne O. Mogensen, “Ugandan Women on the Move to Stay Connected: The Concurrency of Fixation and Liberation,” Anthropologica 53 (2011): 103–116.

References Behrendt, Heike. Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 . London: James Currey, 1999. Håkansson, N. Thomas. “The Detachability of Women: Gender and Kinship in Processes of Socioeconomic Change Among the Gusii of Kenya.” American Ethnologist 21, no. 3 (1994): 516–538. Hansen, Holger Bernt. “Ethnicity and Military Rule in Uganda.” Research Report, 43. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1977. Hansen, Holger Bernt. Mission, Church and State in a Colonial Setting: Uganda 1890–1925. London: Heinemann, 1984. Hansen, Holger Bernt. “Uganda in the 1970s: A Decade of Paradoxes and Ambiguities.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7, no. 1 (2013): 83–103.

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Hansen, Holger Bernt, and Michael Twaddle, eds. Religion and Politics in East Africa: The Period Since Independence. London: James Currey, 1995. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Ugandan Women on the Move to Stay Connected: The Concurrency of Fixation and Liberation.” Anthropologica 53 (2011): 103– 116. Mudoola, Dan. Religion, Ethnicity and Politics in Uganda. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1993. Obbo, Christine. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence. London: Zed Press, 1980. Oboth-Ofumbi, A. C. K. Padhola. Nairobi: East Africa Literature Bureau, 1960. Ocholla-Ayayo, A. B. C. Traditional Ideology and Ethics Among the Southern Luo. Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1976. Ogot, Bethwell A. History of the Southern Luo. Vol. 1 Migration and Settlement 1500–1900. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967a. Ogot, Bethwell A. “Traditional Religion and the Precolonial History of Africa: The Example of the Padhola.” Uganda Journal 31, no. 1 (1967b): 111–116. Ogot, Bethwell A. “On the Making of a Sanctuary: Being Some Thoughts on the History of Religion in Padhola.” In The Historical Study of African Religion, edited by Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, 122–135. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Packard, Randall. “The Significance of Neighbourhoods for the Collection of Oral History in Padhola.” Uganda Journal 34, no. 2 (1970): 147–162. P’Bitek, O. Religion of the Central Luo. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971. Sharman, Anne. “‘Joking’ in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control.” Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 103–117. Southall, Aidan. “On Chastity in Africa.” Uganda Journal 24, no. 2 (1960): 207–216. Ward, Kevin, and Emma Wild-Wood, eds. The East African Revival: History and Legacies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

CHAPTER 4

Intersecting Trajectories

‘I don’t believe in juok. I don’t believe in juok’, I heard somebody exclaim next door. ‘I forsake the Devil. Our Lord, protect me from juok’, the person pleaded in both English and Dhopadhola. I opened the squeaky door and saw Alexine striding around the room with clenched hands. Renunciations and cicadas turned into sunrise, cockcrows and sweeping noises. Alexine bent down with her back straight to reach the ground with the broom, or rather the tuft of straw without a handle. The dust swirled in the sunlight. My car was parked on the green grass in front of the house. Peter and I had been on our way for five hours to reach Saya, travelling on roads that started out being wide, paved and densely trafficked by fuming trucks, heavily crowded vans and roaring buses. Roads that ran along the equator, passed the source of the Nile, sugar cane plantations, buzzing small towns and marketplaces, went through one of the country’s last bits of rainforest and endless clusters of villages and gardens of millet and bananas. Which grew narrower, perforated with potholes, and frequented by wandering people and loaded bikes more than by cars, and which eventually turned into a mud hole or a cloud of dust, depending on the weather, and sometimes both at once, so that the occasional vehicle would have to crawl along it, while energetic children in tattered dirty clothes cheered and waved. He had shown me the house with an apologetic air, and sceptically accepted my insistence that it was just what I © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_4

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needed. I had admired the cement walls and the iron sheet roof and was amazed that a three-bedroom house could be found in the middle of a village of thatched mud huts. I got in touch with Peter before my departure from Denmark in 1995, and he had looked after me from my first day in the country. He lived with his wife and children in Kampala, but like most other men in town, he had a house in his ancestral village, even though he only had one wife, who lived with him in town. Peter was not just any member of the family. He was the best-educated and wealthiest of the three brothers. His older brother, the one who lived in Tororo in the house by the jacaranda trees, was the formal head of the family, but it seemed to be Peter who was perceived as such in practice. It was Peter whom people came to see when in trouble and there was always a long line of people wanting to talk to him when he came to the village. Saya was where he belonged. And where his relatives belonged. Their ancestors were buried there, and Peter and his wife and sons would also one day be buried there. The land was his larder. When you have access to land, you have access to food. Uganda is lush. One of the most fertile countries in Africa. Even during the worst times in the 1970s and 1980s food was there, in rural areas. And in the 1990s, the majority of Ugandans still failed to live from their salary alone. People with salaries helped others in the family with cash, but at the same time many of them depended on the land for food and on their relatives for cultivating the land. ‘Alexine doesn’t know yet that she has just had another grandchild’, Peter said to me in between two lumps of kwon when we ate the festive meal that Alexine and her sisters-in-law had prepared for us the first night. The dim light from the kerosene lamp made the white in his eyes gleam in his pitch-dark face. ‘A few days ago, her daughter, Kate, gave birth to a son in my annexe in Kampala. But then suddenly she was gone again, and now I don’t know where she is. I will tell Alexine before I leave for Kampala. But the truth can hurt. It must be revealed slowly and carefully’. The following day he told Alexine and at night she strode restlessly around the house, forsaking juok. ‘Why don’t you believe in juok?’ I asked her as I sipped the millet porridge she had cooked on the small charcoal stove before she had started swirling dust around in the house. Juok is an indisputable element of life. Its existence is not questioned. Juok is all that which, for better or for worse, is not normal or is beyond our comprehension, such as twins, unusual formations of rocks, extraordinarily talented students,

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ancestral spirits and other incomprehensible events and conditions. Juok is respected, feared and celebrated, most rituals having exactly this as their purpose.1 Her face lit up in ill-concealed pride, as if she had been waiting to be asked that question. ‘Because I am saved, born again’, she replied. ‘I have met God, and I am now a good person who does not give into drinking, quarrelling, lying or other kinds of folly, as do those who are weak in spirit and who have not yet embraced our Lord’. When you buy into the revival preachers’ interpretation of the cosmic order, then you cannot also believe in juok. That made sense. But it still didn’t make sense to me that she needed protection from something she didn’t believe in. The little grey house had a pit latrine in the maize field behind the house: a hole in the ground with cement coating for the feet. There was even a bathroom, a shelter made from banana leaves in which you could wash off dust and sweat with a bucket of water, shielded from prying eyes and grazing goats. And then there was a brown chipboard ceiling, which I appreciated, thinking it would keep the rats at a distance while I was sleeping. Later I realized that the darkness above the ceiling attracted hundreds of bats and that these would sometimes fall through the cracks between the chipboards created by the weight of bat stools. The windows provided us with warm sunlight most of the day and a view of thatched roofs showing above the tall grass separating the homesteads. The red window frames were barred with iron, because cement walls signal that you own more than if you live in a thatched hut. In the living room the iron bars had been removed from one of the windows so that a child could climb through it and open the back door if the key to the front door was lost. That was often the case, but it somehow always reappeared. It was never lost in a millet field. It had just ended up in another pocket, or was tied to the end of the skirt of another woman than we first thought. I had the walls painted yellow and decorated them with children’s drawings and postcards from home. Some of the children came from neighbouring homesteads. Some lived with us. One was five-year-old Okoth, Kate’s oldest son. He was called Okoth because he was born when it rained. It rains a lot in Uganda. The rain falls more heavily some months than others but Uganda is always green. Nelly’s daughter, Sally,

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Alexine’s second grandchild, also lived there for a while. Alexine’s lastborn daughter, Hope, was an exuberant three-year-old girl at the time, named after Alexine’s hope for a better life than what had befallen her in the years before Hope’s birth. Hope’s five-year-old sister, Sorrow, did indeed have sadness in her eyes, or rather a sorrowful confusion about life, but she also had curious and dirty little hands that joined the other children in placing handprints all over the yellow walls. Alexine took a break from sweeping, straightened her back and looked at me. ‘Before you came’, she said, ‘I dreamed one night that Sorrow and Hope stepped out of a big car. I asked my sisters-in-law what they thought it meant and they said that hopefully it meant we would soon get a car in the family. Now I understand that I dreamed of your car’. ∗ ∗ ∗ I wanted to inform people in the village about the purpose of my stay and why I would like to visit them and ask them questions about themselves and their children. It rained the day the information meeting was going to take place. The rain trickled down in silent thin rays all day. It usually poured down in short intensive squally showers in the late afternoon, but that day, when we were supposed to meet the villagers, it came down quietly all day. And when it rains, you don’t go anywhere. You wait for it to stop. I watched Okoth climbing around in the cassia tree in spite of the rain. ‘We told them that we would be there at 2 pm’, I tried to say to Alexine, thinking that a group of women was waiting for me. But in vain. ‘I wonder whether they will show up when it rains like that’, she replied with a deep sigh, wringing her hands the same way as she did when she heard about new grandchildren and unexpected deaths. Life is full of challenges. There are things you can do nothing about. You will probably survive most of them, if you let them pass. Like the rain. ‘Yes, it is raining’, she repeated. And then silence. It was coming to 4 pm, but as I would eventually learn, 2 pm meant: sometime in the afternoon, when women have returned from working in the field, cooked kwon and eaten the first actual meal, washed the dishes—unless they have children old enough to do this for them—bathed and dressed themselves, and those children who are young enough come along, tied to their mother’s back. And by then it was usually well beyond 2 pm and adults as well as toddlers were spotlessly clean, whereas I

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continued to think that we had meant it at least a little bit when we said 2 pm, and trudged around in dusty or muddy skirts and worn out shoes. Instead of a shiny baby on my back, I had a dirty backpack with water, notebooks, a tape recorder, a camera and, not to forget: sugar, salt and soap, gifts for those who gave of their time and life to the odd stranger. The rain subsided a bit and I insisted on going there to check if they were waiting for us. When we reached, a crowd of women were indeed sitting on the floor in the open space of the red brick building that was the Catholic church and which was also used as a village hall for other kinds of meetings. The floor consisted of the same red soil as outside, but inside the building it was pounded smooth and less muddy. The women were all in colourful clean and freshly ironed gomesi. When I arrived, they immediately rose to their feet, started wriggling their hips, clapping their hands, and singing welcoming songs. Babies and toddlers tied to their backs continued sleeping. I told the women that I worked with a group of people from the University of Kampala who wanted to improve child health in the area. Alexine translated. In the 1990s, one-fifth of all children died before their fifth birthday, mainly from malaria, respiratory tract infections and diarrhoea.2 In other words, they died from things that could be prevented or treated with relatively simple means. Means that somehow just did not reach in time, and the situation had, of course, worsened now that many children were also born with HIV. Alexine’s back was as always straight and her hands folded. Every sentence she translated was accompanied by a happy smile and a glow of pride. ‘I am neither doctor nor nurse’, I explained. ‘I cannot treat you, and I have no medication. I am here to listen to you because the people behind this project would like to hear what you think and know about your children’s health and the health care system’. After I had finished talking, they erupted with joy and thanksgivings. ‘We are willing to cooperate’, as Alexine repeatedly said in her translation. I looked down at my shoes, which would soon be replaced by sandals and then the flip flops that everyone else was wearing, but then I still felt safer in shoes. I had tried to sound well-meaning, and at the same time make it clear that things would not necessarily improve because of my presence in the village. I was not sure that I had made it clear enough that I had no medicine to distribute and that, in spite my skin colour, I had no connection to decision-makers. Anthropology’s ambition is to understand local worlds, but I was painfully aware that they would much prefer that I treated their ailing children than tried to understand them. At least I

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had a car, I said to myself. I could take them to the small hospital four kilometres away. A woman got up and thanked me for my work. You always thank others for their work. ‘Thank you for working’, you say when you meet somebody on the path. When you greet each other in the morning, you thank each other for having risen from bed. Later in the day you thank people for working. And when you run into somebody you haven’t seen for some time you thank them for taking care of the family. ‘Thank you’, she said. ‘Here in Uganda’, she continued, ‘our problem is that we are poor and that the hospital wants money from us when we are sick. They do not care about your child’s diarrhoea if you do not have money’.3 A man who knew English, the only man present, got up and said he had some suggestions. He started reading aloud from a piece of paper in his hand: ‘The women in the village are somehow backward. They need education and enlightenment’. I felt uncomfortable again. I did not want the women to think that I was working with people who considered them backward. All studies of child health do show that the children of a woman who has been to school have a greater chance of survival, not because of what they teach in school, but because she has learnt how to cope in an institutional context.4 And it wasn’t their lack of knowledge I was there to do something about. It was the policy makers’ and health workers’ lack of knowledge about them. The women didn’t seem bothered to be called backward, though. They looked expectantly at me, waiting for me to respond to this. Did they hope that I would be willing to also build new schools while I was there? ‘I agree’, I said after a moment, ‘education is important, but there are also things that women here already know that others do not know, and it is important to find out what it is they know and what they would like to know more about. Those who work in hospitals and health centres need to know more about their patients, about women and their children’. They looked at me, attentive, but there was no eruption of joy. Another woman had also noted something on a piece of paper and got up to talk: ‘It’s good’, she said, ‘that you are here to hear what we have to say and to take care of the children. But what about the mother? What if the mother is ill and there is no one to take care of the child? Mothers also have illnesses and mothers die. Sometimes the mother has an illness that she passes on to her children when she gives birth to them, and then they die. Treating children is not enough if the mother infects

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the children when giving birth to them. What are you going to do to help such women?’ ‘The mothers’ health is also important,’ I said. ‘But what can you do to help such a woman?’ she asked again. And again. And again. I asked Alexine by my side, as softly as I could, because English is after all the official language in Uganda, and that which is taught in school, whether the woman was thinking about the illness that I thought she was thinking about. Alexine nodded and said that, yes, she was. So, people talked about it without mentioning its name, I thought. Then I, a foreigner expected to be different, might as well use its name. ‘I will be happy to talk with you about AIDS as well. As you know, there is no medicine that can cure AIDS, but there are things you can do to reduce the risk of a child being infected at birth’. I tried to sound scholarly. But they probably knew as much as I did. Ugandans were well informed about AIDS after a decade of large-scale information campaigns. And it was probably not because she thought I had a cure for AIDS that she had brought it up. She was just trying to remind me that problems are interlinked. She folded her paper and sat down again. After a moment of silence, another woman stood up, thanked me and said that they would rather talk to me about children than about AIDS, and then they all broke into singing and dancing. Maybe they did after all appreciate my interest in local knowledge, I thought. Or maybe it was just time for them to go home and get on with their chores. Life goes on, even though not only children, but also their mothers, die. Alexine adjusted her gomesi and headscarf, looked around with a bright smile on her face, as if she wanted to make sure that everybody had noticed her role by the side of the muzungu, before we took off and walked back through the millet fields.5 ∗ ∗ ∗ I started visiting people in different homes. I inquired and listened and tried to step into this new world still so foreign to me. And once in a while somebody interrogated me. One day, a young diviner called me into his home when I was walking by his homestead in the afternoon heat. He was eager, curious, almost commanding in his insistent manner of wondering.

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‘Do you pay bride-price where you come from?’ was his first question after our exchange of greetings and thanksgiving. ‘No.’ ‘Don’t you love your children?’ He clicked his tongue and looked me straight in the eyes. I looked back defiantly and replied: ‘Yes, we do.’ ‘Then why do you not give the woman’s family any cows?’ ‘Well, the woman does not belong to the husband’s family after marrying him.’ ‘Who does she then belong to?’ ‘Nobody. Herself.’ ‘Do you not have any ancestors?’ ‘We do, but no clans.’ ‘You are lying. How can you get married then?’ We sat next to one of the round mud huts that seemed to have grown out of the red soil. His two young wives leaned against it to obtain a bit of shade from the thatched roof. They paid attention, yet had the careless expression on their faces that people easily get in the drowsy heat of the afternoon. They looked down. Avoided eye contact with me. Sometimes they squinted in our direction. ‘How many children do people have where you come from?’ ‘As many as you want, but most people only have two, maybe three.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know, but a man can only have one wife.’ ‘You are lying.’ ‘Why should a man be allowed to have many wives when a woman is only allowed to have one husband?’ ‘Because we have so much to take care of that one woman cannot do it all: work in the field, feed the children, cook, celebrate juok. Is it true that women wear pants where you come from?’ ‘Yes, in Europe I always wear pants.’ ‘I think you are lying. Here women cannot wear pants. Why are you only allowed to have two or three children?’ ‘We are allowed to have as many as we want, but most people do not want more than that.’ ‘Having many children cannot defeat me. To have kids, work for them, suffer with them, that’s what you want from life. That is why you pay bride price for women.’

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‘So how many children would you like to have?’ ‘Eight. Or fifty. As many as possible. So, I will need some more wives besides those two.’ The young man’s even younger wives nodded without looking up. They already had a couple of children each. One at the breast and a toddler each playing in the red dust nearby. ‘One day your men will learn from us here in Uganda and understand that you need more than one wife’, he continued. ‘In Europe, there is a law that prohibits polygamy.’ Mutual defiance quivered amidst us, and heavy thumps sounded from the pounding of peanuts in a mortar somewhere nearby. His insistence captivated me. ‘I think you are lying. If you get divorced, do you then have to live alone for the rest of your life?’ ‘No, if you get divorced, you are allowed to marry again. But you can only have one wife at a time’. ‘But then you may end up having more than two children.’ ‘I told you that it is not forbidden to have more than two children.’ ‘What do children die from in your place?’ ‘Small children rarely die.’ He paused. Shook his head and made a hissing sound with his lips which I understood as a comment on the inscrutability of my world. He had expected answers like the ones I had given him. His line of questioning showed that he knew the rumours circulating about white people, about ‘those who wander’, those who occasionally show up in Africa, have a look around, behave strangely and leave again. But he may have imagined that if he challenged me I would modify some of my answers. Or maybe he simply shook his head because he was convinced that I had lied. The last thing I had said was inconceivable. Young children are vulnerable. Many of them die. That’s the way it is. ∗ ∗ ∗ Initially, I had my meals on the cement floor in the little grey house together with Alexine and her children and grandchildren. But eventually we joined the rest of the family. When none of the brothers were in the village, which usually they were not, we spent the evening with their wives and children. We sat outside in the warm darkness and ate from pots and dishes from different fireplaces. Chickens, goats, cats, dogs, geese and goslings accompanied us, circled around us and cleaned up after us when

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we were done eating. The sisters-in-law contributed with what they had in their fields: millet, beans, sweet potatoes and various kinds of green leaves. I contributed with that which cost money. Alexine did not have her own garden with millet and there was no fireplace by our house. Instead, we cooked rice and meat with onions, tomatoes and curry powder on our charcoal stove and brought it to the joint meal. We laughed at the kids who fell asleep while eating, at me who tried to pretend that I liked kwon and at the kid goat who stumbled over its own legs while trying to eat from the pot. When the pots were empty, the storytelling started. The first story was usually about Adhola’s walk, his wounded leg and the pregnancy as heavy as heaven. It was followed by other stories: ‘I am delighted to see you, honourable women and men, for the story I want to tell you is the one that the elders used to tell long ago about what happened back then. Long, long ago there was a man; a man who was very wise. Very wise indeed. He was a poor man. He had no food. None at all. Then he decided to fool his friends. To his friends he said that he had many cows …’, and then the darkness got loaded with stories about hares and crocodiles growing bananas together. About hyenas, pythons, monkeys and leopards in human shapes and humans in the shape of animals, trying to clear the forest to make room for humans. About disrespectful women who address their husbands by their name; about disobedient daughters who steal from the granary instead of working in the field; about lazy men who are hungry for termites but cannot be bothered to go and collect them in the bush and send young girls to do so, who then run off with their boyfriends to go and sell the termites at the market; about love medicine turning into black magic; about the man who loved women so much that he married goat women, cattle women, dog women and a human woman who quickly got so tired of all the others, including the man, that she got rid of them all. Stories succeeded each other until everybody, including the small children, had made their contribution and tales about long, long ago had blended with accounts about here and now and not so long ago. MamaJacob, first wife of the oldest brother, burst into hearty laughter after the story about the man who married animal women, and while tears were still running down her cheeks, she said: ‘I also have a story to tell. It is the story of a great miracle. About the day I married my husband. Our wedding was as lovely as butter. Does butter shine? Does it sparkle and glitter? No, it does not. Were we too proud? It wasn’t pride.

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Was it love? It was first-class love. I had a good man. I gave birth to his son, Jacob, who was named after his paternal grandfather. The man loved his son. When he cried, he picked up his guitar and played for him. He played and played until I served them food. But then one day something happened. What happened makes me wonder. I thank God that when someone came and took him from me, he had already built a house for me. A permanent house with iron sheets that do not leak when it rains. I thank God that even though you, my beloved husband, now lives with another woman, I have my house and my home. Let us sing a song in his honour. Thank you very much’. When MamaJacob’s song was over there was a moment of quiet. A pig made grunting sounds somewhere behind us. ‘Timipakinyalo’, she said, and everybody burst into laughter, because they all knew that MamaJacob had called her pig Timipakinyalo, ‘do as you want’, in an attempt to come to terms with the fact that the husband lived with his second wife in town, in the house by the jacaranda trees. MamaJacob was a skinny but strong and hard-working woman with dry skin, worn out gomesi and grinning eyes who never got tired of trying to make me talk to her in Dhopadhola. She never asked anything of me, though she had nothing. Her son Jacob, on the other hand, often asked me to contribute to his life as a smart young man who was about to finish school and was planning to venture into the world beyond the village. ‘By the way, my husband just sent me a new mattress’, she added to everybody’s surprise, and then she continued laughing. ‘My relatives will show up next month to negotiate the bride price for our oldest daughter. He wants to show them that he is taking good care of me, so I guess he thought he’d better give me a new mattress’. ‘I would like to recite a poem,’ Alexine said when the laughter had died down. She folded her hands, closed her eyes, and recited in rhythmic jerks: ‘Ajianti, ajiante, a man of all men. Yes, a man above all men. Where did you come from? Was it from the east or west? You, big, and violent. Wherever you pass water it flows far. It flows far. Ru. Ru. Ru. Ajianti. You love boys. You love girls. You travel by airplane. You travel by car. You visit your friend with a big belly. The belly reduces. The belly shrinks. The rich. The less rich. There is no one that you fear. Ajianti. You have so many names. Some call you the plastic bag. Others call you the grandfather of the clan. But where do you come from?

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Ajianti. Some call you the disease that makes us thin. Some call you AIDS. I wonder who you are. Why have you come to conquer us all? Ajianti. You have triumphed.’ There was silence afterwards. ‘What does ajianti mean?’ I asked, because I wanted to understand how AIDS had found its way into stories about goat women and guitarplaying husbands. ‘Nothing. It just sounds good.’ ‘And ru, ru, ru?’ I asked. ‘It also makes it sound good, don’t you think?’ ∗ ∗ ∗ After a couple of months in the village I decided to go to Kampala for a few days. Alexine asked for a seat in the car and placed the children in the back seat. ‘There is something I have to do in town’, she said. One of the clan elders had been summoned by the sisters-in-law to carry out an important act before we left. He was the oldest cousin brother of their husbands. He was a bashful drunken man in worn muddy pants, and a respected elder of the clan who knew things that not everyone knew because they did not have his age and experience. He knew how to swing the beheaded hen above the car so that drops of blood would fall on it in the right way and he knew how to ask juok to protect the car and its passengers. Juok—that which is beyond comprehension. That which may intervene in the lives of the living in a destructive or protective way, depending on whether you have carried out rituals that celebrate and cherish juok and hence put an end to its potentially destructive impact. I thanked him politely for performing this important act. We had fried chicken for dinner. Except Alexine. She did not want to have anything to do with juok. At night, she wandered around the house again, proclaiming her disdain for juok, and begging the Lord to protect us all, including the car. The car was a small, light four-wheel drive, good at crawling through deep mud holes. At times, the holes were so deep that the front fender of the car was covered in mud, and there were days when I decided not to force it through the mud, but it never got stuck, and it was always full of people when I went to the market to get supplies, drinking water from the borehole and power for the extra car battery that I used for my laptop. There were not many vehicles on the road that year. It was in an appalling condition and the rain was so heavy and frequent that the mud

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holes continued to grow in depth and width for months. The small vans, matatus , that would usually take people back and forth between the local market and the district town, had given up doing so that year. Halfway towards Kampala, Alexine suddenly insisted that we branch off and made a quick stop in Jinja, a town located on the shores of Lake Victoria. ‘There is something I need to do’, she said, and directed me along muddy alleyways behind the market in the town centre. She made sign that I should stop, got out of the car and disappeared into a threestory house with small balconies on each floor, faded red and yellow paint peeling from the walls, and a shop on the ground floor, owned by Indians. She returned fast, accompanied by two young women. I had seen the youngest one in Saya. She was the one who, confident and dignified, had appeared in the doorway in Saya one morning and then disappeared again. The other one was smaller, darker and a little older. ‘My daughters,’ Alexine said. ‘Jane and Suzy.’ They knelt and greeted me while Alexine stood next to them, bursting with pride. I wondered whether it was the daughters or me and the car that Alexine was so proud of. I exchanged greetings and thanksgivings with the two women and we continued our journey to Kampala. In Kampala I was again directed by Alexine and ended up in the staff quarters of railway workers where one of her brothers had a house. This house also had an annexe where relatives from the village could seek shelter for shorter or longer periods. ‘You have to come inside and greet them’, she said, though I hesitated and looked at Kampala’s green hills and the approaching sunset, thinking of the traffic jams hidden from view but which I knew were down there at the bottom of the hill. Inside the annexe sat a light brown woman with freckles and a slightly darker woman with a baby in her arms. ‘My two oldest daughters’, Alexine said. ‘Nelly and Kate’. The two women smiled shyly at me. ‘That was six’, I said to myself, realizing that Alexine had now accomplished her mission with the trip. Four adult daughters and the two little ones in the back seat. I had met them all and they had met me. I had even caught a glimpse of Okoth’s younger brother, Comfort, and I now knew that when Kate had disappeared from Peter’s annexe, she had gone to stay in the annexe of another uncle’s house, where her older sister, Nelly, also stayed for the time being, while their mother, Alexine, took care of their children, Sally and Okoth, in Saya.

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‘My prayers to the Lord worked’, Alexine said a few days later when we sat in a police station on the outskirts of Kampala. The car stood outside, the rear end crushed. We had been on our way back to the village when we had ended up in a multiple collision on Jinja Road. After a phone call, Peter and his wife were soon by my side and they proved to me that day that they were willing, not only to share their family and village house with me, but also to rescue me when I was in trouble. His wife had been to the same school as one of the police officers, and things happened that afternoon in languages I did not understand, but which confirmed that Peter and his wife would make sure that everything worked out alright and that the car would one day be back on the road again. ‘Thanks to my prayers, no one got hurt’, Alexine repeated as we waited at the police station for things to be sorted out. ‘Maybe it was the chicken we slaughtered in honour of the car’, I tried while looking warily from the corner of my eye at the police officer who examined my Ugandan driver’s license and undoubtedly wondered whether there was a way to get some money out of this white person. ‘It was not in honour of the car’, she explained. ‘It was in honour of juok, in the hope that juok would prevent such a thing from happening’. But it had obviously not worked; on the contrary. Fortunately, she had prayed for us and saved our lives.6 In addition, she had succeeded in introducing me to all of her daughters.

Notes 1. The notion of juok among the Jop’Adhola is discussed in detail in Hanne O. Mogensen, “The Resilience of Juok: Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda,” Africa 72, no. 3 (2002): 420–436. My analysis of juok draws upon previous publication about religion among Luo speaking groups, and more specifically, the Jop’Adhola, e.g. Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Bethwell A. Ogot, “The Concept of Jok,” African Studies 20 (1961): 123–130; Ogot, “Traditional Religion,” Uganda Journal, 111–116; and Ogot, “On the Making of a Sanctuary,” 122–135. 2. Tom Barton and Gimono Wamai, Equity and Vulnerability: A Situation Analysis of Women, Adolescents and Children in Uganda (Kampala: Government of Uganda, National Council for Children, 1994); Ministry of Health

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and Macro International Inc., Nutrition and Health Status of Young Children and Their Mothers in Uganda. Uganda Demographic and Health Survey (Kampala: Ministry of Health 1995). During the 1960s Uganda had one of the best health care systems in SubSaharan Africa, but it was severely neglected during the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, public satisfaction with the health care system was very low. Deteriorations in health service deliveries in the 1970s–1990s are, among others, discussed by Cole P. Dodge and Paul D. Wiebe, Crisis in Uganda: The Breakdown of Health Services (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985); Cole P. Dodge, “Rehabilitation or Redefinition of Health Services,” Beyond Crisis: Development Issues in Uganda, ed. Paul D. Wiebe and Cole P. Dodge (Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 1987), 101–112; and Susan Reynolds Whyte, “Medicines and Self-Help: The Privatization of Health Care in Eastern Uganda,” Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural and Revolutionary Change, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: James Currey, 1991), 130–148. For a discussion of the role of schooling for women’s social agency, see Anne Katahoire, Education for Life: Mothers’ Schooling and Children’s Survival in Eastern Uganda. PhD Thesis, University of Copenhagen, 1998; and Lotte Meinert, Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health, and Everyday Life in Uganda (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2009). My first long fieldwork in Uganda focused on mothers’ interpretation of their children’s health and their interaction with the health care system. See e.g. Hanne O. Mogensen, “False Teeth and Real Sufferin: Child Care in Eastern Uganda,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24 (2000): 331–351; Mogensen, “The Resilience of Juok,” Africa, 420–436; and Hanne O. Mogensen, “Finding a Path through the Health Unit: Practical Experience of Ugandan Patients,” Medical Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2005): 209–236. The discussion of what it means ‘to believe’ continues in Chapter 10. See also Mogensen, “The resilience of Juok,” Africa, 426–428; and Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience. An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–24.

References Barton, Tom, and Gimono Wamai. Equity and Vulnerability: A Situation Analysis of Women, Adolescents and Children in Uganda. Kampala: Government of Uganda, National Council for Children, 1994. Dodge, Cole P. “Rehabilitation or Redefinition of Health Services.” In Beyond Crisis: Development Issues in Uganda, edited Paul D. Wiebe and Cole P. Dodge, 101–112. Kampala: Makerere Institute of Social Research, 1987.

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Dodge, Cole P., and Paul D. Wiebe. Crisis in Uganda: The Breakdown of Health Services. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985. Good, Byron. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lienhardt, Godfrey. Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Mogensen, Hanne O. “False Teeth and Real Suffering: Child Care in Eastern Uganda.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24 (2000): 331–351. Mogensen, Hanne O. “The Resilience of Juok: Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 72, no. 3 (2002): 420–436. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Finding a Path through the Health Unit: Practical Experience of Ugandan Patients.” Medical Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2005): 209–236. Ministry of Health and Macro International Inc., Nutrition and Health Status of Young Children and Their Mothers in Uganda. Uganda Demographic and Health Survey, Kampala: Ministry of Health, 1995. Ogot, Bethwell A. “The Concept of Jok.” African Studies 20 (1961): 123–130. Ogot, Bethwell A. “Traditional Religion and the Precolonial History of Africa: The Example of the Padhola.” Uganda Journal 31, no. 1 (1967): 111–116. Ogot, Bethwell A. “On the Making of a Sanctuary: Being some Thoughts on the History of Religion in Padhola.“ In The Historical Study of African Religion, edited by Terence O. Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo, 122–135. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. “Medicines and Self-Help: The Privatization of Health Care in Eastern Uganda.” In Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural and Revolutionary Change, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, 130–148. London: James Currey, 1991.

CHAPTER 5

Questions of Belonging

I wondered why Kate sat all day under the mango tree with her fivemonth-old son by her side, getting her hair braided. She had turned up in Saya with Comfort on her back. I had not spoken to her yet, but I had been told that Comfort had pneumonia, and I had offered to pay for his treatment at the hospital in the trading centre four kilometres away. Why then didn’t she bother to go? Did she want the boy, born in Peter’s annexe, to die? The boy she had thought of abandoning outside a health centre, had she not been discovered by a man while preparing to give birth by herself in the tall grass. The boy she didn’t love. Not at first, anyway. Dramas unfolded in the little grey house while I lived there. Dramas between mother and daughters and between Alexine and her sisters-inlaw. Dramas about belonging and responsibility. Dramas that were often channelled through me and my access to resources but which had started before my arrival and continued long after I returned home. I had been to the hospital in the morning with one of the sisters-inlaw and some of the children who showed signs of malaria and needed chloroquine or penicillin, or whatever was available. Comfort had also been with us. A sister-in-law had decided at the last minute to bring him along. The medical assistant listened to Comfort’s lungs, looked at us over his half-lens spectacles and muttered something about pneumonia and © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_5

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hospitalization. But Comfort’s mother was at home, slaughtering a hen, and we couldn’t leave the boy in the hospital without her. One of the other children had malaria. It turned out that there was no anti-malarial drug available in the hospital, so we were told to go to the market to get the tablets—tablets that had probably slipped into the pockets of a health worker and from there to a trader at the market. Everybody knew that was how it worked. After buying the tablets we went back and I gave Kate money for a boda boda, a bicycle taxi, to go to the hospital and for buying food for both of them while she and Comfort stayed there. But late in the afternoon she still sat under the mango tree with the boy in her arms while having her hair braided by another woman. ‘Can’t you go and talk to her?’ Alexine said when she noticed me looking at Kate from the corner of my eye. ‘She refuses to go. She says there is no boda boda on the road at this time of the day. But I don’t get it. I have always been able to use my feet when my children are ill’. ‘Why has Kate not left for the hospital?’ I later asked the sister-inlaw whom I had accompanied to the hospital. She spent the afternoon removing pebbles from her rice while her goat lapped up the remains of dishwater from a basin next to her. My Dhopadhola was now good enough for me to have small conversations without Alexine’s help. ‘It’s her mother’s fault. She is saved. She doesn’t believe in hospitals. She says that the Lord will help them and that they should not waste money on the hospital’. MamaJacob arrived with a goat. She sent me a look-I-am-tetheringa-goat-would-you-like-to-learn-how-to-do-that smile with her grinning eyes. I sent her a yes-I-would-love-to smile in return, but didn’t join her to learn how to tether a goat. ‘I have absolutely nothing to do with it. My sisters-in-law are the ones who told Kate not to admit the child’, Alexine declared vehemently as I returned to our house in the late afternoon. She knew that I had spent the afternoon chatting with the sisters-in-law, and she immediately embarked upon an attempt to recapture the story. ‘People here are like that. They think they are wiser than medical doctors. They rely on juok’. Alexine seized the chance to remind me that she was not an uneducated woman like her sisters-in-law. She may well have ended up in their home as a divorced and impoverished woman, but she spoke English, had almost completed her training as a teacher and had worked as one for years. And now she had a job with me, taught me Dhopadhola in the morning and worked as my interpreter in the afternoon. I leaned against the back wall

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of the house where we often sat at dusk, cooking on the charcoal stove while watching the sun go down behind the pit latrine surrounded by maize plants. I gave up trying to understand Kate’s motives and what they had to do with Alexine and the sisters-in-law. ‘What is actually Comfort’s Padhola name?’ I asked instead. Everyone has a name referring to the season, weather, mood of the mother or an event that took place at the time of birth. In addition, they have a ‘Christian name’, which in practice means a name inspired by the Bible or the English language. ‘He doesn’t have one’, she replied. ‘I am the one to choose it since his father is not around. But if I do it too soon, I will make it look as if I am approving of Kate’s behaviour. After some time, I will ask Kate who the father is. If she refuses to tell me, then I know the boy is mine, like Nelly, who belongs to my mother’. A black lump moved around in the bowl of rice she had just handed me. ‘Oh, it’s a beetle’, she said. ‘Well, it must have fallen into the pot. But I’ve prayed for the food so it cannot do you any harm’. Rice production in Uganda started during the Second World War, to feed soldiers, but the production remained minimal until the 1970s, when Chinese experts helped in constructing irrigation schemes in different parts of the country. Most of Uganda’s rice is now grown in eastern Uganda by small-scale farmers. The swamps between Padhola and Bunyole were drained and turned into rice fields in the 1980s, and rice is an important source of income for those with access to the swamp.1 Rice was known and highly appreciated in Saya in the 1990s, but most people did not have a swamp of their own to drain and needed cash to get hold of rice. I bought a lot of rice that year to contribute to the joint family meals and because I never learnt how to truly enjoy kwon. The sun set behind the pit latrine, maize plants and banana palms as I ate of the now beetle-free rice. Kate left for the hospital around dusk. Maybe someone had told her that I had spent the afternoon inquiring about her stay under the mango tree. Maybe she had just wanted to finish the braids and wait for the sun to be less hot. Alexine’s strained relationship with the family had come to the fore. ∗ ∗ ∗

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A few days later, Alexine, Okoth and I went to the hospital to visit Kate and Comfort. The hospital was impressive, considering the size of the trading centre and the fact that it had been built while Uganda was still ravaged by civil war and a dwindling health care system. It had three medical doctors and an operating room, and it had once had an X-ray machine. The ambulance stood in the backyard, without wheels; and medicine had to be bought in the market by the patients’ relatives, but the hospital was clean, neat and welcoming. The staff was not always welcoming, though, but people did not expect health professionals to be so. I asked Kate if she had enough money for food. She said that yes. But no, Alexine said afterwards. Kate had bought some juice for the boy, but nothing for herself. She had decided to save the money for something else. ‘And she was bored. Didn’t you see how bored she was? That is why mothers do not want to be hospitalized with their children. You just sit there and waste money on being bored’, Alexine explained as we strolled around on the market looking for shoes for Okoth. He had a toenail that failed to heal. I gathered that it needed protection since it was constantly exposed to footballs. At some point, Alexine stalled in the middle of the market. She just stood there in her bright blue, red and orange gomesi, between pyramids of tomatoes and piles of used clothes, folding her hands and prepared to tell me something important. ‘I only have two problems in my life’, she said, keeping her face straight: ‘My daughter Suzy needs a sewing machine so she can start a small tailoring business. I need some more clothes now that I plan to be a preacher. This gomesi, which I always wear, is the only one I have’. ‘Yes’, I said, but went on to buy tomatoes, eggplants and onions. The variety of vegetables in the market was limited, but these would add flavour to the beans and green leaves that were the main ingredients in the sauce that was usually served with kwon and rice. I couldn’t respond to all the queries I received about financial aid, and Alexine did, after all, get a monthly salary from me. Kate and Comfort were discharged after a few days in the hospital, but the boy still needed penicillin injections. Kate dutifully walked to the hospital with him every morning and evening. Her mother told me so. I had not noticed it. She was still silent even when present. But I did notice when Comfort, the light-skinned baby with wrinkled eyebrows, continued screaming long after completing the many penicillin injections

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that should have cured his pneumonia. He lay on his stomach on his mother’s lap. She had covered him with a loose cloth, which she lifted to show me the enormous abscesses on his buttocks where he had been injected. He whined loudly when the abscesses were cut open. I felt like vomiting. They could at least have asked me if I were willing to pay for pain killers. But maybe it was not one of those things that it was worth spending the muzungu’ s money on. Or maybe the hospital had run out of pain killers. I helped Kate clean and dress the deep holes in Comfort’s buttocks in the weeks that followed, and finally we started talking to each other. The wounds healed, Comfort continued to ail and Kate opened up to me about her life. She would tickle Comfort on his stomach and under his chin to get a smile out of him before tying him onto her back, and go interviewing with me. She sometimes succeeded, but once positioned on her back he would again look out at the world from under knitted eyebrows. After some time I asked her why she had not wanted to go to the hospital with Comfort that day when she had just arrived in Saya. Her response had nothing to do with God, juok or boredom. ‘Because’, she explained, ‘even though you had given me money for treatment, everyone could still see that I was poor. When you come without a notebook for the doctors to write in, without a thermos for tea and with a bed sheet full of holes, then they can see that you are poor, and then they think that you are primitive and ignorant and they treat you accordingly. And the hospital is in Bunyole. People speak Lunyole there. They talk, laugh and cook together in their own language and make you feel all alone. But luckily you came to visit me in the hospital. When they saw that I knew a muzungu, they started thinking that maybe I was anyway somehow rich and educated. After you had been there they started treating me with respect and taking better care of Comfort’. I had had no idea that a thermos and a sheet could make such a difference, but I knew that Kate’s fear of being treated as poor and ignorant was reasonable. Health workers’ long education had inculcated them with the belief that they were enlightened and superior to the ignorant and superstitious villagers. Their wages and working conditions did not, however, assure them a position that lived up to their self-perception. They had to claim that position themselves in their interaction with the patients.2 Their tone towards patients was rarely pleasant, and patients would go far in order to present themselves as anything but ignorant and poor.3 But

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money and education were not all that mattered. Being rich in relatives was also important. ∗ ∗ ∗ The air eventually turned thick and tense in the little grey house. Kate slept with her sons on rush mats that she placed in the living room after I had gone to bed. Alexine slept with Sorrow and Hope in one of the bedrooms. They were both up and running before sunrise, but the air quivered with tension when they were together. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked Alexine. ‘With you and Kate’. ‘What do you mean? There is nothing wrong’, Alexine replied at first. ‘It’s just that when I try to give my daughter advice, then she refuses to listen to me. She turns her back on me and goes away’, Alexine later said while stirring in the rice on the charcoal stove, but she didn’t seem interested in elaborating. Sorrow and Hope looked at their mother and at me, with their curious but quiet eyes. ‘Alexine was born angry’, MamaJacob lashed out. ‘And remember, she doesn’t even belong here. It’s us, her sisters-in-law, who are married here. You can’t just leave your husband and trust that you can live off your brothers’ land forever’. The slender but muscular MamaJacob was preparing the first ripe millet of the year for juok. ‘Does juok eat millet?’ I asked. ‘Of course’, she said with a subtle smile that made me feel that I was the one being laughed at. MamaJacob’s family had been given five cows when she married her husband, so there was no doubt that she belonged to her husband’s clan and that he could not throw her out even though he was no longer interested in her. MamaJacob had ‘produced’ many children, as people say in Ugandan English, and she had also worked hard on the land of the clan for many years. She was the mother of Jacob, the eldest brother’s eldest son, the future head of the family. Her gomesi were worn out. She had not been able to afford the luxury of a blanket or a bag for a long time, but she felt appreciated—not by her own husband, who now lived in Tororo in the house by the jacaranda trees with another woman—but by the other men in the clan. They were also her ‘husbands’. They would not approach her bed, but they contributed to the daily necessities and the children’s school fees when their irresponsible brother did not. She

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belonged. Alexine, her husband’s sister, who had left her own husband and his clan long ago, did not belong anywhere. Alexine’s mother had also left, when Alexine herself was just a little girl. And Alexine’s daughters had never even had any man offer cows for them. These women had not belonged anywhere for generations. In addition, Alexine was born angry, MamaJacob said. ‘I have been taking care of Okoth for years, and now Kate says she wants to take him away from me’, Alexine lamented. I found her alone in the dark house late one night, when I returned from a night of storytelling on the mats with the other women that she had failed to turn up for. ‘I have taken care of my children all by myself since I left my husband. And now also of my grandchildren. But what do I get as a thank you? Nothing. My daughter makes no plans for the future. She just sits all day and dreams about buying clothes and getting her hair done. And she uses sugar, soap and petroleum as if we had endless amounts of it. And I, an educated woman who has been a schoolteacher, I have to go digging in the garden to get food in my mouth. Why is Kate too proud to do so? She should make plans with me, help me in the garden. Or go back to Kampala to find work […] We will soon have to buy some more charcoal. We are also running out of rice. When are you planning to go to the market again?’ ‘I don’t know’, I said. ‘I can send somebody there to buy it for us’. Alexine went quiet. I thought about buying a bike to make it easier to send people to the market for me. The bicycle was the most common mode of transport in the area, but not every family had one. ‘Sorry’, she said after a moment. ‘The Holy Spirit came to me. What were we talking about? Kate, yes. My brothers complain that I have not raised my daughters properly. But I have tried. I have worked my fingers to the bone and done what I could to help them. Look at the dress she is wearing. She got it from me. My daughters have now reached the age where they should be bringing gifts for me. Nelly did not bring anything when she was here for Easter. And Jane. I hear she stopped going to school even though I gave her money for fees when she was here. Suzy, I never see her. At least she has not produced yet. Not like the two big ones who continue producing children without fathers’. I tried to listen but felt dazed. A squeaking sound coming from my room woke me up. We looked in there and saw something twisting in my clothes on the shelf of braided branches. Alexine forgot her worries and took action.

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‘A bat has fallen into your clothes’, she said, and went out to get help. The weight of accumulated bat stool on the attic floor had cause cracks to form between the chipboards. We had dealt with it for some time by sweeping the floor and shaking the mosquito net on a daily basis, but now the cracks had become so wide that a whole bat had fallen through one of the cracks and lay kicking and jerking in my clothes. I withdrew to the far corner of the living room with my legs pulled up underneath me, pondering over the differences between mother and daughter. Kate was humble, cautious, almost submissive and anonymous in her appearance. I sometimes agreed with the mother that she seemed to lack initiative. Alexine would put her foot down, distance herself from the family though she also depended on it, and be quick at getting rid of bats in my clothes. Bats leave their dwelling at sunset only to return several hours later. When the sun goes down, which it does very fast so close to Equator, you can watch them all leave almost at once. I counted 500 at one gable and noticed from the corner of my eye that at least as many pairs of wings flapped away from the other gable. My sisters-in-law summoned a man with something they called bat poison. The poisonous white powder was spread out on the chipboards. I went to stay with bazungu [pl. of muzungu] friends living in a nearby village, drank instant coffee with fresh milk, put up my legs on their couch and read novels for a few days while the bats were being poisoned. It suited me well since it was also at the time of the first election since Museveni had assumed power in 1986. He had spent ten years preparing for the first democratic election. Many bazungu entrenched themselves that day, afraid of what could happen. But nothing happened. Museveni’s victory was convincing, electoral fraud thought to be practically absent. ‘We are tired of fighting’, people said, ‘and Museveni has given us ten years of peace’. I enjoyed a break away from the house with a thousand bats, and a woman lamenting, wringing hands, holding loud prayer meetings and quarrelling with everyone around her. Maybe the poison wasn’t poisonous at all. It didn’t work on the bats. But then, fortunately, bats have the habit of leaving their dwelling at sunset. You don’t have to chase them. You can just watch them fly out, one by one, wait for the last one to leave, put a ladder up the gable, climb up the ladder and cover the hole they left from. My husband had come to Uganda for a few weeks and decided to do something about the bat problem. He found a ladder and covered the holes in the gable with wire fence. It was a strange sight. Hundreds of small bats flying like

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boomerangs, speeding towards their previous entrance, turning off in the last moment and retreating into the darkness, now homeless. Proudly, I explained to my sisters-in-law what we had done. But instead of applauding, they asked me where I thought the bats were now dwelling. I felt slightly guilty when I realized that I had encumbered family members with my thousand bats and their sweet-smelling stool. But only slightly. There would be no bats twisting and struggling in my clothes the next morning and Alexine was also happy that there was less sweeping to do. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘My mother complains about everything’, Kate said one day. We had joined MamaJacob by her kitchen, i.e. the shelter around her fireplace in which she also kept provisions, pots, pans and firewood. The afternoon heat had made us all idle. ‘She seems to be jealous of the other women. And of me. She always says that she is “saved”, “born again”,4 but that is not how she behaves. She is rude. She doesn’t want people to visit you, and she doesn’t let the other kids eat with us when we are cooking. When I gave birth to Okoth, I had to take care of everything myself. She told me to throw the baby away if I could not cope. I think MamaJacob is right that she was born angry. And it is so embarrassing when one’s mother gives birth after her daughters have already given birth. You should not be carrying your own children when there are grandchildren to carry. I cannot stand it anymore. I will return to Kampala and take Okoth to his father’s family in Kakira’. ‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea’, I inserted, since it dawned on me that I would miss the bright boy. ‘Have you talked to Okoth’s father’s family about it?’ I cautiously asked, trying to find a way to put a halt to her plans. No, she had not. She had not seen any of them for about five years. Not since Okoth was a few months old. Okoth played in front of the house in his new shoes, kicking banana-leaf footballs without knowing his future was being debated. Kate tickled Comfort on his stomach while looking into his eyes. His lips parted slightly and in the upper part of his mouth we sensed his budding incisors, his first teeth. ‘Some people say it is juok when a child gets its upper teeth first’, she worried.

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‘Maybe’, I said, ‘Then we must celebrate juok. I will buy the chicken’. By celebrating juok, we would reduce the risk that misfortune would fall upon the boy and his relatives. Getting your upper teeth first is unusual, beyond the ordinary, juok, something that needs to be celebrated and ended, both of which are called chowo in Dhopadhola. ‘Yes, but how?’ Kate lamented. ‘We need grandmothers on both sides to carry out the ritual. We do not know where his father and grandmother are, and my mother and grandmother refuse to celebrate juok’. I could not think of a good answer. ‘Maybe you don’t have to do it if you’re not married’, I tried. ‘Or maybe it was only like that long ago’, Kate suggested.5 ‘Even nowadays. Whether you are married or not’, MamaJacob said. ‘It is still juok. It still needs to be celebrated. Otherwise, it can cause harm to others in the family’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Maybe your mum is sometimes so angry because she is worried about you and your children’s future. Aren’t you sometimes worried yourself?’ I asked Kate one day when she was again complaining about her mother. We spent the afternoon shelling corn from MamaJacob’s maize cobs. Kate didn’t answer. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and I promised to pay school fees for Okoth and Sorrow, who were now six years old. Sometimes Kate carried her rush mat to one of her maternal uncle’s houses and slept there for some nights. When she got tired of listening to her aunts’ criticism of her mother she returned to our house until she got tired of listening to her mother’s criticism of her aunts. I barely noticed these shifts in night lodging. My room had a door that could be closed, and my bed was big and soft and covered in a mosquito net that I had sewn myself from a large piece of lace. She was still a cat on soft paws, sometimes there, sometimes not. ∗ ∗ ∗ MamaJacob knelt on the ground and blew on the fire. Her eyes watered. Beads of perspiration ran down her forehead. She was proud of the small brick building behind the house where she could cook whether it rained or not. Occasionally she lifted her head and smiled and nodded to us.

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‘Sister-in-law’, hand me the stirrer she said. The water boiled and it was time to pour millet flour into it and stir. MamaJacob spoke to me with her grinning eyes and simple words. My Dhopadhola had improved and our conversations had deepened, but I had not understood that what she had just said was addressed to me. ‘She asked her sister-in-law to hand her the stirrer’, Kate repeated in English but I still did not get it. Everybody in the dim and smokefilled kitchen burst out laughing. Young and old were squeezed into the small space full of pots, baskets, piles of maize cobs, firewood and downy chickens tripping on our feet and nibbling rice, corn and millet grains from the floor. Women sat with legs bent and covered under long skirts, making sure to cover the most erotic part of the body: the hips, but with their breasts easily accessible to the children. ‘Aketcha, your sister-in-law is asking you to hand her the cane’, Kate said again. She sat in the doorway. Half inside. Half outside. ‘Don’t you know that you are named after your grandmother?’ She laughed with the others. MamaJacob grinned at me. And nodded her head. ‘You are now their sister-in-law. You are their husbands’ sister, Alexine’s sister. You are my aunt. My mother actually. You know that we call our mother’s sister our mother? You are called Aketcha because you are named after your grandmother, Peter’s grandmother’. It dawned on me that it had finally happened. That I had been assigned a position in the family. Kinship is not necessarily about blood. It is also about reciprocity. You need to know who is what in relation to whom, and I had been there for so long that it was time to figure out how to position me in relation to everybody else. Aketcha means ‘born when there was hunger’. I pondered over my new name while MamaJacob stirred the millet with the cane and the others continued joking and chatting. I was proud of it. It felt good to sit on the floor of a smoky kitchen full of people. ‘Was there a famine when Aketcha was born?’ I asked. ‘She was born just before the harvest’, Kate explained. ‘That time of the year when supplies are dwindling and the next crop is not yet ready. Just before you start eating the leaves of cow peas, the ones we call bô, the one I am named after. You know, Abbo, my name, it means “when cow peas are plenty”’. ‘Mulamu’, MamaJacob said again with a twinkle in her eyes. Mulamu, meaning sister-in-law. That was what I could now call women who were married to a man in the clan of the same generation as Peter, which meant

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the vast majority of women in the village. My husband—whom I was not yet legally married to at the time, which we had, however, not made a big deal out of—had visited me several times in Saya. So, I was clearly married elsewhere and had to be a sister who was visiting my brothers. Sisters do not live permanently at their brothers’ homes. Alexine and her sisters-in-law had made that clear to me whenever they quarrelled. And they did not expect me to linger either. I was a muzungu. One of those who come and go. But while I was there, I was the sister of the three brothers and of Alexine. The Jop’Apdhola are patrilineal, like other Nilotic people. Men of the same generation, whether cousins or second cousins, call each other brothers. Or ‘cousin brothers’ to help those with no knowledge of local languages and kinship systems. Brothers call each other’s children ‘our children’. The women in the village were now my sisters-in-law, married to my brothers, and their mothers were now my mothers. Their children my children. You address people with the appropriate kinship term, not their name. If you want to specify which sister-in-law you are talking about you call them by the name of one of their children, like when we called the elder brother’s wife MamaJacob. Children make you a complete person. The most important thing in life is to have children. More important than marriage, bride price and clan. Kate had despaired when her children’s fathers abandoned her. But it would have been much worse not to have any children at all.6 The smile was skewed and her eyes twinkled when MamaJacob addressed me as her sister-in-law, but she was serious about wanting to acknowledge the tie between us. ‘We are one, and we are together’, they sang at night in between the stories about the clan and about life, and I learned to respond when people addressed me as Aketcha or mulamu. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Aunt, I need new shoes’, Jacob told me a few days later. He was the eldest brother’s eldest son. His father had lived in the house by the jacaranda trees in Tororo for many years, and his father’s brothers were also busy with their lives in town, so he was the only adult man in the homestead. He was a grave young man with a high shiny forehead whose façade I never got behind. But I assumed that behind it was a desire to feel equal to the white woman. A hope that she would discover that she had much more in common with him than with all those uneducated people

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whom I spent my day with. He was in his early twenties, always wearing newly washed shirts and trousers with creases. He was still in school. He had not passed his A levels yet, but he was still trying. He was articulate, had good English, was always working hard on presenting himself as a man of the world and expected me to help him finance his endeavours. ‘Where I come from’, I responded, knowing he hoped to be able to go there one day, ‘people don’t ask foreigners to pay stuff for them like that. We consider it rude’. ‘Neither do I’, Jacob riposted. ‘You are not a foreigner, and I didn’t ask you to pay for me. I just asked you to give me money. That is different. You are one of us now. You are my aunt. You can just say no if you don’t have anything to give’. A father’s sister holds some of the father’s authority. She even possesses the power to curse nephews who do not respect her. I felt like using my new status as his aunt to tell him to go and help his mother in the field and to spend less time strolling up and down the road hoping to run into a beautiful girl. Jacob wanted to use my new status as an aunt to teach me the difference between paying and giving. Paying is something you do when you have no relationship to the person who receives the money. But money can also be given as a gift, and I had to get used to the fact that relatives expect such gifts when they know you have something to give. Giving money is a sign of love and respect. In fact, money should be circulated all the time to uphold relationships. Old people deserve a note now and then in appreciation of their lifelong efforts for others. Money is given to mourners as a recognition of their grief. A woman expects a man whom she has had sex with to show his appreciation through money or other gifts. When Peter spent a night in the village chatting and drinking beer with relatives he would repeatedly have to reach for the bundle of notes in his pocket. That was also why he did not turn up in the village that often. Jacob never got much from me. But I bought him a radio with a tape recorder and said I would pay him a salary if he transcribed interviews for me. He received the idea well. It was a recognition of his status as an educated man, and the radio allowed him to listen to programmes about the world beyond Saya, which he hoped to venture into some time soon.7 ∗ ∗ ∗

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Things went from bad to worse between Alexine and her sisters-in-law after she had tried to put a padlock on the water tank we had installed by the little grey house so that we could collect rainwater from the roof. We rarely got any water from it ourselves. Before we got out at sunrise to fill our jerry cans and buckets, many others had already sent a child to collect drinking water from the tank. They were our children, children of the clan, so the water was theirs too. But Alexine thought it a good idea that we should be allowed to first fill our own jerry cans and only afterwards let other people bring theirs. The sisters-in-law called on her to remove the padlock right away or somebody would bewitch us for being so stingy and selfish. ‘We are the ones who are married here. Not Alexine. We let her cultivate our husbands’ land. Still, she behaves as if she owns everything, including you. And the water in the water tank’. I went back to collecting drinking water for myself at the borehole near the hospital four kilometres away. Occasionally, I defended Alexine, saying that she was only trying to help me. The perpetual requests for financial aid were a strain. I was only glad that Alexine was able to send some people away before they reached the door of my room. I refrained from mentioning to MamaJacob that her own son was actually one of the worst ones. Alexine had ended up in a hopelessly difficult position as gatekeeper in the rich woman’s house. She made life easier for me while becoming more unpopular herself. But she also pushed us all aside with her anger, her intense relationship with the Lord, and her disdain for juok. A silent power struggle played out between Alexine and her sisters-in-law, and between Alexine and me. We both knew that I would come out as the winner. Our only actual quarrel took place the day I saw Okoth and Sorrow play in front of the house at a time when they should have been at school. ‘Why are the children not at school?’ I put to Kate as she glided by with a bucket on her head and beads of perspiration and water seeping into her eyes. ‘They say they have been chased from school because of school fees. But I don’t know if it is true’. Kate continued her sliding movements with the bucket on her head, as if it had no weight at all and it didn’t matter that school fees had not been paid, though I thought I had paid for all the small children in the family. Schools, like everything else, had suffered during the years of war and turmoil, but people still believed that education was the road to a better life. In the 1990s, almost 90% of all children started school, but

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only half the boys and one-third of the girls completed the first seven years of school. Secondary school was expensive and being a boarder at a good school was unattainable for the vast majority. At dinner, I confronted Alexine with the missing fees which she had been assigned to take to the school. She explained that the church and not the school had received the money. She had nothing to add. She straightened the scarf she had tied around her head and gave me a look that told me that she was not sorry. The church needed the money and she needed the church. It was an investment. The Lord would help her when I was no longer there. My time in the country was running out, and she knew that I knew by now, that money often ended up in a different place than one had planned. I could make note of it and write about it, but there was no reason to get upset about it, because I was there to learn what life was like for them. Alexine knew that I had a different opinion about her church than she did and that I would soon be leaving anyway. Were it not for the church, she would still be lost, and were it not for the Lord, I might never have turned up in the village and given her work. But I couldn’t stop myself from reminding her that she had lied to me and that saved people say they don’t lie. ∗ ∗ ∗ We had to do something about Comfort’s teeth before I left. ‘I am Comfort’s grandmother, too’, I said to the sisters-in-law one evening, as we sat on the mats outside and discussed Comfort’s ailment, his upper teeth and his saved grandmother, who refused to celebrate juok. ‘I don’t mind juok and I would like to pay for the chicken and millet’, I added. ‘You are right’, MamaJacob chirped. After a moment of laughter and reflection, she explained that Jacob and Kate’s common grandfather was also named Jacob. ‘My son is named after him, so my son in a sense is Kate’s grandfather. And your grandfather is also your husband’ she continued, reminding us of the informal and playful bond between grandchildren and grandparents, which is jokingly referred to as a marriage and which is very different from the relationship that a child usually has with his or her parents.8 ‘So, if Jacob is Kate’s grandfather, then he is also her husband’. Jacob didn’t say anything. He was probably thinking about school and whether he would fail again.

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‘I am planning to be a lawyer’, he had often told me. ‘That will never happen’, his uncle said. ‘His results are not good enough’. Jacob sat on a chair in the darkness behind us, in newly ironed trousers and freshly polished shoes. I sat on a mat on the ground with the women and children. He would have much preferred to see me on a chair discussing his future with him. He was eager to move on. To get away. And he didn’t know how to get me to help him with it. My own path forward depended on whether I could think of something interesting to write about the women on the mats on the ground. Furthermore, when sitting on a mat, one can easily slide down and let oneself be embraced by the warm darkness and the lush Ugandan garden. Jacob may not have commented on our discussion, but he did not object either. ‘If Jacob is Kate’s husband, then I’m Comfort’s grandmother, and then we have both a maternal grandmother and a paternal grandmother’, MamaJacob established. We played around with the kinship terms—for fun and in earnest. Relationships are vital and therefore flexible. I bought the chicken. The paternal grandmother, MamaJacob, cooked it, and the ‘spouses’, Kate and Jacob, chewed on the meat and spat it out, four and three times respectively, after which Comfort and his ‘parents’ each got a copper bracelet. Kate could now be referred to as MamaJuok and together we had done what we could to prevent Comfort’s special relationship with juok from causing harm to him or others in the family. We celebrated juok, and we celebrated that Kate and Comfort belonged. Alexine had not been informed but was suspicious and turned up to pull away Sorrow and Hope, demonstrating through her refusal of juok, that she was painfully aware—and accepted—her lack of belonging. Her marriage had failed. She no longer had a clan that was hers, and she could not afford to depend on anyone to celebrate and finish the harm of juok for her. She had opted out of juok, had been saved by the Lord, and trusted that the growing revival movement would be a family to her.9 But Kate had not yet given up on belonging. That day under the mango tree, when she had her hair braided, with Comfort in her arms, she had felt like a nobody. Now she felt like somebody. ‘I’ve been so worried’, she said. ‘Comfort has been sick all year, but now I know that my aunts are there for me’. That was what we celebrated. That Kate felt acknowledged. That sheets, thermos flasks and the celebration of juok are

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about the same thing. About the need for recognition. About the feeling that others will be there for you. But the sisters-in-law were there for her, partly because I was there. They were neither from her father’s clan nor her marital clan. She knew full well that she would soon have to move on. They were prepared to help her out now and then but she would also have to seek out other bonds and other avenues. One day in the near future she would be off, on soft paws, making no noise and no fuss about it. She would go looking for somewhere to silently hover along the walls of other relatives for some time. Later she would maybe return to Saya. Or maybe not. I left for Denmark the following day. But the story had only just begun. Kate made that clear to me while I was away.

Notes 1. Michael A. Whyte, “Nyole Economic Transformations in Eastern Uganda,” in Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: James Currey, 1988), 126–134. 2. For a discussion of health workers’ approach to patients, see Helle Max Andersen, “‘Villagers’ Differential Treatment in a Ghanaian Hospital,” Social Science and Medicine 59, no. 10 (2004): 2003–2012. 3. Mogensen, “Finding a Path Through the Health Unit,” Medical Anthropology, 209–236. 4. Alexine identified herself as Balokole, a term which has been used for the East African Revival movement since the1930s. Pentecostal churches became a major force in Uganda after the takeover of Museveni, and Balokole now largely refers the Pentecostal movement, as discussed by Amos Kasibante, “The Challenge of the New Pentecostal Churches to the East Africa Revival: The Confluence of the Two Movements in My Life,” in The East African Revival: History and Legacies, ed. Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 90–104. 5. For a discussion of the different idioms of distress employed by mothers when discussing their children’s sickness, see Mogensen, “False Teeth and Real Suffering,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 331–351. 6. For the importance of having children, see Susan Reynolds Whyte, David Kyaddondo and Lotte Meinert, “Children,” Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, ed. Susan Reynolds Whyte (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 152–166; and Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael A. Whyte, “Children’s Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda,” Africa 74, no. 1 (2004): 76–94.

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7. Sjaak van der Geest, “Money and Respect: The Changing Value of Old Age in Rural Ghana,” Africa 67, no. 4 (1997): 534–559; and Hanne O. Mogensen, “Skillingen, broderen og tabletten. Penge og sundhed i det østlige Uganda” [The Shilling, the Brother and the Tablet: Money and Health in Eastern Uganda] Tidsskriftet Antropologi 49 (2004/2005): 45– 59, both discuss money as a sign of recognition and respect and the role of money in social relations in African countries. 8. A detailed discussion of ‘joking relationships’ among the Jop’Adhola, i.e. relationships of permitted disrespect and teasing between grandparents and grandchildren, mother’s brother and sister’s son, and a person and his spouse’s siblings, is found in Anne Sharman, “‘Joking’ in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control,” Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 103–117. 9. The belonging to one’s father’s clan has often been discussed as more complicated for single and divorced women in patrilineal Nilotic groups than in patrilineal Bantu groups. See e.g. Håkanson, “The Detachability of Women,” American Ethnologist, 516–538. See also Susan Reynolds Whyte, Sulayman Mpisi Bagiiha, Rebecca Mukyala, and Lotte Meintert, “Remaining Internally Displaced: Missing Links to Security in Northern Uganda,” Journal of Refugee Studies, 283–301 for a discussion of this among the Nilotic group of Achole in Northern Uganda. However, it is also clear that Ugandan women have for long sought economic independence, as shown by Obbo, African Women, and that there is a general decline in marriage in many Africa countries, as discussed by Julia Pauli and Rijk van Dijk, “Marriage as an End or the End of Marriage? Change and Continuity in Southern African Marriages,” Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 4 (2016): 257–266. The ways in which women among the Jop’Adhola, seek both independence and belonging through mobility has been discussed in Mogensen, “Ugandan Women on the Move to Stay Connected,” Anthropologica, 103–116.

References Andersen, Helle Max, “’Villagers’: Differential Treatment in a Ghanaian Hospital.” Social Science and Medicine 59, no. 10 (2004): 2003–2012. Håkansson, N.Thomas. “The Detachability of Women: Gender and Kinship in Processes of Socioeconomic Change among the Gusii of Kenya,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 3 (1994): 516–538. Kasibante, Amos. “The Challenge of the New Pentecostal Churches to the East Africa Revival: The Confluence of the Two Movements in My Life. In The East African Revival: History and Legacies, edited by Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood, 90–104, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

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Mogensen, Hanne O. “False Teeth and Real Suffering: Child Care in Eastern Uganda.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24 (2000): 331–351. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Skillingen, broderen og tabletten. Penge og sundhed i det østlige Uganda” [The Shilling, the Brother and the Tablet: Money and Health in Eastern Uganda]. Tidsskriftet Antropologi 49 (2004/2005): 45–59. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Finding a Path through the Health Unit: Practical Experience of Ugandan Patients.” Medical Anthropology 24, no. 3 (2005): 209–236. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Ugandan Women on the Move to Stay Connected: The Concurrency of Fixation and Liberation.” Anthropologica 53 (2011): 103– 116. Obbo, Christine. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence. London: Zed Press, 1980. Pauli, Julia, and Rijk van Dijk. “Marriage as an End or the End of Marriage? Change and Continuity in Southern African Marriages.” Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 4 (2016): 257–266. Sharman, Anne. “‘Joking’ in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control.” Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 103–117. van der Geest, Sjaak. “Money and Respect: The Changing Value of Old Age in Rural Ghana.” Africa 67, no. 4 (1997): 534–559. Whyte, Michael A. “Nyole Economic Transformations in Eastern Uganda.” In Uganda Now. Between Decay and Development, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, 126–134, London: James Currey, 1988. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Sulayman Mpisi Bagiiha, Rebecca Mukyala, and Lotte Meinert. “Remaining Internally Displaced: Missing Links to Security in Northern Uganda,” Journal of Refugee Studies 26, no. 2 (2013): 283–301. Whyte, Susan Reynold, David Kyaddondo, and Lotte Meinert. “Children.” In Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, edited by Susan Reynolds Whyte, 152–166. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, and Michael A. Whyte. “Children’s Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 74, no. 1 (2004): 76–94.

CHAPTER 6

Stories That Alter Life

June 1997 ‘My dearest mother Aketcha, Surely, it is a pleasure to have this glorious chance of communicating with you through a letter after a very long silence. I hope you and your family are doing well. I guess they are fine. Back this way life is fair. Well, in fact, life started being hard after you left. We had no food and I used the money which you had given me for a mattress to rent a room by the road where I opened a small shop. In fact, I really tried my best for three months. I got a small profit which I could use to help the family. But all in vain. In the end, I had nothing left because people in the villages like cheap things, and the things in the shop were also what we survived on. The money got finished and I didn’t even know anymore where to get soap and vaseline for Comfort. I went to my uncle and asked him to give me some of the money you had left for me. He asked what I wanted to spend it on. I knew of course that the money was for the course we had talked about. But I asked him to give me 20,000 shillings [20 USD]. I took Comfort, the poor little boy, to my grandmother’s place and found a job with an Indian family. I left Okoth with my mother in Saya, because he was still going to school there. But the salary the Indians paid me was too small (40,000 shillings [40 USD] per month) and my mother kept coming to see me with all the kids, saying they were hungry. I gave them the little that I had, but © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_6

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if you had seen them, you would have wanted to forget what you saw. I understand that the whole village is suffering from hunger. No rain, no food. You also know how village kids eat. They need a lot of food. In the end my money got finished because of buying food. While Comfort was with my grandmother, he had stomach problems. In fact, I had stopped breastfeeding him because I was no longer staying with him. I told my grandmother one day when I visited them that he looked sickly, but she just started quarrelling with me, insisting that he had been growing fat and healthy since I left him with her and that if I didn’t believe that she could take care of children, then I could just take him back with me. But Indians do not allow your kid to stay with you when you work for them. I took him to the hospital and the doctor said he was lacking blood and was not getting enough food. I decided to leave him with my mother instead, because milk is cheap in the village. Back to me and my course. It is still on my mind, but the problem is that I removed some of the money you left for me, to buy food. I have decided to first work for a year so that I can put the money back that I removed. Then I can attend the tailoring course we talked about, next year. And when the kids get a little older, maybe I can buy a sewing machine and sew clothes for people. My sister and I also talk about starting a small restaurant. Maybe you wonder why I have changed my mind about the course. But I have not. It was just the circumstances that prevented me from starting the course. I remember how kind and loving you were to us and all the good things you did. I will never forget them in my whole life. In fact, I really appreciated being with you. Very much. Not just because of all the good things you bought, but also our conversations. When I think of how we walked around in the village together, I find myself shedding tears. I wish you could come back. Please promise that you will. I can’t even explain how incredibly happy I would be if you came again. In fact, I was really disappointed that day in Kampala when my uncle did not allow me to come to the airport to say goodbye to you. In fact, it was the worst day since I was born. I even fell sick that day because of having many thoughts in my head. When I returned to the village I thought that maybe I would find you out there. But all in vain. In fact, I could even forget and knock on your door thinking that you were in your room. Okoth started laughing at me and said: “Mum are you dreaming or are you mad?” I became more and more sad, and in fact, my dear mother Aketcha, we really miss you a lot. Even Comfort knows who you are.

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When I show him the picture where you are holding him and ask: ‘Who is that?’ then he replies, “Adhadha makwari” (our brown grandmother), because that’s what he hears the other kids call you. Anyway, I really apologize for not writing to you for so long. You even left me with paper and envelopes with stamps and your address on it. But while I was in Kampala, the envelopes got spoiled. Mum used my bag without knowing what was in it and water poured on the envelopes so that they got all dirty. When I got money again I bought some new stamps and envelopes, but by then I had nowhere to post the letter. By the way, I don’t even want to stop writing, because it is as if I am talking to you when I write to you. In fact, when I write to you I feel happy and it could maybe even take one full week for me to finish the letter. But let me stop here and please come back. Greetings from Okoth who says that he would like you to buy a school bag and shoes for him. Remembrance, etc. I remain yours faithfully Kate (Catherine) Abbo. Please stay cool and have a wonderful time. God bless you. (Please reply)’ ∗ ∗ ∗ Kate had been the object of my study. I had urged her to tell me about her life but put a halt to the story because my time in the country had run out. Not because the story was over. I had bagged what she had given me and left with it. Her first letter arrived six months after my departure. ‘We have only just started’, the letter called out. Others followed. But some got lost on the way.1 I had asked women on the margins of the clan, of Ugandan society and of the world, to let me in on their experience of life on the margins. Women who had to save up to buy a stamp, who had to share their bag with others and to whom water in a bag could mean the loss of communication and the end of their story. Women who did not belong and to whom a European would always be a potential portal to a better world. Kate’s letters contained several densely covered sheets with words on and between the lines and in the margins. Her spelling was largely phonetic and she sometimes wrote ‘sp’ (‘spelling’) in small letters above the word as if to inform me that I had to be particularly creative in my decoding of

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that word. I have edited her letters, corrected her spelling, added punctuation, and shortened them, while trying to keep the spirit of her English and her letters alive. ∗ ∗ ∗ February 1998 ‘Hello, my beloved mother Aketcha. In fact, it is my pleasure to have this chance to communicate to you through a letter once again. I hope that conditions are good in your place and that your daily work is fine. How are you and how is your family? I received your letter and I am so happy for it. I have read it again and again and every time I feel like I am really talking to you. I wanted to answer right away, but due to problems, I failed. I was in Saya in December and saw that my son Okoth was not doing well. He climbed a tree and fell down and broke his right leg. I was only told about this three months later. My mother didn’t bother about his wound. She didn’t want him to tell anybody. She just prayed for him instead of going to the hospital. But when I heard I went to the village to pick him up. Uncle Peter took us to Mulago Hospital, where the doctors took his X-ray and said that he had to be operated on, and that his blood and bone had been destroyed because the wound had been there so long. After the operation I nursed him for a long time in Uncle Peter’s annexe. I cleaned his wound every night, and I am so glad you showed me how to clean wounds when we lived together in the village. I can tell you, mum, that Okoth’s illness was the reason I lost my job and I am now looking for something else, because now I want my own place, be it even a small room. I want to stay with my kids, because my mother and grandmother cannot manage to look after them. Also, there is a killer disease in the village. They call it cholera. It comes due to dirtiness and it only takes a few hours for it to kill a person. As Okoth was very sick he did not get his report from school. Mum says Sorrow got hers, but I haven’t seen it. Both of them still go to school. Don’t worry. I have a photo of Okoth with four legs (with crutches). I wanted to send it to you, but I do not have it with me now. I will send it later when he gets his school report. I still have so much to tell you that I do not even want to stop. But Comfort disturbs me and says he wants me to carry him because he is

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sick. So, I will force myself to finish the letter. I really hope I hear from you again soon. I remain your daughter Kate. I wish you success and happiness in the USA and Denmark. PS Okoth still remembers you. He talks about you every day. He says that if you were still here, his leg would never have ended up in such a bad condition. ‘And do you remember Comfort’s swollen injection,’ he says to me crying, with tears. PPS Sorry, I forgot about the book you sent me that you are writing about your work in Uganda. It is really interesting. I just want to say that you should use my real name when writing about me. There is not any reason to use that other name. Just write Kate, or Catherine Abbo, or if you want to use my sons’ names, you can write Catherine MamaOkoth, or MamaComfort. You can do what is best for you. I am very proud that my name will be in a beautiful book. Well, Mum, I just remembered to write this after I had already closed the envelope, so I had to open it again and write it on a new piece of paper. And in all the other letters I have sent, I wrote the same thing, but unfortunately, you don’t seem to have gotten them all. Wish you all the best.’ ∗ ∗ ∗ My letters to Kate were sent to Peter’s place. It was also through him that I sent her money. It was through her letters and his annexe that my contact with Kate was kept alive. I visited Uganda regularly in the years after my extended fieldwork there in 1995–1996, and I often stayed with Peter and his family in Kampala when I passed through the country. When the family was at work and in school, Kate silently snuck into the main house and sat on a chair near the door to the kitchen. At one of my visits, she wore a lavish, yet worn olive green dress with intriguing patterns of glittering sequins in multifarious colours. Probably a gift from one of the Indian families she had worked for. ‘What a beautiful dress’, I said from the couch at the other end of the living room, because I could see that she had put on her best piece of clothing, and because it did indeed have a striking beauty to it that

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emphasized Kate’s natural elegance. Her hair was not plaited. Her tightly coiled afro hair rose from her head and encircled her face. ‘Do you have time to talk now?’ I asked, to downplay the fact that it was my time that was sparse, and that she had waited for me in the annexe while I had travelled around the world and been fed and entertained by the residents in the main house. ‘Yes’, she said, and we resumed the story. Peter’s annexe and our strolls along the road made it possible for me to become updated on her life and to hear more about her past. Occasionally we also made it to Saya together. In 2000, almost four years after my departure, we spent Easter there. We arrived late one afternoon. MamaJacob was busy serving millet beer to her in-laws, her husband’s cousin brothers, who celebrated Easter drinking the cherished alcoholic beverage made from malted millet and served in large communal clay pots. People gathered around the pots and sucked millet beer through long straws or plastic tubes while they told stories about long ago and now. MamaJacob’s guitar-playing husband, who used to live in the house by the jacaranda trees, sat by one of the pots with his cousin brothers. He was a big and stately man who welcomed me graciously thanked me for coming, for working and for taking care of my people back come. He made it clear that he welcomed me and thanked me as the head of the family, but also that I should not try to challenge his impeccable façade by asking him strange personal questions like I did with the others. He invited me to join them by the pot. I declined and went to join Kate and other women on the edge of the circle. ‘He has come back to you?’ I asked MamaJacob when she showed up with tea and roasted peanuts for us. ‘Kind of. He is here every now and then’, she replied while struggling to hold back a proud and happy smile. ‘Timipakinyalo?’ MamaJacob laughed when I reminded her of the pig with the funny name and she told me that it had been slaughtered long ago and that her new pig had another name. I smiled perceptively and assumed we were both thinking about the time when I was the one who bought oil, soap and salt for her. ‘But he probably spends more time in the village now because he has retired from the railway’, Peter later explained. ‘He can no longer afford to live in town’. MamaJacob poured hot water into the pot and the cousin brothers sucked beer through their straws with renewed vigour, while Jacob, newly married and a recent father, took over with a story about a man who tricked his friends into giving him food for free: ‘Long, long ago, there

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was a man of much wisdom who was so poor that he had nothing to eat’, he began. Jacob recounted how the man tricked his friends into believing he had a herd of healthy cows grazing deep inside the dense forest, and promised to give them these cows in exchange for food. They let him eat with them, but after some time they wanted to be shown the cows in the forest. He took them out into the woods, made them stand in different places, gave them a rope each and told them to pull the cows out of the dense forest. They pulled and pulled and pulled and they never discovered that they were holding on to opposite ends of the same ropes. Eventually they had to admit that this man did indeed have some big and strong cows. They went home and continued giving him food, thinking that one day they would receive one of the amazingly big and strong cows in the dense forest. ‘When I left, the wise man was still eating other people’s food’, Jacob concluded, and the cousin brothers laughed, content and pleased with the story, the millet beer and the festive season. MamaJacob was no longer a deprived woman. She had been rediscovered by her husband and she was now a mother-in-law and a grandmother. Jacob was married. He had made a girl pregnant who was still at school. Her parents reported him to the police for having impregnated a minor and they put him in prison, but his father and uncles paid to get him out and told him to marry the girl. ‘That’s the way it is when a girl has a father who cares’, Kate noted. Jacob’s father and uncles were not impressed, since Jacob was studying to become a teacher at that time. He had finally given up on becoming a lawyer and had managed to complete the course at the Teachers’ Training College. He no longer discussed his plans for the future with me. He taught at the local school, and did not seem particularly eager to introduce me to his wife and son. In fact, he seemed to avoid me. But MamaJacob was delighted to now have a helper: a daughter-in-law whom she liked very much, and a grandson. Her back was straight, her movements resolute, and she took great pleasure in serving me tea and roasted peanuts while telling me about the developments in her life. However, she would have preferred to see me come back as a mother, she said. The storytelling was replaced by a discussion about the upcoming presidential election. Many people thought it was time for Museveni to step down after thirteen years in power, and the opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, had many supporters among the Jop’Adhola. They felt that Museveni favoured western Uganda at the expense of the eastern and northern parts of the country. They also felt it was time to allow the

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participation of other political parties again, to give other candidates a fair chance. Museveni had managed to safeguard peace in the southern part of the country and had, among other things, introduced Universal Primary Education, free primary schooling for everybody, in theory. But he had not built more schools nor hired more teachers. The result was that sometimes one hundred students would gather under a tree outside the school. Anyway, that was what it was like in the eastern part of the country. Maybe Museveni had built new schools in the west, where he came from. He probably had, an elderly man said. School uniforms, pencils, notebooks, school lunches and much more also still cost money in eastern Uganda. As did the health centres, although officially Museveni had also abolished user fees in the health care system. But they were happy that the road to Tororo had been repaired and that it had been done so thoroughly that it was likely to last for another rainy season or two before anything had to be done to it again. A regular service of matatus , small vans taking passengers, had been reinstalled between Tororo and the trading centre four kilometres from Saya. They sucked beer in silence for a moment. Then somebody embarked upon a new story: ‘Long, long ago, that time long ago that the old people used to tell us about’, began an elderly woman in a faded gomesi without a sash, who had joined the inner circle of men around the pot. Deep wrinkles in the leathery skin revealed her age. But so did the self-confidence that comes with old age. After a long marriage and many children, when you have passed on responsibilities and hard work to children and grandchildren, then you enjoy the respect of both young people and elderly men for your contributions to the home, the clan and its land. ‘Back then’, she continued, ‘there was a girl whose parents had let her go to school for many years’. And then followed a story about the many men who wanted to love her. She refused to have anything to do with them until one day when a python snake came along, whom she did not dismiss. She even escorted it as it left at night, which you do to visitors whom you wish to return. Some or the men in the clan found it weird and decided to deceive her, telling her that her lover had been attacked. She went out to look for him. For days she stood on the top of a termitary and called for him with her song. Meanwhile, the python wound itself around her leg and sank its teeth in her foot without her noticing it. The men who had deceived her went looking for her. They heard her song and found her, but it took them days to detach her from the song and the snake and persuade her to come home. When they saw that her leg had started

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decaying, they rushed her to the hospital. The doctors cut off her leg, but she survived, and there was nothing they could do to make her change her mind. She continued rejecting men who wanted to love her. ‘When I left them, the clan elders still took care of her. She still was not married’, the woman concluded, and once more long ago had been woven into here and now. To my surprise, Kate decided to join in. She had been an avid narrator when we lived in Saya and spent the night on rush mats with the other women. We now sat around the clay pot in the company of important men from the clan. Still, she decided to contribute: ‘Long, long ago, back then, there was a woman who gave birth to twins, two girls. One day she told them to go and collect firewood. The oldest, Apiyo [the fast one, the twin that came out first], gathered a lot of firewood, but meanwhile, the other one, Adongo [the last one, the second twin to come out], spent her time playing with the boys. When their mother saw how much firewood Apiyo had gathered and how little firewood Adongo had brought home, she scolded Adongo. But that was a mistake. You should never scold twins. Twins are juok and must be respected. They become offended if people differentiate between them. Adongo left home and climbed into a tall tree. They looked for her for a long time, but couldn’t find her. One day an elderly woman went looking for firewood, and suddenly a piece of wood fell on her head. “What kind of bird throws firewood?” she thought to herself. She looked up and saw Adongo in the tree. She rushed back to Adongo’s home and asked her mother for some salt. “Go home, old wife. You disturb me for some salt,” said the mother, “even though you know I have just lost my child.” “I am asking you for salt in exchange for telling you where your daughter is,” she replied, and then she led the mother to Adongo. Other people followed them: uncles and aunts and the five boys she had played with the day she ran away. One came in his tractor, the other in his Land Rover, the third in his bus, the fourth in his van and the fifth in his Mercedes Benz. They all tried to get Adongo to come down. Adongo’s mother started singing: “My child, my child come down. Hop down, hop down and we will go home.” “Ngelu, ngelu,” Adongo sang, refusing to come down. Then her father started singing: “My child, my child come down. Hop down, hop down, and we will go home.” But again, the answer was, no. One by one, her uncles tried, but still the answer was no. Then the young boy with the tractor tried:

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“Woman come down. Hop down, hop down, and we will go home.” Sill she said no. The one with the Land Rover was next, then came the ones with the bus and the van. Finally, the one with a Mercedes Benz tried: “My wife come down. Hop down, hop down, and we will go home,” and then finally the girl said to the tree: “Olwa, help me descend,” and the tree bent forward so she could jump down. The old woman received ten sacks of salt from the girl’s parents. Everyone was happy and started slaughtering cattle to celebrate. And I got a thigh from one of the cows which I carried home with me and roasted on the fire. Let us hope that one day I will also rise as high as Adongo in the tree’, Kate concluded. ‘Eeh’, said the cousin brothers approvingly, and continued sucking beer. I wondered whether they had understood what Kate was trying to tell them. Fresh supplies of fermented millet arrived. Kate looked down and folded her hands in her lap again. A woman should marry and not depend on her father’s clan for life. She should marry a man who is willing to pay bride price in recognition of her work and the children she will give birth to in the future. But the man must be able to afford something besides cows for the relatives of the woman. He should have a Mercedes Benz rather than a tractor. Women know their worth. They want recognition. Every sexual encounter must be compensated with gifts in the form of money, food, clothing or other goods. Quid pro quo, and hopefully the beginning of a lifelong relationship. But rather a Mercedes Benz than a tractor. You do not marry just anybody. Kate had wanted to add that to the old woman’s story. And to explain her own situation. She had often told me stories about men deceiving and abandoning her. That she had failed to marry the fathers of her sons, to have someone pay cows for her, to have a clan to belong to, a place to live. Or was it just the way I had understood the story? She had also told me that she would never consider marrying someone from the village or agree to be the second wife of somebody. That she would not marry just anybody. Rather a Mercedes Benz than a tractor. She had recently told me that she did not want to marry at all until she had completed a course, had success with some kind of business or found a good job: ‘So that I can manage on my own and let the man do what he wants. Timipakinyalo. Village men, you know … you cannot trust them’. She had her sons. She was a mother, and motherhood is far more important than marriage. If you marry but don’t ‘produce’ children then

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you will end up divorcing anyway. And whether you have a husband or not, you usually end up having to fend for your children and yourself anyway. You can manage without a man. But you are nothing without children. The despair and fear she had felt at the time of her pregnancy with Comfort were insignificant compared to the joy and pride she now felt from being a mother. It dawned on me when Kate told about Adongo, that Kate’s own story was not just about life on the margins. It was also about her right to choose to do other than what the clan expected of her. Alexine and her daughters had all failed to marry. Alexine’s brothers saw them as a burden to the family. But they were also the ones who tied the family together. They made connections between family members as they moved back and forth between homes and homesteads. Men can have many wives, and each individual can have many siblings and cousins, all of whom are siblings in Ugandan languages. Men work in the city and have wives located in different places, so one’s many brothers and uncles may have many homes and families that you can stay with, for shorter or longer periods. When couples divorce, the woman moves away. She may remarry, have children with another man, and anyway choose later to return to her former husband’s land to stay with a grown son of hers with his own family, and land for his mother to settle on. Brothers settle near each other, but sisters spread out across the country as they go to their husband’s places. Transversal ties are established and maintained by married women. But also by unmarried and temporarily married women who bind the scattered family together through their incessant movement. Nelly, Kate and Suzy ran back and forth between their father’s homestead and their uncle’s house in Tororo. They ran away from their father’s and stepmother’s new place in central Uganda, back to their uncle near the railroad and jacaranda trees in Tororo, then to their grandmother’s sister’s place in the millet fields, and Kate went on from there to her grandmother’s sister’s son’s place in Kampala. Later in life, they alternated between relatives, temporary jobs, domestic work, and petty trade, and refused to settle for a life as a second or third wife in the village. Alexine and her daughters probably could have found a man to settle with in a village somewhere. Alexine’s brothers had hoped that one day they would do so. According to Suzy, her father would be happy to take

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Alexine back. But the women hoped that even if they failed to find somebody with a Mercedes Benz, there would be other options than a python with sharp teeth. There was always the possibility of fending for oneself. Ugandan women have sought independence for a long time. Since the 1970s, the number of women in cities has risen faster than the number of men. Some arrive as domestic workers, as Kate did, or they come to seek opportunities in the informal economy. Educated women settle in town with their husband instead of cultivating his land in the village. Or they embark on a career in the city without being married.2 There is a growing number of women who, like Alexine and her daughters, opt out of partnerships with men in order to be in control of their own income. Are they marginalized or independent? Both. Was Kate relieving her pain in her letters to me? Was she hoping that the white woman would save her in return for her stories and letters? Or was she recasting herself by telling a story showing that it was not her fault that things had developed the way they had, and that she managed alright in spite of the many challenges? She had not actively chosen to renounce clan, marriage and life in the millet field for the sake of a sweet life of Kampala. She had been let down. Deceived. She had not decided it was better to fend for oneself than to be married. But at times it was. Ties could be made to others than to your relatives. Alternatives to a polygamous marriage in the village did exist.3 She sat on the edge of the millet-drinking circle and looked like a submissive woman, with small tattoos on the high cheekbones, neat braids, her hands in her lap and eyes facing the ground. She did not yell out and draw attention to herself the way her mother sometimes did. But I began to understand more of what lay behind her long letters.4 ∗ ∗ ∗ Kate had tried many different things, some with more luck than others. Being a domestic worker ensured shelter and food for some time.5 It also pays a little, but usually very little. In many cases, there was hardly any free time and it was close to impossible to go and check on one’s children staying with relatives in the village. That is why Kate, like other women in her situation, would also try out their luck with petty trade now and then. In the four years that had passed since I had lived in Uganda, she had had the shop in the village, a job with an Indian family, a job as a nanny for a muzungu family, which an aunt had been able to find for her,

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since she was now known to have some muzungu experience, but which unfortunately had lasted just less than a year since the family had left again for Europe. Kate and Suzy had then tried to sell second-hand clothes for children, walking around in the streets. For some time they did so well that they could afford to rent a muzigo, that is, one of the small houses with a single room in Kampala’s industrial district, which cost them just under 100 USD a month. It was a good muzigo, with an iron sheet roof and a porch that allowed you to cook on the charcoal stove when it was raining. The shared pit latrines were decent and the residents helped each other to keep them clean. The other residents worked in the market or cooked for workers at the various factories in the industrial district. One woman had a small piece of land where she grew flowers that she sold at the market in the centre of town. Kate liked talking about this woman and her flowers. The problem about selling children’s clothes is that, when school holidays are over, customers are few, and they then lived on the little profit they had made and did not have enough money to buy a new bundle of clothes. The money that she had planned to spend on a course had once more disappeared. In addition, Kate fell ill. ‘Look how thin and weak I was’, she said, showing me a picture that she carried around with her. ‘I sometimes look at it, to remind myself that even if one goes like this, it is not yet over. You may get well again’. At times she had the boys with her. Sometimes they went hungry and had to go to one of their uncles and ask the domestic worker, who was usually one of their relatives from the village, for some food. ‘It was a tough time, but I was happy because I had the boys with me. Okoth is such a good boy. And a bright boy. You can always count on him. He is also strong, and he never gets sick. Not like me and Comfort’. Once, during a heavy thunderstorm, the wind tore off the roof of their muzigo while they were inside sleeping. Kate and Comfort got sick, but not Okoth. He cooked and nursed them while they shivered from fever in the house without a roof. While he lived with his grandmother, someone at her church gave him a pig. He cared for it and fed it and sold it at a profit. ‘That boy will do well’, Kate said in a soft voice as we sat on the edge of the circle eating peanuts and drinking tea. ‘Once I have done a course, I will find a better job, and if Okoth gets the chance to go to a good school, he will do well. That boy fills me with hope for a better life’. ‘Maybe I should take the boys to my dad’, she added after a pause. I was taken aback by this change of mood.

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‘I thought you were not in touch with him’. ‘Do the mosquitoes bite you?’ ‘They do’. ‘Well, I am not, but Suzy is. At least he has enough food. He has a large piece of land and he is hard-working’. ‘But what will he say if you suddenly show up after all these years?’ ‘Maybe he will be glad to see me again’. ‘And what about your stepmother?’ ‘Maybe she has changed. Suzy says she has’. ‘Maybe’. ‘I see that the mosquitoes bite you’. They did bite me, but I had never had malaria. I had access to prophylaxis. We left the mosquitoes and the millet-drinking cousin brothers and went to bed. The next day we went to the market to buy groundnuts, meat, tomatoes, sugar and sweet bananas for our stay in Saya. We sat on a small wooden bench next to one of the market stalls and had a soda before walking the four kilometres back to Saya and I said to Kate that I wanted to buy her an Easter present. She looked down but mumbled that she needed a suitcase. She used a sheet to wrap around her belongings. We found a suitcase made of synthetic leather and tartan cloth in black and grey shades. She ambled back to Saya with the suitcase balancing on her head. ‘I lost an awful lot of lovely things when we had to escape from the muzigu that I rented while I worked for the Europeans’, she told me, as she glided by the pink bougainvilleas by the road in her floral dress and with the suitcase balancing on her heard. ‘I failed to pay rent when the family I worked for went back to Europe, so I had to flee in the middle of the night without my things. I had plates, a bed, an electric hob, a small petroleum stove. I also had a big radio, which I bought for 80,000 shillings [about 80 USD] while working for the Europeans. I later sold it to the man Nelly lived with for 20,000 shillings [20 USD]. He said I could buy it back later. But then it disappeared. He took it to his village and told me that someone had stolen it there. I loved that radio so much. More than anything else I owned. When I think of Okoth happily playing with it, I feel like crying’. The heat peaked in the afternoon before the rain arrived. Kate glided along the road by my side, caught up in her own thoughts and without a bead of sweat on her forehead. ‘But that was before you bought this

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suitcase for me. Now it is my dearest possession. I can have all my things in it. It looks expensive, and when someone comes to visit me, they will. probably say: “What a nice suitcase. Who does it belong to?” And then I will explain to them that it is mine and that you gave it to me’. ∗ ∗ ∗ A few days later we were back in her uncle’s house in Kampala. I was packing and getting ready to return to Denmark. ‘When you arrived, I was so happy’. she said in a barely audible voice. ‘I couldn’t imagine that you would ever go away again. And now the car is almost here to pick you up’. Her sadness weighed heavily and I tried to push it away from me by asking her whom she confided in when I was not there. ‘Mostly Suzy’, she said. ‘I can share my thoughts with her’. Not with Nelly, she explained. It was as if Nelly was pulling away and wanted nothing to do with her and the other sisters. She was sick all the time but would not talk to them about it. Jane now had two children with a man who had promised to pay school fees for her. But he never did, and he now lived with them in a remote village in northern Uganda, where the rebel leader, Joseph Kony, had decided to overthrow Museveni with the help of the holy spirit whom he believed had possessed him. She wasn’t sure whether Jane was still there with them.6 She also told me that she had started going to the Watoto Church, a Pentecostal Church in the centre of Kampala. When she had dark thoughts that she could not share with Suzy she sometimes went there instead. Inside the enormous and beautiful church, she felt as if she was in Heaven. So many people gathered there. Africans and white people sang happy songs together, and the choir wore such beautiful uniforms. Everybody was always welcomed in a warm way and all were allowed to sit in good seats, no matter whether they were poor or rich, black or white, new or familiar to the church. And they always prayed for those who were sick and said that God takes care of everyone, no matter what sickness they have.7 ‘It is as if my problems change when I am there. As if I am growing, becoming bigger and happier. When thoughts about wanting to die disturb me, then I go to the Watoto Church to make them go away’. ‘What are you saying? That you want to die?’

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‘What? No, it is not that I think about it all the time. Not like when I was a kid and my dad beat me so much that I wanted to die. These days, the thought that comes to me is that actually I am strong. That I would have died long ago if I had been a weak person’. I continued packing, unsure what to do with her words. I gave her some money and the rest of my shampoo. I closed my suitcase and looked away. I sensed there was more she wanted to get across to me before I left. But then the cab came. She knelt, thanked me and said she would write to me. ∗ ∗ ∗ Kate did go and see her father soon after I had left. She wrote to me about it. Alexine had arrived in Kampala on her bare feet, distressed that I had not been to see her while I was in Uganda. Her nephew had accompanied her to Kampala and told Kate that they had been completely exhausted when they arrived, not only because of the long journey, but also because they had no food in the village. Everybody was starving at the grandmother’s sister’s place where they were now living. The grandmother who had brought maize cobs to church when Kate was a little girl who lived with her father in Padhola. The one whom Alexine had also lived with for some time in the 1980s when she gave up trading in Tororo and whose son had brought Kate to Kampala. She had a large piece of land and let Alexine and her mother use some of it. Her grandson, the nephew who had accompanied Alexine to Kampala, also told Kate that Okoth was herding cattle instead of going to school. After receiving this news, Kate could no longer concentrate on her work. She told the family she worked for, that she had to go to the village to check on her boys. She passed by her uncle’s annexe to inform her mother of her decision and could see in her mother’s face that it made her worried. She could see in the face of her employer that it was not wise of her to ask for leave again so soon after her Easter leave with me. She got fired, but, contrary to what she had expected, they paid her salary anyway and therefore she had enough money for both transport and cassava flour, which was good, because you cannot arrive empty-handed when you have been away for a long time. The grandmother prepared cow peas with the cassava and told Kate that she had not seen Okoth for three weeks. Kate sent out Sorrow and Hope to go looking for him. Her mother and grandmother stormed and raged when they realized that she wanted to take the boys to her father’s place. But the grandmother’s sister said: ‘Let Kate do as she finds best. After all,

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you cannot take proper care of them. Do you really want them to die of hunger?’ Then they kept quiet. The now ten-year-old Okoth appeared on the path, dancing, bouncing, delighted to see his mother. He told her that he had decided himself to go and herd cattle because there was never any food at home. When you herd cattle for others, at least they give you something to eat. But he also told his mother that he still went to school in the morning and that his grades were good. When he heard that his white grandmother, who used to buy food for him in Saya, had been to Uganda again, he was so happy. He thought I was still in Uganda and that he would be able to see me. He was very disappointed when he understood that I had already left again. His mother described all of this in one of her long letters to me, and pleaded with me that Okoth should not miss me the next time I came to Uganda. She also described how she had packed up the boys’ things and headed for her father’s home with them: the place in central Uganda that he had moved to when he had fled Padhola in the mid-1980s. She had arrived out of the blue, unannounced, 16 years after she had run away from there, now with two sons without fathers and with their belongings tied in a sheet. ‘He was so proud’, she wrote, ‘of having two big grandsons. So happy to finally see them’. The stepmother had also welcomed them. Her father had sat down on his three-legged stool, just as she remembered he had done when she was a child. The boys could stay with him, he said, but she would have to go back to Kampala to work as hard as she could and send him some money. Then he would rent two oxen so he could plant more millet and pay for school uniforms, books and pens for the boys. He also talked to her about their future. Later, they would need to have their own land. When they do not have a father, who can give them access to land, and when they live with a grandfather whose own sons might feel threatened by the needs of their nephews, then it risks becoming a hard life for them. Kate was so happy that he had wanted to make serious plans like that. She understood it as love and concern for her and her sons. She had also asked her father if a daughter who was not married but had children could be buried on his land. He said that she could, maybe not right next the house, then juok would disturb the living, but yes it was possible to do so on his land, a little bit away from the house. She had been so happy to hear that.8 ‘In fact, dear mother,’ she wrote, ‘I feel much better now than I did when you were here for Easter. What really worried me back then were my sons. Now I live with Suzy. We are trying again to sell second-hand clothes together and we are doing very well right now. And my dear

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mother Aketcha, when I start writing to you, just like when I talk to you, my worries always disappear. Before I knew you, I just kept my worries inside myself. And that Easter day when the car came and picked you up, I felt so very sad. But Mum, now let me force myself to stop, because if I don’t stop, I might end up writing a thousand books for you.’

Notes 1. Telling about one’s life is a process of meaning making. When life’s many incidents are transformed into one story, a sense of coherence and meaning is created, as convincingly argued by Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 20. Storytelling gives us a sense that even though we do not determine the course of our life we at least have a hand in defining its meaning, as phrased by Jackson, “The Politics of Storytelling,” 16–17. In making and telling stories, Jackson continues, we rework reality in order to make it bearable and renew our faith that the world is within our grasp. Stories are therefore not only about the journeys we have taken in life. They are also in themselves journeys. They change our experience. The anthropologist, like the stranger, as discussed by Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. K. H. Wolff (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 402–408, often receives the most surprising openness and confidences which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person. Kate had told the stranger, i.e. the anthropologist, stories about her life that she would never have confided in others, and thereby stories had been set in motion which made her embark upon a journey, that was interrupted by my departure. Kirsten Hastrup, A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), 123–145, discusses the violence of ‘being fieldworked upon’ and the pain that one may experience when a professional stranger, e.g. an anthropologist, departs, carrying with her the meaning that was created through the interaction with her. 2. For a discussion of women seeking economic independence and getting by with petty trade and domestic work, see Obbo, African Women; Sandra Wallman, Kampala Women Getting By: Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS (London: James Currey, 1996); and Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Marjorie Keniston Mcinthosh, Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900–2003. Oxford: James Currey, 2006. Kyomuhendo and Mcintosh provide a historical overview of women’s struggle to deal with the tension of being on the one hand pushed and pulled into the market economy, and on the other hand having to face a set of expectation to them as wives and mothers.

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3. Women’s search for belonging and mobility is discussed by Mogensen, “Ugandan Women on the Move,” Anthropologica, 103–116, and Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Michael Whyte and Jenipher Twebaze, “Mobility,” in Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, ed. Susan Reynolds Whyte (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 80–94. The decline of marriage in Africa is discussed by Pauli and van Dijk, “Marriage as an End or the End of Marriage?” Anthropology Southern Africa, 257–266; and Julia Pauli, The Decline of Marriage in Namibia: Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 4. What became clear to me was that Kate had used her letters to continue the story we had set in motion together. My departure had been painful, but the journey had not come to a halt. Her perception of herself had in many ways changed. She now told different kinds of stories. She also made different kinds of decisions. As argued by Cheryl Mattingly, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), stories are not only told, they are also acted. 5. For a discussion of life as a domestic worker, see e.g. Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 6. Little was known in southern Uganda during the 1990s about what happened in northern Uganda during those years. The extent of suffering in the North, caused by both Joseph Kony’s insurgency movement and the Ugandan army has later been documented by among others Chris Dolan, Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006 (New York: Berghanh Books, 2009); and Sverker Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 7. The Pentecostal movement grew in importance in Uganda during the 1980s and 1990s, and for some AIDS patients it brought both hope and social and moral support to be a member of a Pentecostal congregations, see e.g. Lydia Boyd, Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2015); and Alessandro Gusman, “HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches, and the ‘Joseph Generation,’ in Uganda,” Africa Today 56, no. 1 (2009): 67–86. 8. It is important to be buried ‘at home’, which is often a major concern of unmarried women and their relatives. The question of where a woman belongs thus assumes urgency at her death, see Susan Reynolds Whyte, “Going Home? Burial and Belonging in the Era of AIDS,” Africa 75, no. 2 (2005): 154–172.

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References Boyd, Lydia. Preaching Prevention: Born-Again Christianity and Moral Politics of AIDS in Uganda. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2015. Dolan, Chris. Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006. New York: Berghanh Books, 2009. Finnström, Sverker. Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Gusman, Alessandro. “HIV/AIDS, Pentecostal Churches, and the ‘Joseph Generation’ in Uganda.” Africa Today 56, no. 1 (2009): 67–86. Hansen, Karen Tranberg. Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Hastrup, Kirsten. A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory. London: Routledge, 1995. Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Story Telling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002. Mattingly, Cheryl. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Ugandan Women on the Move to Stay Connected: The Concurrency of Fixation and Liberation.” Anthropologica 53 (2011): 103– 116. Obbo, Christine. African Women: Their Struggle for Economic Independence. London: Zed Press, 1980. Pauli, Julia. The Decline of Marriage in Namibia: Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pauli, Julia and Rijk van Dijk. “Marriage as an End or the End of Marriage? Change and Continuity in Southern African Marriages.” Anthropology Southern Africa 39, no. 4 (2016): 257–266. Ricoeur, Paul. “Life in Quest of Narrative.” In On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, edited by David. Wood, 20–33. London: Routledge, 1991. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. H. Wolff, 402–408. Glencoe: Free Press, 1950. Wallman, Sandra. Kampala Women Getting By: Wellbeing in the Time of AIDS. London: James Currey, 1996. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. “Going Home? Burial and Belonging in the Era of AIDS.” Africa 75, no. 2 (2005): 154–172. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Michael Whyte and Jenipher Twebaze. “Mobility.” In Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, edited by Susan Reynolds Whyte, 80–94. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 7

Dying Poor

Nelly did not get buried on their father’s land, and their second-hand clothes business failed, because they had to spend more and more time caring for her. Nelly died shortly before my return to Uganda in the summer of 2001. Kate described her death and burial in one of her letters, and later Suzy also told me about the last days of their sister’s life. She had been badly off for some time and the sisters had taken turns staying at her place, helping her. She couldn’t go to the toilet and bathe by herself, and you cannot expect a husband to help you with things like that. Nelly’s co-wife, who had been married to the man long before Nelly had joined the household, had shown no interest in caring for Nelly. On the contrary. She did not hide the fact that she thought Nelly had brought illness and death to the family. It was hunger that made her die fast, the sisters insisted. There was never anything to eat in that family. Tea but no food, and often there was not even sugar for the tea. They knew full well that her illness had started long ago, that she had never fully recovered after her son had died and was buried in the bare ground near the ugly black man’s home. The boy was born with a belt of a rash around his neck, and everyone knew it was a sign of AIDS, but Nelly’s signs only came much later. After her son’s death she had worked in Kampala for years, where she met a man, who had asked her to move in with him and his first wife. He had never paid bride price for her, but he had done what

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he could to take care of her, though her health only got worse the whole time she lived with him. After the sisters had cared for her for a long period, Nelly recovered a bit and got out of bed to go to the toilet and bathe by herself. The sisters decided to make the best of this improvement in her condition and go back to work before she got sick again. Suzy started cooking for workers in the industrial district of Kampala. She had done so before. Kate found housework with a Ugandan family. She had also done so before. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘The police has taken your sister to the hospital’, a couple of small girls yelled as they caught sight of Suzy and her pots. They came running towards her from the alley where Suzy shared a small musigu with another woman. She had sent the girls to go and get Suzy at the market where she cooked for the workers in nearby factories. Nelly’s husband lived near a police station and had rented a car from the police. The husband had stuffed Nelly and her mattress into the car and paid to have her admitted to the hospital so that she did not die from his home. If that happened, it would be juok, because he had never paid for her. If she died at his house, her relatives would make him responsible for the funeral, and they would also charge him for the bride price he had not yet paid. After the police car had left with Nelly, the man sent some of the neighbour’s children to inform Nelly’s sisters. When Suzy heard what had happened, she left her gear and ran to the road to find a matatu in the direction of Mulago Hospital. The message also reached Kate, who interrupted the laundry she was doing, and went to kneel before her employer, a wealthy female owner of a small drug store. She asked for permission to go to the hospital, but did not get it. Suzy arrived at the hospital a few hours after Nelly. Mulago Hospital was built on the slopes of one of Kampala’s green hills, as far back as 1917. It became a university teaching hospital in 1924, and was the first— and for long also the best—medical school in East Africa. The hospital was expanded in the 1960s to about 1500 beds, but it suffered severely from the economic collapse and Idi Amin’s persecution of well-educated people in the 1970s. In theory, it again offered many kinds of specialized treatment around the turn of the century, but often there were 3000 patients admitted in the 1500 beds. In addition, relatives camped in the hallways, under the beds or in the hospital garden, where they cooked for

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the patients and washed their clothes and bed sheets. It was somewhere in this swarming medley of people, stairs, corridors and laundry that Nelly had been taken to, and it took some time for Suzy to find her. She immediately saw that Nelly was badly off indeed. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear, didn’t open her eyes. It was as if she was already dead, though she was still breathing. But worst of all was the smell. A terrible stench from her mouth, as if she had already decayed from the inside. She had been thrown on a bed with her own mattress, but without bed sheets, without a blanket. Suzy took Nelly’s hand, was overwhelmed by fear and began to cry. Nelly, her beautiful big sister with her light brown skin and freckles on the cheeks and shoulders. Nelly whom Suzy had once saved from the ugly, black man who was Sally’s father. This time, she couldn’t save her. She was scared. Once AIDS comes into a family, she thought, then it kills many members of the family. ‘That is not how AIDS spreads. You know that, Suzy’, I said when she told me about it a few months later. Suzy was well aware of how AIDS is transmitted. Everybody in Uganda is. ‘But misfortune moves with juok’, she said. Once it has entered the family, it can kill many people, before it stops again. She had already lost several relatives to AIDS. Three uncles were dead, one aunt was ill and she was also worried about others in the family. Eventually, she lifted her head from Nelly’s bed and looked around for help, but everybody had left the room because of the stench coming from Nelly. Nelly completed a whole day at the hospital without even a nurse coming to see her. Slowly Suzy let go of Nelly’s hand and went out into the hallway where she found a woman who lent her a basin so she could bathe Nelly. Afterwards, she started looking for a nurse. Finally, hours later, a nurse came and gave Nelly a drip. She also lent Suzy some bed sheets. But not enough. Urine poured from her incessantly. It was a full-time job changing the sheets, rinsing them and getting them dry so they could be used again. They had had colourful flowers when she got them, but Nelly’s urine burnt off the colours. Suzy had trouble turning Nelly from one side to the other to change the sheets. As she tried, she saw that Nelly’s back was one big wound. She stopped putting the sheets under her, and instead she just folded them and placed them between her legs to collect the urine. For a week, Suzy sat there by her, washed and changed sheets, and slept on the bare floor at night. Occasionally, the staff gave her some

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of the food from the hospital kitchen, lumpy posho (cooked maize flour), and if she were lucky, cooked beans, or the water in which beans had been cooked, but no beans. Her own cooking gear was still at the market, or maybe it was not. Surely someone had thought by now that they might as well take it. She would probably have to start afresh after Nelly’s death. After a week, she decided to leave the hospital to go and fetch Kate. She told Kate, with eyes full of tears, that their sister might not survive another day. Kate waited for her employer to come home, and tried again to explain to her how serious it was but was fired on the spot. She packed her things and asked for her salary, but was told she was crazy to think they would pay her. After all, it was her decision to leave. Suzy was relieved that Kate had arrived. Now there were two of them. Other people in the hospital had started asking Suzy if she didn’t ‘have any other person?’ meaning, ‘Where are your relatives?’. They didn’t hear from their mother. She did not care. That was what they thought. She did not believe that a daughter of hers could die of AIDS, because she prayed for them and had told the Holy Spirit to protect them. ‘Did she even know Nelly was so ill?’ I later asked Suzy. ‘Yes, she did. She says she didn’t know. That she thought it was just a normal sickness. That she didn’t know it was serious. But there was a time when we all ate together, and grandma started talking about Nelly’s boyfriends. And cried. I am sure it was because she knew what Nelly suffered from. And we had seen her baby boy with the belt of AIDS, the rashes around his neck. Everybody knew even though they didn’t say it’. They did not hear from their father either. The doctors asked them to buy medicine for Nelly and when they returned and saw that no medicine had been bought, they just moved on to the next patient without uttering a word. Their wages could not ensure them a living standard that matched their education. They had to find other ways to make enough money so that they could send their own children to schools and give them an education as good as their own. They had therefore developed creative ways of making money from their skills and authority. But patients had to obey them for it to work. Suzy and Kate had no money with which to obey the doctors. ‘When they saw that we had not bought the medicine, they just skipped her. They didn’t work on her’, Suzy explained. Later the doctors suggested an X-ray and Suzy and Kate agreed that Kate should go and see the uncle with whom she had stayed as a teenager. He was no longer a trader. He had been saved and spent most of day praying to the Lord, like their mother, but

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he gave Kate a bit of money. She rushed back to the hospital and the Xray was done. Nelly almost died on the way back to the ward. They rolled the bed themselves, managed to make the lift work and got her back to the ward. She was soaking wet from perspiration and gasped for breath. A few hours later she died. And the X-ray? Sure, they paid for it and they got the picture, but nobody ever told them anything about it. ‘Kate went to that communication box, what do you call it? She rang the uncle from the call box and told him that Nelly had died’. The sisters lay in the corridor next to the cold chamber (mortuary) all night. Had they been in the village, relatives would have come from near and far and slept near the deceased person until the time of burial. After the burial people would still be sleeping together outside by the fire, to keep the bereaved company. But Kate and Suzy had no other choice than to lie in the corridor near the big and heavy door of the cold chamber. The uncles arrived with a car and a coffin by noon the next day. They took Nelly to her mother’s home in Malinde, the village near Saya, where Alexine’s brothers had bought a piece of land and built a small house for her. That was where Nelly was buried.1

Note 1. Much has been written about the social consequences of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s and of the difficulties of caring for the sick. Some examples are George Bond and Joan Vincent, “Living on the Edge: Changing Social Structure in the Context of AIDS,” Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural and Revolutionary Change, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (London: James Currey, 1991), 113–129; George Bond and Joan Vincent, “AIDS in Uganda: The First Decade,” in AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, ed. George Bond, John Kreniske, Ida Susser, and Joan Vincent (Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1997): 85–97. The pain of losing a relative is described by Noerine Kaleeba and Sunanda Ray, We Miss You All: AIDS in the Family. Harare, Zimbabwe: SAFAIDS, 2002, 2nd ed. Other texts deal with the burden of care-taking for the relatives, e.g. Christine Obbo, “Who Cares for the Carers? AIDS and Women in Uganda,” in Developing Uganda, ed. Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (Oxford: James Currey, 1988), 207–214; Hansjörg Dilger, “‘My Relatives Are Running Away from Me’: Kinship and Care in the Wake of Structural Adjustment, Privatisation and HIV/AIDS in Tanzania,” in Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, ed. Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 102–124;

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and Liv Haram, “We Are Tired of Mourning: The Economy of Death and Bereavement in a Time of AIDS in Tanzania,” in Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, ed. Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig (New York: Berghahn, 1999), 219–239. Haram discusses the tendency of women as mothers, caregivers and mourners to emotionally distance themselves to the care of the sick and to the many death and losses they experience.

References Bond, George, and Joan Vincent. “Living on the Edge: Changing Social Structure in the Context of AIDS.” In Changing Uganda: The Dilemmas of Structural and Revolutionary Change, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, 113–129. London: James Currey, 1991. Bond, George, and Joan Vincent. “AIDS in Uganda: The First Decade. In AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, edited by George Bond, John Kreniske, Ida Susser and Joan Vincent, 85–97. Colorado and Oxford: Westview Press, 1997. Dilger, Hansjörg. “’My Relatives Are Running Away from Me’: Kinship and Care in the Wake of Structural Adjustment, Privatisation and HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.” In Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, 102–124. New York: Berghahn, 1999. Haram, Liv. “We Are Tried of Mourning: The Economy of Death and Bereavement in a Time of AIDS in Tanzania.” In Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, 219–239. New York: Berghahn, 1999. Kaleeba, Noerine, and Sunanda Ray. We Miss You All: AIDS in the Family, 2nd Edition. Harare, Zimbabwe: SAFAIDS, 2002. Obbo, Christine. “Who Cares for the Carers? AIDS and Women in Uganda.” In Developing Uganda, edited by Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, 207–214. London: James Currey, 1988.

CHAPTER 8

Feeling Stuck

My mother was in Uganda with me for the first time, in 2001, a few months after Nelly had passed away. My Ugandan family was, as expected, honoured to meet my Danish ancestry. She was an elderly member of my family who deserved respect. She was the proof that I had—maybe not a clan—but at least people I belonged to, when I was not in Uganda. ‘Kate looks so sad’, said my mother, as we sat on the low wooden benches outside the building where Kate and her pregnant sister, Suzy, stayed in 2001. Peter and his wife had rented two rooms in a newly constructed building near their own place, in an attempt to assist relatives in need to have a way to support themselves. In the front room was a shop, and in the back room lived Kate and Suzy. They cooked food for workers repairing the road nearby. Peter and his wife were both well educated, had good jobs in town, and were always looking for ways to help out and support deprived members of the family. This shop was one of their many attempts to do so. ‘Her face lit up when she saw you, but there is an intense sadness about her’, my mother insisted. ‘Is there?’ I asked, taken aback by her observation. I had been happy to see them in a nice place and with something to do. Customers turned up and the sisters told us to sit inside while they served food for the workers on the porch outside. The door, the only source of light, was open, and a strong odour of fluid asphalt entered the room from behind the building. ‘Yes, and they are so poor’, she added. © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_8

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I looked at the sisters’ sparse possessions, neatly organized in one of the corners of the room. ‘And she looks much younger and more vulnerable than I imagined from what you have written about her’, my mother continued. Kate was beautiful, slim and elegant as always. But no, she was not a forceful person. She glided rather than strode across a room. She used to have her hair plaited. Tight braids would run along her scalp and reach half way down her neck. But this year, there were no braids. Her face was not wreathed by tall and tightly coiled afro hair either. Her hair was short, close-trimmed. She was in her early thirties, a mother of two, and had just lost her older sister, Nelly, who had died from what was now openly referred to as AIDS. No wonder she looked sad. But what had happened to the tattoos on her cheeks that used to give her face its cat-like grace? I had once asked her what they meant, but they didn’t mean anything, she said. They were just meant to make her look pretty. A cousin had helped her make them by smearing ashes into small cuts on her cheekbone. Now they were gone. Or were they covered by a rash? Or maybe they had never been as conspicuous as I remembered. The shop in the front room was kept by a relative of Peter’s wife. He was a smart young man who was proud of his spotlessly clean new shop, selling everything from rice, soap and plastic buckets to maize flour, matches and kerosene lamps. At night he slept behind the counter. Not always alone. According to Kate and Suzy, young women regularly found their way to his mattress behind the counter. Kate and Suzy did the cooking behind the shop on charcoal stoves. For breakfast, they served chapatis (thin flat bread made from wheat flour and water) and tea with milk and sugar. For lunch, they prepared beans and matoke, that is, cooked mashed plantains. An enterprising person had built this elongated yellow building with four shops, each with a back room, in the hope that with time, a small trading centre would spring out of the red soil. However, two of the shops were still empty and only plantain trees and a few scattered houses neighboured the building. Was it poor? Yes. But the women’s living conditions were much better than what I had seen on other visits. They had a large clean room with plenty of space for their scarce belongings, cement walls and a leak-proof iron sheet roof. Their earnings may not have been great, but they were not starving either. They ate leftovers from their cooking, which meant that they could often have several good meals in one day.

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‘Those mobile phones are pure exploitation, aren’t they?’ asked Daniel, who kept the shop in the front room. He had clear skin, a thin moustache and a dark blue cap with a red AIDS ribbon, matching his dark blue tshirt with stars and stripes. I sat on a tall stool in front of the counter and played with my mobile phone. A new class, as the saying went, had appeared in Uganda in the 1990s: The C-class, a class of people with cash, cars and cell phones. Daniel did not belong to it. But he knew of its existence. Uganda had for some years been one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, which, however, said more about the swiftness of change since the civil war than about the actual wealth of the vast majority of the population. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, eager to explore the entry of mobile phones into the lives of Ugandans. In the mid-nineties, I had stayed an hour and a half away from a post office with a mailbox, where letters from Denmark reached a couple of weeks after they had been sent. Landline phones were non-existent outside of major towns and even in town, only a small number of people had access to expensive and unreliable phone lines. Only once or twice during my first year in Uganda did I call home from the central post office in Kampala. Now, six years later, mobile phones were already more widespread than landline connections had ever been. In 2001 they were still the privilege of the lucky few with cash to spare, but this number grew at an immense speed. So did the difference between rich and poor. ‘It’s like eating the eggs of the hen. If you spend your money feeding the hen and eat its eggs, what then is left in the end? Nothing. The phone gives us communication. But what do you have afterwards? And how can you afford to pay for airtime when you also have to rent a place for your family, buy food, pay for medicine and school fees? They could at least give us free airtime since the phone is so expensive to buy. Do you know those Microsoft people?’ No, I couldn’t say that I knew anybody having anything to do with Microsoft. ‘I’ve heard that this guy, Bill Gates, is a blackmailer who has caught us all in his big net. Do you know the people outside of Uganda who brought those mobile phones?’ I did not know those ones either, but I could see why he felt that the magic of computers and mobile phones bore a resemblance to each other, and I agreed that expensive airtime and Microsoft’s dominance on the software market could, in a sense, be seen as con tricks. I also knew

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that I was one of those from ‘outside of Uganda’, just like Microsoft and the people behind mobile phones, so he had good reason to think that I may have met them. His reasoning made sense and I could see how information and associations had crossed continents and ended up in Daniel’s yellow shop. He knew how to converse with people with cash and mobile phones while he weighed out and packed the goods they bought in his shop. I sat on the tall stool with my mobile phone in one hand and my shopping list in the other. It was long. Kate sat on a low stool behind me to advise me on the choice of soap, variety of rice and colour of basin, and to make sure Daniel did not make me pay muzungu prices for his goods. We needed toilet paper and notebooks before heading to the village where we were going to spend a few weeks together in the little grey house amidst the emerald green grass, surrounded by millet, cassava and plantains, five hours’ drive from Kampala. I also bought sugar, salt, cooking oil and soap to bring to the family. Rice, maize flour, groundnuts, beans and curry powder are common ingredients, but something that people have in limited quantities. They would use what they had when we showed up, so I wanted to take them new supplies. We also needed a kerosene lamp, rush mats, sheets, basins and a bucket, to use while we were there and to give away as gifts when leaving. Daniel had nice blue bed sheets in his shop, which I bought for the mattresses that might still be in the house but which were probably dirty and worn out by now. A bit of bread and cakes for the trip. Biscuits and toffees from Kenya that I devoured after retiring from village life and relaxing under the mosquito net. ‘He has never sold that much at once before’, said Kate, as he was outside for a moment. ‘He pretends to be unimpressed, but he is not’. ‘I would like a phone but I cannot afford it’, he remarked as he returned to his customer with the many needs and a lot of cash. ‘I know that I cannot afford to keep it open for very long. But these days, if you have money it is essential that you have a mobile phone’. ‘Why?’ I asked, while watching him weighing out sugar, meticulously and slowly. One kilogram in each of the bags for the four houses in the homestead: Peter’s house, where I would be staying with Kate and my mother, one bag for each of his two brothers’ wives, and a bag for Jacob, who now lived with his wife in the deceased grandmother’s house. In addition, I had asked for ten bags of half a kilogram of sugar to use as gifts for the neighbours in the surrounding homes. It took time. ‘Then you can talk to people who are far away’. ‘Relatives you mean?’

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‘No, that wouldn’t be all that necessary, but if I had a phone, I could call those Coca-Cola people and tell them that I had run out of CocaCola. Now I have to sit and wait for a truck with Coca-Cola to pass by. I would also be able to call and ask for a larger refrigerator, because the one I have now is not big enough’. ‘Don’t you want a picture of me?’ he said when we were done. He put on his cap, held a plastic can of toffees in his hands, and looked earnestly into the camera. The picture reveals that the only goods on his shelves that I did not buy that day were beer, margarine and spaghetti. Everything was stacked in neat rows on the freshly painted yellow shelves. Even the scale was new and shiny. The basins and buckets in bright blue, red, green and purple colours on the top shelf remind me that I messed up his way of organizing the buckets and their lids, because I insisted that the lid on my bucket should have the same purple colour as the bucket itself. My mother noted that I sat enthroned on my stool, like a queen ordering half the store to be stowed away for her. Suzy watched us with interest from a distance. She was also called Awori, born at night. I had heard a lot about her over the years, and met her briefly once, but I only got to know her that year. She wore a soft black captain’s cap that she had pulled down to her eyes and a tight-fitting black lace dress that she could no longer zip in the back, due to the advanced pregnancy and which therefore highlighted her luxuriance. She was darker and shorter than Kate, and well rounded, but behind the dark round cheeks I recognized Kate’s high cheekbones and in the shadow of the cap I also saw the same brown eyes, which, however, appeared more headstrong and more withdrawn than Kate’s did. I knew Suzy from Kate’s letters as the enterprising sister with whom she occasionally threw herself into a new business venture, such as going from house to house to sell second-hand clothes. I also knew her as the sister who had disappeared from their lives for several years and spent months in jail for stealing children’s clothes. Suzy had to do the cooking for the roadworkers by herself for a couple of weeks. Kate was going to the village with me and would benefit from my excessive shopping. Suzy sent me a careful smile from the doorway and I promised myself to get to know her better when I returned to Kampala. ∗ ∗ ∗

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The majestic mvule tree with the blue cross that we had painted so that I knew where to branch off had been cut down. The woman who used to live under the tree had died of AIDS. The children had finished school thanks to the tree, but I overshot the path to the homestead. We went into the swamp behind Saya, turned around and passed the place a couple of times before finally identifying the narrow path to the homestead that the four-wheel drive just managed to pass through. After an early start and a long journey, we rolled the car onto the lawn in front of the little grey house around midday. The homestead was quiet; empty, it seemed. Heavy thumps from mortars came from neighbouring homesteads. Chickens cackled, a goat was bleating and a child cried in the distance, but otherwise silence and stolid heat. Eventually soundless feet of small children turned up on the thick grass and the car was soon encircled by children. Women arrived from the fields ululating, with muddy feet and the hoe in their hand. As they spotted the car, their cries of joy turned into clapping hands, wiggling hips, and a Padhola song about the joy of welcoming foreigners: ‘Wasangala gi neno win’ [we are happy to see you]. The grass was greener than ever. The Pearl of Africa was still a cornucopia of colour. The house with the grey cement walls, iron sheet roof and red window frames still stood out from the round thatched huts that surrounded it, but it had become a little more dilapidated. The curtains were tattered. I had had them made from kitenge, the gaily coloured fabric that women wrap around their waist and use for carrying their children on their backs. There were no panes of glass left, and the cement had cracks. But the welcoming of the villagers was cordial and the key to the house was soon found. The couch, which used to be in the living room, had been moved back to the house where it actually belonged. They had lent it to me for a year without my ever realizing whose it was. They brought it back now that I was also back. There was one single cushion left, with no cover, but the wooden frame was intact. The walls of my room were still yellow and shiny. The beds were there and the upholstery of the two mattresses had only minor tears. They were not worn out and they did not smell of children’s urine. Only a hint of the sweet odour of bat stool came from them. They were obviously not used on a daily basis. They were waiting for the family’s muzungu to return. Sally, now 11 years old, whose mother, Nelly, had died a few months earlier, was asked to sweep the room with a bundle of straws tied with

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a cord. Afterwards we brought our luggage, supplies, jerry cans, basins and the purple plastic bucket with its matching lid into the room. Only Alexine was missing. The hand-twisting, saved, bright but at times confused and scheming mother of the four sisters: Nelly, Kate, Suzy and Jane. I had lived with her, and later also with Kate, in this house for a whole year six years ago, but I had not seen her since. The last time I was in Uganda, Alexine had showed up at Peter’s house in Kampala, just as I had left for the airport. She had burst into tears when she realized that she had again found out too late that I was in the country. She explained to her brother that she had missed me every single time I had been back. The rumour that I was in Uganda had somehow reached her, and she had decided that if need be, she would walk on her bare feet the 300 km to Kampala to see me. Fortunately, after 20 kilometres on the road, she had met a nephew who had paid a driver to let both of them climb onto the barrel stand of his truck. They had arrived in Kampala late in the afternoon, in torrential rain and with no money to pay for transport to Peter’s house. They were completely exhausted when they arrived at his place after hours of walking along the muddy streets—streets that at sunset were not just muddy but also hectic from people returning home and trying to complete their shopping and errands before darkness enveloped the city. By then I had already been picked up by a large four-wheel drive with air conditioning and had been taken along the shores of Lake Victoria to the airport. I knew all this, since afterwards Kate had described it to me in one of her detailed letters. I could no longer ignore Alexine. I had to send her a message that I was once more in Uganda. I made up beds for my mother and myself in the yellow room, hung the mosquito nets and unfolded the new blue sheets. Sally, who had lived with MamaJacob since her mother died, watched me in her glaring pink school uniform without uttering a word. I wanted to know what it was like to be 11 and have lost one’s mother to AIDS. But I did not know what to ask her. ‘Was this also your room back then?’ my mother asked. Kate looked at us with an air that made me feel I had done something wrong. When she arrived in Saya in 1996 my cousin from Denmark was visiting me, and he had shared the yellow room with me. Before that, and again later, my boyfriend (whom I married some years later), had stayed with me in that room. Back then she would not have told me if I did anything wrong. She probably still wouldn’t. ‘Was it wrong that my cousin and I shared a room?’ I asked when we later sat in the dim light, bent over plates with kwon, cow peas and

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chicken. She ate slowly. Rolled the kwon into a ball before taking a small bite from it and then continue rolling the rest in her hand. She was afraid to eat from the meat unless I insisted. And even then, she seemed shy to eat from a bird that had been slaughtered in honour of our visit. Not hers. ‘No’, she said, in a barely audible voice. But yes, it was. It just dawned on me that there was something that I had either been unaware of it or had chosen to ignore back then. I liked chatting with my cousin at night. The other room had never been painted and its door was crooked and could not keep bats and rats away. ‘Please tell me if people said it was wrong’. ‘Okay, they just said, “The Bazungu don’t mind, but we Africans don’t like it.” You don’t sleep in the same room as your cousin brother. You don’t marry your cousin brother either, right?’ ‘What about mother and daughter, can they sleep in the same room?’ I then asked. A small grunt, but no answer. ‘But we don’t sleep in the same bed’, I added in my defence, remembering that Kate and Alexine had once slept in the same room because my guests from Kampala stayed overnight in the living room. ‘Back then, you told me that it was alright for you and your mother, if you didn’t sleep in the same bed? Wasn’t it?’ ‘You are so curious’, my mother said. ‘You ask her questions all the time. Kate, now it must be your turn to ask’. She was right. It was still me who asked all the questions. Kate replied and she wrote long letters. I thanked her on floral cards that she exhibited as proof of her relationship to me. But it was still me who took the lead in our conversations. I asked the questions and Kate answered them. After rolling and chewing kwon in silence for some more time, Kate explained hesitantly: ‘Here with us, if I marry, my mother cannot even enter the house in which I live with my husband. What about you? If your mother visits you after you have married, can she then sleep in your bed?’ I hesitated. Tried to remember whether it felt right to have my mother sleep in my bed back home. As I hovered between here and there, my mother answered that of course she could. Meanwhile I secretly thanked my Ugandan family for being so tolerant. They had not complained that my cousin brother slept in my room and neither did they now complain

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that my mother was going to sleep, not just in the same room, but in the bed that I had slept in with my boyfriend. For a brief moment, I thought that Kate had indeed tried to ask us questions about our world, but she was just trying to explain what we had not yet understood about her world: sexual relationships are prohibited not only between members of the nuclear family, but also between everyone who belongs to the same clan or whose grandparents belonged to the same clan—that is, you should not only avoid sex with your brother, but also with cousins, first cousins, second cousins and third cousin, and so on, who descend from the same ancestor, hence the same clan. People who should not have sexual relations such as siblings and cousins, parents-in-law and childrenin-law, should behave respectfully towards each other; that is, they should respect a series of rules and prohibitions resulting in subtle actions that may go unnoticed by outsiders. You should step aside and kneel when you met your father-in-law (or one of his brothers and cousins) on the path, you should avoid entering the house (or bedroom) of your parentsin-law and your adult children (and your adult nephews and nieces), and you should definitely not sleep in the bed where they have slept with their spouse. Outsiders may hardly notice these subtle actions, but they are significant signs of recognition of kinship relations, and a daily reminder that the clan is big, that we have a special relationship with each other and are there for each other.1 ‘Some say’, Kate continued, ‘that I’ve been so unlucky in life because I’ve worked for my uncles. I’ve cleaned their bedrooms in their big houses in town, made their beds, washed their clothes, including their underwear. There are some who say that you can never get married after doing this. I used not to believe it, but now that I see how my life has developed and that it is as if I have no luck in life, I wonder if there is some truth in it’. ‘You have to tell Kate that she should not believe in things like that’, my mother said to me in Danish. I could not. I could not tell her that she should not believe in what she believed in, when I had always told her that I was there to understand her world. Furthermore, I understood very well what Kate was talking about. I had even written articles about misfortune, symbolic pollution and kinship relations.2 Still, it seemed, I sometimes forgot to respect these rules myself when I was in Uganda. Kate did not believe that bedrooms and uncles had magical power, but she believed in the recognition of kinship relations. Kate was not subjected to exotic beliefs, but trying to understanding why her life had been so

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difficult. Her jobs never lasted long. The course she had long dreamed of had not yet been realized, the fathers of her sons had disappeared, no man had ever proposed marriage to her, and she had had several long periods of illness in recent years. There was something that disturbed her, and she sought an explanation and a way to move her life in a more favourable direction. But I got a little snappy. I didn’t know how to explain all this to my mother while struggling to swallow the sticky kwon and listen to Kate. Kate noticed the tone of our exchange and maybe she guessed its content. ‘Okay’, she said, ‘I don’t believe it so much either. Educated people do not believe in it. Uncle Peter is educated and he does not believe in it. Not very much. Maybe it is rather because of my grandfather that I do not have luck in life. He cursed my father. My grandfather wanted to divorce his wife, but my father and his siblings chose to go with their mother, and then he cursed them. He cursed them that they and their children would never succeed in life. Maybe that is why I have had so many problems’.3 ‘Don’t believe in things like that. Don’t give up on having a good life’, said my mother, confused by this talk about uncles’ bedrooms and grandfathers’ curses and about the detours of Kate’s life. ‘I am not giving up. I am just telling you how other people talk. But I haven’t given up. I am still trying to have a good life. But I am also trying to understand why I have been so unfortunate in life’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Alexine’s ululation reverberated in the darkness later that evening. It had not been my intention to ignore her, but we had had disagreements. Her quarrels with others had disturbed my work, and she ended up transcribing interviews while Kate and I moved around with Comfort on our hips and visited people in other homes. In the years that followed, I had not informed her of my visits to Peter’s place and to Saya. But this time I had sent one of the young boys with long fast legs fifteen kilometres down the road, to the village of Malinde, where Alexine now lived on a small plot of land that her brothers had bought for her. My mother and I had already retreated to the room with shiny yellow walls, mosquito nets and a door that could close. Alexine’s unmistakable cry and joyful singing could be heard from far, so I had time to get out from underneath the mosquito net before she entered the house, dancing. She was

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dressed in a spotlessly clean, newly ironed white shirt and a tight black skirt, and she had a scarf around her hair and a brown handbag hanging from her arm. She beamed like a sun in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. Her cheekbones were as elevated as they possibly could be. The rhythmic clapping of her hands accompanied her swaying hips and the welcoming song: ‘Wasangala gi neno win’. I sensed my eyes going moist. Contrary to what I had expected, I was moved by her arrival. Where was the woman who had quarrelled with everybody, been backbiting against her sisters-in-law? Who had given her children’s school fees to the church and lived in a dilapidated church with no roof after leaving Saya? The woman in front of me was straight-backed, proud and hopeful. Much of the hope was undoubtedly linked to my visit. But was it only the thought of my purse that brought such joy? And why the moisture in my own eyes? Hope and Sorrow had radiant eyes and long thin arms and legs. The handbag swung merrily on their mother’s arm while she danced and sang, but as soon as she had paused her dancing, she opened the bag. ‘Look’, she relayed, eyes flashing with pride, ‘hope’s school report. She is number one in her class. Unfortunately, Sorrow’s school report was eaten by the white ants. But look, we have brought groundnuts and maize for you’. She turned the bag upside down. Groundnuts tumbled onto the small table and rolled down onto the cement floor. The girls had carried a bundle that Alexine now also untied with such exuberance that cobs of maize also toppled onto the table and ended up on the floor. Hope and Sorrow looked at her with big smiles on their face, and indeed the three of them exhibited unprecedented and unexpected prosperity and joy. Alexine’s singing was replaced by a flow of words praising her new happy life in Malinde, where she—thanks to her brothers—now had a plot of land of her own and a small house. A place where she could one day be buried. ‘So, what is your project on this time? Is it still about children?’ She broke off her own flow of words and gave me a chance to answer. ‘No’, I said, ‘it is actually about women like you’. ‘That sounds good’, she said, ‘I am happy to tell you about my life. I can start. right away’. And then, surrounded by groundnuts and maize, she started talking again. I was tired, thought of the bed I had just left and whether she would pause at some stage and give me a chance to postpone her life story until the next day. But no, that did not seem to

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be a possibility. She only paused for a moment to ask me go and get my recorder so that I could later remember properly what she had told me. Her talk sounded almost like a preachment, I thought, recalling that she had tried to make a living as a preacher in recent years, which, if nothing else, had given her the right to sleep in a church with a leaking roof until her brothers had built a small house on her land. ‘Let me first tell you about the kind of life I would like to live. If only I had a permanent house. Not one of clay, but a permanent one of bricks. And if my daughters got married, and came from their homes to visit me and brought gifts for me, stayed with me for some time, and then went home to their own families again, then my life would be good. I would like my daughters to progress in life and maybe one day come and visit me by car. Wouldn’t that be a good idea? Then I would see my grandchildren and also have time to work in the field and sell fish at the market in Malinde. I would also like a pit latrine in my home so that I don’t have to send guests into the field with a hoe. And a kitchen so I can cook when it is raining. A bike would also be helpful when I need to collect water and firewood. I would like to be able to drink tea with sugar every day and have time to pray to the Lord. When my time comes, I shall rest in Heaven […] and it will be good if you do not forget me when you go back to Denmark. So even if you are busy, remember that in Malinde there is someone named Alexine’. A shadow and a whirring above us turned out to be a bat. One of the chipboards in the ceiling had disappeared so the bats had a dark attic as well as access to the living room. I instinctively bent over each time it hovered over my head. She gazed at it while talking but didn’t seem bothered by its presence. After all, it was not kicking and jerking in my clothes yet. I realized that her presence reassured me, even though she didn’t do anything about the creature right away. I was looking forward to be woken up by the familiar sound of Alexine sweeping the house, and I was touched by the tenacity of her attempt to show me how well she was doing: the groundnuts, the maize, the girls’ school reports, the house in Malinde, her life as a preacher. She wanted me to know that life was still tough, but also that she was making a commendable effort to get by. Her struggle for a good life had not caught my attention— or my sympathy—the way Kate’s had, though it had played out right under my nose for a whole year. Kate’s modesty and punctuality (she was able to make breakfast on time and be ready for appointments) had helped her become my primary research assistant, at the expense of her

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demanding, loud-mouthed and unpunctual mother. And maybe it had been easier to identify with Kate, my age-mate whose life trajectory had differed so much from my own, yet challenged my sense of difference. Kate’s modest, almost self-effacing, personality had been given shape and character through her letters and the letters had allowed our relationship to evolve over time. With groundnuts, maize and a brown handbag, Alexine was now demanding attention and trying to recapture her position. The woman with the recorder whom she called her sister and who was writing about her daughter should listen to her story too. ‘Am I talking nicely?’ she interjected. I confirmed that she did, because I had indeed been pondering over the fact that she was so much more used to fighting for a place in the world with her voice than her daughter was. The Church and her attempts to become a preacher had given Alexine some of what Kate had sought through her writing of letters. After I had confirmed to Alexine that she was talking nicely, she paused. My mother slept in the room next door. The bat was hovering above us. Hope and Sorrow had joined Kate and the sisters-in-law in one of the other houses. Alexine’s hands were folded in her lap. Nelly had recently been buried on her mother’s land. The recorder was still on, recording the cicadas, the darkness and Alexine’s calm. And later also her tears as we started talking about Nelly. ‘I was sad to hear what happened to Nelly’, I said. ‘Yes, Nelly was a good girl. We miss her very much’, she replied, calm and composed. ‘As you know, I was still attending the Teachers’ Training College when I got pregnant with her, so it was my mother who cared for her. She was a good girl. Everybody liked her. Okay, when she was worried, she was not patient with people. But otherwise she was a good girl. I know people say that I knew she was sick and that I didn’t care. But in fact, I knew nothing. It is true. I did not know it. Not properly. I did not believe it. I thought that maybe it was just normal sickness. She wasn’t open with me. No, she wasn’t open about it. The last time I was in Kampala to see her, I could see that she had become weak. That was when I began to understand. But I had to persevere and control my heart. Push the hurt away from my heart. I tried to be patient’. Her initial composure was replaced by tears. ‘We don’t have to talk about it’, I said. ‘But I would like to tell you about it’, she answered resolutely. There was something she wanted to get across. There was a version of the story that she wanted to comment on. A sadness that things developed the way they did. It would be easier for her to live with what

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had happened if she had the opportunity to shape her experience through her own narrative, not just the narrative of others. She wanted to tell what it was like to know but not believe in the worst imaginable. ‘Last year I went to see her and saw that she was seriously ill. That she had changed completely. My brother asked me to take her back to the village. So, I did. But one day she was gone. She had gone back to Kampala and there was no way I could follow her there. I had no way to go. No money. And no one came and told me how badly off she was. When they brought her here, I wasn’t even at home. I was visiting my friend. They sent my neighbour to announce to me what had happened, and I heard her say to me: “Sister, go and bathe. Here is some food. Eat.” But I could not eat and I said: “What is wrong?” She said: “Now just eat a little.” I said: “Is it bad news?” “Yes,” she said, “your daughter has passed away.” Oh God, oh God, oh God. I got a shock because I wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t expect she would die. I thought my brothers would come and tell me how bad it was so I that could see her again. Look after her at her deathbed’. Her voice drowned in tears, but she wiped her eyes with her shirt sleeve and continued. ‘No, no one helped me to go and see her. I don’t blame them. Maybe they had no money. But then one day they brought her dead body. Just like that. If I had not been saved, then I do not know what would have happened to me and what I would have done. Something bad, maybe. But God helped me and I was strong. My friends at church prayed for me and advised me. “Be cool,” they said. “Be calm.” At one point, my brother had been to see me and he told me that Nelly was badly off. I started crying. But suppose he had said: “My sister, let us go to Kampala together. Come and see your daughter.” But he didn’t. I just saw the coffin. I just saw the car with the coffin. Imagine that! How would you have felt? I almost died. I couldn’t move. I could do nothing. I had nothing to put on, but my friend picked one of her gomesi from her suitcase and gave it to me so I could look decent for the funeral. She found a handkerchief, and handed it to me, and she rented a boda boda, a bicycle taxi, one for each of us to take us back to my home. Then she started sweeping my house. I didn’t sleep for days. It was as if I had lost my mind and my own life. I lost other children when they were small but I was with them while they were sick. And I was with my relatives who supported me, encouraged and comforted me. Nelly, she was an adult. Somebody who was supposed to have been there for me now. And then suddenly she was dead. After the funeral, I prayed to God all the time to

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keep the voices in my head away. They said: “You must die, see the coffin, it is your child lying in it, your child is in the coffin, see the grave, you must also die, you must also be put in the grave.” But God helped me to be steadfast’. ‘Who decided where to bury her?’ ‘I do not know. But I don’t mind her being buried with me, because I’m saved, so I don’t believe juok will interfere with us. When my brothers arrived with her, they asked my friend to ask me if I wanted her buried there. I answered: “Yes, leave her here. Her life is over. There is no need to worry about that kind of thing.” I didn’t want to bother my brothers and tell them to bury Nelly in her father’s home instead. Her father knew she was ill, but he never went to see her. He has not seen her since she was a little girl, so you can probably understand that we couldn’t just show up with her coffin like that. He didn’t even come here to see the grave’.4 ‘Yes, I cry, but my brothers did well. They came with the coffin, a good coffin. They came with food: maize, millet and different kinds of sauce. Everything that was needed for a funeral. They picked up relatives in Saya in a large truck, which they had rented for the funeral. They were also taken back to Saya. I thank my brothers for all this. It is normal to cry and to mourn. Thoughts come and you remember. But I am saved, and when I speak the word of God, I can make bad thoughts go away. There is no reason to fear for my other daughters and shorten my life with fear. If they also have the disease in them, then I leave it up to God. I have devoted myself to our Lord’.

Notes 1. For a discussion of avoidance and joking in kinship relations among the Jop’Adhola see Sharman, “‘Joking’ in Padhola,” Man, 103–117. 2. Hanne O. Mogensen, AIDS Is a Kind of Kahungo That Kills: The Challenge of Using Local Narratives When Exploring AIDS Among the Tonga of Southern Zambia (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995); Quentin Gausset and Hanne O. Mogensen, “Sida et pollutions sexuelles chez les Tonga de Zambie,” Cahiers d’Etude Africaines 143, no. XXXVI–3 (1996): 455–476; Hanne O. Mogensen, “The Narrative of AIDS Among the Tonga of Zambia,” Social Science and Medicine 44, no. 4 (1997): 431– 439; Mogensen, “False Teeth and Real Suffering,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 331–351; and Mogensen, “The Resilience of Juok,” Africa, 420–436.

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3. A comparison of the role of symbolic pollution and cursing in the interpretation of misfortune in Africa is made by Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael A. Whyte, “Cursing and Pollution: Supernatural Styles in Two Luyia-Speaking Groups,” Folk 23 (1981): 65–80; and Mogensen, AIDS Is a Kind of Kahungo That Kills. See also Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 4. Again, we see how important the issue of belonging becomes when a woman dies and how complicated it may be to decide where to bury an unmarried woman. See Whyte, “Going Home?” Africa, 154: 72.

References Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Gausset, Quentin and Hanne O. Mogensen. “Sida et pollutions sexuelles chez les Tonga de Zambie.” Cahiers d’Etude Africaines 143, no. XXXVI–3 (1996): 455–476. Mogensen, Hanne O. AIDS Is a Kind of Kahungo That Kills: The Challenge of Using Local Narratives When Exploring AIDS Among the Tonga of Southern Zambia. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1995. Mogensen, Hanne O. “The Narrative of AIDS Among the Tonga of Zambia.” Social Science and Medicine 44, no. 4 (1997): 431–439. Mogensen, Hanne O. “False Teeth and Real Suffering: Child Care in Eastern Uganda.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24 (2000): 331–351. Mogensen, Hanne O. “The Resilience of Juok: Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 72, no. 3 (2002): 420–436. Sharman, Anne. “‘Joking’ in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control.” Man 4, no. 1 (1969): 103–117. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. “Going Home? Burial and Belonging in the Era of AIDS.” Africa 75, no. 2 (2005): 154–172. Whyte, Susan Reynolds and Michael A. Whyte. “Cursing and Pollution: Supernatural Styles in Two Luyia-Speaking Groups.” Folk 23 (1981): 65–80.

CHAPTER 9

Closeness and Distance

‘Let us do some interviews where you ask me questions’, I suggested to Kate, inspired by our first night in the village where my mother encouraged her to ask me more questions. I gave Kate a notebook and a pen and asked her to write down anything she would like to ask me about. A few days later, a conversation began, which could not be stopped again. ‘We have to work’, we explained when we went into the yellow room and closed the door. My mother went to school with Sally. Sally, in her pink school uniform, proudly strode along on her bare feet and shiny legs. The muzungu next to her was no less enthusiastic. She was in Africa for the first time in her life and she took it all in with an open mind. They couldn’t say a word to each other but they didn’t need to. ‘Okay, I only have a few questions’, Kate said at first, looking down, focusing on the paper in her hand. ‘Where you come from, what do people say, is it okay to have a boyfriend who is younger than you?’ Many questions don’t have an answer that can be captured by a recorder. ‘What do people say?’ she asked. But who are people? Say when? About who? Who do you mean? How much younger do you mean? Being the informant was harder than being the anthropologist. ‘People usually say that … No, they don’t say it is wrong. Usually the man is older than the woman, but not always. People don’t mind. Not so much anyway. Maybe if he is much younger than the woman, then somebody will start talking about it’. © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_9

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‘Here in Africa, people are very much against it’. My bland answer had, if nothing else, made room for her to say what she wanted to say. ∗ ∗ ∗ It was not until we returned to Kampala a few weeks later that I truly understood what her question had been about. The door of the back room was closed one day when I arrived, but through the hole in the wall, that served as a window when, on rare occasions, the shutter was open, I saw her white blouse and long tight skirt and a man embracing her tightly. I decided not to disturb her and went back. Back across the road to Peter’s house, where I had a room. There was power. I could type notes. Or sit in front of the television together with his kids, who were on holiday from their boarding school, one of the country’s best and most expensive. Or I could do nothing. She showed up before long. And she didn’t mind talking about him. He lived nearby, was somewhat younger than her, was still in school, but was at home for the holidays. A few weeks ago, he sent their maid over to tell Kate that he was in love with her, but she tried to hide from him because ‘he is just a boy and I thought he might be kidding me. Their maid knows Okoth and Comfort, so I told her to tell him he was too young and that I had children. The maid offered to keep quiet about the children if I wanted to pretend that I am younger than I am. He kept sending messages, so one day I let him come and visit me, and we talked. After talking for a while, he said he liked me. That he thought I was beautiful. And yes, I was happy. I knew that if this handsome young boy could talk like that, then it must mean that I … that it is true that I look ok. He made me very happy’. ‘Then what happened? Is he your boyfriend now?’ ‘He wanted to kiss me, but I said it was too early. That was just before you came. That is why I asked you that day in the village whether it is good to love someone who is younger than you’. ‘But do you like him?’ She answered with a small giggle. Hid herself behind her giggle. Then softly: ‘I haven’t decided yet. I’m still thinking about it. Well, I know he will never marry me. But maybe he can be my boyfriend. It would make me happy. And then I would maybe think less about, well, you know…’

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He came for lunch a few days later. Kate and Suzy had prepared a sumptuous meal for me and for him. They had moved a table and chairs inside and served us food on their best plates. Glass plates. Not the plastic ones used for the customers outside. They had prepared an omelette with tomatoes and green pepper and delicious freshly squeezed passion fruit juice. In addition, they served us hot chapatis and cold sodas, from Daniel’s fridge. I conversed with Kate’s boyfriend knowing full well I was being shown off to him and he to me. A knowledgeable, handsome and sympathetic young man. But I couldn’t help but wonder what his intentions were. Because he was so young? My answer to Kate had been that age doesn’t matter where I come from, that it was okay for a man to be younger than a woman. ‘Can’t you see he is just eating her money?’ Suzy said after he had left. ‘It is strange with Kate and men. She always spends everything she has on them. I don’t know whether she thinks it can make her happy or what’. She probably did. ‘I don’t know what it is about Suzy’, Kate said later, ‘but it is as if she constantly wants to argue with me. Now she is mad at me again. Maybe she is jealous. When one of the clients seems interested in me and talks nicely to me, she starts talking of my son, who is 13 years old. And he is not that at all. He is only 11, but she is trying to make me sound old, so that they lose interest in me. That is why I am also afraid of what she will say to my boyfriend if she is alone with him’. ‘Didn’t you tell him about your children yourself?’ ‘Well, I have told him that I have children, and I have shown him a picture of Comfort. But not of Okoth. So he does not know how old Okoth is. He said it didn’t matter and that he likes me the way I am. He is a friendly boy. But Suzy, I don’t know what is wrong with her. She wants to quarrel with me all the time. It was also like that when I had a boyfriend in Saya’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Okay. Here is my second question. Where you come from, if a man and a woman got married in church, can they get a divorce and still marry somebody else later?’ ‘Yes, there are people who do that. They may even marry and divorce several times. Even in the church. But many people live together without being married’.

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‘That is also the case here, but if you got married in church, you cannot also marry in church the second time’. ‘But you do know that in Europe you can never be married to more than one woman at a time, right?’ ‘So you can only remarry if the first dies?’ ‘Or you can divorce’. ‘But you can never have two at the same time?’ ‘No’, I had to say. Africans are polygamous, they can have more than one wife. We are monogamous, we are only allowed to have one spouse at a time. Culturally and legally. But, ‘Yes’, I had to add. ‘It does happen that a man has two women at the same time’. ‘If a woman finds out that her husband has another woman, what does she do? Does she quarrel with him or does she divorce him?’ ‘Having two wives is illegal. He cannot be married to two, so he usually has to choose one of them. He cannot say to his wife: “This is my second wife. I will now build a house for her and share my time and my land between you.” But in Europe, it also happens that a married man falls in love with another woman, so he has two women at one time. But when the wife discovers it, she asks him to choose between them. Usually’. Kate laughed. ‘Who asks whom to choose?’ I thought she was laughing at my obscure answer and the fact that Europeans are basically no different from Africans. But on the contrary. It seemed very exotic to her that the man can be asked to choose. ‘The woman says to the man: “You can only have one wife. You have to choose.”’ ‘And then he takes the one he loves?’ ‘Yes … but so do women’. ‘Do women?’ ‘Yes’. ‘But European men love their women. In Europe, women trust their husbands’. ‘Sometimes. Not always’. She looked disappointed. Like so many other Ugandan women, she had an idealized notion of European men and relationships. She held the paper with her questions tightly in her hand and continued, despite the deception. ‘And when a girl gets pregnant while living with her parents, can she still get married, or will she become useless?’

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‘She doesn’t become useless. But it is completely different. Usually you do not live with your parents right until you get married. And whether you get pregnant before or after you marrying doesn’t matter that much. What do you mean by useless? Do women become useless if they have a child without being married? I know many women here who had children before marrying, and yet many end up marrying someone else later’. ‘Yes, we want children, and the man also wants to know that the woman can produce children before he marries her. But if the father of your child does not marry you, then it is difficult to marry with cows. Usually the man pays five cows and three goats for a woman, but if she already has children, her family will only get two cows or nothing at all. She becomes “ongoye gi koyo”, no help. She doesn’t add anything to her own family when she gets married. In Europe, if a woman with children gets married, can she then take the children to the husband’s home? Can he love her children?’ ‘Yes, there are many men who do that. But men also take care of their own children. They usually don’t abandon the children when they marry someone else. Sometimes the children take turns living with their mother and their father, a week at a time in each place’. ‘Well, but that is not the case here in Africa. The new man tells her that she needs to leave the children with their father’s family. My uncle took care of the daughter that his second wife had with another man before marrying him. When that daughter got married, he received some of the cows that were paid for her. But you cannot do that with sons. The new husband does not want them. He does not want to risk having to pay cows for the girls they marry. And he does not want to give them some of his land’.1 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Did you have a boyfriend in Saya?’ ‘Yes’. The odour of fluid asphalt bothered me. She was putting away the plates after the lavish lunch she had served for her boyfriend and me and seemed unaware that she had just dropped a bombshell. ‘You never told me that. You told me you had not been with anybody since Comfort’s father’. ‘I thought you knew’. ‘Was it someone I knew?’

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‘I don’t think so, but I met him when we lived in Saya. Later, he came to Kampala to live with me while I was a nanny with the muzungu family and had my own house. But by then, he was already married to somebody else as well’. Suzy had gone out to buy plantains and we were alone, cleaning up after lunch. ‘You wanted to marry him?’ ‘Yes’, she murmured. ‘But he disappointed me. And I still loved him. Since that time, I have not had any other boyfriend. Not until the one you just met’. ‘Did you want to settle with him in Saya? You have always told me that you didn’t want a villager and that you didn’t want to be the second wife’. ‘Well, I wanted to live with him in Kampala. He worked in Kampala. He worked as a plumber. He was not married when we met, and he let me understand that he did not himself choose to marry. He made a girl in school pregnant and was forced to marry her. Otherwise, they would have put him in jail, you know, like Jacob. The parents can ask the police to do that if the girl is underage and still in school, when she gets pregnant. But after marrying her, he sent his cousin brother to Kampala to tell me that he wanted me back, that he did not love the woman he had married, that she was ugly and that he had just been forced to marry her’. ‘Did other people know? Did the uncles know?’ ‘Yes, they knew, and well, they said I could not marry him. That we were somehow related. His mother is from the same clan as my mother’s mother, so apparently it is juok if we marry. They planned to take us out into the forest and make a bonfire with some herbs, to finish the juok and prevent that we cause harm to other family members. But I loved him’.2 ‘Was that why it ended between you?’ ‘No. He did not care. He said we should not listen to them. It was his wife’s fault that we broke up. She gave him some love medicine, so that he decided to leave me. He was with me in Kampala for almost a whole year without going to the village to check on her. But at one point he was out there for a week and I understand that she managed to put medicine in his food while he was there’. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Someone told me. My cousin-sister’s wife, who is married in the same family’.

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It was always like that. Someone somehow knew what had happened, but it was never easy to find out who it was that knew and how this person had found out. One thing was certain, though: it was never the man’s own fault. He was not expected to be in control of his feelings and his behaviour towards women. Women were. They knew about love and love medicine. ‘What about your sons?’ ‘Comfort was still small, but Okoth understood that it was not his father. He didn’t like him. He knew full well that he would not take care of him and he heard my mother and Suzy say that the man ate my money. Once when I quarrelled with him, Okoth picked up a knife and told him that if he beat his mother, he would cut him with the knife’. Kate laughed at the thought of her courageous son. ‘In the beginning he said he would take good care of my boys. But I knew he was lying. A man cannot take care of a woman’s sons. Daughters maybe, but not sons. Sons need land, but girls bring cows to the family when they marry’. Suzy showed up with a bunch of plantains on her head, sparkling with sweat. Her belly bulged under the tight black dress that could no longer be closed. The father of the child was married, and Suzy did not want to be his second wife, because the first wife threw boiling water at her when she went there to remind the father of his responsibilities. She threw the plantains on the ground and disappeared again. Maybe she sensed that she was interrupting something. As soon as she was out of sight, Kate continued. ‘I got angry and I cried. He had shown me that he loved me. Not that he gave me any money or anything. After all, it was me who worked. I had a good salary when I worked for the muzungu family. But the way he talked to me. He made me feel loved’. Her sad face lit up as she said it. ‘He said I was just the best, that I was beautiful, that he didn’t want to look at others, and things like that. So it didn’t matter to me that it was me who made money and that he never gave me any gifts’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘And now my next question’. My mother and Sally were still in school. The sun on the iron sheets had heated up the house. Midday was nearing. The paper was rumpled and her hand sweaty. She carefully read the next question to me:

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‘Where you come from, does the husband beat his wife when she does not want to sleep with him?’ The difference between her and me, I thought, was that she could think of asking a question that way. Not that the answer was straightforward. ‘Some men beat. But I do not think it is as common as it is here’. ‘So they just quarrel?’ ‘Yes, they quarrel. But some can also beat’. ‘Well, but here they beat. They can beat badly. They can even kill a woman’. ‘When a woman refuses to sleep with them?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘What do women say about that?’ ‘They think the man loves them very much’. Kate asked me about the uselessness of women giving birth before marrying, about violent lovers and the tacit acceptance of women. She told me about her life through her questions for me. But I failed to explain to her what it was like where I came from. There are more men in Uganda who beat and have multiple wives, than where I come from. I think. But love, relationships and divorce are also complicated and painful where I come from. ‘Some women suspect that the man has another woman if he does not sleep with her for a few days. So she thinks that if he beats her to sleep with her, then it must be because she is the only one and that he loves her very much’. ‘And women don’t mind that?’ ‘No … Not so much’.3 ∗ ∗ ∗ She escorted me as I headed back to Peter’s place after finishing the dishes with her. It was a short walk, but it could be made long, and much of what later proved to be significant, was told on walks like this one, and not to the recorder. The slow stroll and the approaching sunset created an intimate space. Lunch with her young worshiper and her revelations about the boyfriend in Saya had given me the courage to ask about things I had never talked to her about before.

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‘Did you have other lovers that you didn’t tell me about?’ ‘Not since the one I just told you about’. ‘But before him?’ ‘Now that I have sons, I am a grown woman and I have to respect myself. Some women continue behaving like that after they give birth. But I did not’. ‘Behave like what?’ ‘Go to bars. Wear short skirts. Go to bed with boys’. She laughed at herself. A grumpy laugh. ‘Did you do that?’ ‘Yes, I did when I lived with my mother and grandmother in Kakira. My mum said it was wrong, but I thought she was just crazy and didn’t want me to be happy. Now I can see she was right. After Comfort was born, I stopped it. But I thought that one of them would marry me one day. I figured that if I got pregnant, the man would marry me. After all, there are some who do. I thought I could meet my future husband that way. But I didn’t’. ‘So how many boyfriends did you have between Okoth and Comfort?’ ‘A few’. ‘But you never got pregnant?’ ‘I used that injection, you know. The one that works like the pills you can take to prevent pregnancy’. ‘But why then did you get pregnant with Comfort?’ ‘Before Comfort I didn’t use it’. ‘But you just said that after Comfort you stopped having boyfriends’. ‘Okay, but I had the boyfriend from Saya, and while we were together, I used the injection’. ‘But what about the other boyfriends?’ ‘They used condoms. That is probably why I didn’t get pregnant’. I got the feeling I wasn’t supposed to pursue it. ‘Did you notice how angry Suzy was when she brought the plantains?’ she said, to change the subject. ‘That is how she is. Suddenly angry like that. She always mocked Nelly that she probably had AIDS and that she didn’t want Nelly to use her clothes. Imagine talking like that to someone who is seriously ill. Nelly and I respected each other. We did not tell each other deep, deep secrets, like you and me. But we respected each other and we never quarrelled. Even now Suzy sometimes says ugly things about Nelly. But it is not good to talk badly about a person who is dead’. ‘Did you ever talk to Nelly about her illness?’

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‘She said she was tired of being sick and that she could not understand what was wrong. I said she should test for HIV, but she refused. Once she tried to convince me that she had already done so and that it was negative. That she was sick because of one of those normal STDs’. ‘Why did you tell her to have an HIV test?’ ‘I think it is good to know. Then you can plan your future. Then you are not just sick without knowing anything’. ‘What could she have done if she had known?’ ‘She could have gone to TASO [The AIDS Support Organization], and they could have given her medicine for her symptoms. Then maybe she would have been alive today. Maybe they would have given her some food. Sometimes she had nothing to eat at all. But she didn’t want to admit she was sick’. Small slow steps. The intense colours at dusk. Cicadas singing. ‘Sometimes I think it has ruined my mother’s heart that she got saved. When someone is seriously ill, she doesn’t even take them to hospital. She just prays to God. Says that she has left it all to God. When Nelly died, she did cry though, as if she had lost her mind… I have not had any bad dreams about Nelly since she died’. ‘But you dream of her?’ ‘Yes, but I dream that she is well and that we sit and talk. Suzy always dreams that she is quarrelling with her and she hears Nelly say to her: “Come with me. Let us go together. I am cold. Why can’t you give me something I can cover me with?” I don’t know what it is about Suzy. Sometimes I get the feeling that she is still scolding Nelly, even though she is dead. But you have to talk nicely about the dead, because you are not just dead when you are dead’. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘You don’t die completely. The body dies, but juok listens to what one says about that person’. She didn’t enter her uncle’s house. She returned to her place. I joined the others in front of the television. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Now I have no more questions’, Kate said, and folded the paper. Heavy thumps from the mortars, like a heartbeat in a drowsy village. It was good to be back in Saya. Maybe we would have sweet potatoes with groundnut sauce for lunch, my favourite Ugandan dish. My sisters-in-law

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knew that, and they cooked it as often as they could. They served it with a ‘you-do-not-want-to-admit-it-but-we-know-you-still-do-not-like-kwon’ smile that made me feel at ease. ‘Sometimes I have these wonderful dreams about you and I at the market together. Sometimes I even dream of boarding an airplane with you. And when the airplane takes off I feel wonderfully happy. It always makes me sad to wake up and discover where I am. I like moving around with you and I like that others can see me moving around with a muzungu. And we always buy so many nice things together: cooking oil, tomatoes, onions, rice, soda. And we have so many nice conversations while looking for things to buy’. I recalled the time we bought her suitcase, her floral dress and the flowering bougainvillea. A humble but gracious woman with a happy smile and a suitcase balancing on her head. ‘But mostly I have bad dreams’. ‘What about?’ ‘Sometimes I dream that I am in a house that is burning, that I am in a traffic accident, or that Comfort is dead. Or very sick. Or I dream that I can see Jesus. The saved people say he will come back when the end of the world is near. I see him in my dreams and I see people running around in the fire. Some are crying and screaming. People are dying. And sometimes I dream that I myself am dying, that I am with the doctor and that he tells me that I am sick. That I have AIDS’. That which she didn’t say, drowned out her words and waited for me to grab it. I pulled myself together and asked if she had thought about being tested. ‘Yes’. ‘Have you done it?’ ‘No’. ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘No!’ She didn’t want me to think so. That was not what this was about. ‘Some people are scared. But I am not. Whether you test or not, you die if you have it’. ‘So why didn’t you do so already?’ ‘I have heard it costs money and I don’t have any’. Reality caught up with me. Money. Yes, but … Long break. ‘I think we have run out of words’, she said. I turned off the recorder and saw tears rolling down her cheeks.

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My mother was right. I asked too many questions. I took advantage of her. I tried to make it up to her by telling her about pain and grief in my own life in exchange for what she had shared with me. I apologized for asking her all those questions. Promised her that I would stop asking so much. She interrupted me. ‘I will tell you more in a bit’, she said. She didn’t seem interested in the story of my suffering and she didn’t ask me for money either. I would be happy to pay for an HIV test, but a test cost no more than what she would have been able to pay herself. Maybe she could even get it for free somewhere. Something else was at stake. She wiped her eyes with her white shirt sleeve. I said she could rest on my bed, which brought forth a wry smile that reminded us both of her attempt to teach me that adult daughters do not sleep in their mother’s bed. I looked at the ants orbiting my feet, eating crumbs from the biscuits I sometimes savoured in my room when I needed to get away from it all and especially from kwon. My feet and legs were full of small wounds from mosquito bites I had scratched. Harmless mosquito bites due to my efficient malaria prophylaxis. ‘Sorry. I got sad because I started thinking about Comfort’. Her voice cracked. ‘He has rashes. Serious rashes. Nobody at my father’s place wants to bathe him. They are afraid to touch him. They don’t want him to use their basin. They refuse to sleep next to him. I feel so sad when I think about it’. ‘Does he have other sicknesses?’ ‘No. Just rashes’. ‘Nothing else? No diarrhoea, vomiting, fever? Is he sick on and off?’ ‘No’. ‘Then it is probably not AIDS. After all, he is already six years old. If he was HIV positive, he wouldn’t still be here, would he?’ She was not convinced. And I didn’t really know enough about it. I just needed to say something. ‘And I am sick every now and then’, she said. ‘When were you last sick?’ ‘Three months ago. Two years ago, I was so seriously sick that I thought I wouldn’t survive’. ‘But that was a long time ago’. ‘When I wake up in the morning, I often have a headache and feel dizzy’.

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‘You probably lack iron. We can buy some iron tablets for you’. ‘And even Suzy mocks me that Comfort is sick and that I am sick’. ‘Don’t pay attention to Suzy. That is how she is. You told me so yourself. Everybody talks like that these days’. Those were the answers I gave her. But I knew that I was just putting off the next step. Money and floral cards no longer sufficed. She wanted my involvement. ‘Okay, so you would like to test for HIV?’ ‘Yes, then at least I would know. Then I would know what my life will be like, and then I can plan for my sons’. ‘Do you want me to go with you to have the test done?’ I asked, and finally she raised her head, wiped away the remaining tears, looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘Yes, that is what I am trying to tell you. I would like you to come’.

Notes 1. The problem of bringing sons from a previous relationships into a new marriage is discussed in e.g. Whyte, Baghiiha, Mukyala and Meinert, “Remaining Internally Displaced,” Journal of Refugee Studies 26, 283–301. 2. Mogensen, “The Resilience of Juok,” Africa, 420–436. 3. The complex interweaving of gender, sex and violence in Uganda is dealt with in depth and through remarkable sensitivity by Holly Porter, After Rape: Violence, Justice and Social Harmony in Uganda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Though Holly Porter’s book deals with northern Uganda during and after the years of conflict and encampment she brings forth a number of issues of general relevance for understanding marriage/ partnerships and domestic violence in Uganda.

References Mogensen, Hanne O. “The Resilience of Juok: Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 72, no. 3 (2002): 420–436. Porter, Holly. After Rape: Violence, Justice and Social Harmony in Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Sulayman Mpisi Bagiiha, Rebecca Mukyala, and Lotte Meinert. “Remaining Internally Displaced: Missing Links to Security in Northern Uganda.” Journal of Refugee Studies 26, no. 2 (2013): 283–301.

CHAPTER 10

Knowing What to Hide

I waited in the back room while Kate and Suzy moved back and forth between the kitchen utensils piled up inside, the roadworkers on the benches outside and the small charcoal stoves in the narrow cubicle next to the porch that was their kitchen. Chapatis were fried, eggs were cooked and tea was prepared. I waited. Again. And was waited on. Again. Freshly squeezed passion fruit juice, chapatis stuffed with scrambled eggs, tomatoes and onions. I had given up on making them eat the food themselves which they prepared for me. The joy and pride of being able to serve me meals like that seemed much more satisfying to them than eating the food themselves. I was impatient. Restless. I started making notes on what was in the room. Along one wall stood an iron rack with all their kitchen utensils: plastic mugs, plastic plates and the yellow glass plates for special occasions, cutlery, tea and a strainer, instant coffee, sugar, a Coca-Cola bottle with cooking oil and a couple of huge knives, which I knew from experience were dull. Still, the women somehow managed to cut up everything from onions to sweet potatoes and even to slaughter a chicken with these knives. Next to the iron rack were the large pots used to cook matoke and beans for the roadworkers for lunch, a blue plastic basin and one of the green jerry cans in which water is collected and stored. A neighbour had a water tap and charged 200 shillings (20 cents) to fill a jerry can of 20 litres. I had asked them why they did not collect rainwater © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_10

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from their iron sheet roof instead of paying for tap water. Every afternoon, thick sheets of water dropped from out of the sky, and in a few minutes they would be able to fill buckets and basins with clean water. But they didn’t have enough buckets and basins, they said. Along the other wall stood the women’s possessions. A mattress and a colourful straw mat were coiled up each morning and on top of one mattress lay a sheet and a blanket. One of each. ‘Don’t you have a blanket?’ I asked Kate while she was inside for a moment to pick up some plates. No, she didn’t, she said. Just a bed sheet. ‘But have I never given you a blanket?’ ‘No, but I once had one. Then I cut it into two and gave Okoth and Comfort half a blanket each’. ‘Don’t you feel cold at night?’ ‘Yes, sometimes, but then I put on my jacket’. Kate’s belongings were kept in the suitcase I had bought for her. The most precious thing she owned. Suzy’s belongings were in a large plastic bag on top of the suitcase. I had heard that most of Suzy’s belongings were elsewhere. Or that her previous employer did not want to hand them over to her because she had quit her job and had taken some of the woman’s belongings with her when she left. The long and the short of it was that the two sisters shared what they had. Suzy had lost most of her clothes, but in return she had many shoes because she had worked in a shoe store at one point. A tiny mirror, soap, Vaseline, oil and a couple of bottles with beauty products unknown to me, were neatly placed on a stool that served as a dressing table and cash box. The money the roadworkers paid was kept in between the bottles on the stool, which was the only furniture in the room besides the iron rack with kitchenware and the chair I sat on and that was fetched from the store in the front room, whenever I came by. ‘Do you recognize it?’ Kate asked, pointing to a white toilet roll among the bottles on the stool. I did not. ‘You gave it to me when you were here last year. Or was it the year before? I have taken good care of it. I only use a small piece at a time when I want to look smart. Like when I go to the hospital’. ∗ ∗ ∗

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We decided to go and see a diviner, a jathieth, before returning to Kampala. Kate wanted help with answers to some of her many questions about the ways in which her life had developed. A jathieth is ‘the person who sees’, the one who knows how to communicate with juok. He is consulted when you want to understand the reasons for your misfortune, whether recurring fever, a painful leg, infertility, mishaps in love, fear of exams, sick children, unfaithful husbands, co-wives quarrelling or other kinds of disturbing phenomena. The jathieth goes into dialogue with the awe-inspiring and the disquieting in order to find ways to live with it.1 We took the narrow path through the fields and the tall green grass to the residence of the young jathieth whom I had once told that children rarely die where I come from. As always, he seemed reserved. Even sceptical. Did he think I would disclose his knowledge? Deceive him or maybe sell his secrets? After our first visit in 1996 he had started coming to my place now and then, pausing for a moment on my porch, chatting briefly with me before proceeding to his own homestead. He also kept a journal for me for some time. He noted what kind of problems people came with and what he did to help them. When I left Uganda, I gave him my hat and some money, and sensed his disappointment, but that was all that was left. My mattresses, blankets, sheets, buckets, basins and lamps had already been given away. Since then, I had often passed by his place with small gifts of sugar, salt or some shillings when I was in the village, but I always saw scepticism in his eyes. Or maybe his gaze had something to do with his special relationship with juok. Or with alcohol. I had heard rumours that he had started consuming too much of it. Alexine was so happy that we were once again together in Saya that she said she didn’t mind going to see the jathieth with us. She had inquired in the church, and they had said that if you do not go to the jathieth to talk to juok yourself or to obtain medicine to kill others, then it is okay to visit his home. However, she preferred waiting for us outside the hut so that nobody would misunderstand her intentions. She sat in the shade of a tree near the path next to the homestead and smiled to everyone passing by, back straight, legs stretched out in front of her, hands folded in her lap, the brown handbag upright next to her and the shirt still white and newly ironed. We entered the round thatched hut and the door was closed so carefully that no chink of light was seen anywhere. Total darkness and heavy heat enveloped us. We were instructed to sit with our legs bent to one side and not move while juok was present, not talk and, generally speaking,

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just remain passive, unless juok or the jathieth spoke to us. However, Kate was given permission to act as an interpreter. Sparks glittered in the dark, and polyphonic singing filled the room. My legs soon started to ache, but I persevered out of respect for juok that felt very real there in that dark space of wonder, doubt and singularity. I gathered that no one would notice if I moved a limb, but I assumed that juok would sense it. In the brief moments where sparks lit up the room, I tried to capture the contours of those present. But the moment was always too short, and the voices seemed to come from all directions. As always, when attending such a session, I gave up trying to understand how juok had come to be among us and who it was we were talking to. Juok greeted us. We greeted back. Said that people in our home were doing well. Replied once again that everybody was doing well. We thanked the jathieth for his work and juok for coming. We were thanked for looking after each other. For having come. For being there. We thanked and thanked again. We said that they were welcome and that thank you to you also. That we were glad to have this chance to talk to juok. ‘I salute you, Kate’, said a voice. ‘We have come a long way to hear what you have to say’. ‘I have something I would like to talk to you about’, Kate replied. ‘Something that is not the way it should be. Why do I not have any luck in life? Why did I never marry? Why am I losing my job all the time? Why do my jobs only last for maybe a month? Why am I being sent away without pay? Why? I do not understand what the problem is? Have I been cursed by somebody?’ Questions were many. Both Kate and juok asked. They searched for answers together. Every now and then I caught a word or a whole phrase. Most of the time I was lost, and listened to the rhythm of the language and Kate’s quest. I regretted not having brought the recorder, but I wasn’t sure juok would have liked me to record it. When they were done we had to show our appreciation in the form of banknotes placed in the basket in the middle of the round hut. Not as a payment. Just an appreciation, a recognition of our relationship with juok. ‘How much?’ I asked Kate. ‘Not too much’, she said. ‘Less. Only a little’. I sensed that she had not received many answers. That her appreciation of juok was limited. ∗ ∗ ∗

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I had no recollection that I had given her a roll of white toilet paper. I had never given it any thought either that Ugandan toilet paper isn’t white. It is pink and pale blue and its texture a bit like crepe rather than smooth and soft like European toilet paper. In any case, most people would not spend money on toilet paper at all. I had no recollection of this soft white toilet paper. Maybe it was the remnants of a roll I had brought with me from Denmark. By good fortune, there was still some left because today was one of those days where Kate wanted to look smart. ‘I just need to bathe’, Kate finally said after serving me the lavish meal. Drops of water sparkled in her hair when she came back with the dripping basin in her hand and her body wrapped in a kitenge. She rubbed her skin with Vaseline until arms and legs were all shiny. Then she disappeared again. By the time she returned, she wore jeans and a grey t-shirt with a black logo across the chest. She explained that she had borrowed the clothes from one of the girls working in the house of her uncle’s neighbour on the other side of the road. On her feet, a pair of Suzy’s shoes. Fashionable sandals with thick soles held onto the foot with two thin straps. They were notably smarter than mine. I often felt clumsy compared to Kate and her sisters. In spite of the dust, mud and heat, they were always smart, clean and neat. After hours of preparation, she was finally ready. So was the rain. We just managed to enter a matatu before the rain set in. It had subsided as we reached the roundabout near the hospital and started climbing the slopes in front of Kampala’s largest hospital: Mulago. Red mud ran down the slopes, gathered in small streams that we tried to sidestep and straddle as we made every effort possible to minimize the amount of red smudge on shoes and clothes. Our efforts resulted in a broken sandal strap. Kate continued the ascent, dragging the shoe along. Hours of preparation, borrowed jeans and now a cracked sandal strap. Tailors repairing shoes, bags and the like with a few quick stitches can usually be found among petty traders along the road, but that day, of course, there was no sign of anybody with a needle and thread along the path to the hospital. I would have been happy to buy new shoes for her, but the traders along that path only sold washing powder, bed sheets, juice and bread. I searched my bag for something useful, and found a rubber band, which I expected to be useless but anyway handed her to show her my good intention. Kate politely accepted and pocketed it without uttering a word. The waiting room was full of colourful gomesi, fashionable young women in jeans and with straightened hair, clean toddlers and, here and

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there, also a man. We arrived around two pm. By three pm we were informed by those sitting next to us that they had arrived at nine am. Kate pushed her way forward to the nurse who guarded the door to the consultation room and heard her say that the doctor had gone for lunch and that his replacement had not yet arrived. Probably because of the rain. When would they then start working again? That would then depend on the rain. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it any longer. We had arrived at the hospital compound through an entrance unknown to me, but I gathered that we could not be far from the research centre I was affiliated with. It was my birthday. I had not mentioned it to anybody, but I now felt an urge to go to the research centre to read birthday greetings on my email. I could step out of her reality whenever I needed to. And a need to do so had arisen in the cluttered waiting room where we were destined to wait for an unknown amount of time. I told her that I had to quickly run to ‘my office’. A thin woman with close-cropped hair, clinging to a piece of white toilet paper in her hand, looked back at me without uttering a word. I couldn’t imagine a six-hour-long queue come to an end during the short time it would take me to read a few birthday greetings further up the hill. I left her but promised to come back. As always. She did not object. She never did. I was the one who moved around in the world and passed through Uganda now and then. She was the one waiting for my life course to intersect with hers, hoping that when it happened, hers would be made to change its orbit. ∗ ∗ ∗ Alexine had already left when we came out of the hut. The session with the jathieth had taken longer than expected, and she must have grown tired of smiling to passers-by. Kate and I strolled back. The sky in front of us was cobalt blue, a sign of rain in a short while, or at night, or in a different place, and a shade of blue against which the colours of the flowering trees deepened. ‘Juok asked where I was born’, Kate explained. ‘And I told them. Then they asked where my father’s village is. My clan. My name. My father’s name. My grandfather’s name. After all these answers, they said: “Okay, now we will go and inquire,” and then they went outside’. ‘Outside?’ I did not remember anyone having gone outside while we were in the hut.

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‘Yes, outside. His juok went to inquire the juok of my family, and when they came back they said they had seen that there are collaboration issues in my family. That there are many quarrels which is why my siblings and I have no luck in life. That is right. I already know that. But I don’t understand why they had to ask about my name, my village and my clan. I thought they knew those kinds of things. If he had said that it was my grandfather and grandmother who had started the quarrel, maybe I would have somehow believed him. But he didn’t even know whether my father was still alive and how many children my grandfather had. Doesn’t juok usually know those kinds of things? This is why I think that maybe it was just the jathieth guessing. Maybe he didn’t find my family’s juok out there’. ‘But what did you tell him yourself?’ ‘I told him that all of my father’s brothers were dead and that only my father and his three sisters are alive. Only then did he talk about someone cursing us. Someone having sent a tipo. Tipo, you know, shadow – or I don’t know what to call it in English. That there is someone in the family who has called on the shadow of our deceased relatives to prevent us from having success in life. That they have locked our luck. People can do so at funerals. They utter words whose effect can only be removed if we ask for forgiveness for the evil we have done to them. I asked him who it was. But he didn’t want to tell me. “If I tell you,” he said, “you might just go and argue with that person.” But I don’t understand what he then wants me to do. I have to know. If I do not know who it is then I cannot do anything about it. He said that in any case, we can only find out if we hold another session at night. He cannot call on a person’s tipo in the middle of the day. So maybe I should go back tonight and ask him to try again’. She paused for a moment, and strolled on, caught up in her own thoughts. ‘But he also said that maybe it was someone in the family where I had been married who had done it. Maybe, he said, they gathered the earth where I passed urine and took it to a jathieth who performed magic on it so that I would never be able to have another husband if I left them’. Kate laughed. ‘I have never been married, so I don’t really know what to believe. That was why I didn’t want you to give him a lot of money. I didn’t dare try explaining it to you while we were still there. I was afraid that even though the jathieth did not understand English, maybe juok would know what we were talking about. I hear that juok understands all languages in the world’.

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We sauntered along the path, engulfed by the intense colours around us. Neither of us were in a hurry to get back to the house full of people. ‘A jathieth once explained to me that the money you put in the basket is for juok and that juok only leaves a little bit of it for the jathieth to thank him for his work. But what does juok need money for?’ I asked, in an attempt to explore the very being of juok. ‘For transport’, Kate replied without hesitation. ‘They come from far… But you are right. I also wonder whether they have to pay for fuel. They probably do not’. She looked ahead, lost in her own thoughts, in juok’s words and the inscrutability of her life. ‘They also talked about a man and a woman having done something. I wonder who that could be. When I worked for the muzungu family, I had rented a house and made friends with my neighbour. She sometimes looked after my kids while I was at work. One day she told me that she was going to her village and that there was a very powerful jathieth there, who could help me get another job when the family I worked for would go back to Europe. She asked me to give her pieces of nails I had cut off, and said she would return with the medicine for me. But she didn’t come back with anything. He had not been able to prepare the medicine for me without me being there. That was what she told me. I asked others for advice and they all said: “Oh, how could you be that naïve? That woman is envious of you. How could you give her your nails? She has surely used them to remove your luck and get it over to her side.” So maybe she is the woman juok talked about. And the man is perhaps the jathieth who helped her. Or her own husband. She knew a lot about magic. I told her at one point about the man whom I loved but who had been taken to Saya to marry somebody else. She told me how she had used magic on her husband to make him leave his mistress and that he had now become so confused and harmless that he would never be able to leave her again. And it was true. He was completely confused. He cooked and washed clothes while she was just sleeping’. Many things were at stake in Kate’s life. People, living and dead, magical acts and words were entangled in her loss of luck. She still looked ahead without seeing. She did not seem to notice that the blue colour deepened, that the rain was approaching. Or maybe she did notice. Maybe she saw but wasn’t sure what to do about it.

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‘And the woman also knew my clan name, because she had helped me in the past’. ‘Your clan name?’ ‘Yes, my last name’. Kate’s clan name was Abbo, born when ‘cow peas were plenty’. Was that a secret? I had never heard before that ‘clan names’, people’s Padhola names, were a secret. Many used them as their first name. An unanswered question hung in the air, but we had reached home. ‘Rain is coming’, said Kate. ∗ ∗ ∗ When I returned to the waiting room, she was gone. But a muzungu’s confusion does not go unnoticed and I was quickly guided in her direction by helpful patients still waiting. Kate sat on another wooden bench downstairs, waiting to be given the medicine that had been prescribed for her. ‘Okay’, she said, without reproach, ‘they didn’t work on me. They didn’t do what I came for. I told them I had a headache and rash and they handed me the paper and said: “Go down and get your medicine”’. ‘But didn’t you tell them that you came for the test?’ ‘Yes, I said I would like to have a blood test done. But they said there was no reason to do so and that I should go and see the dermatologist tomorrow’. ‘But didn’t you say what you would like to be tested for?’ ‘I thought they could figure out what it was I had come for when I talked about my rashes’. ‘But at the front desk, when you announced your arrival, didn’t you say what you had come for?’ ‘I just asked to see a doctor and they sent me upstairs’. ‘Should I ask them how to get an HIV test?’ ‘Yes!’ Maybe I could have done so right away. But I was there to observe. Participate and observe. Attend to her fears and observe her actions. If I had asked how to get an HIV test, then I would not have figured out what she would have done without me. She sat on the bench and looked at me, waited for me to take action. The way she squeezed the prescription with the nervous fingers. The rash on

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her face. The sorrow in her eyes. I stopped being an anthropologist. We went back to the front desk and I asked where to get an HIV test. ‘Is she sick?’ asked a forthcoming young man in a newly ironed shirt and with creases in his pants. He looked down while talking, busy playing with the buttons on his mobile phone. ‘No, she is just a very responsible person. She thinks it is better to know for sure’, I replied, startled by the insensitivity of his comment. ‘I don’t know if we have the equipment for it, but we can ask’, he said, looking up from his mobile phone for a moment with his fine regular face. He made a number of calls, looked at her prescription, pushed himself forward to the drug dispenser, and came back with two small cones made of pages from an exercise book. My skin colour had had the desired effect. One cone contained eight white tablets. The other had six yellow ones. On one cone it said ‘flagyl’ which I knew was often used to treat fungus. Was her rash due to fungus? Was that a bad sign? The forthcoming young man used every possibility to wave his mobile phone as he led us along the covered paths connecting the hospital buildings. He took us to the newer part of the hospital on the other side of the hill. Kate humped along in her broken shoe. ‘That doesn’t look good’. The proud owner of the mobile phone glanced at Kate’s dragging gait. He could hardly have come up with anything more insensitive to say. ‘Well, why don’t you make sure to have shoemakers near the hospital’, I replied tartly, as if every muzungu would expect that from a hospital of a certain standard. ‘Does she work for you?’ ‘Yes, she is my research assistant’, I said, and savoured his surprised and impressed gaze. He had probably thought she washed my clothes and cooked for me. And she did so now and then, but he didn’t need to know that. He was a concoction of helpfulness and arrogance. We arrived at what seemed to be an abandoned wing of the hospital, deserted brown rooms, a doorman with a crumpled notebook that must have been attacked by white ants at some stage. Our helper left us by the entrance and came back a moment later with two lab technicians in white robes. ‘Well, yes, we can do it’, one of them said. ‘But it will probably cost a little’. I was well aware of that, but I did object to the amount he suggested. My skin colour again. They were no doubt trying to get as much as possible out of me. We all laughed a little, knowing that we had

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embarked upon a predictable negotiation. But then it took an unexpected turn. ‘Listen’, one of them said, ‘you can get it for 4,000 shillings at the AIDS Information Centre, and that includes counselling. Here we just test the blood and send people home to die without any kind of support’.2 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Do you think juok will let me record the session if we go back there?’ I asked when we sat in the little grey house and continued the conversation. The rain drummed on the roof. Not so hard that we couldn’t talk. But hard enough for others to be excluded from our conversation. ‘Yeah, because they are okay, the juok over there’. ‘How okay?’ ‘I have always heard a lot of terrible things about how tough juok can be if you move, scratch yourself, or say something in the hut without being asked. But yesterday I scratched myself at some point and they didn’t even say anything. And I also laughed several times’. ‘Why did you laugh?’ ‘Because in Europe those kinds of things don’t exist, do they? He claimed that somebody had tried to remove your luck, that they were envious and wanted to do things to you. But no one in Europe does that. It was funny. I couldn’t help laughing’. ‘How can you be so sure of that?’ ‘I just know. When a muzungu comes to Africa and someone tries to use magic on him or her, it doesn’t work’. Kate laughed loudly. A happy redeeming laughter. But I was puzzled. Not about the insufficiency of magic. I knew very well that it didn’t work on me. But about Kate’s cocksureness when it came to the differences between Africans and Europeans. I needed further explanations, so I kept asking. ‘Why?’ Her laughter died away and she seemed offended, or maybe humiliated. She thought I was suggesting that she was wrong. But I wasn’t hinting at anything. I was trying to understand. Asking questions, as always. ‘Sorry, I just didn’t think people did things like that in Europe. Do they? Do you have jathieth where you come from?’

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‘No, we don’t have jathieth. But how can you be so sure that magic doesn’t work on Europeans? I am not saying you are wrong, Kate. I just want to understand how you can be so sure of it. Do you think that we are a completely different kind of people or what? Is it our skin colour or what is it?’ ‘Okay, I just thought that you don’t believe in it’. ‘And it only works when you believe it?’ ‘Yes, if you agree with juok’. ‘Agree?’ ‘Yes, you do not agree with them. And you don’t have a clan name’. ‘So it doesn’t work because we don’t have a clan?’ ‘Yes, because when you do magic on other people, you have to call on juok of the clan. You use the clan name for that. We call it nyinge majuok – the juok name. It is not the same thing as family name. It is a clan name. If I go to jathieth to do something to somebody else, it can only work if I know her clan name. The name that she has from her great-great-grandparents’. ‘But you are called Abbo because you were born when cow peas were plenty. And Okoth got his name because he was born when it rained’. ‘But they are still our clan names’. ‘And my clan name is Aketcha’. ‘I guess it is’. ‘So it is because we don’t have a clan name’, I said to myself, still trying to understand. Kate thought I said it to her. ‘Okay, I just never saw it work on Europeans’, she said with resignation, but I did not let go that easily. ‘I often heard your mother pacing around the room at night shouting: “I don’t believe in juok. I don’t believe in juok,” and then she would pray to the Lord for protection from juok. If she doesn’t believe they are there, why then does she need protection?’ ‘They are there. She knows they are there’. ‘But she doesn’t believe in them?’ ‘She doesn’t agree with them. Akiyeyi in Dhopadhola, means I don’t agree. She does not agree with their plans. They are there, but she does not believe they can hurt her. She won’t let them hurt her. That is what she means’. Things happen that are out of the ordinary. Amazing or terrible. But one can agree or disagree with these things. With juok. The English word ‘belief’ has a long history, over the course of which its meaning

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has changed. Older senses of the words which evolved into the modern ‘believe’ were, ‘to belove’, ‘to hold dear’. To have belief in God originally meant a loyal pledging of oneself to God, a commitment to live one’s life in his service. Over the years, believing in God has come to mean that one judges God to exist as part of the empirical reality.3 But the Dhopadhola word that people translate into ‘believe’ when speaking English, has nothing to do with questions of existence. Juok exists, as does God, but you may not agree, ‘belove’, and pledge yourself to both of them. If there is something that you do not agree with, you must do something about it. Change it or protect yourself from it. You can pray to the Lord for protection from juok. Or you can go into dialogue with juok with the help of jathieth. That is what juok is all about. About the fact that the world affects us and we affect each other. Things happen to us and between us, but it is possible to do something about it, to try to change the direction of life. Kate and her relatives were bound to each other. Their clan name was the string that tied them together, and it was therefore their strength as well as their weakness: people in the clan are there for each other and they can hurt each other exactly because they are dependent on each other. I was called Aketcha, and they had met my mother, but they knew that Europeans don’t have clans. Magic didn’t work on me, and it was unclear how my life was connected to the life of others. It was clear, though, that I didn’t depend on the clan, so they couldn’t use juok against me. I came and went. I was a muzungu, one of those who wandered. Kate had a clan, and she wanted to know who in her clan had tied her luck and who would be there to help her in the future.4 ∗ ∗ ∗ The lab technicians explained how to find the AIDS Information Centre at the other end of Kampala and I was relieved to leave the brown rooms. It had indeed not seemed like the right place to get the answer that Kate was looking for. We headed towards the main gate of the hospital compound. I drove past that gate every time I went to the research centre behind the hospital. I had been through the gate once or twice, but I had no idea that it had a life of its own. We initially stood in line behind other people waiting to be let out, but eventually I realized that some were let through while others were held back. I asked Kate how it worked.

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‘Only hospital staff is allowed to go through without paying. The rest of us have to hand a banknote to the gatekeeper’. Why had she not told me so immediately? Did she feel uncomfortable that I would have to reach for a note yet again or had she simply expected that I knew the procedure? Was it as strange to her that I knew nothing about this as it was to me to that such a system could exist? The day had already been long, hot, sad and unresolved. I stubbornly stepped forward and said ‘staff’ with a loud voice and was led straight through. The skin colour once more. Kate was allowed to follow me when I demanded that they let her through. ‘There was a time when I came to visit Nelly and had no money’, Kate related. ‘I had spent what I had on passion fruit juice and bread for her. I waited for hours and cried many tears, but they did not let me in and I ended up having to go home again’. Her voice was sad as we proceeded on the other side of the gate. But not at the thought of the gate. She was used to things like that. Her life is full of gates like that. ‘It took a long time for Nelly to die. There were others in the ward who were not even as weak as her, but who anyway died before she did … She was unconscious the last week. She couldn’t move. Didn’t open her eyes. I had a job with a family, but I had to stop working to help Suzy take care of her’. The gate reminded her what it was like to be dying from AIDS. ‘She was confused for some time before they admitted her to the hospital. She said she knew she was dying. She spoke all kinds of languages: Dhopadhola, Luganda, English, Swahili. She mixed them. She said she saw the fire of hell and that she couldn’t put it out. Or that the sky was near and that she could touch the stars. Sometimes she cried out in the room that she had AIDS, screamed the names of those who might have given it to her, and laughed a strange and scary laugh. Then suddenly, it was as if she woke up, looked at the calendar and asked us what time it was. Then she went mad again and started yelling and screaming and asking for Sally in all sorts of languages’. ‘What did the man she stayed with do?’ ‘I cannot blame him. He was a good man and he did his best. He was really trying to help. He bought medicine, milk and sugar whenever he could. But at one point he had no more money left. He had spent it all on Nelly’s illness. She lived at his place for two years. She was sick most of the time, but he kept trying to take care of her. When she died, both the husband and his first wife cried. But maybe the wife cried for

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herself too. She knew that she may also die, and she saw how horrible a death it was … Yes, he really was a good man. She was lucky. He always welcomed Sally when she came to visit her mother. Some men would have scolded her for bringing sickness to his house. But he just took care of her. He said that maybe there was juok in our family and that when he could no longer handle it, he would take her out to our dad’s place. We didn’t want to worry, so we just said to each other, “Yeah, maybe it is juok. Let us take Nelly out to our dad and see what happens”’. ‘But you never did?’ ‘No’. ‘But even if you spoke like that, did you know in your heart that it was AIDS?’ ‘You may be thinking so, yet nowt knowing for sure … We did not know for sure. She didn’t say so herself, except those times where she was so confused. When we could see that there was no hope left, we started saying to each other that it was probably AIDS. And when we escorted her to the hospital for treatment, we heard her talk to the doctors about AIDS. And when the rest of us, Suzy, Jane and I conversed we sometimes talked about it being AIDS. But that was when we had already lost hope. We never did so when she was present. We didn’t want to hurt her’. ‘Where was Sally during this time?’ ‘She was at my grandmother’s sister’s place, where my mother also lived, after she left Saya. Sometimes she was with me. Back and forth like that. She has never lived very much with her own mother … Suzy took Sally to our father one day. He was so happy. He slaughtered a goat for her. Our dad liked Nelly and was glad that Sally was his granddaughter. He would have been happy to bury Nelly on his land’. ‘Your uncle said he did try to contact him, but he didn’t want to come and get her. Then the uncles got annoyed and decided to bury her on the land they had bought for your mother’. ‘Yes. Maybe’, she whispered She would have preferred her own version to be true. ‘Yes, it is true that he never came to see her in the hospital. Not even at the grave. But when she was ill, he always said we should tell her to go to his place so that he could look after her. But she knew it would have been difficult. No one in his home could care for her. Our stepmother certainly would not have taken care of her. And maybe she wouldn’t even have been able to travel there in the first place. She couldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself’. Kate summed up her biggest fear: ‘The worst

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thing is that Nelly died as a poor person. As if she had no relatives. She didn’t even have a bedsheet, just an old worn rug. Not that you have to be rich when you die, but I mean, at least you should have someone who can take care of you’. We reached the AIDS Information Centre at half past five in the afternoon. It was too late. The test had to be done in the morning and the answer would be given an hour later. We read the guidelines on the wall. ‘Do you get the answer the same day?’ I could see Kate’s heart pounding in her chest. ‘I thought it was a few days later’. ‘Do you regret coming here?’ ‘No’. The garden was thriving, the white buildings freshly painted and she sent me a careful smile. This was the right place to ask the question Kate so badly wanted answered. Outside the centre we found a shoemaker who sewed her sandal strap for 300 shillings (30 cents), and at the central bus station we found a matatu heading in the right direction. We got off at the market to buy more tapes for the many words we still wanted to record. The strap broke once more, but this time it only cost 100 shillings (10 cents) to have it fixed, and it held up until we reached home. ‘But aren’t you scared of the answer?’ I asked as we walked along the maize fields separating the marketplace from the residential area with the shop and her uncle’s house. ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep’. ‘When I’m very sick, I’m scared. But not today. I’m ready. Whether it is good or bad news, I’m ready’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Sally is fine now, don’t you see?’ Said Kate as we sat in the grey house waiting for the rain to stop. Yes, I thought so too. She looked so happy walking to school with my mother in the morning. Sally had introduced her to her teacher, who had invited her to attend classes. It was a great experience for both of them. Our talk and the rain subsided. Playful children with bulging stomachs and muddy feet popped up on the wet grass and started playing football with an inflated condom wrapped in banana leaves.

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‘She is happy with MamaJacob. MamaJacob’s husband loves her very much. He plays with her, talks to her. He always gives her extra food. He makes sure she gets meat and other good things that he doesn’t even give to his own son. I think he is trying to be good to her, so that she doesn’t have too many thoughts. It makes me so happy’. He was still there. MamaJacob’s husband. Now he lived in Saya and was rarely with his other wife in town. ‘And are your sons happy at your father’s place?’ ‘I don’t know. Last time I visited, they were not very happy, but I don’t have anywhere else to leave them. Okoth told me that the others tease him that it is not his home. When my dad dies, the others will throw out my sons, because they don’t want them to share their father’s land with them. I know Okoth’s father’s family. Maybe I should take him there. He is a big boy now. He knows how it is and that he cannot stay forever on my father’s land … But I don’t know about Comfort… He sleeps on a torn mat all alone. The other small ones sleep in the other room with their mother, and Okoth sleeps with the big boys. Comfort is always dirty. His hair is not trimmed. They have no soap, they say, but the other children look clean. I think they get enough to eat. That is not the problem. But when I leave them, they always cry’. ‘Even Okoth?’ ‘Yes, Okoth too. They both say that they want to go to Kampala with me. Okoth cries that his little brother is being treated so badly. He loves his little brother very much… It is my mother’s fault that Okoth doesn’t know his home and his clan. My mother always said he shouldn’t go there since they refused to pay’. ‘For what?’ ‘For me. That they ruined me by refusing to pay for me. But she never asked my dad to help her negotiate the bride price. Okoth now says he wants to know his home. And it is probably the best thing to do. Except that I don’t know what to do about Comfort’. Sally arrived, skipping through the wet grass. She informed us that MamaJacob had made tea and roasted groundnuts, so we got up and joined the rest of the family. ∗ ∗ ∗ She didn’t seem any different the next day. She served tea and chapatis for me. She refused to leave before having cooked at least something

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for me. She got ready while I ate. It was not until we sat on the wooden bench in the waiting room at the AIDS Information Centre that I noticed small signs of fear. I could see her pulse throbbing and small beads of sweat on her temples. She registered, I paid, and we went back to the bench. Except that I could no longer sit on the same bench as her. She sat in the line of those who were going for pre-test counselling where they explained about AIDS, about the test and about her options if she turned out to be HIV-positive. I made sure to look at her now and then to reassure her that I was still there. She looked back with pleading eyes. That was how I understood the look that she gave me. I felt that she was pleading with me not to leave and with life not to end. I could still see her throbbing pulse from the other end of the room. She had asked them if I could go with her for the counselling, but no, there would be others there and I would have to wait outside. I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to push my own discomfort away with a theoretical article on how to study emotions and whether emotions are culturally specific or not, thus preparing for a residency at a university in New York where I would write about Kate and other Ugandan women. That was the reason I followed them around in the first place. That was why I spent time with them in waiting rooms like this. At the other end of the room, a cartoon was shown again and again, featuring explicit sex scenes and instructions on how to use a condom. The others barely noticed it. Evidently, they had other things on their mind, but maybe they had simply seen a video like that numerous times before. Nobody was as well informed about AIDS as Ugandans were. Nobody had been shown how to use a condom as many times as they had. Loving couples in jeans held hands, middle-aged women in gomesi, greying men and cool youngsters were all there. The disease was ubiquitous. Kate put her head through the door and signalled that I could now join her. We were escorted out of the building, out into the sun, and into an annexe behind the main building. I wondered whether she had already been given the answer. She seemed light at heart. Lighter than I would expect. My hands were cold and clammy. ∗ ∗ ∗ Kate told about our visit to the jathieth while we sipped tea and ate MamaJacob’s groundnuts. Her aunts listened attentively.

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‘You never know’, said MamaJacob. ‘Sometimes they lie. Sometimes they guess, and sometimes they tell the truth. You have to go and see different ones and then asses which one has the strongest juok. Which one is closest to the truth. If you choose a jathieth who lives near your home, you will never find out whether you can trust him. That is why we rarely go to the one that you went to see. He already knows everything about our family, so if we went there we would not know whether he just pretended to be in touch with juok. But he doesn’t know Kate’s father’s family, and if he couldn’t answer questions about them, then it is probably because his juok is not very strong. You have to go and see others as well’, she concluded, and the others nodded their assent. My mother’s departure was approaching. My sisters-in-law had decided to slaughter a goat in her honour, and brew millet beer. They were stirring the fermenting millet gruel while we drank tea with them. They knew well that Kate’s life had not been easy. They may not have known her greatest fear, but they were happy to discuss her life with her: ‘You get different answers when you go and see different jothieth [pl. of jathieth]. It is good to try out many different things when you have a problem. There is no need to stick to a single explanation’, said MamaJacob. A single session with a jathieth or a single blood test may not provide the whole answer. I was not on friendly terms with Jacob, who sat behind us and listened to our conversation. He had settled in the village with his wife and now two children. He was a schoolteacher and had a job at a nearby school. I had refused to pay for a stereo, car batteries and loudspeakers so that he could organize a proper party now that we were anyway slaughtering a goat and brewing millet beer. He had been tireless. He had used every opportunity to bring it up. Sent children to me with small notes begging me to pay for the stereo. I had a hard time showing smart young men like him any interest. Even harder than I used to. And he was even worse than I remembered. I scolded Jacob while his wife listened, because he had lured money from my mother. I had been inconsiderate and he had reason to be mad at me. He had a family, a position to defend and unfulfilled dreams. But I was preoccupied with Kate’s story. ‘Jacob says I’m a fool’, Kate said one day, ‘because I am not trying to get more money out of you’. We smiled at each other. We both knew she was just the opposite of a fool. She had understood that she got more out of me by not asking for something all the time.

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I knew the sisters-in-law were right. I had been to a jathieth with them on several occasions. They asked juok, juok asked them and juok had at times asked for my opinion. At first, I was confused that juok would ask me for advice on treatment, hospitals, transportation and the like. But yes, you have to ask if you want answers and sometimes you have to ask many times and in different places. The party was realized without my financial aid. Jacob raised the money for the music in a different way. There was drinking and dancing all night. It started in the late afternoon. Alexine gathered a group of children and sang and clapped her way through a series of songs in which the words ‘Oh darling Jesus’ and ‘Jesus amorin’ (Jesus I love you) recurred incessantly. The men eventually gathered around the pot in front of the house, and Alexine was the first one to let ‘Oh Darling Jesus’ be replaced by wiggling hips. The sisters-in-law joined her. They wrapped kitenge around their hips to make the rhythmic movements of their lower body more distinct. The young girls joined in, embarrassed by their own abilities to wriggle their hips, but cheered on by older women. A woman must know how to dance her hips both at a party and in bed. My mother filmed their dancing. Three of the sisters-in-law and Alexine happened to all wear gomesi in golden and reddish-brown colours. The setting sun lit up the grey house and gave the wall an orange gleam on the video. The women dancing in their golden gomesi glowed in the orange light. Kate stood in the shade of the house, outside the orange glow, watching them. My mother was right. She looked very sad. We didn’t get hold of a jathieth again and left for Kampala without the name of the one who had locked Kate’s luck. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘You are free?’ said the nurse, as we had sat down on the chairs opposite her. ‘Of course’, I thought, and in a split second I was preparing to pick up my bag and get ready to go home and get on with my work. I had made plans with Suzy that I should interview her, and there were also parts of Kate’s life that I would like to know more about. But I had not heard the question mark. ‘I am free’, Kate said. She had understood that what the nurse had asked us was whether Kate was ready to hear the answer in my presence. ‘I trust her’, Kate said. ‘She is part of the family. She knows all my secrets, and she paid for the test’. I hoped Kate didn’t think I was entitled

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to the answer because I had paid for the test. But I liked that she had said I was family. When I arrived in Uganda that year, I had noticed the cement walls, the waterproof roof and the abundance of food. My mother had noticed that something was missing in Kate’s life. Maybe not what it was that was missing. Only that something was missing. I now understood that what was missing in Kate’s life was the confidence that even if death were approaching, there would be someone to help her along the way. The test was not just the answer to a question about the presence of a virus in her blood. It was an element in the quest for somebody to believe in. Somebody to have faith in. The many tapes and letters had not been about Kate’s sickness, but had it not been for them, we would not have sat in front of a plump woman in a white coat, looking over her halflens spectacles, waiting for our answer to the question about whether we trusted each other. Whether we were free with each other and ready to face the devastating answer together.

Notes 1. Diviners and divination among the Jop’Adhola are interlaced with the notion of juok. See Mogensen, “The resilience of Juok,” Africa, 420– 436. See also Whyte, Questioning Misfortune, for an in-depth discussion of divination in eastern Uganda. 2. Testing for HIV was established in 1990 in Uganda and was at first primarily carried out by branches of the ‘AIDS Information Centre’, run by a US-supported NGO. Testing remained optional but massive AIDS information campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s made testing for HIV widespread, also before the arrival of ART. See, e.g. Tim Allen and Suzette Heald, “The Political Environment of HIV: What Has Worked in Uganda and What Has Failed in Botswana,” Journal of International Development 16 (2004): 1141–1154; and Whyte, Second Chances, 4–6. 3. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience, 15–17. 4. Kate’s reflections over the causes of her misfortune, her insistence upon my juok name being of a different kind, and her choice to confide in the anthropologist should be understood in the light of the ambiguity inherent to kinship relations in lineage-based societies and of Georg Simmel’s discussion of the stranger. Michael G. Peletz, “Ambivalence in Kinship Since the 1940s,” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 413–443, argue that kinship and family relations are profoundly ambiguous. The high prevalence of conflicts between relatives arises from

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the inability to live up to the ideals of unconditional support and solidarity often associated with kinship. In Africa, this tension between closeness and distance is often expressed through potentially dangerous forces such as witchcraft, as discussed by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937); or in the case of the Jop’Adhola, juok, as discussed by Mogensen, “The Resilience of Juok,” Africa, 420–436. Suspicions and accusations of relatives might be said to take a particular form in societies with an ideology of a segmentary lineage-based system. The Jop’Adhola often refer to the ideology of their kinship system when explaining and negotiating solidarity and conflict. E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes, eds., African Political Systems (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), have argued, that in its ideal form a segmentary lineage-based system, has a boundless capacity for fusion and fission. Those who share a common ancestor are obliged to help and defend one another against outsiders or more distant relatives. As a consequence, Meyer Fortes further noted in Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 234–235, quarrelling is inevitable among kin and especially among members of the same family, as the many instances of witchcraft suspicions and cursing show. Charles Lindholm, Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukthun of Northern Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), takes Fortes’ point even further in his discussion about the role of friendship in segmentary lineage systems. Those who share an ancestor are obliged by the tie of blood to defend one another against outsiders or more distant relatives, but the most important conflicts are between individuals not groups, he claims. The ones on whom you depend the most, are the ones with whom you also compete over limited resources, and they are the ones whom you fear the most to be abandoned by. One’s relatives are thus often also one’s rivals. The closer the relation, the greater the rivalry and the foreigner thus is much sought after as a friend (ibid., 159). Or as phrased by George Simmel, “The Stranger”, 402–408, the stranger is the one who comes today and stays tomorrow, but who is also expected to leave again at a later stage, and who therefore often receives surprising openness, and is in many ways ‘near’ due to being ‘far’. I was near, yet far. Kate knew that I was not a member of the clan in the same ways as her and her relatives and that I did not take part in their competition over resources, hence I was not a threat—and could not be threatened by—others in the same ways as could other members of the clan.

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References Allen, Tim and Suzette Heald. “The Political Environment of HIV: What Has Worked in Uganda and What Has Failed in Botswana.” Journal of International Development 16 (2004): 1141–1154. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., and Meyer Fortes, eds. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. Fortes, Meyer. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969. Good, Byron. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lindholm, Charles. Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukthun of Northern Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Mogensen, Hanne O. “The Resilience of Juok: Confronting Suffering in Eastern Uganda.” Africa 72, no. 3 (2002): 420–436. Peletz, Michael G. “Ambivalence in Kinship Since the 1940s”. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 413–443. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. H. Wolff, 402–408. Glencoe: Free Press, 1950. Whyte, Susan Reynolds. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, ed. Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 11

The Order of Secrecy

I had been to many funerals in Uganda. Clan members sleep around the fire and sit around the pot of millet beer for days to show that they are one, that they belong together. I arrived in the village shortly before the family lost its beloved grandmother and I had interviewed Kate, her mother and her sister about Nelly’s death. But I had never been next to another person in a moment like this. What would be culturally appropriate? I had never held Kate before. I took her hand, but she didn’t respond. She was silent. Petrified. Out of a hazy corner of my eye I saw her wipe a few tears away with a piece of white toilet paper. The nurse talked about safe sex and healthy living. It seemed absurd. Kate knew what there was to know about these things, and she had dreamed of a healthy lifestyle all her life but had never been able to afford it. We got a referral to TASO and were asked to go and do a TB test. She did not have TB. Not yet. The good news of the day was that she was only HIV-positive. ‘Have you heard of Mildmay?’ asked the nurse who had tested her for TB. She addressed me. Not Kate. She looked at the one with the skin colour that signalled access to resources. I looked back at the wellpadded friendly woman, but she didn’t explain in further detail. She didn’t need to, because I knew what she meant and it was out of consideration for both me and Kate that she didn’t go into detail. ‘Yes’, I just said, because I did know that Mildmay, a Christian non-governmental © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_11

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organization outside Kampala, now provided antiretroviral treatment to AIDS patients. I knew that privileged Ugandans with HIV could now prolong their lives with treatment from Mildmay. I understood that it was thoughtful of the nurse not to raise unrealistic hopes in Kate. She did not know how far I would go.1 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Okay, I was upset when I heard it. But I am also happy’. Birds quacked in the flowering bushes. Car doors were slammed. The workday was over. We hadn’t said anything to each other all day. We sat near the gate of the AIDS Information Centre, not yet ready to return to the world outside the white walls of the AIDS Information Centre. She asked me to turn on the recorder. ‘It is as if I have a lot of words now’, she said, the trained informant that she was. ‘Of course I am worried, but I still think it is good that I tested. Now at least I know. It is better to know than to fall sick all the time without knowing what is hiding in one’s body. I have wondered so much for so long whether I was HIV positive. Now I don’t have to think about it anymore. Now I know the answer. Now I can plan. For me and for my children. And I am not the only one to die from this disease. Even important people die from AIDS’. She tasted the word. She was not used to saying it out loud. ‘The singer, Philly Bongolay Lutaaya, he also died of it. He sang this song: “Alone and frightened”. I am probably going to be sad at first, but then I can think of his song and then I know it is okay, and that I am not alone … Now it is just Comfort that I am worried about. I don’t know if he is also HIV positive’. HIV-positive was pronounced with great care, one letter at a time. She must have known for a long time, I thought. The birds quacked, the car doors slammed, and Kate tasted the H, the I and the V. She had known. I had refused to face up to it. Because I was worried. For her. For me. Worried where it would take me to follow her. ‘They look happy’. ‘Who?’ ‘Those who work here. They look normal’. ‘Yes’. ‘We haven’t had lunch today’.

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‘No, I guess not … How long you known that you might be HIV positive?’ ‘I wanted to test for a long time, but I still had that fear, you know. But when I fell ill again in May this year, I told myself that if I got the chance. If you came. I didn’t know how much it would cost. I didn’t know how to do it either. But I thought about it all the time. Thought that I would ask you to help me’. Two women with a recorder leaning against the wall, one light and one dark. The small boy with the wrinkled eyebrows had grown up. He no longer sat on our hips. He was far away, in the village of his grandfather. I still carried the backpack with notebooks, water and the recorder. Chatting people strolled past us. ‘I see that people with HIV can be happy. They say that all those who work here are HIV positive themselves. Look at them. They look normal. Maybe they were sad right after the test, but they got used to it. I. know a woman in the church who also looks normal. If your time has not yet come, you need not worry. And my time hasn’t come yet. Philly Bongolay Lutaaya sang that today is me, but tomorrow it is somebody else and that people should be careful and take care of each other. He said it directly. Said that he was sick. Sick of AIDS’. There it was again. As if she was only now getting to know the word and would do her utmost to pronounce it properly. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘You should go to uncle’s house and have dinner’, she said. ‘If you stay here, Suzy will know something is wrong’. So I left her to go and sit on the couch with well-off members of the family. I skim-read the newspaper that someone had left in the couch and caught sight of a small note informing that the price of antiretroviral treatment had fallen from 1000 USD to 700 USD a month and was soon expected to fall to 200 USD a month. It was becoming realistic. But it was still a lot of money. I left the newspaper on the couch. Later she stood outside and asked for me. We squatted at the end of the house. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. ‘Yes, have you?’ ‘A little bit. Suzy had cooked. It is cold here’. ‘Yes … No, not really’.

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‘I hear it can be very cold in Denmark’. ‘Yes. Much colder than here’. ‘Maybe it will rain tonight’. ‘Do you regret?’ ‘What? No’, she said, in a faint voice. ‘No’, she repeated resolutely a moment later. ‘No, I don’t regret that I did it. But I am just sitting up there thinking about how it will be so I felt like talking a bit more with you before going to sleep. I thought about what will happen to me. And I don’t really know how to tell people. I know, there have been rumours for a long time, but what if it is me who says it myself, will people then start staring at me? And my father? Maybe he already knows. But I wasn’t even sure myself. Not until today’. ‘Couldn’t you go and stay with your father so that you could be with the boys?’ ‘The hospital is somehow far from his place, so you pay a lot of money every time you need transport to go there. But yeah, I know we cannot stay here so much longer. The roadworkers will move further down the road… I would like to find a place where I can stay with Comfort since we may not have so much time left. Okoth, I have to bring him to his father’s family so that he can get to know them before I am gone… Maybe I could try to be at my father’s place for some time. Maybe I could do some business at the local market. Or maybe in Kamuli. Kamuli town is not too far from his village’. ‘Does Kamuli have a post office?’ ‘There must be one. It is a big city’. ‘So you can open a post box so that I can write to you?’ ‘Yes, I can’. ‘Do you know how to do it?’ ‘No’. No, she said. And laughed. Laughed at her own no. At her own inability to open a post box. Or maybe at her reluctance to admit it to me? ‘Maybe you can explain to me how to do it’. ‘I think you need a recommendation from someone. Then you pay some money and get a key’. ‘Yes’. In fact, it had not been that simple when I did it in Tororo, and Kate would probably not succeed in doing it. She lacked initiative, I thought

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at times, but I also felt that that word hid more than it explained. She rather lacked faith that someone like her was entitled to a post box. ‘What about staying with your mother? There is a good health centre in Nagongera and a small post office and it is not too far from Saya. There is also a market and a good school for the boys’. ‘I like Nagongera. But I cannot stay with my mother. We will just quarrel’. ‘What about Tororo with your uncle’s wife?’ ‘Maybe. She is a good woman, but if I move in with her, then I will never be able to go to MamaJacob, her co-wife, to see Sally’. When it is dark in Uganda, it is black, and the mosquitoes bite. ‘I … the only thing I want to say is … I think, maybe … if only I can find a place where I can settle, then I will not worry so much, and then it will be bearable. But if I am going to be thrown out all the time… Also, I would like to live with my children and still show them that I love them. That is my only problem. Nothing else’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Her eyes were swollen the next morning. She served breakfast for the workers as she used to. I asked her how the night had been when she brought me tea inside the back room where again I sat on the chair from the shop in the front room. ‘Okay, but you know, I had thoughts while sleeping. Thoughts about Comfort. Thoughts about Okoth. Thoughts about what will happen when people find out’. She left again, came back, knelt by my side with a plate of chapatis in her hand, and continued: ‘Thoughts about my friends and whether they will stop spending time with me’. Her eyes turned moist. Suzy entered and she managed to hold back the tears. I had been awake much of the night myself. I had pondered over her need for certainty. ‘Then at least I know’, she had said. Repeatedly. The tiny mosquito net didn’t allow me to move much. Somebody had called, reminding me that I would be leaving Uganda soon and that I had a trip to the US coming up in a few weeks. A trip across the Atlantic for the price of two months on antiretroviral medicine.

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Kate’s moist eyes were still with me as I sat in the matatu on my way to the hospital with Suzy. I had promised to take Suzy to the antenatal clinic for a check-up. She was at least seven months’ pregnant and had not yet been to see the midwife. She was obviously happy to get a little attention from me. But she was also more confident than Kate and could no doubt have managed to go there by herself. She asked the staff where to go instead of waiting for me to do so. She mocked someone who jumped the line, the other woman chose to ignore her, and then Suzy pushed herself into the queue right in front of this woman. I watched the drama, detached. I did not understand the queuing system and could not concentrate on trying to understand it either. I had no idea what had happened either when Suzy emerged from an office, outraged because she had been told to return a week later. She resolutely entered another office, and shortly thereafter a nurse came out and proclaimed indignantly to me that Suzy could not be examined until next week and that she did not have to pay anything. Maybe Suzy had insisted that she be examined right away, and suggested that I pay for her to be allowed to. I was embarrassed. I didn’t want the nurse to think it was my idea. But I didn’t say anything. Could Suzy really have done that? Kate would never have thought of doing so. Suzy anyway seemed pleased afterwards. ‘It was good we went there’, she repeated several times. She had learned many interesting things about being pregnant and she had not even been scolded for coming so late in the pregnancy. ‘I thank God that even though I felt lonely at my dad’s place, and thought my sisters had forgotten about me, at least I was allowed to go to school until the 10th grade, and now I can read and write and count and understand all the things they tell me in the hospital. Not like Kate, who has only been to school for four years’. ‘Kate has been to school for more than four years’, I said. ‘No, she has not. She never went back to school after they burned my father’s home and she ran away with Nelly to join our mother’. ‘But she went to school in Kampala when she lived with your mother’s cousin brother’. ‘Kate? No, she never went to school in Kampala. She never went to school after she left our father’. ‘Kate told me she went to school in Kampala’. ‘Well, she didn’t. And had it not been for problems with school fees, I would have gone even further than up to 10th grade’.

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I was used to their conflicting stories by then, and I did not spend more time pondering over the number of years that Kate had been to school. But I did make note of the fact that although Suzy had steered purposefully towards the staff at the hospital, rebuked people jumping the line, was admired by Kate for her ability to think up new businesses and to avoid getting pregnant—she was now living in the same back room as Kate, her stomach was growing, her possessions were missing, and the father of her child had a wife who threw boiling water at her. Maybe more years in school had given Suzy more confidence in herself. Maybe she would be able to open a post box in a post office, but her education had not been a ticket to a noticeably better life. ‘What a shame they didn’t do any examinations today’, she said on her way to the matatu. ‘Well, but I must go back there next week then’. And no, she didn’t have time to go out to eat or drink a soda with me. She wanted to go home and take over from Kate, who had promised to start lunch for her, but who would probably be mad if she arrived too late. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Now I have tightened my heart’. ‘What did you say? Is your heart tight?’ She sat with her back straight and her hands resting in her lap for hours the next day, the day after we had been told that her days were numbered. We spent the afternoon in the house with rooms where only the uncle, his wife and children and I were supposed to be, and where nieces should not go if they wanted to avoid that their luck be locked. Peter later scolded me for having brought her to the room. And I should have known. But I forgot to think of boundaries that should not be crossed, for the most important of all boundaries had already been crossed and there was no way back. ‘Yes, now my heart is tight. Not like this morning when I started crying whenever we talked about it’. ‘What does it mean that your heart is tight?’ ‘That I have now tightened it so that it is not weak. You know, so that I am not so worried. A weak heart, chunye malwori, is a heart that fears. A heart filled with thoughts. If, for example, I live with Suzy and she gets sick and I leave, then that means my heart is weak. Or if you see a snake and run away, then it is because you have a weak heart. If you go back and kill it, that means that you managed to tighten your heart. And now,

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like me, I tested and found out that I am HIV positive. If I went home and killed myself, it would be because I had a fearful heart. But if I don’t, then it is because I have a tight heart’. ‘It is like being brave?’ ‘Yes! I think that is what it means. Now I can use my head for thoughts about other things than just worries. Now I can start making plans. Now I know that I should not waste my money. Every shilling must have a purpose. Yesterday, I even thought that now I would never speak to other people again. I just wanted to stay inside. Alone. Die without bothering anyone. But today I decided to look happy and talk nicely to people. If I just sit there and say nothing, then they can guess that something is wrong. When you and Suzy left this morning, I washed all the plates. I worked hard and fast. That helped me. I felt strong and thought I still had many years left’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘I noticed that your boyfriend was there while I was in the hospital with Suzy’. Happy little smile. ‘Yes, he came while I was cooking. The roadworkers had lit a big fire behind the building, and I coughed really badly, but he said it didn’t matter and that he just wanted to sit there a bit while I was cooking’. ‘What now? What are you going to tell him?’ ‘Who? My boyfriend? I think I’ll have to tell him about my problem. But I don’t know how. When I tell him, he will get scared and stop coming to see me’. ‘Maybe you can just make sure he uses a condom’. ‘No, imagine if something happened. It would be like killing another person. Even before I tested, I always said to myself that if I found out I was HIV positive, I would be saved, pray to God and stop having anything to do with men’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘The thing that makes me have many thoughts is that maybe Okoth will be left alone. If now Comfort is also HIV positive, then Okoth will be all alone. And he loves his brother so much. I dare not think of how much he will miss him. I want so much to live with both of them so that I can teach them something, tell them things, talk to Okoth about the future.

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I don’t want it to be like Sally. She was in shock over her mother’s death. She just saw the dead body arrive without knowing anything’.2 We again sat in my room at her uncle’s place, one of those rooms that a niece should not enter. But other things were more important. And it wasn’t the uncle’s bedroom. It was the bedroom of one of his children. Someone closed the windows from the outside. ‘Mosquitoes are coming’, said Kate, explaining why the pleasant breeze at sunset was shut out. She had cried silently for a while. ‘If you tell your mother about it, she will probably be upset too’, she said a little later. ‘I have already done that. Sorry, Kate, I forgot to ask for your permission’. ‘It is OK. But how? She has just left’. ‘By email. Do you know email?’ No, she didn’t. ‘You use a computer, and when you send it, it arrives right away’. ‘Like your computer lying there on the bed?’ ‘Yes, but it must be connected, like a telephone. I can’t do it here now without connecting it to the phone line’. ‘So it is like a fax at the post office?’ ‘Yes, it’s a bit like that. Your uncle knows it. If you urgently need to get in touch with me, you can ask him to send me an email’. ‘Yes’. ‘In fact, my mother has already answered. She wrote that I should greet you and tell you how sorry she is. I should have told you that I had written to her’. ‘It is okay’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘I wish I had no children’. ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘I’m so sorry that they will be alone. And Comfort, I just wish he didn’t have to die too … Before, I always thought that even if I got AIDS one day, they would probably have found the medicine by then. But they still haven’t found any medicine for AIDS’. ‘Kate, they actually have’. ‘So that is why I think AIDS is probably a sign that the end of the world is near’.

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‘They found a medicine that can keep people alive for a long time. But it is still very expensive and difficult to get here in Uganda’. ‘People say it is the end of the world and that it was God who sent the disease because people no longer respect him’. ‘Who says that?’ ‘People in the church, but also other people. They also say that AIDS can be cured through prayer. But I don’t really believe that. God can help one to slow down the many thoughts and forget your problems… And I know that God is not evil. But I still don’t understand why he doesn’t help people find a medicine against AIDS’. ‘Maybe he did help the ones who are developing this medicine right now’. ‘God decides whether we should die or not. I am not saying he kills people, but he is the one who decides whether there is still more time left for you. When he decides that your time is short, even the smallest thing can kill you. Because he is the creator and you cannot argue with him’. ‘But I still don’t think it is the end of the world. I think Okoth will grow up, have a good education, a nice wife and many children and start a new clan, named after you’. She didn’t respond. I dared not say more about antiretroviral medicine and its cost. Kate did not ask. She was used to the fact that expensive things were out of her reach and that AIDS was something you died from. She wrote a letter to my mother and asked me to send it to her through my orange computer, that I always carried with me. ‘Dear Grandma, I received your message. Thank you so much and I was so glad you reached home without any problems. And I will always remember the love and kindness you gave me when we were together in Uganda. It makes me really proud that I have such a nice white grandmother who comes from Denmark and who cares about me. I thank you for all the things you gave me when you left. Especially my necklace that you bought when we visited the source of the Nile. I am so proud of it, and when other women ask where I got it from, I just say it was a gift from Denmark. I wish you could come back and stay here forever together with your daughter, because I miss you so much when you are not here. But there is nothing to do about it. I don’t know if we will ever meet again.

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Anyway, dear grandmother, the problem that I have and which gives me so many thoughts, is the one that my dear mother Aketcha has already told you about. That is how this world is. Everything has a beginning and an end and you should not be so worried, because there is nothing to do about it other than just wait. Well, but Grandma, in these few words let me stop here and wish you all the best and many greetings to your husband, my grandfather. I will always remember your stay with us in Uganda. Your granddaughter Abbo Kate’ ∗ ∗ ∗ The next day we went shopping together in Kampala, a city that is a large, lush, tropical garden and a raging, chaotic traffic hell. Our shopping list was long. Her new life required many things. The taxi park where the matatus depart and arrive is a huge buzzing shopping area, where you need to hold on to your bags and parcels, and where we found most of what she needed. We bought tapes and batteries for the recorder and a large blue laced mosquito net, which matched the blue sheets I was planning to give her when I left. She beamed like the sun. Fewer mosquito bites meant less malaria, and hence less episodes of sickness in her ailing body. And it would look nice in her room. We also bought 300 vitamin pills. The drug vendor tried to hide his incredulity that we wanted to buy that many at a go. He poured a pile of tablets onto his disk and started counting carefully to 300. It took time. Three hundred tablets, thirty shillings apiece. That came to 9000 shillings, about 9 USD. Together with the ones I had left, she would have a year’s supply of vitamin pills. ‘A whole year?’ she said, with her voice as soft as butter in the heat, and full of gratitude. A laced mosquito net and some vitamin pills. How little can one give and still be showered with gratitude? We crumpled up in a matatu where my long legs never fitted easily. A vendor showed his bracelets through the window and I looked at them, but no, Kate wasn’t interested. She would like a large package of white paper napkins, though. She would have to go to the hospital regularly in the years to come and the roll of white toilet paper wouldn’t last forever. We headed to TASO, one of the first African grassroots

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organizations that had started, as early as 1987, to provide counselling and symptomatic treatment to HIV-positive people in Uganda, and which had since then grown into a national movement, internationally recognized for its tireless efforts to combat discrimination and provide support for AIDS patients. We arrived too late in the day to have her registered but we were invited inside. The doctor who welcomed us proudly showed us around while highlighting how much Danida (the Danish Development Agency) had supported them over the years, which of course they hoped would continue. I didn’t bother to inform him that I, despite my Danish passport, had no connection with Danida’s AIDS programme. I just confirmed that TASO was famous for the great work they did for Uganda’s AIDS patients and wrote: ‘Thank you for your good work’ in their guestbook. They told us to return to have her registered the following week on Wednesday. I would leave Uganda on Tuesday, but now Kate knew where it was. As I talked to the doctor, she sat quietly behind us with tears in her eyes. ‘So TASO is hidden behind the hospital’, she noted as we strolled down the hill again. I hadn’t thought about that. But yes, it was. Most people who came to the hospital would never go that far up the hill. People would not accidentally pass by and recognize patients who did not wish to be recognized.3 We had a late lunch at the golf course. It was one of the few green oases in the hot chaotic city, where the food was not too expensive. We could enjoy a good meal, without my having to reveal that I was prepared to pay as much for one meal as five years’ worth of vitamin pills would cost. She had liver, a big bowl of passion fruit juice and a couple of sodas. Her appetite was good, which only exacerbated the feeling of powerlessness that our life-extending shopping trip gave me. There was so much money in my world, so much to spend it on and so little in her world and only one thing that would really make a difference. ‘We have forgotten one thing’, she said as we approached the store and the residential area with her uncle’s house. ‘I know you have already spent a lot of money today, but I need a padlock for my suitcase. I would like to be able to store my papers in it. The ones with words like AIDS and TASO that I do not want others to see’. We got off at the market and bought a padlock. ∗ ∗ ∗

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‘Kate, didn’t you tell me that you went to school in Kampala when you lived with your uncle?’ We sat on the grass behind her uncle’s house one day when I recalled what Suzy had told me. Tears ran down her cheeks as she replied. ‘When they set fire to my father’s place and we had to flee the village, life got really tough. We had not yet started in a new school when we left to look for our mother. And then my mother’s cousin brother offered that I could come to Kampala to stay with him. They said that once they had found another girl to work in the house, they would send me to school in Kampala. I thought it sounded good. So did my mother, so she allowed it. But they never kept their promise. They just treated me like a house girl for a year, two years, four years. I never went to school in Kampala. If I had stayed with my dad, then I would have gone to school and then I would not have attracted this disease’. ‘But Kate, Nelly went to school, and she got it too’. ‘Okay, she went to school. But she lived in the city with my uncle, not with my father. Maybe if I had lived with my father I would have gotten used to village life and not become addicted to sweet life in the city. Then I would not have met the kind of men who have this disease’. ‘Why did you always tell me you went to school in Kampala?’ ‘Well, I thought that if you knew I had only been to school for four years, you wouldn’t hire me. But I was always somehow clever. Like Okoth. That is why you did not notice how little I have been to school’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Kate got up abruptly and walked away with angry steps without looking back. I looked, astonished, at her back. ‘What happened ?!’ I asked Suzy, who had just arrived. ‘It happens all the time’. ‘What?’ ‘What you just saw’. ‘Well, I don’t know what I just saw’. ‘She is jealous. She doesn’t want me to talk to you. Like that time with my mum out in the village. I heard that you got mad at my mother because Kate told you rumours that she had not paid school fees for Okoth and Sorrow and that afterwards you didn’t want to have anything to do with my mother for years’.

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‘It wasn’t rumours. It was true. And it wasn’t Kate’s fault that I found out. I discovered it myself. And it is not true that I didn’t want to have anything to do with your mother. She left Saya and was never there when I was in Uganda’. ‘But Kate shouldn’t be gossiping about her mother. Nor should she speak badly about our father. He takes care of her children. It is as if she does not appreciate that. Last time she went to see them, she discovered that our stepmother had lent some of Comfort’s clothes to one of her own children. Even if you are not happy about something like that, you have to keep it in your heart. But Kate is not able to do that. She showed them how angry she was’. ‘Were you there? Did you hear it yourself?’ ‘No, but I have been told. And clothes always get dirtier in the village than in town. Kate also gets angry about that. But the children do not suffer at our father’s place. They get plenty of food. She should be happy about that’. ‘Do you think they treat Comfort properly? She is afraid the other children tease him and do not want to sleep with him’. ‘I can’t imagine that. I don’t think my father would allow that. But has Kate never talked to you about her illness or what?’ I hesitated. I had not yet reflected on what to do if a situation like this arose. But I had no choice. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Okay, so she hasn’t. I thought she had told you, since she seems to tell you everything. Her life is not ok. She looks like somebody who is sick. Can’t you see it?’ ‘You really think so?’ ‘She and Nelly were always sick. Both of them. If you had seen Kate and Nelly together the past few years, then you would understand what I mean. Everyone knows it. The uncles, their wives, the neighbours. Everyone says she is sick. She used to love the same men as Nelly’. ‘Do you know that – or are you guessing?’ ‘It is true. Of course, I don’t know for sure, but you always saw them with the same men. I have often told her that she should be tested. But I don’t know if she did. Our customers also say she looks like someone who is sick’. ‘I don’t think she looks that sick’. ‘They keep asking me: “But what’s wrong with your sister?”’ ‘Are they afraid to eat the food she prepares?’

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‘No. They know that is not how AIDS is transmitted… But I am really worried. First Nelly, then Kate and then I am next in line. Can’t you see it?’ ‘Suzy, you have said that before, but you know that is not how you get AIDS’. ‘I took care of Nelly. But she doesn’t seem to remember that. When we quarrel, she yells at me and says that I never took care of Nelly’. ‘I’ve never heard Kate yell at anyone’. ‘But you’ve never seen her really sick. Well, people do weird things sometimes. When she was really sick and thin, they looked out the window when she went out to pee. Stared at her because it was incredible she could still walk while being so thin. Then she cried to them: “What about yourselves, you will also die some day”, and then she kicked a dog standing next to her’. I would have felt angry too, I thought. But I didn’t know Kate had anger in her. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her and why she has wasted her life like that. She made a lot of money when she worked for you and for the other muzungu family. Did you hear about that time when she had a boyfriend in Saya?’ I hesitated again. Then I said that yes, I had heard something about a boyfriend, but I had not met him. ‘She let him eat all her money. Our mother explained to them that they could not marry, since he was our relative. But they refused to listen and went on to live the sweet life in town. Drinking sodas and eating eggs and other expensive items. With her money. He had no job. Not until she bought him a job’. ‘Bought what?’ ‘A job. You know, you have to pay to get a job, so she bought him a job. But later he just set off to the village with a lot of the good things she had bought with her money. I think she still loves him. In her heart she still thinks of him. And when she was young and she lived with our uncle in Kampala she was also busy with men. She was thrown out of their place because of that. She wasn’t very old, but she sat on the bed all day talking to the boy who worked in the house’. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘I have heard it’. ‘Maybe they are lying because they are embarrassed that they never sent her to school’.

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‘Yes, maybe’, she said, and yawned. ‘I just hope there is someone there to help her if she falls sick again’, I said, hoping that Suzy would confirm that she would be there. ‘She could take her children to their father’, she said instead, with the same air of indifference. ‘But she doesn’t know where Comfort’s father is’. ‘Yes, she does’. ‘But he went back to Kenya’. ‘Well, I don’t know where she got that story from. Comfort’s father is from Jinja. I know him. He looks exactly like Comfort, and when I lived with Kate, he often came to check on his son. But he is a drunkard. One of his wives is sick. She already has the signs: thin, rash, cough, running [straight] hair. You know, hair like yours’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘What happened, Kate? Why did you leave yesterday?’ ‘Suzy came to quarrel with me. Even before she had sat down, she had scolded me for not washing the pots properly. I didn’t want to listen to it’. ‘When you were really sick in 1999, you never told me about it. Why not?’ ‘I thought you knew. That you would understand’. ‘That I would understand?’ ‘Yes, when I wrote that I was really sick, then I thought you understood that I feared AIDS’. I looked for her letter in the computer while we talked. I was curious to see what she had actually written back then. ‘Do you still have it?’ ‘Yes, I have it at home, but I also typed it, so I also have it in the computer. Look here is one from that year. But you don’t write much about your illness’. ‘Maybe I wrote it in one of the ones that you never received’. ‘What would happen if you told people that you are HIV positive? Would it be bad to say to them: “Yes, you are right. I have AIDS”?’ ‘ Not that they will do evil things. They just want to talk. Gossip about me. When you pass by, they will say to each other: “That one, she is going to die soon, she is sick, she is in TASO”, and things like that. It makes me sad to think that people are going to talk about me like that. Because

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I didn’t do it on purpose. It just happened without me knowing it. At least, I don’t want Suzy to know. It is like I can’t trust her anymore. She may even try to remove my children from my father’s home because she doesn’t think I appreciate what he does for them. But my sister Jane is good to me. She says I shouldn’t worry, and that if I trust God, he will take care of me’. ‘Did you tell her that you feared you had AIDS?’ ‘No, we were not talking about me having the disease. We just talked about Suzy’s behaviour and then she comforted me like that’. I would have liked to ask her who Comfort’s father was. But I couldn’t bring myself to do so, because she had told me so many times already. I decided to reveal something else from my conversation with Suzy instead: ‘Kate, I think I have to tell you that Suzy asked me if I knew you were sick. But I said I didn’t know anything about it’. ‘But why is that so important to her?’ she asked, aghast. ‘She didn’t talk badly about you’, I continued, trying to convince myself that this had indeed not been Suzy’s intention. ‘She said she was worried and wanted to know whether you had told me about your problems’. ‘But why? How? Why does she say I am sick? Has she been to the hospital with me or seen that I had a test done? Does she want me to die? Is that why?’ ‘No, she didn’t say she knew it. She just said she was worried. And then I said that I hoped that there were people there who would take care of you if you fell sick again’. Kate cried. ‘I think she told you so because she reckons that if you know I am sick, then you will give her all those things that you normally give to me’. ‘Well, but then she is wrong, isn’t she? I have never helped you as much before as I do now’. Kate gave me an I-am-not-convinced humph. ‘That is why I am so scared that she may see my papers from the test and from TASO. I don’t care what she says as long as she hasn’t seen the papers’. ‘But Kate, I don’t get it? What will happen if she sees them? She obviously knows already’. No answer. She didn’t know how to explain it to me.

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‘Maybe Suzy thinks that if somebody is ill, then that person is useless and nobody will want to help her’. ‘Kate, have you ever been afraid I would reject you? Was that why you didn’t tell me properly about your sickness in 1999?’ ‘No, it wasn’t. I am not afraid of you. Maybe just shy. I easily get shy when you ask me about my problems. But if you knew how people talk. My cousin, for example, when she heard that you had returned, she said that I should tell you that I would like to go to Europe with you. Then I just told her that it was kind of hard to be allowed to go to Europe. It costs a lot of money. And then you need a passport and a birth certificate. But I don’t have any. My mom didn’t keep it. She says the white ants ate it’. ‘Are people very jealous that we are friends?’ ‘Yes! Haven’t you noticed? My cousin, who also lives with my uncle, she hasn’t even greeted you yet since you arrived’. ‘No, I haven’t thought about it’. I wasn’t even sure who she was referring to. ‘She was really jealous when she saw all the things your mother gave me. The shampoo, the lotion, the necklace. But the other cousin, Uncle Peter’s daughter, she was there too when I showed them the things, and she admired them and said: “That must be a very good shampoo. The smell is so nice. And the necklace is so beautiful. You can use it for parties. They must really love you.” That was how she spoke. She is a good girl. She has always been a good girl. She and her siblings were also the only ones who came to see Nelly’s grave after the funeral. But my other cousin brothers and cousin sisters get really jealous. Are people also like that in Europe?’ Her question was difficult for me to answer. Half a bottle of shampoo and some lotion from the local supermarket in Denmark would not make them jealous, or acquisitive. But when it comes to antiretroviral treatment for Africans, then they are no longer sure that they have anything to spare. ∗ ∗ ∗ Did I lie to Suzy? Did Kate? Kate had known for a long time that she was ill—without being sure. So had everybody else. But you may very well know that you are HIV-positive and not want anybody else to know. And your relatives may very well know and not want to tell you that they know. Not only did Kate know that the others knew. They had even talked

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about it—without saying it. I had to play along in this game of mutual deception. We were all implicated in deceiving each other, in keeping unsaid something that everybody seemed to already know: that she was dying. But we were not lying. We were making room for stories that made it possible for her to continue living. Kate ‘tightened her heart’ and faced death, but she also continued to live.4 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘They say that when you have just been told the result of your test, then you are very worried’, explained Kate, ‘but after maybe a month, then you stop thinking so much about it’. ‘Who says that?’ ‘People at the AIDS Information Centre. And those in TASO. They say that instead of thinking about it, you should eat well and make sure you get treatment when you have symptoms. And didn’t you notice how happy and healthy they all looked? There was nothing to be seen on their body’. We were looking at her collection of personal photos. The ones I had sent over the years made up a considerable part of it, but they were not the only ones. It was affordable to have a photo taken now and then by one of the photographers who walked around with a camera and charged a few hundred shillings for a photo. There were pictures of Kate’s youth in Kakira, always in smart clothes and with stylish hair. Pictures of the life she dreamed of living. One picture was of particular importance to her. It was from 1999 and showed a skinny Kate with arms and legs thin as sticks, but elegant as always. On the back of the photo she had written: ‘The day I will never forget’. ‘When I am sick and scared, I look at that picture and remind myself that you can be so thin that you are almost dead, and yet you can still return to life’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Before going for the test, I had repeatedly asked her why she wanted to know. Why she couldn’t just continue living without proof that life was soon to be over. ‘Then at least I know’, she had said, and left me puzzled. And now that she knew, she tried so hard to hide from others what she knew. TASO was perhaps one of the reasons that she had wanted

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to know. Without a paper showing you are HIV-positive, you will not get any support from TASO. But TASO wasn’t the whole answer. ‘Yes, I am afraid to die’, she explained. ‘But death is there for everybody. It is only because I did the test that I know that my time is approaching. We all know that we will die one day. But if you know the time of your death, then maybe you can run away from it. If someone tells you that you will die in a traffic accident on Jinja Road the next day, then you can stay away from Jinja Road that day. I don’t know the exact moment that I will die, but I know it is near. Now that I know, it feels as if I can run away’. Kate had chosen to face death. Knowing her status made her feel free to act, to plan, to fight, to win time. She told me so through shrewd tears: ‘Of course, I know that I cannot stop death, but I can escape it for a while. I can plan for my own life and for my sons. And I can now tell you all the words in my head so you can write a book about me’. She had confided in me for years, knowing that I was not part and parcel of local quarrels and rivalries, and that I would leave with the stories she told me. But she now asked me to write a book about all that which she carefully hid from others, so that people would know that Kate Abbo had been there. Knowing that she was dying made it possible for her to continue living—at least as long as her death was implicit. The need for secrecy was not a refusal to know or to acknowledge death, but a shared illusion. We were all imagining that together we could make life continue; if not win over death, then at least postpone it. The prospect of a book about her, TASO, the photo of skinny Kate and the freedom that came with knowing—all those things gave her a sense of still being alive. Kate knew that a microscope had detected the physical existence of a virus in her blood, but she didn’t want people to know she knew. She wished her relatives would respect the order of secrecy and behave as if she were still alive. That they would be there for her and care for her until the end. She did not want to die ‘poor’, as Nelly did. ∗ ∗ ∗ She wanted only one person in the family to know: Peter. He was Kate’s uncle and the one who for years had helped her, her sisters and her mother more than anyone else. She thought it would be a good idea to let him know that in the years to come she may need even more help. Besides,

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she knew I was close to him. He knew my world and I knew his. He was able to step back and take a look at his own family and Padhola culture and therefore to help me understand it. Kate now gave me the task to inform him that she was dying. I didn’t really mind. That is what I remember. But it says in my notes that I was nervous. It also says that I immediately started explaining to him that I didn’t ask him to take on more responsibility than he already had, but I needed his advice on how I could help her. The issue was not only my friendship with Kate, I said. It was also a question of research ethics. My involvement had resulted in her test and I couldn’t just leave her to die. ‘But to what extent can you help her?’ He asked me. I had a knot in my stomach and hesitated to answer. He had a far more realistic picture of my financial situation than Kate and everyone else in the family. My situation was similar to his, with one big difference: my clan name was not a real clan name. I was a travelling anthropologist who did not have to share my wealth with a clan back home. ‘You see’, he said. ‘Now that I know she knows, I feel obligated to help her. But do you realize how much of my income I would have to spend if we started treatment for her – and how many in the family that need this treatment? Do you have any idea what an awfully difficult situation you have put us in, first by letting her test, and secondly by telling me about it?’ ‘Well, that is not what this is about’, I hastened to say. I had not thought of committing myself to antiretroviral treatment either when I agreed to help her with the test. It wasn’t realistic. Not quite. A few months ago, we would not have had to worry about it at all. None of us had 1000 USD a month to spare. But the price plummeted. It had become something to consider. If not tonight, then soon. ‘But yes, that is exactly what it is about’, he interjected. ‘Of course, I’ve known for a long time, without knowing for sure. But now she knows that I know. And one day she will also know about antiretroviral treatment’. ‘I haven’t told anybody else’, I tried. ‘And I promise not to tell anybody’. ‘But the dilemma is still there’, he said, looking down. Looking gloomy. ‘Because now I know’. And he also knew that I would have to tell Kate that I had told him. ‘What did he say?’ Kate asked. ‘He did not want to know’, I answered. He had helped me get a foothold in Uganda. Now I felt the rug being pulled out from under my feet. That I had failed his confidence. That I

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had broken the fragile order of secrecy. I had failed to understand that it was the one that kept people alive and families together. I realized now how many times he had told me that he knew. Without saying it—and without my hearing it. He had taken me to an Indian restaurant a couple of years ago and had told me that night that he had sent Kate to the village because she was so ill that he did not know what else to do. But she had recovered and sat in his annexe and waited for me. I recalled the blooming backyard of the restaurant, eating spicy food and drinking cold Nile Special in the warm darkness. I remembered that he had said it, but also that I did not hear it. Like I didn’t hear it when other people, including Kate herself, had told me, without saying it—even though one of the first things I learnt in Uganda was that the truth can hurt. That it needs to be revealed slowly, bit by bit. And that you talk about somebody with AIDS without saying it. You respect the order of secrecy and thereby you help people stay alive, even if they are doomed. I had known these things for a long time, but not understood them. Now the involvement of the anthropologist, the test, and the arrival of antiretroviral treatment had made her death explicit. Breaking down the order of secrecy had consequences, and they had worsened in the space between availability and accessibility of antiretroviral treatment.5 Her relatives had to prioritize, help some and not others. They had to choose between life and death and the many different needs of family members.6

Notes 1. Susan Reynolds Whyte, Michael A. Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Betty Kyaddondo, “Treating AIDS: Dilemmas of Unequal Access in Uganda,” Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS 1, no. 1 (2004): 14–26. 2. Ugandan children often spend (parts of) their childhood in foster care with relatives, but the AIDS epidemic resulted in large numbers of AIDS orphans and put severe strains on family networks. AIDS orphans have been the cause of major concern since the early days of the epidemic, see e.g. Susan Hunter, “Orphans as a Window on the AIDS Epidemic in SubSaharan Africa: Initial Results and Implications of a Study in Uganda,” Social Science and Medicine 31, no. 6 (1990): 681–690; Jayati Ghosh and Ezekiel Kalipeni, “Rising Tide of AIDS Orphans in Southern Africa, in HIV & AIDS in Africa. Beyond Epidemiology, ed. Ezekiel Kalipeni, Susan Craddock, Joseph R. Oppong, and Jayati Ghosh (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 304–315; and Angelika Wolf, “Orphans’ Ties:

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Belonging and Relatedness in Child-Headed Households in Malawi,” in Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, ed. Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig (New York: Berghanh, 2010), 292–311. The experience of orphans, street children, foster parents and grandparents are also presented in Emma Guest, Children of AIDS: Africa’s Orphan Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2001). 3. The AIDS Support Organization (TASO) was founded in 1987 and is one of the best-known patient organizations in Africa. It has provided care, support and counselling to people diagnosed with AIDS since the late 1980s, and since 2004 it has also offered ART to its members. One of the co-founders, Noerine Kaleeba, has written about the loss of her own husband to AIDS and the founding of TASO, see Noerine Kaleeba and Sunanda Ray, “We Miss you All. Noerine Kaleeba: AIDS in the Family,” Reproductive Health Matters 11, no. 22 (2003):187–191. 4. For a discussion of mutual deceptions as part of social life, see Houseman, “Dissimulation and Simulation,” Social Anthropology 10, 77–89. Houseman discusses initiation rites in Central Africa where both men and women are implicated in deceiving the other, thereby making the event highly ambiguous and placing everybody in a reflective and questioning state of mind, which far from undermining the significance of the situation provides the condition for the production of shared meaning. Kirsten Hastrup, Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004) discusses illusion as a precondition for any human action and interaction. Without some kind of social agreement about the conventions within which we act, our actions would be meaningless. To maintain social order, we therefore have to continuously invest ourselves in the recreation of an illusion that we share a frame of action. Inspired by Houseman and Hastrup we could say that Kate and her relatives invested themselves in the illusion that her life had not yet come to an end though their mutual deception of each other. 5. We live in an era of therapeutic common sense where secrecy is typically a pejorative notion, generally undesirable, psychologically, if not socially harmful. This understanding informs most interventions in public health, particularly those surrounding HIV/AIDS. Secrecy is framed as complicity with the stigmatisation and shaming that inflicts social death on people living with HIV. For a discussion of this, see Anita Hardon and Deborah Posel, “Secrecy as Embodied Practice: Beyond the Confessional Imperative,” Culture, Health and Sexuality 14, supp. 1 (2012), 1–2. Inspired by Houseman, “Dissimulation and Simulation,” Social Anthropology, 77– 89, and Georg Simmel’s work on secrecy, I use the story about Kate and her relatives to add nuance to the simplified understanding of secrecy and disclosure in public health discourse. As Simmel has shown, secrecy is an

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inherent part of social life. Social relationships develop upon the basis of reciprocal knowledge, but this knowledge is characterized by limitations and distortions. Social relations also presuppose a certain ignorance and a measure of mutual concealment and in any social situation there is a need for discretion and respect for the sphere around individuals and groups, which delimits what is revealed and what is concealed. Lying is but one of a number of possible means to restrict one person’s knowledge of another, the most common of which are secrecy and concealment. For the sake of the interaction, we agree that ‘what is not concealed may be known’ and ‘what is not revealed must not be known’. Simmel further adds that all of human intercourse rests on the fact that everyone knows somewhat more about the other, than the other voluntarily reveals to him, see Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society,” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 308– 309, 316, 321, 323. Disclosure, therefore, of e.g. one’s HIV status is never a question of either or. It is a social process. That which is disclosed, to whom, when and with what purpose and with what consequences for the relationship changes other time. 6. Hanne O. Mogensen, “Surviving AIDS? The Uncertainty of Antiretroviral Treatment,” in Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives, ed. Liv Haram and C. Bawa Yamba (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2009), 179–193; and Hanne O. Mogensen, “New Hopes and New Dilemmas. Disclosure and Recognition in the Time of Antiretroviral Treatment,” in Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, ed. Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 61–79.

References Ghosh, Jayati and Ezekiel Kalipeni. “Rising Tide of AIDS Orphans in Southern Africa.” In HIV & AIDS in Africa: Beyond Epidemiology, edited by Ezekiel Kalipeni, Susan Craddock, Joseph R. Oppong, and Jayati Ghosh, 304–315. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Guest, Emma. Children of AIDS: Africa’s Orphan Crisis. London: Pluto Press, 2001. Hardon, Anita and Deborah Posel. “Secrecy as Embodied Practice: Beyond the Confessional Imperative.” Culture, Health and Sexuality 14, supp. 1 (2012): 1–13. Hastrup, Kirsten. Action: Anthropology in the Company of Shakespeare. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004. Houseman, Michael. “Dissimulation and Simulation as Forms of Religious Reflexivity.” Social Anthropology 10, no. 1 (2002): 77–89.

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Hunter, Susan. “Orphans as a Window on the AIDS Epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa: Initial Results and Implications of a Study in Uganda.” Social Science and Medicine 31, no. 6 (1990): 681–690. Kaleeba, Noerine and Sunanda Ray. “We Miss You All. Noerine Kaleeba: AIDS in the Family.” Reproductive Health Matters 11, no. 22 (2003):187–191. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Surviving AIDS? The Uncertainty of Antiretroviral Treatment.” In Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives, edited by Liv Haram and C. Bawa Yamba, 179–193. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2009. Mogensen, Hanne O. “New Hopes and New Dilemmas: Disclosure and Recognition in the Time of Antiretroviral Treatment.” In Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, 61–79. New York: Berghahn, 2010. Simmel, Georg. “The Secret and the Secret Society.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. H. Wolff, 307–376. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Michael A. Whyte, Lotte Meinert, and Betty Kyaddondo. “Treating AIDS: Dilemmas of Unequal Access in Uganda.” Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS 1, no. 1 (2004): 14–26. Wolf, Angelika. “Orphans’ Ties: Belonging and Relatedness in Child-Headed Households in Malawi.” In Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, 292–311. New York: Berghanh, 2010.

CHAPTER 12

Shifting Secrets

I heard the first crash before entering the shower. The sky was blue. While in the shower, it dawned on me that it couldn’t have been thunder, and then came the second crash. It was overcast when I left the house to head north to the university where I was going to spend the next year. Ashes and debris fell on New York. I went back, put on Philly Bongolay Lutaaya’s song about being alone and scared. Later I started transcribing interviews. I spent all day listening to Kate’s voice. The entire world was bewildered by the attack on the Twin Towers. I was in a state of shock over the ability of one person to step out of the statistics and tell me a story that numbers would never be able to. Hours of recorded interviews turned into hundreds of typed pages during the months when Manhattan and the rest of the world mourned the Twin Towers and the world order it used to know. Ashes from the Twin Towers also fell on Kate and the millions of other AIDS patients whom her voice brought to life. The first letter arrived in November 2001, almost three months after I left Uganda. It contained 23 densely covered sheets, which had been written in the course of three months. And others followed suit. ∗ ∗ ∗

© The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_12

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‘My dearest mother Aketcha, Before I go any further with my many words, I will first send you all my warmest greetings and ask how are you and my beloved Danish grandmother doing? And the rest of the family, and all those who haven’t even met me? I hope you are all well. And dear mother, here in Uganda, I’m ok, because I haven’t really been sick yet. The only problem I have is the one that only you and I know about. It troubles my heart and there is nothing I can do to make it go away. But I think there is now some change in me. I still have a lot of worries, but not as much as when you had just left. I think of that day at the airport and how sad we both were. We looked at each other as if we already missed each other. I did not want to look into your eyes, because my tears were very near and I did not know how to control them. People must have wondered what was wrong with me. I kept looking in the direction where you had gone, but you were nowhere to be seen. As I walked down the stairs to look for a matatu, I discovered that it was only half past five in the morning. But I was lucky because there was a car which had ‘Monitor’ written on it, you know, the newspaper. A woman stopped it and said she was going to Entebbe and that I was going to Kampala, and he agreed to take us. The woman got off in Entebbe, just near the hotel where we spent our nice time together. After she got off, I got worried, because it was still dark and I was alone with the driver. He drove very fast and stopped at all the small markets on the way and sometimes he would go far away from the main road. I felt the fear in my heart and told him to open the door so I could get out and wait for him outside. But he said I should not be afraid and that he was not a bad person, but that he was just delivering newspapers to those who sell them. Can you imagine what I feared? I thought he might rape me, because there are many who do that. It was a strange experience. Even though I’m sick, I still have to take care of my life. In fact, even more than before. Then he branched from Entebbe road and went very far into the country. I even wanted to scream for help. We reached a small house where a police officer asked why he gave him so few newspapers, and the driver replied that it was all that he had been given today. After that my mind settled down and I stopped fearing him. Then he started picking up other people and the car ended up being completely full. He only asked for 1500 shillings (1.5 USD), both from me and from those who had not been in the car for as long as I had. So he was not a bad man at all.

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I reached Kampala when it was still dark, but that was only good, because I wanted to go to TASO early. I was so happy because I was the first one to arrive. I reached when the gate was not even open yet. I waited for almost three hours before other people turned up. It was very cold and I fell asleep outside the gate. When they started writing our names, they wrote them according to the time we had arrived, and I was so happy that I would be the first one to be seen by the doctor and that I could then go back and cook in time for the roadworkers to have lunch. But I could not make things happen the way I wished. I was one of the last ones to be considered because they first took those who had already been there before and then those who knew someone working there. Those of us who were new just sat and waited all day, from half past six in the morning, until half past seven in the evening, very tired and so hungry. It made me so sad and full of thoughts, almost crying. But though I was not happy, I thank God that I was lucky to have a very beautiful notebook in the bag that you had given me. I didn’t know it was in the bag. When he asked me, ‘Did you come with a book?’ I just opened my nice bag hoping I had a piece of paper in it, but then I was really surprised to see a very nice exercise book inside the bag. I was so proud that as a newcomer I did not have to disturb the doctor. And I could even have missed seeing the doctor because of that. He would have sent me outside to go looking for a book and then I would have missed my place in the line. Those who could not afford a book were told to come back another day. I was lucky. I even got a very good counsellor. I have not talked so much with him yet and maybe he can change, but he was so kind. He asked about my life and whether I had kids, where they live, whether they go to school, and things like that. In addition, he gave me good advice on what to do so that I can still live for a long time. He told me to have a balanced diet, not have many different lovers and only have protected sex with someone I trust and who will agree to use a condom. He also talked about mosquitoes. Good for me that I have my beautiful blue mosquito net. I am so happy for it. More than anything else in my room. It makes the room look very smart, together with your mother’s blue towel and your blue bedsheets’. ∗ ∗ ∗ In the 1980s and 1990s the media described AIDS in Africa as a steppe fire out of control. Culture, traditions and lack of education were used to explain the haste with which the virus spread. We now know that

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the reasons for the rapid spread of HIV in Africa were poverty, political unrest and war, as well as poorly functioning health care systems, including inadequate treatment of venereal diseases, and hence lesions on the genitals, which increase the likelihood of HIV transmission through sexual intercourse. One of the first countries to be severely hit by AIDS was Uganda. Thanks to President Museveni’s openness and efforts to combat AIDS, Uganda was also one of the first countries that became known for its AIDS epidemic in the rest of the world. The number of people infected has never been easy to obtain. Some studies showed that around 12% of the sexually active population was infected in the early 1990s, and that half a million Ugandans were living with HIV, by then. Studies have also shown that the infection rate fell and was down to 7–8% around the turn of the millennium. But the reliability of both the early and the later numbers is questionable. In reality, it is not known how bad it was and what may have made the numbers fall. What we do know is that the only thing you could do in those years was to inform about AIDS, prevent transmission of the virus, and provide care for those who were sick and dying. Large-scale prevention campaigns were launched in Uganda in virtually every sector, including the health care system, the education system, religious organizations and the media. Billboards were raised in cities and along the roads, informing about the ‘ABC strategy’ (Abstain, Be Faithful, use Condoms), encouraging people to be open about their HIV status and avoid discriminating against those already infected. Condoms were made easily available as were instructions on how to use them. Children were taught about sex and AIDS in schools. Sex and gender relations were talked about in new ways. Prevention campaigns were pervasive and people were sick and dying. AIDS was part of everyday life. A premise of life. One more thing that made life precarious. Around the turn of the millennium, Ugandan newspapers started writing about the medicine that kept people with HIV alive for extended periods in Europe and the US. They also wrote about the many challenges involved in the treatment: it had many side effects, it had to be taken with extreme regularity, the viral load had to be measured regularly, which would be a major challenge in poorly functioning health care systems. Antiretroviral therapy was not expected to be a quick or simple solution to the problem. But as the Ugandan newspaper, The New Vision, wrote in 2000, ‘they are an important opportunity for people who are

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sufficiently educated and disciplined to use them’. African AIDS patients were generally considered too poor and too ignorant to benefit from the treatment. Prices were high in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Only symbolic reductions were given in developing countries and as the article in The New Vision also stated, ‘The multinational drug companies that have discovered them have understandably wanted to keep the price up so that they can recover their investment in research’. But many African countries were in a state of emergency, as the newspaper also noted and, ‘antiretrovirals have to be made more accessible to people in developing countries and they have to be made more affordable. If the multinationals can’t do that, then the governments of developing countries have to take the law into their own hands’ (The New Vision, 2 November 2000).1 As early as 1997, the South African government allowed the import of affordable generic antiretrovirals from India. A lawsuit against the government was launched by 39 drug companies, which however dropped the case in 2001 in response to resounding global denunciation of the lawsuit. The head of the South African AIDS organization, Treatment Action Campaign, Zackie Achmat, made the following statement when it was announced that the case had been dropped: ‘This is a real triumph of David over Goliath, not only for us here in South Africa, but for people in many other developing countries who are struggling for access to health care’ (BBC News, 19 April 2001).2 Doctors Without Borders wrote on their website on 19 April 2001: ‘The outcome of the case signals a dramatic shift in the balance of power between developing countries and drug companies. It also sends a clear message to the African heads of state, who are meeting next week at the Special Summit of the Organization of African Unity on HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and other Related Infectious Diseases in Africa, that lives should and can take precedence over patents’.3 AIDS activists had won an important victory. But drug companies and governments still had a long way to go before the medicine would reach all those who needed it. Meanwhile, AIDS patients had to settle for the little care that organizations like TASO could give them. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Suzy has left and I am alone cooking for the road workers. She was told to leave as the time of her birth approached. I went back to TASO again after two weeks, but I do not understand their bad habit of not seeing

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people in order. I wonder whether some pay more than others. Usually we pay 500 shillings (50 cents) each time we go there. I always try to arrive as early as possible so I can go home and cook for the roadworkers, but it doesn’t matter how early I get there. I am never the first one to be seen […] I told the doctor about the rash on my face, but he said he had no medicine for it. He advised me to use boiled water with salt to cleanse my face and then he gave me the same tablets as the ones you bought for me in a large white container. Multivitamin they are called. Also, there are still very many left of those you gave me. I will use the ones from TASO first. I don’t want to finish the ones you gave me very fast, because each time I take one of them I am being reminded of your care for me […] Once, I left for TASO after I had already made breakfast for the roadworkers. I had started getting sick, on and off. I felt pain in my body and I could vomit every morning after eating. My heart beat hard and I had so much headache that at times I would be pacing the room and howling at night. But dear mother, do not get too worried when reading this. I wasn’t so seriously ill that I had to stay in bed. On the way to TASO it started raining. I ran as fast as I could, but the rain was heavy and I got all wet. When I reached it was already late, the queue was long and I froze. They said I had come too late to see my counsellor. I insisted and then they allowed me to see him anyway. But it was as if he could not recognize me at all or was in a hurry. Then I wanted to see the doctor, but they just gave me the 500 shillings back, because it was too late to see the doctor that day. Just imagine. After being soaked by the rain and waiting for hours and then you are told to come back the next day. I was so sad. I went back with tears. And I was thinking of not going back there ever again. But I know that I am the one with problems and that I need help so I should not give up. I have to struggle and do what I have to do so that I live as long as possible […] I promise to keep writing to you about all the treatment I receive so that you can keep up with my problems. I’m sorry it took so long to send this letter, but it is because I want you to know it all, and it feels like there is always more to write before I can send it. I also want you to know that I think of you every single day. In fact, every minute. So don’t be afraid that I will stop writing. There is nothing that can hold me back because I am still strong and you have given me many envelopes with stamps on […]’.4 ∗ ∗ ∗

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Not everybody believed that antiretroviral treatment was a good idea in developing countries. Leading economists within UNAIDS warned that treatment was far from the optimal solution to the AIDS epidemic, and that a focus on treatment risked the channelling of money away from prevention. Concerns were raised that African health care systems would not be able to provide such treatment at all. It would require not only affordable medicine, but also a massive expansion and improvement of health care systems. Successful treatment of AIDS requires a wellfunctioning health care system, well-trained health care professionals and educated, well-motivated patients. And all of this was said to be lacking in many African countries that had very little or no experience with the treatment of long-term or chronic illness. A child dies from malaria every other minute. The cure for malaria takes three days, but African health care systems cannot even handle that. How then, physicians working with international health asked, should they be able to provide a complicated antiretroviral therapy for the rest of a patient’s life? Some would argue that it was unethical to pretend it could be done.5 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘I went to TASO again. It was only the second time that I managed to see the doctor and get treatment. I got some tablets in a long plastic bottle. They are so big that you cannot swallow them, but when you put them in a glass of clean water, then the water starts boiling like if something is on fire. Then it keeps boiling until the tablet is very small and comes to the top of the glass and then it is over and I drink the water which is now orange in colour. This time he also gave me a tube with some ointment for my rash. Not for my face. But for my private parts where I also have a rash. I have no idea what to do about my face. The doctor was really good and spoke nicely and caringly to me. Unfortunately, I did not see my counsellor. Maybe he will be there next time […] I sometimes get worried when I see all those who are really sick at TASO. If you look them in the eyes, they look angry. And I just hope that I will never be like that. I think it is because they are in so much pain that they become envious of those who are in less pain. Sometimes I also see people who make it easier for me to tighten my heart. There are some who do not look sick at all, and there was someone who told me that she had been a member of TASO since 1992 and was still doing well. So, I think it is better if I let go of the bad thoughts. That was also what the

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doctor said. That maybe my many thoughts had brought the headache. And he is right. I am not good at controlling them. But everything has a beginning and an end. Even life ends at some point, so dear mother, just pray to God to help me so that my thoughts do not cut down on the number of days that I am allowed to be here […] I am so incredibly happy about the book from the bank that you got me. When I went to the bank to pick it up, it was there, fully prepared and waiting for me. A nice red book with my passport photo and a bank stamp in it. I love that book so much. Like I love you and my children. It is as if it is a part of my life now, just like you and my kids. They put it in an envelope with ‘Post Bank Uganda’ written on it. But I was afraid of thieves when I walked out of the bank, so I held it tightly so that no one could see what was written on the envelope. I was a little shocked to see that they had removed 5000 shillings (5 USD) from my account. Maybe some kind of fee to get the book or what? That was probably what it was […] Suzy now rents a house on Luzira Road. She has not given birth yet, but it must be just about to happen. She has a small stall where she sells tomatoes and other small items from the money her aunt gave her when she stopped cooking for the workers and moved away from the shop. She has also bought a mattress and some items for the baby, and she has picked up a girl from the village who can help her when the baby arrives. I haven’t been to see my sons yet. It is bad enough that I am away for a whole day and cannot cook for the workers every time I go to TASO. And I will not start spending my money in the bank for transport until I know what to live on when I can no longer cook for the roadworkers. But I hope I can go and see my sons in November, and then I will take Okoth to his grandfather (father’s father) and bring Comfort to Kampala with me […] I was again told that Comfort is sick. Suzy said so, but I don’t know if it is true or if it is just a way of saying that I should send money to them. In any case, I really miss my boys. When I see other mothers with their children, I get really upset from missing them. I would like Comfort to be with me even though life is hard for me here in Kampala. I am in TASO and getting help, but he gets nothing. It is as if I am punishing the poor little boy. As if I don’t love him and that I don’t care about him, though it is probably my fault if he is sick. I want so much to show him how sorry I am […]

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Well, but dear mother, the only problem I have is the boys. If I cannot find a solution for them now, what do I do when I get even weaker and sicker? I wish I could live long and watch my kids grow up and go to school. I wish they could be with me so that I show them that I love them before I die. I wish I could be with you until I die so that I would not have to have all those thoughts inside my head all the time. I really miss you. Since you left, I haven’t talked to anyone about my situation. The uncles haven’t even asked me how I am doing. Maybe they are scared to make me sad. But it still makes me feel like no one cares about me. Dear mother, do you think I should tell my father about my sickness when I go looking for the boys? Would it be okay? I don’t think he is going to say it to anybody. He has heard people say for a long time that both Nelly and I were sick, so it may not be so new to him. I know he is poor, but he can help me in other ways. Give me good advice and help me plan for the future. I cannot say my future, of course, but the children’s future. Okoth’s at least […] Again, dear mother, sorry it takes me so long to send this letter. It is just that I wanted to see if there were any major changes in my life before I sent it. I was hoping I could write that I had found a place to live and other good things about my life so you wouldn’t have to worry about me. I would have liked to be able to tell you something other than just bad things […]’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Prevention is cheap, compared to treatment, ‘but what is the cost of focusing solely on prevention?’ asks physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer in the preface to his book, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. The global era has made it increasingly difficult to live in ignorance of the suffering of others. This has not, however, led to a more just distribution of the fruits of science and technology he continues. He tries to infuse new life into the health-care-for-all movement that ran out of steam as the new millennium approached.6 We cannot meet the highest standards of health care in every situation, he also states in one of his publications, but it is an excellent idea to try to do so, not because it is cost-effective, but because it is the right thing to do. The human rights thing to do.7

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Antiretroviral treatment improved considerably around the turn of the century. More and more people survived for longer and longer periods. Medicine poured into black and less black markets and found its way to those in poor countries who could raise money or who had contacts in Western countries. Meanwhile, battles were fought on the global stage to get the medicine to those with few means. Some would still argue that it was a mistake to embark on costly and lifelong treatment for millions of people and that prevention is a much better investment than is treatment. Concerns were raised that people living with HIV would return to sexually active lives and increase the spread of the infection, that poorly functioning health care systems could not be expected to monitor the treatment properly, and as a result, resistance was likely to develop. There were still drug companies threatening to prosecute governments buying affordable generic drugs.8 But activists in wealthy as well as less wealthy parts of the world demanded health and justice for all. Non-governmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders set out to prove that it was possible to provide affordable antiretroviral treatment in health care systems with few resources. And prices continued to drop. Antiretroviral treatment became increasingly available, but for the vast majority it was still inaccessible. In the space between availability and accessibility, negotiations took place over life and death, hope and disappointment, sorrow and bitterness. Few had given the kind of dilemmas that Kate’s uncles faced any thought: how should they prioritize between their relatives? How should they decide who should live and who should die and whether it would be better to send the children to school than to save their parents? ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Before I finish this letter, let me just make you laugh. You should have seen people when I received the letter from you with all the photos. Everyone was so envious. My aunt’s brother who works in the shop went and told everyone that I had received a thick envelope full of money from Denmark and he wanted me to open it immediately so everyone could see it. The girl working in uncle’s house came with it in the morning, when people were still having breakfast. I was so proud of it, and everyone sat

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looking at me, admiring me, waiting for me to open it and see if it was from my muzungu friend. Even before I had fully opened it, my eyes fell on a beautiful, beautiful card. And all the pictures were so lovely, especially the one with my boyfriend and Suzy and me the day we served lunch for you. I have missed him so much since he went back to school. Now, at least I have a picture of him. I also showed them the picture of the two of us at the hotel in Entebbe. No one knew where it was, so I just said it was in Nairobi, to tease them. No one objected to it. When they saw the picture of me and your mother they all asked me how I had come to know those bazungu. Then I proudly said that you are part of the family. That you are my mother’s sister. Then they asked me why you didn’t come and fetch me. I told them that you were thinking of doing so in 2003. Thank you so much for it all. My room is so smart. Every day I enjoy my blue mosquito net, my blue towel, my blue sheets, my green blanket and my backpack. Thanks for all the lovely things you have given me. Dear mother, sorry for all the mistakes in the letter. I have been writing this letter for a long time and once I get started, I cannot stop again. Thanks for the money you sent with your friend. I will take it to the bank right away, because I still haven’t decided what to use it for. Maybe I will use some of it on medication, because the itching and rash between the legs gets worse and worse. I have to stop here, but you just have to know that Suzy gave birth last week, a small boy. They are doing well. I’ll probably write again soon. To my beloved mother from your daughter, Kate’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Before 2005, product patent for drugs could not be granted in India, only process patents. Indian drug companies had therefore started developing and producing generics early on. In August 2003, after a year and a half of difficult negotiations, Indian drug companies obtained an agreement with the World Trade Organization, which authorized them to export generic antiretrovirals. Multinational drug companies had to follow suit and started lowering their prices in the course of 2003. In November 2003, The New Vision announced that prices for antiretroviral treatment were expected to fall to about 30 USD per month due to an agreement

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between Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and four drug companies. ‘However, a lot of preparation is required to ensure that Ugandans benefit greatly from these developments. Awareness needs to be raised in both rural and urban areas, about what ARVs can achieve, and their limitations […] Above all, Ugandans need to remain on guard and protect themselves against HIV infection despite the availability of ARVs. These drugs do not cure AIDS, but prolong life’ (The New Vision, 2 November 2003).9 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Dear beloved mother, First, let me thank you for everything you have done. I pray that you are well, and that you had a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year. I was planning to celebrate Christmas together with my sons at my father’s place, but I wasn’t paid any salary for months so I had nothing for the transport. The owner of the shop said I could just go to the bank and withdraw money from there. I don’t even know how she knows that I have a bank account. But my money in the bank has to be used to start a business when the work of cooking stops. I was sad and thought that I was now going to spend Christmas alone, but fortunately my sister Jane came and asked me if I could go and check on mum for Christmas. She had bought something that she wanted to give mum and the kids. She even gave me money for transport. So you can probably see that it was very nice for me, even though I was sick […] I even managed to make a quick stop in Saya to look for Sally and give her some small Christmas presents […] When I came back, I went to the bank anyway, because I missed my boys so much that I had to go and see them. I celebrated New Year’s Eve with them, but it was really hard to listen to all the words that came from my stepmother about me not sending any assistance to my children. The other kids looked happy and healthy, but Comfort was thin and had long hair. Okoth had a wound on his leg. The leg that was broken years back. It made me worried, because the doctors had said then that he should take good care of that leg, and that next time they may not be able to save it. Okoth said the wound came from looking for firewood, but Comfort said the other children were throwing stones at him. I don’t know what to believe, but it is also because my dad is a hardworking man, going in the bush for firewood, going for water, going digging with his

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wife so that there is enough food. So, he is not at home so much to keep an eye on them […] When I told my dad that I wanted to take both of the boys with me, he got very upset. He thought I was just going to take Okoth to go and greet his grandfather, but when he saw that I wanted to go with both of them, he understood that maybe they were not coming back. I could see he was afraid that I thought he was treating my sons just as he treated me when I was little girl. I felt sorry for my father. All of his brothers are dead, and the sister whom he is very close to is sick and can die any time. Now I am also sick and taking his grandsons away from him […] They welcomed us in Okoth’s home. They were so happy to see their grown grandson after such a long time. That made me very happy. They haven’t heard from Okoth’s father since he left for South Africa when Okoth was only a few months old. I am so proud of Okoth and I was proud to show them his school report and that he is always number one in his class. Now he can speak and write some English. He could even read the card you had written to him and he showed it to his grandfather. I told them that I had brought Okoth so that he could be with them during the school holidays and get to know them and that I would pick him up again in February. Maybe his grandfather will then say that Okoth should stay with them, but I don’t know if I’m ready for that, because I would like to spend some more time with him myself. It would be so nice if he could stay with me until he finished primary school. Okoth has taken such good care of his younger brother. People told them I was sick and dying in Kampala. Comfort even came up to me and said: ‘Mum, is it true that we are sick, you and me?’ I asked him who had told him and he said it was his uncles and aunts, my stepmother’s kids. But, dear mother, I don’t care what they say about me having AIDS. It is the future of my boys, I think about. I can only pray to God that I can be allowed to live many years and that people will get tired of talking about my illness. When I got back to Kampala, there was a message that I should move out of the room behind the shop. The roadworkers are done repairing the road near there so there is no longer a lot of customers coming, and my aunt’s brother, who keeps the store in the front room, had moved into the backroom with his family while I was away. He said I could move to the house where he had been living with his wife for the past few months, but it costs 20,000 shillings a month, and now I no longer have a job. ‘You can go and get money from your muzungu friend’, he just said. I

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always knew they would send me away at some point, but the problem was that I didn’t know where to go. Luckily, my sister Jane suggested that we could rent a muzigo together. We paid two months of rent each, so now we have a place to stay for four months. It is a good place and I am not that sick anymore. So now I am happy. Comfort is with me. I haven’t had him tested for HIV yet, but I still have plans to do so. He has made a good friend, where we now live. He plays with him all the time. And mum, don’t worry that this sister, Jane, will start behaving like Suzy. She is a really good sister. I have never seen her behave badly or mock me. Maybe she will even be able to take care of my kids when I am not here anymore. She doesn’t even mind sharing a mattress with me. Maybe I’ll tell her about my problems one day, but not yet. There is no need for her to worry about me. Many greetings from my sister Jane, Comfort and Okoth, and also Suzy and her little son, whom I saw just before Christmas, and from me, your daughter Kate’. ∗ ∗ ∗ By 2002–2003, when Kate was writing this letter, around 10,000 people in Uganda were on antiretroviral treatment. The number increased rapidly in the course of 2003. By then, patients were told that they could expect to live an extra 10 years on antiretroviral treatment. But most of them never died. Today, you no longer die from being HIV-positive. In Uganda in 2003, most people paid for the medicine themselves. Some were lucky to have an employer who paid. Others got it for free as part of research programmes or projects testing procedures and infrastructure before embarking on larger roll-outs of treatment. Some NGOs had started providing free medication to a limited number of people, but it was unclear to people with HIV and their families what to do to be in the right place at the right time and become one of the lucky ones. At the end of 2003, UNAIDS suggested for the first time in its history that there was reason for slight optimism. An unprecedentedly high level of political commitment to AIDS treatment was in place in many African countries and the price of antiretroviral drugs had been reduced by 90 per cent. Several large donors were planning to allocate resources to pay for the medicine, and UNAIDS stated that it was now time to make a serious effort to prolong the lives of millions of mothers, fathers, workers and farmers affected by AIDS (UNAIDS 2003).10

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∗ ∗ ∗ October 2003 ‘Dear beloved mother Aketcha, It is your sad and worried daughter who writes to you after a long time. I send you many warm greetings. How are you feeling? How is your life? Here it is ok, but the problem is that I think of you all the time and am afraid that you have problems, forgot about me, or that something has gone wrong with the letters we send to each other. You do not usually take so long without writing to me. I remember writing that you should use Jane’s address, but she does not work for the same people anymore, so now I am afraid that your letters have never arrived. All this because I do not have anywhere to settle down but keep moving around. After I wrote to you last time, I got a new job with a headmaster’s family. But it only lasted until I got seriously ill again. I first went to the local clinic so that I did not have to spend the whole day going to TASO, but after five days the sickness got serious and then I decided to go to TASO. When I came back in the evening, the headmaster fired me on the spot. But I have to continue going to TASO. Even if it takes a long time there you always get some medicine to take back home with you. I hear that if you stop taking medicine, you will die fast. This time, they made me a little worried, because they told me I should stop working and make sure to relax. What if I am now so weak that I get sick every time I try to work? Dear mum, I have a question for you and now I am very direct. Don’t be too surprised. I know you have already had very many expenses on my life and health, but there is just one thing that I am interested in that can help me in very many ways. Sometimes I get sick and too weak to go to the hospital, and then it would be good if I could get the medication without going there. And it would also be good if I could call and check if Okoth is doing well. His grandfather has a mobile phone. And these pay phones, they are very expensive, so if I had my own mobile phone then I would take good care of it and not use it too much. It could also help me to ask questions on the radio on Tuesday when they broadcast this programme called “Capital Doctor” with a doctor from TASO or some other place who answers questions. It is in the evening from 8-10 pm and the whole country is listening to it. But I do not mind, because you can tell the doctor that you do not want your voice on the radio. You can

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ask them anything, and they also give advice on the new medication for people with HIV. They say it can make you live for a long time, but it is very expensive, and when you start on it, you have to take it the rest of life. If you stop it, then it will be your end. So it is probably only a good idea for people who can afford it. But it is a really good radio programme. Listening to it makes me feel better. It makes me want to be strong and live positively. But it is just that I have no way to talk to the people on the radio because I have no mobile phone. So dear mother, this is what I ask for, with respect and humility, maybe you could help me get a mobile phone. I can also contribute with some of the money in the bank. I have already used some of it to buy a small radio. Don’t think I’m wasting your money. It is for listening to health programmes. Now that is the only thing that matters in my life. I will be so very grateful if it is possible and I will love that phone so much for the rest of my life and take better care of it than anything else I have. Sincerely yours, from your daughter with many thoughts, Kate Abbo’ ∗ ∗ ∗ Medicine and information flow across borders, whether rich people want it to happen or not. Connections are made through mobile phones and other channels. Kate and Uganda had come closer to the rest of the world. ‘One day she will hear about antiretroviral medicine’, Peter had said. ‘But what if she finds out I can’t pay for it? What if her mother finds out?’ I had no answer. Two years had passed. AIDS used to be a death sentence. It no longer was. There was a time when secrets would keep you alive for some time. Now the medicine could keep you alive for even longer. Most people could not afford the medicine yet, but it was there and so were the hopes and dreams attached to it. The thought of what it would be like to be able to afford it. They were there. Also for those who did not have a mobile phone. I was in touch with some of Kate’s uncles about her condition and the development of prices for antiretroviral drugs. Around Christmas 2003, I was told that she was seriously ill and suggested that we start her on antiretroviral treatment. I would pay for the treatment but needed their help to get it started and to monitor it. I transferred the money, explained what it was for and lived in the spring of 2004 with the feeling that luckily

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the world is at times unpredictable. She had not, as we thought, been sentenced to death. Our long dark conversations were over. A new life was about to start. Not everybody did well on antiretroviral therapy, but many got a second chance of life. I did not hear from her, but trusted that she would write as soon as she had recovered and gotten used to the medication. I was aware of the many dilemmas that would arise. I was aware that not only antiretroviral drugs were needed, but also other kinds of treatment, blood tests, transport to the treatment site, food, a place to live. Furthermore, she could maybe start on the cheapest drug but would later have to move on to a more expensive treatment regimen. But nobody knew what would happen to the prices in the years to come. They continued to fall. Reservations had been put to shame by possibilities. Nobody needed to die from AIDS anymore. Not in Africa either.11 That year I was finally going to Uganda again, three years after I had last been there. In the country that I come from, where people had already stopped dying from AIDS, we have a crown prince who donates money to scientific expeditions, and I had been given some of that money to explore the social implications of antiretroviral treatment. He had invited me to his castle to receive the grant a few days after the whole country had celebrated his wedding. Mud huts and chambers hummed with hopes and dreams. Kate and the AIDS epidemic were entering a new era. I was on my way to Uganda to see Kate return to life and start a research project on antiretroviral treatment. I cycled back to the office with the envelope from the prince and turned on the computer. And then I read that Kate had passed away the day before.

Notes 1. New Vision, “AIDS Drugs Vital,” February 26, 2000. https://www. newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1018371/aids-drugs-vital (accessed February 26, 2020). 2. BBC News, Web site, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1285971.stm (accessed February 26, 2020). 3. Doctors Without Borders, Web site, https://www.doctorswithoutbord ers.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/drug-companies-south-africacapitulate-under-barrage-public-pressure (accessed February 26, 2020). 4. The role of support groups or ‘Post-Test Clubs’ like TASO have been widely discussed in relation to AIDS. The notion of ‘therapeutic citizenship’ was suggest by Vinh-Kim Nguyen, to call attention to the

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

relation between HIV-positive individuals and the wider national and international polities, see Vinh-Kim Nguyen, “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (London: Blackwell, 2004), 124–144. The notion of ‘therapeutic clientship’ was suggested by Susan Whyte et al. to refer to the links through which people connect to various programmes, see Susan Reynolds Whyte, Lotte Meinert and Jenipher Twebaze, “Clientship,” in Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, ed. Susan Reynolds Whyte (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 56–69. Support groups have played an important role for many patients and for AIDS activism in the global north as well as in the south, but what we learn from Kate’s story is that even though membership of TASO was important for her sense of being cared for, she, like many others, got very little out of her membership compared to how it has often been described in the literature. She did not connect to anybody in TASO, did not see her counsellor very much and she certainly did not feel part of a global community. She occasionally succeeded in getting some symptomatic treatment. Samvirke, 5. maj, 2002, pp. 60–61. Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 [1999]). Paul Farmer, “Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights,” American Journal of Public Health 89, no. 10 (1999): 1486– 1496. Peter Mugenyi, Genocide by Denial: How Profiteering from HIV/AIDS Killed Millions (Kampala: Fountain, 2008). New Vision, “Prepare for AIDS Drugs,” November 3, 2003, https:// www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1256917/prepare-aids-drugs (accessed February 26, 2020). UNAIDS/WHO, Web site, http://data.unaids.org/pub/report/2003/ 2003_epiupdate_en.pdf (accessed February 26, 2020). Ugandan’s first encounters with ART has also been described by Lotte Meinert, Michael Whyte, Susan Reynolds Whyte, and Betty Kyaddondo, “Faces of Globalization: AIDS and ARV Medicine in Uganda,” Folk 45 (2004): 105–123; and Lotte Meinert, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Jenipher Twebaze, “Tests for Life Chances: CD4 Miracles and Obstacles in Uganda,” Anthropology and Medicine 16, no. 2 (2009): 195–209.

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References BBC News. “Joy at SA Aids Drugs Victory,” April 19, 2001. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/africa/1285971.stm. Accessed February 26, 2020. Doctors Without Borders. “Powerful Precedent Set for Other Developing Countries,” April 18, 2001. https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/whatwe-do/news-stories/news/drug-companies-south-africa-capitulate-under-bar rage-public-pressure. Accessed February 26, 2020. Farmer, Paul. “Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights.” American Journal of Public Health 89, no. 10 (1999): 1486–1496. Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues. Updated. Edition with a New Preface. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Meinert, Lotte, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Jenipher Twebaze. “Tests for Life Chances: CD4 Miracles and Obstacles in Uganda.” Anthropology and Medicine 16, no. 2 (2009): 195–209. Meinert, Lotte, Michael Whyte, Susan R. Whyte, and Betty Kyaddondo. “Faces of Globalization: AIDS and ARV Medicine in Uganda.” Folk 45 (2004): 105– 123. Mugenyi, Peter. Genocide by Denial: How Profiteering from HIV/AIDS Killed Millions. Kampala: Fountain, 2008. New Vision. “AIDS Drugs Vital,” February 26, 2000. https://www.newvision. co.ug/new_vision/news/1018371/aids-drugs-vital. Accessed February 26, 2020. New Vision. “Prepare for AIDS Drugs,” November 3, 2003. https://www. newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1256917/prepare-aids-drugs. Accessed February 26, 2020. Nguyen, Vinh-Kim. “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 124–144. London: Blackwell, 2004. Sørensen, Tonni Vinkel. “AIDS strategien der kørte af sporet” [The AIDS Strategy That Ran Off the Track]. Samvirke, May 5, 2002, pp. 60–61. UNAIDS/WHO. “AIDS Epidemic Update,” December 2003. http://data.una ids.org/pub/report/2003/2003_epiupdate_en.pdf. Accessed February 26, 2020. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Lotte Meinert, and Jenipher Twebaze. “Clientship.” In Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, edited by Susan Reynolds Whyte, 56–69. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

CHAPTER 13

Whose Responsibility: And What Happened to the Letters?

Jane knelt down because women greet others and show respect that way. Not because she was humble and submissive. There’s nothing submissive about Jane. ‘So, you got my messages’, she stated more than asked. ‘What messages?’ I asked. ‘All the emails I sent you about Kate’. But I didn’t get them. Her uncle and the pastor of the church in whose house she worked, as well as other members of the church, stood around us and listened to our conversation. The church was one of the countless budding churches within the Pentecostal movement that popped up all over Kampala, located in the outskirts of the city, hidden in a small alley in one of those puzzling neighbourhoods where small sheds and flashy houses lined up side-by-side on the muddy red soil. I took note of the bright blue timber walls of the church and the Coca-Cola advert in the form of an immense bottle at the entrance to the alley, hoping to be able to find my way back to this place by myself. Peter had taken me out there. Otherwise I would never have found it. Otherwise I would never have found her. I had asked him to help me. He had called me on a Sunday afternoon when I felt rootless and restless no matter what I did, and had ended up by the pool in the club for people with money and different worlds to move between. But even this place felt wrong and I was grateful for the call from my Ugandan brother and the sense of belonging that it entailed. I had just returned from the east, where I had prepared for a study on life with antiretroviral treatment. We © The Author(s) 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_13

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talked briefly about the state of his house in Saya and whether it needed any repairs if I were to stay there during my fieldwork. ‘I would like to get in touch with Jane and Suzy’, I quickly added, trying to prevent the phone call from ending in the sudden Ugandan way that I had such difficulty getting used to. People rarely introduced themselves or said goodbye when on the phone. Perhaps the mobile phone culture had been adapted to the price of air time, which was still high even for well-to-do people. Conversations were short and direct and time was not wasted on farewell greetings. Goodbyes are not important when meeting face-to-face either, but you do spend a lot of time greeting each other upon arrival and asking how life is going, how the family, the work, and so on are doing, how was the journey and what was the weather like where you came from. You also exchange thanksgivings with your hosts when you leave, and you are wished a safe journey. If possible, you will be escorted, at least briefly, as a sign that you are welcome back. But on the mobile phone people just hang up. ‘Can you help me find them?’ I managed to ask before it happened. ‘Come to my office tomorrow after twelve’, he replied, and then he was gone, and I was left with the swimming pool, the sun and my restlessness. I was in Uganda alone. And Kate was no longer there. ‘We’ve talked about it at home, and we have decided that it is okay for you to go and see them’, he said with a serious air when I saw him the next day. His kind, strong face with a hint of a beard, had always had a calming effect on me. He was a tall and well-nourished man, unlike many villagers, and one of the clan’s best-educated and most prosperous members. He took his responsibilities as a ‘big man’ seriously. He was as kind as always, but also a bit distant and maybe a little more worn out than I remembered from previous visits. His office, like most other offices, had walls with paint peeling off, a tilted desk, rusty chairs and not much else. The messy piles of files, cardboard folders and papers, found in most Ugandan offices, did not take up much space in his office. His stacks of files never seemed out of control. I had always felt at ease in his office and it was good to know that I had a brother in Uganda who took care of me and who even had an office not far from the one I used myself when in Kampala. We downloaded a report he had written, onto my computer. It wasn’t quite within my field of research, but I promised to read and comment on it, since it helped in creating a platform from where we could embark on a more sensitive topic: his nieces. I did not

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know that I needed permission from him and his wife to go and see them. I had just wanted to ask for their help to find them. ‘It is okay that you take them to Saya so that they can get to know that place better’, he said while still working on saving his document to my computer. ‘When you have started with the story of one family, then it is better that you continue with that story instead of starting a new one’, he continued earnestly. It seemed to be the conclusion that he had reached after some deliberation with himself and maybe his wife. But it was not my intention at all to take them to Saya. On the contrary. There were plenty of people out there to catch up with. ‘They don’t have to go the village and I am not trying to continue the story of Kate’, I tried to explain. ‘I want to learn about life in Kampala’. This was both true and not true. I was as always caught in between the notebook and life. The AIDS epidemic changed rapidly, and I wanted to make use of my existing network in my new study. In the village, as well as in Kampala. Kate’s sisters could be my entry into a network of marginalized women in Kampala. But he was right. It would also be the continuation of Kate’s story. I did want to find out what had happened. How the story had ended. But how could I write Kate’s story, when it was also Peter’s story though he had not been given a chance to tell it. How do you honour the experience of one without failing the experience of others?1 ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Thank you’, he wrote to me in an email earlier that year, ‘for what you do for her. I just hope that whatever you decide to give her, you understand the risk of not being consistent with the treatment. I feel I should remind you of what is likely to happen. A number of conflicts will arise. Her sisters and mother will want a share of the money. Kate will probably pick up her sons and rent her own house and therefore end up having a lot of other expenses in addition to the treatment itself. And will she actually be able to comply with the treatment? It’s not as easy as it sounds’. I knew he was right, and that most of the money given for one purpose would end up being used for another purpose. But I had to try, and I didn’t know how to do so without his help. The treatment now only cost about 20 USD a month for the drug itself, and even though it would maybe amount to much more—blood tests, check-ups, transport to the clinic, three meals a day, a place to live near a clinic and whatever else is

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needed for an active life—it still had to be tried. I asked him to manage the money, wrote to him that I trusted him to choose how best to use it. Handed over the responsibility to him. Asked him to get it started and said we would discuss details later. He had more experience resolving such challenges than I did. I just studied them. When he wrote that she had joined a programme with free medicine, but that there would still be a number of expenses associated with it, I reminded him that he should spend the money on whatever he considered best. I was delighted with how things were developing and thought that I could follow up on my obligations when I went to Uganda a few months later.2 In the course of the next few months emails arrived suggesting that Kate had stopped taking the medicine. That she had moved from her uncle’s place to her sister’s place and back again. That she had been taken to the village. Was on the way to the village but had not reached it. There was a question as to whether I thought we should go on with treatment, ‘when the medicine flowed again’. What medicine? I thought, but did not follow up on my own thought, because then I heard from someone else that she now had tuberculosis and had to be treated for this before they could go on with antiretroviral treatment. The news came from different people at different times. I couldn’t keep track of what was happening. I was confused. I was busy with other things. I had paid and thought they knew better what needed to be done than I did. I did not hear from Kate, but I do not remember whether I wondered about that at all. I knew she was sick. And that I was busy. A life on antiretroviral treatment could become a long life, her uncles told me. I was embarking upon a lifelong commitment and they wanted to make sure I was aware of that. What they did not seem to be aware of was that this had already been the case for some time. The interviews and the book that had not yet been written had made me obligated to do something long ago. But none of us had known or knew now what would happen in the near or the distant future and how long her life and my obligation would become. Prices were falling. In just a few years, costs had fallen from thousands of dollars per month to just 20 dollars for a month of treatment. One day, the world might decide that this treatment should be free for everybody. In early June she died. A few weeks later I arrived in Uganda and talked to her sister about what had happened. ∗ ∗ ∗

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‘Life-prolonging medicine? Well, she never got any of that’, Jane said. She had called me from the market to apologize for being a little late due to traffic jams. Her punctuality awoke confidence in the muzungu. So did her maturity. Her dignity. She was still a thriving, not fat, but a strong and vigorous woman, now 25 years old. Her hair straightened, and sometimes braided and twisted in fancy styles with the help of hair extenders. I had never seen Kate’s hair like that. Life had not been any easier for Jane than for the others in this story. Jane’s father had been a soldier in Amin’s army and was killed by the Tanzanians. She had grown up with her loving, but at times drunken, grandmother. After ninth grade her mother and grandmother could no longer afford to pay school fees for her. She got some help from the muzungu who stayed in Saya with her mother by then, but not enough, and after several failed attempts to earn enough money herself during school holidays, Jane moved in with a man who promised to pay her school fees, but instead made her pregnant, beat her up and took her kids to his family in war-torn northern Uganda.3 The organization in Kampala, which helps women with such problems, told her that they could do nothing to help her get them back unless she was able to support them financially herself. She attended classes at night preparing for her O levels (10th grade), while working as a maid in the pastor’s home. She gave me the impression that she trusted herself to make it, that she knew what she wanted and went for it. Still, I was sceptical, when she said that Kate had never received as much as a single tablet of this new life-prolonging medicine. ‘She received treatment for tuberculosis and she took antibiotics the last few years of her life. That is what TASO (The AIDS Support Organization) gave to all their patients. But they said she would have to improve before they could give her antiretroviral treatment. She should gain weight and cough less. We were told by TASO and by the uncles. Other times they said there was no money for antiretroviral treatment. But she had received a letter from you where you had written that you would pay for it. That’s why we kept trying to get hold of you. We really tried so hard to get in touch with you’. Kate and Jane had written loads of emails to me, she said. So had Kate’s counsellor in TASO, Jane added. She was Padhola herself, and her father was a friend of the uncle whom Kate had lived with as a child. She had tried very hard to help Kate. In addition to all the emails, Kate had written a letter to me at least once a month right until the end, put them in an envelope and asked different relatives to send them to me.

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I looked at Jane, empty of words. All of her letters lost? All their emails disappeared? Could I have been so immersed in other thoughts that I or my spam filter had deleted them? I had been far away and spent time on many different continents lately. Did Jane not speak the truth, or had these cries for help never reached me? Or never caught my attention? ‘Maybe I should contact her TASO counsellor’, I said, looking at her out of the corner of my eye. ‘Yes, do that’, she answered calmly. No sign of fear that another version of the story would come to light if I did so. ‘And those emails’, I asked, ‘do you still have them? Could we go online and find them?’ ‘Yes’, she said in the same calm tone, so and we agreed to do so the next time we met. Just before she left, she noted that I should be a little cautious about Kate’s TASO counsellor. ‘You know when people see a muzungu, they immediately see money’. Yes, I knew that. I also knew that people often accused others of doing so. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked anyway, while she prepared to go. ‘Well’, she replied, ‘I guess she is okay. She really fought for Kate. She went to see the uncles and scolded them for not helping her’. ∗ ∗ ∗ I went to TASO the next day. The modest brown building that had been there three years earlier had been replaced by a three-storey white unit. Kate’s counsellor was not around. She had been transferred to Entebbe. I told one of the guards that my good friend had died and that I would like to get in touch with her counsellor. He made a few quick calls and inquiries, and got the counsellor’s mobile number for me. I called her and she was brief and direct like everybody else on the phone. She said she was happy to hear from me and that she would come by my place after work. We met at the main entrance of the university. I had been looking for her, not knowing how to recognize her, when suddenly I was embraced by an energetic little woman in high heels, jeans and a sequined T-shirt. She immediately sat down on the couch in the small apartment I rented at the university campus, took off her high-heeled shoes, placed her feet on the table and asked to have the television switched on. She then started recounting details of past episodes of what seemed to me to be a dull Spanish soap opera, which she claimed would only take 20 minutes but

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took an hour and a half. While watching she also talked about her 8-yearold son who was at home watching the same show and who would come running to tell her all the details as soon as she returned home. She would then pretend that she hadn’t even seen the day’s episode. We had had a brief talk while walking from the gate to the flat. ‘Have you seen Kate?’ she asked me. Did she ask me whether I had known Kate, or whether I had paid a visit to her grave? Or did we talk about two different people? She seemed genuinely shocked when I told her that Kate had died. ‘Why didn’t anyone contact me? Why hasn’t Jane said anything? Her uncles? I would have come to her funeral. But how? Why did she die?’ She had tears in her eyes. She seemed sincere and yet not. It didn’t make sense. If Kate had meant so much to her why had she not been to see her for months? ‘How many patients does a counsellor have?’ I asked. ‘2-300’, she said. ‘But the one whom I replaced had been in charge of 4000’. Did she really say that? She also said she saw her clients twice a month. ‘But Kate was special to me’, she insisted. Why? She had sent me emails informing me about Kate’s CD4 count, she said—the figure indicating the state of your immune system, which is a measure of when to start treatment. She thought that was why I had come. To start the treatment. But I had never received any of her emails either. When she had heard my voice earlier that day, she had been so happy. She had thought that Kate was still alive and that I would pay for her treatment until she could get access to free treatment at TASO.4 The free treatment should have started in January, but it had been postponed several times. Right now they were about to start the first group, and she had expected that she would be able to include Kate in the programme very soon. She had lied and told TASO that Kate was already on medication because they preferred to start with people who already had experience with the treatment. Her stories reminded me of the many emails I had received about Kate’s condition during the spring. Something wasn’t quite right. But this time I was alert. Why had it been so important that I came if she would soon get free medicine anyway? How could she lie to TASO that she was already receiving medication? Her stories had loose ends in a way that Jane’s did not have. ‘I wish there were someone who could pay school fees for Comfort. I would like to take care of him, but I can’t afford the fees myself’, she

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repeated countless times while gazing at the television as if hypnotized. ‘He could come and stay with me during the holidays’, she added. ‘He could also stay with his aunt or grandmother’, I replied. But no, she didn’t think so. Jane had left her own children with the husband. She did not trust they would take proper care of Comfort. ‘I disagree with her’. ‘Disagree with what?’ ‘Disagree with Jane that it was a good idea to leave the children with their father’s family. A mother should never do that. No matter how little she earns, she will always be able to feed her children. You can live on a bunch of matoke for two weeks. The pain of giving birth to a child ought to make you never give up the child. Jane makes it sound as if she wanted to punish the father by leaving her children with him. “They are the only thing you are interested in. Not me. So here are your children. Now I go.” That is what she told him. When she came back to visit them the following year, her daughter’s stomach was swollen due to malnutrition, and she ran around without clothes and couldn’t recognize her mother. And yet she didn’t take them with her. There is a law in Uganda that children belong to the mother until they are nine. Only then can the father have them. I have made that clear to my ex-husband. And when my son is nine years old, I’ll no longer be in the country’. The penny dropped. It glided down quietly as her history evolved. Her son was 8 years old. She had one year to find a way to get out of the country. But if she left the country, she left her privileged access as an AIDS counsellor to antiretroviral treatment, which she herself also depended on. Maybe she thought I knew it, since TASO volunteers are usually HIV-positive, but she did not mention it at all. Maybe she did not know exactly what to get out of me, but she was certainly trying to figure it out. I was a potential contact to the world outside Uganda, and a potential source of money. While the penny slid downwards, I caught sight of a woman who was fighting for her life and her children with whatever means she had. Her strategies differed from Kate’s. Her options too. Her schooling had been longer and the support of her family seemed more significant. But her struggle for life and for her child was no less desperate. She was constantly texting on her phone. Pressed energetically on the buttons with her dark red nails while glued to the soap opera and also explaining it to me. I offered her tea and coffee. No, she first had to get over the sad news of Kate’s death. Unfortunately, I had no soda, though

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that was what she wanted. Bread, bananas, jams, peanut butter? Maybe just a banana. She made me feel that she expected more from me than I could offer. After hours of television and silent power struggle between us, I started cleaning the table, hinted at my early morning appointment, hoping she would understand the evening was over. Eventually she hesitantly followed me to the door. Asked if I had a little money for transport. She got her pennies, but no more, and I sighed with relief when she finally left. She had hoped that something else would have come out of this meeting. So had I. At least I now knew that Kate had never received any treatment. And I saw how difficult it had been for all the parties involved, including Kate’s uncles, to navigate in this struggle for life and death, where everyone makes use of whatever means they have. ∗ ∗ ∗ When I met Jane the next day we stepped into the world of the dead. Kate was still there on the net: [email protected]. On opening the account we saw the emails Jane had helped her send to me and the ‘failed delivery’ messages they had received in return. They had forgotten the dot between my first name and my last name. Again and again, they had sent the same email with the same missing dot. Emails that said that Kate was dying, that she needed medication, that they were miserable, that they would like to hear from me. It was Jane who had written them. Sometimes Kate had made a draft. Other times she had just written to me on Kate’s behalf. We both looked at the stupid dot that wasn’t there. There was no one to blame. The dot was where it was supposed to be on the business card I had given to Kate. Jane had taken a course on how to use a computer and how to send emails, but she had not been taught that a dot could make the difference between life and death. If I had received the emails, would she then still be alive? Maybe. And the letters? The ones that Jane said that Kate had written to me in the last months? Jane also had proof of those. Kate not only wrote long letters to me. She also made drafts. She wrote and rewrote, crossed out, tried out different spellings, chose one, wrote some more and then rewrote the whole thing. Jane kept the drafts in a folder under her bed. She had also kept all the flowered cards I had sent to Kate over the years. Again I fell into a dark hole. A hole of drafted letters and flowered cards and Kate who wasn’t there. ∗ ∗ ∗

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The first time I had fallen into such a hole was the week before in Malinde. I visited Alexine on her small plot half way between Saya and Tororo. They had a roof over their heads. The clay walls were cracked, but at least they were still there four years after they had been erected. Alexine was elsewhere, but the neighbour sent somebody to the school to inform the children. Sorrow, Hope and Comfort arrived one by one. Sorrow and Hope had turned into big girls, 14 and 12 years old, with pretty, happy smiles. Hope still had a cunning, cheeky look in her eyes. Sorrow was, as always, thoughtful and confused, but a beautiful young girl with firm breasts and strong arms, who no doubt had begun to attract the attention of boys. Comfort’s hand was dry and dirty and did not return my handshake. I fell into the hole of yearning for what was no longer there and didn’t know how to tell him how much his mother had loved him and how badly I felt for not having done more for her. A neighbour insisted on giving me a chicken which later turned out not to be his own. Still alive, kicking and cackling loudly. The girls, the man with the chicken that was not his, and the man who had shown us the way to the house all received a bit of money. Then I set off for Tororo with the chicken that we didn’t want. But at least I had now made an effort to tell Alexine that I was in the country and that she could find me in Tororo the next few days. I hated it all, anthropology and myself. Hated to be a cash machine that turned up, dished out money and left again. Hated their rejoicing over our visit and my own bad conscience for being annoyed. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that money and friendship could well go together, I failed to escape the feeling that money undermined friendship as I knew it. I much preferred to show them interest and give them emotional support instead of money for food and schooling. But that was not what they themselves preferred. How could Comfort be anything but sceptical about somebody turning up in a big car, handing out a few notes to people and then disappearing again? Comfort’s eyebrows, wrinkled since he had been a few months old, now radiated with bitter resignation. ∗ ∗ ∗ I took it out on Peter. We sat in the poorly lit restaurant in the only hotel in Tororo town, a hotel where one would at times find hot water in the showers and where each room had a small balcony overlooking

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the lively streets. Tororo was a quiet provincial town, full of activity. It sometimes lit up in a purple-and-red-flower splendour. At other times everything was brownish red from the dust and mud of the red soil. The bulbs in the restaurant were weak. The candles that took over during the frequent power failures did not make it any less dim. I don’t remember whether there was a power failure that night, whether it was just the normal darkness of the room, or whether we sat in a particularly dark corner. But I do remember being very direct under the cover of darkness. He had taught me long ago, when I had just arrived in the village, and Comfort had just been born in the annexe of his house in Kampala, that the truth could hurt and should be revealed slowly. But I was used to being muzungu and Padhola at the same time when I was with him. So was he. I did not mince my words when I said that I knew that Kate had not received the treatment, that she had tried to send me letters about it and that I would like to have these letters if he or somebody else still had them somewhere. I went on to claim that I understood how difficult it was for him to be the guardian and to provide support for numerous clan members who did not know how to manage on their own and who died of AIDS one after the other, but also that I had always appreciated having someone I could trust and who never lied to me. I drew my breath and felt the fatigue sink in. It wasn’t Peter’s fault. But he was the one I took it out on, because I knew he could handle the straightforwardness of a muzungu.5 Why? To make sure the story was told in a way that made it possible for me to live with it? Lies could be necessary, but there were too many loose ends in this story. He had told me that TASO had promised free medicine since the beginning of January. Perhaps it had not started as a lie, but had evolved into it as things became complicated and the medicine was delayed. And how could I be so sure I knew what had become of the letters just because there were some drafts in a cardboard folder with Kate’s private papers? I would probably never find out what had happened to the money, but if I knew Peter, he had not spent it on himself. There were many ways in which it could have been well spent on the family. He had many dilemmas to deal with. He was a responsible man, and Kate was dead, not because he had failed his responsibilities, but because he had assumed responsibility for so many. And because I had broken down the order of secrecy when I told him about Kate, and thus had forced him to make choices that resulted in Kate being pushed towards the periphery of the family. He couldn’t just care for her without also giving her that

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which everybody knew she really needed. She couldn’t die at his place. That would be juok and cause harm to others in the family. There were many reasons why they had had to leave her outside Jane’s muzigo. ‘My honesty’, he said after having listened patiently to me for some time, ‘you would have still had it if you had not insisted on channelling your help through me. I did not know how to tell you that you shouldn’t. I tried. But you didn’t understand. Do you have any idea what all of this has meant for me? How many people were queuing up in front of my office and asking me to do the same for them? Or getting you to do it for them? Are you aware how many people in the family need that medicine?’ Shielded by the dim light I paused while recalling my repeated rejections of Jacob. My dismissive attitude towards Kate’s TASO counsellor. My scepticism of Kate’s mother when Kate became my confidant. I heard what he said. But Kate was dead and my problem was that I couldn’t write a book about her if I couldn’t tell the story in a way that made it possible for me to live with it. I had to have a section in the book on how I had tried to save her. ‘It’s not that easy to have an anthropologist in the family’, he said after moments of mutual silence. ‘It’s like having your privacy taken away. It’s not because I don’t consider you to be part of the family. I do. And anthropologists don’t laugh at people when they write about them. I know they don’t. Still…’. His words were imbued with a sadness that I interpreted as a desire to maintain our friendship. But his insight hurt. We got up and started walking towards his car further down the street. Our stroll in the warm darkness made things feel almost alright again, yet not quite. How was I to accommodate all those who were part of the story but had their own version of it? A few gunshots were heard nearby. ‘Someone is trying to break in somewhere’, he said in a declaratory way, but the fact that a guard sent a couple of warning shots did not necessarily mean that someone had been hit, and it didn’t make us change direction or walk any faster. Nor did other people around us. There was no war going on for the moment. You could walk peacefully in the streets at night in this part of Uganda at this time in history. It was not war but love that made life dangerous. I promised to give him some of the articles I had written over the years, so he could see for himself that people cannot be recognized in what I write. Which was true, and not true. It was true that you could not recognize people in what I had written so far. But I had promised Kate that people should know there was somebody named Kate Abbo who was

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once there. The story, however, is not only about her. Because she wasn’t there by herself.6 ∗ ∗ ∗ Jacob had grown up. He wore glasses and the hair was beginning to give way a little at the top, so that his forehead resembled his father’s even more than before. He had accepted his marriage and fatherhood to now three children. He had become quiet. Disillusioned or just accepting? ‘Of course we knew she was sick. We also knew that you knew it, but you didn’t talk to us about it. Everyone in Saya knew it’, he said while reading the newspaper I had brought to the village a few days ago. He tried to concentrate on reading it all the way from Saya to Tororo even though I tried to strike up a conversation with him. We were on our way to Tororo town. I wanted to show him how email works. Tororo had come closer to Saya, now that the matatus could pass on the road again. The world had come closer, now that one could write to each other by email. ‘Have you noticed how much Uganda has changed?’ He asked me. ‘Have you noticed that cars now come in all kinds of colours?’ ‘Didn’t they always?’ ‘No, they used to be white’. I had always found Uganda to be full of colours. In my view it was mobile phones and antiretroviral treatment that had changed Uganda. But nobody mentioned the treatment when I talked to them. Well, yes, they had heard about the medicine, they would say when asked directly. They knew that some people got it. Those who had money. Those who had contacts. But it did not cure people, they added. It just milked people. Took away their money. The medicine had not been presented as a miracle cure, nor was it understood as such. On the contrary. People had so often heard of things that were on the way, that they did not have access to, or that did not turn out to be as promising as they had first sounded. Pregnant women were the best informed. In the summer of 2004, a programme had been launched in many parts of the country offering free treatment for HIV-positive women during their pregnancy and childbirth. It reduced the risk of HIV transmission to the unborn child. Nothing had been done for mothers yet. ∗ ∗ ∗

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In the drafts that Kate had left at Jane’s place, I read that TASO had talked about the arrival of free treatment since September 2003, and that it had been postponed several times. I also read that her genitals had turned into one big wound that no medicine had been able to do anything about. The doctors had told her that it wouldn’t heal again unless she started antiretroviral treatment. I also learned from these pages that while she lived with Jane, she occasionally went to visit Suzy, who was cooking at Nakawa Market in Kampala. Suzy gave her food and money for transport back to Jane’s place, and she did not mock her the way she used to. On the contrary, when other people in the market laughed at her because she was so sick and thin, Suzy shouted at them: ‘“How can you be so sure that you are still alive and part of this world yourself?” When she sees me sick and weak, I can see that she gets very sad and tries to give me the best of her food. I do not hide anything from Jane anymore either. I’ve lived with her while I’ve been so sick that there was nothing to hide. One day when I wanted to go to the hospital, she offered to go with me. When we arrived, I just walked past the hospital and up towards TASO, and she didn’t even show me that she might be surprised. She just took my notebook, wrote my name on it, and made sure I was attended to immediately because I was so weak that I could barely stand by myself’. In yet another attempt to hook up with me, Kate’s counsellor provided me with the clinical record from TASO. She also claimed that she could help me get this and that for Kate’s sons, but she never managed to find the person who could put their names on the list of children who were entitled to help. One day she abruptly turned up at my place with a book about TASO, which I was not uninterested in and which I ended up buying from her for far more than it would have cost elsewhere. But she didn’t get much else out of me. She was still too intrusive. I must admit, though, that I looked through the TASO records before giving them back to her, but there was nothing there that Kate had not already told me in her letters. The only thing that struck me was that at each visit, she had been asked who she had told about her HIV status. Every single time, for three years, Kate replied that she had only revealed it to one single person, an acquaintance. No one from the family. Me, I suppose. The secret was not disclosed. She had not told it to anybody else. But she no longer hid it. Over the years, something had happened to the secret that Kate had at first carefully guarded, and she no longer used the padlock for her suitcase. She had not revealed her secret as such or been open about her HIV status. But openness and disclosure are not

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a matter of either/or. One can reveal things about themselves without saying them. The boundaries of what could be known and what was to be hidden had changed in subtle ways. Suzy and Jane sensed and respected this during their last time with her.7 ∗ ∗ ∗ She bent over her pots in the ruthless sun. Mats of reed provided a meagre shade but sweat poured down her forehead. She wore a light blue shirt, a white apron and a white toque. I barely recognized her. She was so thin, and her eyes lacked the spark they used to have. Jane had warned me that Suzy had thinned from worries. Still the sight made me sad. At the end of a row of stalls at Nakawa market, she now stood all day with three small charcoal stoves, cooking food to sell to people at the other stalls. Her day began before sunrise. She placed flour, beans, pots and charcoal stoves on her head and started her one hour-long walk to the market. In a month she could, if lucky, make almost 20 USD of profit. She used 15 USD to rent a room and was left with 5 USD after that. ‘And then I have eaten well all month’, she explained, ‘and sometimes it is a little more than that. But if only I could save up enough for a kettle then I could start making breakfast as well. Cook tea with milk and fry chapati. Then I would be able to make twice as much profit’. We were heading to the place where she lived while she explained, calculated, dreamt. She wanted me to know her place, but I would never be able to find my way back there by myself. There were no blue walls or large Coca-Cola bottles to guide me. Just mud and misery. Poverty had not shaken me for a long time, but it did make me infinitely sad to see the place where Suzy now lived. Dark and damp. A small muzigo—a room in a long row of rooms along a narrow muddy alley. Clay walls and a narrow strip of light when the low door was open. Kate and her sisters were not the only ones who had not been successful in life. These muddy alleys and tiny dark spaces were filled with women trying to survive through petty trade at Kampala’s markets, and their kids with torn t-shirts and inflated stomachs. Children were staring at me, women were smiling. Men were absent. ‘Are any of your neighbours married?’ I asked. ‘Yes, there is someone who lives a little further up, who has a man living with her most of the time’. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Suzy promised to come and see me in my university apartment the next day. She did come, hours later than we had agreed, without calling to warn me. Without thinking that it would be necessary, and without complaining that she had then had to sit for hours in front of my door, because I had gone elsewhere in the meantime. When I turned on the recorder, she started all over with her calculations and dreams. I had asked her to describe her everyday life and to explain to me how she managed to live on so little and in such a sad and dark little room. She also told me about her son’s birth three years ago, just after I left, how hard she had struggled to feed him and that the father and his family had refused to help her. One day when she went to his place and left the baby in their living room. To scare them. She was not planning to abandon him. She just wanted them to wake up. To acknowledge the child. But they understood it to mean that she had left her child in their care. They have kept the boy since then and refused to let her see him. She also told me about the sickness that followed later that year, and which caused her to spend half a year in her father’s village. He sent her to many different jothiet, for it was a strange disease and there was no doubt some kind of juok was involved. The symptoms had been unclear; a stiff neck, dizziness, problems with one arm, fatigue. And Kate. Yes, she had been ill ever since I left in 2001. Sometimes she was a bit okay, and then they had tried to make plans to start some kind of business with the money she had in the bank. It would have been better to do so out in the village, but Kate was afraid to leave Kampala because she wanted to be near TASO. ‘So she admitted she was in TASO?’ ‘Yes. She might not have said it directly, but I noticed that she didn’t worry so much anymore now that she was in TASO. She had a strong heart. Only during the last few months did she say it directly. But I had known it for a long time. And she knew that I knew’. She sat with a straight back and spoke politely in a matter-of-fact way, her hands folded in her lap. Sometimes she used them to smooth out the skirt. The foul-mouthed Suzy I had met three years earlier was no longer there. Her insecure, sad figure made me assume that her entire life was like her room: dark and miserable. I asked her about it. Not for the sake of the recorder. I had turned it off. But because of the unspoken grief surrounding her and the nervous movements of her hand smoothing out her skirt. ‘Is life hard for you?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say. ‘Yes, life is hard’, she replied calmly.

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‘Those whom you work with’, I continued, referring to the other women cooking at the corner of the market where I had seen her bent over her pots, ‘are they good to you?’ ‘They are ok. We don’t argue. But they are not like friends. I have no friends. Not here in Kampala anyway’. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ ‘Ahe, you know, here in Africa, even if you have a boyfriend, it is no help. They only eat what the woman serves, but never think of contributing themselves. Few men have work. They do nothing. They are idle. Maybe it would be better if I found a job as a maid again. If one finds a good person, it can be ok with that kind of work. Then at least you can eat and you have a place to sleep’. We continued discussing job opportunities. Whether it was better to do housework or petty trade in the village. She cried quietly. Words became fewer and she tried to end the conversation with the words: ‘I have no one to tell my secrets to’. ‘Do you have many secrets?’ The smoothing of her skirt intensified. ‘Do you talk to your sisters about them?’ ‘With Kate I did’. ‘But you also argued a lot’. ‘We argued, but we always forgave each other again. I miss her. When someone goes away, they are gone forever. You never see them again’. She didn’t say more that afternoon. She cried and yawned. I turned on the television and she looked at it, gratefully and hypnotized. News in German was replaced by music programmes. It all seemed to please her. I offered her cake, bread and soda. Fetched a pillow and asked her to lie down on the couch. She fell asleep, woke up, watched television, fell asleep again, and I felt good being able to care a bit for her, read the newspaper while she slept, did some typing on the computer that still contained all the letters and words they had given me over the years. ‘You know’, she said apologetically in the late afternoon, ‘I rarely watch television’. Suzy was not trying to invade me the way the TASO counsellor had. She was vanishing in front of my eyes. When late at night she got up to leave, I gave her money to buy a kettle so that she could start making breakfast for people on the market. She looked at the pile of newspapers I had read while she was asleep and asked if I needed them for anything,

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but no, I had cut out what I needed—that which was about AIDS and life-prolonging medicine. I gave her my cut-up newspapers. ∗ ∗ ∗ Alexine was waiting for me in the restaurant of the hotel in Tororo when I came down for breakfast the morning after I had left a message for her in Malinde. An old round waitress who remembered me from previous visits told me that Alexine had waited for me since sunrise. She wanted to know whether Alexine was somebody that I wanted to see or somebody that I wanted her to chase for me. But I did want to see her. She had reached Tororo the night before and had slept at a sister-in-law’s place in Tororo so that she could meet me early. She wore a newly ironed gomesi in beige colours and a scarf tied around her hair. Her face lit up in a smile when she saw me. I recalled her joy, dancing and peanut-filled bag three years ago. Her reception was somewhat more restrained this time. Maybe because we were in a restaurant in Tororo. Maybe because of everything else that had happened. I met a different Alexine that year. I almost believed her when she told me that the Holy Spirit had given her inner peace. She no longer gave me the impression of being caught up in a fierce combat against juok and life’s unpredictability. She no longer wrung her hands in despair when talking about past events. ‘It wasn’t as bad as that time with Nelly’, she said, calm and composed. I offered her breakfast, but no, she was fasting to get closer to God, so I had to drink my instant coffee and eat my toast with margarine that smelled and tasted like plastic. ‘It wasn’t that hard this time, because I was there to take care of her. Back then with Nelly I just sat in the village and couldn’t do anything. I had no money to go and look after her, and no one told me how serious it was. But I was with Kate for months before she died. Of course I was sad, but at least I had done what I could. First we were at Jane’s place for some time. We took Kate to the hospital where they made an X-ray and found out she had tuberculosis. Advanced tuberculosis. It was as if her lungs were completely burned. We started giving her tuberculosis medicine. Slowly. Slowly. First we got her to drink a little. Then eat. But she had wounds all over, in her mouth and in her throat. She had appetite, but she couldn’t swallow properly because of all the wounds. That was what her life was like. You see, it was not easy. People from the church came and prayed for her. She even tried to get up and go to church herself. She

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really struggled. She kept saying: “Mom, I’ll be fine again. I’ll be fine. I will go with you to Malinde and we will have a stall together. Do small small business together.” And she did get stronger again. Slowly. Slowly. She started walking to the toilet herself, washing herself, lubricating her skin with oil, arranging her hair. You know, slowly, slowly. We went to the hospital for regular check-ups. When we were there, they gave her food and fluids through a tube because they said she didn’t eat enough and didn’t have enough blood. We also checked her blood and were told that very few cells were left and that the blood could no longer fight any disease. So we were very worried, but we continued to fight. They told us about the new medicine and that it is very expensive. They said the medicine could help her produce more cells. But we had no money. We told ourselves that if we got the money, we would buy it, but we barely had enough money for food. In Kampala you have to buy everything. Every little thing you eat must be bought. Then we decided to go to my brother’s place and he accepted us. We were with him for almost a month, but as you know, in our culture it is a very big problem if a niece dies in her uncle’s house. I could understand that so I agreed to go back to Jane’s place. But as soon as we arrived, the disease worsened again. She had terrible stomach ache. She asked us to take her to the hospital, but we had no transport. We had a bit of money to buy food for her, but if we used it for transportation, we wouldn’t have anything to eat. I called my cousin’s son, who has a car, and he promised to come the next morning. But all that night we didn’t sleep because of Kate’s abdominal pain. She cried. She yelled. I tried to calm her, but the pain was unbearable to her. I could see where it was going and I slowly started preparing the room. I could feel that she was disappearing. I sensed it. And I knew that when she was dead, people would start coming to offer their condolences. I started to light up the charcoal stove so that I could heat water. I washed her. Dressed her nicely, and when I felt that the time was near, I went out to call the neighbour so that I would not be alone with her when it happened. But when we returned she was already dead. Jane was away for two days with her employer. The neighbour helped me call my brothers, and fortunately we quickly got hold of many family members who came and helped us arrange the funeral. One came with the coffin, another with a car, a third with money for fuel, and so on. We went to her father’s place to bury her there. He got very sad when he saw us arriving. Sad and surprised. But he didn’t throw us out. He welcomed us, and said we could bury her on his land, at some distance from his hut.

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People from the village helped us dig the grave, and the next day at four pm, she was buried. It was a nice funeral. The neighbours did what they could to help us. They cemented the grave for us very nicely. Yes, it was all very well done’. ‘So you had known for long that she was sick?’ ‘Peter told me that you had helped her get a blood test. I cried when I heard it. I got a shock. But there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe it was because I had already had the shock at the time that I could take it more calmly as the time was approaching. I had become used to the thought. I had tightened my heart’. ‘But before Peter told you, when I was here three years ago, did you already think she could be sick?’ ‘I suspected it. I could see that she was often sick. I could see the rashes. Yes, I thought that this common disease had attacked her’. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’ ‘I gave her advice on how to live, talked about TASO doing a good job, but not that I talked directly about her having AIDS’. ‘Did she feel that that people had failed her?’ I asked, hoping she could reassure me that Kate had not died feeling abandoned. ‘You know’, she explained earnestly, ‘people who used to look after Kate could be annoyed and tired of her illness. But sometimes when you feel anger in your heart, it is because you are sad. I could see that they were sad. That grief made them feel bad. So I cannot blame anyone for anything. When you get sad, sometimes it is as if you are annoyed and angry. It is understandable. And you know, it’s always the same people that we go to with all our problems. Especially after you became part of the family. People knew who you were in touch with when you were not here. They would go to their place and sit in their house, waiting and hoping for you to return. It wasn’t easy for them. A lot of hardship and grief were placed on their shoulders. No, I cannot blame anyone. I cannot’. ‘Did she talk about me?’ ‘Yes, she always talked about you, that she did not hear from you, that she had written to you again and again, and that you did not reply’. ‘Did she think I had forgotten her?’ ‘What? No. No, she thought her letters did not arrive. But she kept asking Jane if she had been checking if there was a message from you on the computer. Every day, when Jane came home from work, it was the

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first thing she asked about. I have a letter at home that she has written to you. I don’t know if they sent it to you on the computer’. Did she really have a letter to me that she had not thought of bringing? My old annoyance with her resurfaced. A letter that she didn’t know if I had received but had not tried to get to me? Was she the one who had all the letters but just hadn’t thought of sending them to me? It wasn’t the case. She just had a slip of paper from a small notebook that looked like something that had indeed been intended for an e-mail. Dear Aketcha Many thanks for the greeting you sent me through my aunt. I received it and was very happy. I’m not as sick now as I was before. It’s just the chest, and my heart still pains. I am so glad to know that you are coming to Uganda, and I pray to God that I will still be here when you arrive. I’m still waiting for the antiretroviral treatment. TASO told me that I can join a programme with free medicine from August, so we just have to find money for these few months. Mother and Okoth are both here. Okoth still lives with his grandfather, but he came to see me. He is a big boy now, and he is so good to me. I’m so proud of him. I thank God for my uncles who have helped me so much and made sure I had something to eat. They take good care of me. I don’t know what I would have done without them. NB. If there is anybody else than my sister Jane writing to you, then you should not answer. My TASO counsellor saw your address in my book and took it. If she writes to you, it is probably to use my name to get money out of you. Well, I really appreciate all the support and help you have given me, and I truly hope that I will see you again. Yours Kate ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘I don’t understand why she writes like that about the uncles’, Jane later said when I showed her the letter. ‘It isn’t true. No one wanted to help her in the end. It was only me, Okoth and mum who took care of her’. There was hardly any bitterness in Jane’s voice. She stated a fact. We sat in her muzigo, a room of about two by four metres. Whenever I was there, it struck me how pleasant this small room was. The light poured in from the door and the small window. She was fortunate to be in the last room, and hence had access to the window in the gable. An off-white

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carpet covered the floor. A curtain with shades of cream colours hung in front of the bed, which was made up with a floral bedspread. Above the bed was a cord over which her clothes were suspended. Along the wall two good chairs. An armchair and a wicker chair with cushions. On the wall facing us hung a chipped mirror. Underneath the mirror a shelf with nail polish and a radio and a small chest of drawers. Kate and her mother lay for months on the couple of square metres in front of the curtain. I don’t think they could fit two mattresses. They must have shared one. I was glad to know that it was here she died and not in a shabby, leaky, sombre place. ‘The sad thing is that Kate died angry. Bitter. She sensed that everybody felt she was a problem. She didn’t want to die like that. She told us so all the time. But that was anyway what happened. Even the funeral was sad. When we reached the village, people began to flee. There had been a cholera outbreak, and they thought we had brought another cholera patient. They complained that we had no death certificate and did not want to bury her without it. My mother started shouting that if no one would help her bury her daughter, she would do it herself. Eventually someone came. But there were only a few relatives there. They did not wait for people in Saya to be notified, and since Kate never lived much with her father, there were not many relatives from his side either. Luckily Okoth arrived’. It dawned on me that the secret had shifted its content when death was approaching. It was no longer about Kate dying—but about the fact that there was no one there to care for her. That which nobody wanted to reveal was that those who had access to resources also had to make choices of life and death. They had to prioritize between the basic needs of many and the survival of one. Were they angry or sad? These are two sides of the same coin, Alexine said. She acknowledged the dilemmas of her brothers and helped me understand that I would never find out what had happened to the money, and that I myself had made the content of the secret shift.8 Jane was eager to challenge the order of secrecy, to say out straight that nobody had made the survival of Kate a priority. And I started believing that she, unlike her sisters, would indeed be able to complete a course. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Suzy called on my mobile phone to make sure I would come and see her once more before leaving the country. I passed by the market and gave her my bed sheets and other small things I would anyway be leaving behind. She gave me big happy smiles in return, and proudly showed me the kettle she had bought to prepare breakfast. She also described her plans to build a shed of reed mats that could provide some shade from the sun. She was busy but urged me to come back two days later. She even told me what time to be there. When I arrived she eagerly gathered some shopping bags, got hold of a taxi and had us brought back to the small sombre room, which seemed a little less sad that day due to her cheerfulness. The walls were no longer brown. They were now covered with the newspapers I had given her a few days earlier, pasted onto the wall with a small lump of millet in each corner. Behind a curtain lay a mattress. In front of the curtain another mattress, now covered with the sheets I had given her. My couch, she proudly said, and asked me to sit down. The shopping bags contained fried liver, French fries and soda. I had noticed the smell in the taxi but thought it was the taxi driver driving around with his lunch. While serving the food, she explained how much money she now made serving breakfast to people in the market. Sitting on the mattress she started telling me about her boyfriend, whom she had known for over a year, who was sweet and kind, but didn’t contribute much, so she could never marry him. Our lunch and chat in her now not-so-sad home was one of the most life-affirming experiences that year. Her life was hard, but she wanted to rejoice with me over the fact that the kettle had made it a little less hard. ‘There’, she said, as we sat in the matatu on our way to Jane’s place, whom I also wanted to say goodbye to. ‘That is the house where Comfort’s father lives’. I managed to catch sight of a cluster of reddishbrown houses with iron sheet roofs surrounded by small banana palms and flowering shrubs, which unmistakably resembled other clusters of houses in the outskirts of Kampala. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. But yes, she said she was, and she even knew his name and the woman with whom he lived. ‘Suzy says Comfort’s father lives down that road’, I said, when we later all sat on the sun-drenched floor of Jane’s muzigo. ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea for Comfort to get to know him?’ ‘Ahe, but I don’t know’, Jane replied doubtfully. ‘Kate always said it was a man from Kenya’.

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‘But it is true. He is the one’, Suzy repeated. ‘Just wait and see how much Comfort resembles him’. ‘I think we should go and ask him’, I said. ‘We can’t do that’, Jane said. ‘Maybe he’ll be angry with us. We don’t know him at all’. ‘Yes, I know him’, Suzy said cheerfully. ‘He used to come and see us when I lived with Kate’. ∗ ∗ ∗ ‘Look’, Jane had said on one of our walks a few days earlier: ‘This is bô, cow peas. These are very young. They have neither flowers nor pods’. ‘Do you think it is alright for me to pick some leaves?’ ‘Yes, but let me find some nice ones for you’. She stepped into the field to have a look at the small plants. A man had been digging at the other end of the plot. He came towards us on his bare muddy feet. A couple of children joined him. Both he and Jane picked some leaves, assessed them, discussed something. ‘They are doing well because of all the rain last week’, the man explained to me. ‘They will soon be blooming. Do you also grow cow peas where you come from?’ ‘No’, I said. ‘That’s exactly why I’m interested in them’. ‘Ochieng, go home and get some of the dried pods from last harvest for her to see’, he told one of the boys, who had been observing our interest in the small plants. He set off, with jolly jumps over the lumps of earth, and returned to empty the contents of his little dirty hand into mine. Dried yellow pods with small round beans inside. Their happy curious eyes asked what I was going to do with them. But fortunately, only their eyes spoke, for I would not have known what to answer. I just wanted to hold on to them. ‘Thank you’, I said. ‘Thank you for giving them to me. Thanks for your work in the field. Thank you for the help’. ‘Thank you, too’, they replied. ‘Thank you for your work. Thank you for your visit. Safe trip back’. The pods ended up in my purse. The leaves in my notebook. I didn’t really know what to do with them. Eventually I started writing as she had said I should. ∗ ∗ ∗

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Imagine if Comfort’s father really lived just across the road form Jane. Imagine if Comfort had a chance to get to know his clan, and me to round off the story and go back home with a feeling that I knew how everyone fitted into it. Jane did not feel confident that it was a good idea, but Suzy and I persuaded her on my last day in Kampala that year. We walked the few hundred yards down the road, crossed the gutter on a narrow plank, and walked along the muddy path towards a house where an elderly woman sat under a roof of banana palm leaves and peeled grains off dried cobs of maize. Did she know him? Yes, she did. Was he there? No, he wasn’t. He was at work. He worked as a guard at a factory in the industrial district. If we came back late in the afternoon, he would be there. ‘Can we?’ Suzy asked. ‘No, I’m on my way to the airport’. ‘And it’s not good to be late for a plane?’ ‘No, it’s not’. Suzy jumped into a matatu going back to the market. Jane caught one for me going in the direction of the city centre. ‘I should go home and do some homework’, she said as a farewell greeting. ‘Maybe you can go looking for him some other day’, I managed to say before she took off. ‘Yes, maybe’, she replied.

Notes 1. Providing anonymity is not always straight forward, as discussed by Diane Duclos, “When Ethnography Does Not Rhyme with Anonymity: Reflections on Name Disclosure, Self-Censorship, and Storytelling,” Ethnography 20, no. 2 (2019): 175–183. She suggests that questions of anonymity and confidentiality are not only about protecting sources, collaborators and friends but also about protecting ourselves and the relationships we build during fieldwork and that this has consequences for the co-production of knowledge. The combination of Kate’s wish that I use her name, my decision to write narrative ethnography, and my desire to protect relationships in the field have indeed all contributed to the shaping of the plot of the story told in this book. 2. See Whyte, “Second Chances,” 1–24; Meinert et al., “Test for Life Chances,” 195–209; and Meinert et al., “Faces of Globalization,” 105–123 for more about the arrival of ARV in Uganda.

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3. See Finnström, “Living with Bad Surroundings” and Dolan, “Social Torture,” for more about the war in Northern Uganda around the turn of the century. 4. TASO started giving out ART to some of its members by late 2004, six months after Kate’s death. 5. Mogensen, “Surviving AIDS?” 179–193; and Mogensen, “New Hopes,” 61–79. 6. High, “Melancholia and Anthropology,” 217–233, discusses the fact that guilt and self-approach—akin to what I describe—are widespread in the discipline and have resulted in repeated calls for a more ethical, public or engaged anthropology, as exemplified in Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (1995): 409–420. High calls for the need to be frank about the complex and often ambiguous terrain to which an engaged anthropology, or as she calls it, an anthropology of solicitousness leads. The ambiguity of relationships in the field, she argues, arises from the tension between ‘being there’ and leaving the field again. She shows how in her own fieldwork she offered other people help to realize their life projects, but also that this did not guarantee the transformation of her friends’ lives and it furthermore caused guilt when she chose her own life projects over the ones of friends in the field. Failing to help is painful, but as she states, helping is itself often fraught and does not guarantee a solution to the ambiguities of fieldwork and inequality. High suggests that anthropologists should work towards a self-awareness of this ambiguous terrain of solicitousness, and of the ways in which accounts of guilt and self-reproach, so common to anthropology, gain their compelling force. She does so, inspired by, among others, Don Kulick, “Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 6 (2006): 933–952, who argues. that anthropologists’ identification with the people that he or she studies, and the longstanding anthropological interest in powerless or disenfranchised people, are manifestations of, what he, inspired by Freud, refers to as a masochistic desire to align with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. It is, he claims, the result of a repressed desire for the privileges of powerful capitalist societies—a desire which anthropologists compensate for by studying the ravages of capitalism and global inequalities on their friends and adopted families in the field. The ambiguity of relationships in the field, my failed attempts to help, and guilt over my own privileges have clearly also shaped the way I tell the story about Kate and her family, as becomes evident in my interactions with Peter. 7. Inspired by Simmel, “The Secret,” 320–323, we may say that people around Kate showed discretion. They stayed away from the knowledge of

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all that which Kate did not expressly reveal, but in subtle forms, fragmentary beginnings, and unexpressed notions, their interaction rested on the fact that they knew more about her than she had revealed. 8. The secret is a form which constantly receives, and releases contents, writes Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society,” 335. What was originally manifest becomes secret, and what once was hidden later sheds its concealment. See also discussion about secrecy in social life in notes 4 and 5 in Chapter 11.

References Dolan, Chris. Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006. New York: Berghanh Books, 2009. Finnström, Sverker. Living with Bad Surroundings: War, History and Everyday Moments in Northern Uganda. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. High, Holly. “Melancholia and Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 38, no. 2 (2011): 217–233. Kulick, Don. “Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 47, no. 6 (2006): 933–952. Meinert, Lotte, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Jenipher Twebaze. “Tests for Life Chances: CD4 Miracles and Obstacles in Uganda.” Anthropology and Medicine 16, no. 2 (2009): 195–209. Meinert, Lotte, Michael Whyte, Susan R. Whyte, and Betty Kyaddondo. “Faces of Globalization: AIDS and ARV Medicine in Uganda.” Folk 45 (2004): 105– 123. Mogensen, Hanne O. “Surviving AIDS? The Uncertainty of Antiretroviral Treatment.” In Dealing with Uncertainty in Contemporary African Lives, edited by Liv Haram and C. Bawa Yamba, 179–193. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2009. Mogensen, Hanne O. “New Hopes and New Dilemmas: Disclosure and Recognition in the Time of Antiretroviral Treatment.” In Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa, edited by Hansjörg Dilger and Ute Luig, 61–79. New York. Berghahn, 2010. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 3 (1995): 409–420. Simmel, Georg. “The Secret and the Secret Society.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by K. H. Wolff, 307–376. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950.

CHAPTER 14

Moving On

He did not remember writing it. I spoke to him about it under the fiery sun of northern Uganda in February 2014. ‘But I remember how much I missed her,’ he said with moist eyes. Jane had sent me an email from Kuwait informing me about Alexine’s mobile number. I called Alexine in Malinde in eastern Uganda, and she hurried to the market to buy a little bit of air time so that she could call Okoth’s aunt in Kakira, who was Suzy’s neighbour. Suzy then went to find Okoth. The mobile phone I had given Okoth last time I was there seemed to have disappeared into the pocket of a friend who had gone somewhere with it. Okoth called me from Suzy’s phone and I asked him whether he wanted to visit me while I was in northern Uganda. I transferred money via the mobile phone. He received it in a kiosk in Kakira a few minutes later and started his journey up north in dilapidated dusty buses. A few days later we walked around in the dry grass discussing life in general and the life of people in the former refugee camps in particular. The small round thatched hut next to us had a solar panel placed on the burnt soil in front of the hut. The cord entered the hut beneath the door which was made from tin cans from the UN Food Program—cans that once contained cooking oil, one of the international community’s contributions to the survival of the population in the north. For two decades the Acholi of northern Uganda had been exposed to some of

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the worst violation of human rights known to the world. From the mid1980s until 2008, this part of the country was ravaged by war and turmoil that we heard nothing about down south in the 1990s. We were told that Uganda was a peaceful country on the road to democracy and development. Meanwhile, people in the northern part of the country were mutilated, killed, raped and crammed into refugee camps, living under inhuman conditions—exposed to the violence of both Joseph Kony’s insurgency movement and the Ugandan army. Children and adolescents were kidnapped, forced to beat and torture each other and their own relatives, killed or trained for a life in the bush as guerrilla fighters. While this took place, the fight for antiretroviral treatment had been won down south. Medicine has been available for free since 2005, and both the health care system and AIDS patients have—unlike what was expected of them—learned how to handle the treatment. The bulk of the funding came from the Global Fund and the US through PEPFAR (The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Some of this money was channelled through religious organizations which, in addition to distributing antiretroviral drugs, also invest in campaigns against condoms and for sexual abstinence and monogamy. But some of the money was also used to improve health services. The AIDS epidemic ended up having a beneficial impact on the health care system. Much has changed in Uganda, for better and for worse. Hundreds of thousands of people have risen from their death bed and once more malaria kills more people in Africa than AIDS does. Being HIV-positive is referred to as a chronic condition and not a fatal disease. Still, they had just buried two AIDS patients in one of the villages we visited in February 2014. ‘Yes’, the man we spoke to said, ‘we know. People know that medicine is there. But sometimes they just don’t have enough money for transport to the health center. Or for food’.1 AIDS is no longer something you need to die from. Child mortality in the southern and eastern part of the country has also declined notably over the last 20 years. But we do not know enough about what happened up north during those years. Nor do we know what can be done to ensure peace and restore confidence in life and in the Ugandan government. Many research activities, aid organization and the world press therefore moved up north during the first decade of the new century. Okoth, the small Padhola boy with bright eyes and quick legs, had become a young Acholi with ideals, confidence in himself and hopes for the future. His mother left him with his father’s family in Kakira before

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she died. They are Acholi, but they moved to Kakira in the south of the country in the1980s to get away from the instability in the north. His grandfather returned to Acholiland where he owns more than one hundred hectares of land that he wants Okoth to be in charge of. But when I met Okoth up there in 2014 he had not yet gone to see the land, nor did he want me to take him there. He feared that his grandfather would not let him leave again. And he’d rather be a lawyer. Okoth finished school with good results and would be able to enter law school if somebody would be willing to pay for it. Jane worked as a maid in Kuwait. She had had two more children with a man from the church that she worked for when I found her in Kampala in 2004. The children now lived with Alexine in Malinde. The man had left for Tanzania. Suzy tried to make a living in Kakira selling macaroni in chapati, assisted by Sorrow, now a mother of a 2-year-old girl. They would prepare a bucket of these macaroni chapatis each morning, and Suzy would then walk around Kakira with the bucket on her head until she had sold all of them. Hope was in Kampala, Okoth told me, all by herself, without a job, but always smartly dressed and with a mobile phone in her hand. The shy boy I had found in the settlement in the sugarcane fields eight years earlier had become talkative. Okoth spoke continuously during the four days we spent together. He was worried about Hope, who made money without doing anything but looking smart. He told me that Comfort had never been tested for HIV but was a healthy young man living with his mother’s uncles in Saya and doing well in school. And then he told me about his burning desire to become a lawyer and everything he hoped to accomplish if he got the opportunity. Museveni was still in power and he struggled hard to keep it that way. He had agreed to sign a law that punishes homosexuality even harder than the existing law which had been in place since the British imposed it during colonial times. He did so in spite of the resentment of those who had otherwise been his allies: the Western countries. But to the delight of the American Christian revival movement, which many Ugandans had joined in recent decades. And to the delight of the many Ugandans who feel that they have been bossed around by white people and donors for too long.

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‘I am so scared’, Okoth told me while studying the newspapers. ‘I’m so scared that the donors will pull out if he signs, and that we will then face darker times once more’. ‘So you are against it?’ ‘Yes, I’m against it’. he said without looking up from the newspaper. ‘I oppose it, because the Bible says that homosexuality is wrong’. ∗ ∗ ∗ Okoth accompanied me on my visits to people living in the former refugee camps. He listened to women’s accounts of corrupt lawyers who made them pay a lot of money without helping them gain access to the land they themselves thought they had the right to return to after their stay in the refugee camps. He suggested that they find a new lawyer, tried to convince them that it was worth fighting for their rights. ‘I always knew that was what I wanted. Since I was a little boy’, he repeated several times. ‘I want to fight for justice’. ‘Are you sure that you want to do so as a lawyer?’ I asked. ‘I promise you, Grandma, I won’t be a corrupt lawyer. I promise you that I will make Uganda a better place if I get the opportunity. I believe so much in human rights. I really do’. ‘Homosexuality is also a human right’, I said. ‘Is it?’ He glanced at me. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Yes, the Human Rights Convention says that there should be no discrimination against people due to skin colour, religion or sexuality’. ‘Well, in the Bible it says that God is against it’. ‘The Bible says many strange things’. He squeezed his eyes and waited for me to elaborate. ‘I know the many “saved” churches in Uganda tell you to believe every word of the Bible. But what do you think yourself? Is it the “saved” churches or Ugandans who have decided that homosexuality is such a big problem?’ He continued looking at me for a long time. Not down and away, but straight into my eyes. ‘Yes, it also makes me confused that the Bible repeatedly contradicts itself. You never really know what to believe’, he finally said. I decided that he should be given a chance. Faith in the world as a fairer place must be kept alive.

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Note 1. For discussions of life with HIV as a chronic condition, see. Steven Russel and Janet Seeley, ‘The Transition to Living with HIV as a Chronic Condition in Rural Uganda: Working to Create Order and Control When on Antiretroviral Therapy,’ Social Science and Medicine 70 (2010): 375–382; Janet Seeley and Steve Russel, ‘Social Rebirth and Social Transformation? Rebuilding Social Lives After ART in Rural Uganda,’ AIDS Care 22, spp. 1 (2010): 44–50; and Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Hanne O. Mogensen and Lotte Meinert. ‘Life,’ in Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, ed. Susan Reynolds Whyte (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 268–283.

References Russel, Steven, and Janet Seeley. “The Transition to Living with HIV as a Chronic Condition in Rural Uganda: Working to Create Order and Control When on Antiretroviral Therapy.” Social Science and Medicine 70 (2010): 375–382. Seeley, Janet, and Steve Russel. “Social Rebirth and Social Transformation? Rebuilding Social Lives After ART in Rural Uganda.” AIDS Care 22, spp. 1 (2010): 44–50. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, Hanne O. Mogensen, and Lotte Meinert. “Life.” In Second Chances: Surviving AIDS in Uganda, edited by Susan Reynolds Whyte, 268–283. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Index

A Adhola, 29, 30, 56 agency, 8, 61, 174 AIDS (Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), xiii, 8, 18, 27, 32, 36, 53, 101, 103, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 115, 151–153, 156, 159, 164, 174, 181, 184, 185, 189, 191–193, 195, 200–202, 204–206, 211, 216, 219, 226, 238 Amin, Idi, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 17, 32, 36, 37, 39, 104, 213 Ancestors, 30, 31, 48, 117, 160 anonymity, 233 anthropological research, vii ART - Antiretroviral treatment, 164, 165, 180, 183, 184, 195, 198, 199, 202, 204, 205, 209, 212, 213, 216, 221, 222, 229, 238 ARV – Antiretroviral (drugs), xiii, xiv, 167, 172, 192, 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 233, 238

avoidance, of in-laws, 117 B Balokole, 32 Bantu, 30, 33, 44, 80 Banyole, Lunyole, 67 Bazungu, 70, 199 believing, 11, 89, 151, 230 belonging, 3, 39, 63, 78, 80, 99, 101, 110, 124, 140, 209 Boda boda, 23, 64, 122 bride price, 20, 33, 57, 74, 92, 103, 104, 155 Bunyonle, Munyole, 30, 43 burial, 103, 107 C child, 2, 7–9, 12–14, 16–18, 20–27, 30–42, 47–53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71–74, 76–79, 84, 90, 92–95, 97, 99, 104, 106, 113, 114, 117–119,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. O. Mogensen, Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9

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INDEX

122, 123, 126, 129, 131, 141, 145, 154, 157, 158, 169, 172, 179, 184, 192, 195–198, 200, 213, 216, 218, 221–224, 232, 238, 239 diseases, 164 health, 51, 52, 61 civil war, 8, 33, 36, 37, 66, 111 clan, 9, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 58, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 78–80, 85, 90–94, 117, 130, 144, 145, 151, 160, 163, 172, 183, 210, 219, 233 co-wife, 7, 33, 103 cursing, 124, 145, 160

D Death, 50, 101, 103, 106, 108, 153, 159, 163, 171, 182, 184, 185, 198, 204, 205, 216, 217, 230, 234, 238 dying, 181, 182, 230 Dhopadhola, 19, 32, 47, 57, 64, 72, 73, 151, 152 divination, 159 divorce, 93, 118, 132 domestic work, 22, 100 Douglas, Mary, 124

E Ethics, 183 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 160

F Farmer, Paul, 197, 206 Fassin, Didier, xiv Fiction, xi, xii Fieldwork, 29, 61, 87, 210, 233, 234 involvement of researcher, 134–136, 218–221

G Geertz, Clifford, xii Gomesi, 19, 29, 39, 51, 53, 57, 66, 68, 90, 122, 143, 156, 158, 226 Good, Byron, 61, 159

H Håkansson, N. Thomas, 44, 80 Hansen, Holger Bernt, 27, 44, 61, 79, 107 Hansen, Karen Tranberg, 101 Hastrup, Kirsten, 100, 185 health care system, xiv, 51, 61, 66, 90, 192, 195, 198, 238 High, Holly, xiv HIV (Human immunodeficiency virus), 18, 51, 156, 163, 164, 170, 180, 182, 185, 186, 192, 193, 198, 200, 202, 204, 216, 221, 222, 238, 239, 241 HIV test, 136, 147, 148, 159 Houseman, Michael, xiv, 185

I idioms of distress, 79

J Jackson, Michael, xiv, 100 Jathieth, 141, 142, 144–146, 151, 156–158 Joking, 73 joking relationship, 43, 77, 80 Jop’Adhola, 29–32, 43, 60, 80, 89, 123, 159, 160 Jothieth, 157 Juok, 32, 47–49, 58, 60, 64, 67, 76, 78, 91, 99, 104, 105, 123, 130, 141, 142, 145, 146, 150, 151, 153, 157–160, 220, 224, 226

INDEX

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K Kakira, 16–18, 20, 21, 40, 71, 181, 237–239 Kaleeba, Noerine, 107, 185 Kampala, 4, 5, 14–18, 21, 23, 25–27, 36, 42, 43, 48, 51, 58–60, 69, 71, 84, 85, 87, 93–95, 97–99, 103, 104, 111–113, 115, 116, 121, 122, 126, 130, 141, 143, 151, 164, 173, 175, 190, 191, 196, 201, 209–211, 213, 219, 222–224, 227, 233, 239 kinship patrilineal, 44 relatives, 123, 159, 160 segmentary lineage-based, 160 Kitenge, 114, 143, 158 Kulick, Don, 234 Kwon, 31, 48, 50, 56, 65, 66, 115, 116, 118, 136

140, 141, 143, 145, 152, 157, 158, 165, 166, 170, 174, 180, 195, 196, 198–201, 204, 205, 209, 211–214, 216–219, 221, 222, 224, 225, 227, 229–231, 237–240 Mulamu, 73, 74 Museveni, Yoweri, 8, 16, 26, 32, 36, 40, 70, 79, 89, 90, 97, 192, 239 Muzigo, 5, 95, 202, 220, 223, 229 Muzungu, 9, 24, 27, 29, 43, 53, 67, 70, 74, 94, 95, 112, 114, 125, 135, 146, 147, 199, 201, 213, 214, 219

L Lienhardt, Godfrey, 60

O Obbo, Christine, 27, 44, 80, 100, 107 Obote, Milton, 7, 8, 13, 36 Oboth-Ofumbi, A.C.K., 43 Ocholla-Ayallo, A.B.C., 43 Ogot, Bethwell, A., 43, 60 Orphans, 184, 185

M Marcus, George, xiv Marriage, 33, 34, 44, 74, 77, 78, 80, 90, 92, 94, 101, 118, 137, 221 Matatu, 59, 90, 104, 143, 154, 168, 173, 190 Matoke, 110, 139, 216 Mattingly, Cheryl, 101 Meinert, Lotte, 61, 79, 80, 184, 206, 241 Melancholia, anthropological, 234 Mogensen, Hanne O., 27, 44, 60, 61, 80, 123, 186, 206, 241 Money, 4, 5, 16, 19–26, 33, 39, 40, 42, 52, 56, 64, 66–69, 75, 77, 80, 83–85, 87, 90, 92, 95, 98, 99, 106, 107, 136,

N Narrative, 122 narrative ethnography, 233 Nilotic, 30, 32, 33, 37, 44, 74, 80

P Padhola, 7, 9, 13, 19, 22, 31, 32, 37, 43, 65, 98, 99, 114, 183, 213, 219, 238 Partnerships, 94, 137 Patrilineal kinship, 74 Pauli, Julia, 80, 101 P’Bitek, 43 Pentecostal movement, 101, 209 petty trade, 93, 94, 100, 223, 225 polygamy/polygamous, 94

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INDEX

Posho, 106 Poverty, 192, 223 R responsibility, 32, 63, 90, 131, 183, 210, 212, 219 Ricoeur, Paul, 100 S Secret, secrecy, 182, 184–186, 204, 219, 222, 230, 235 Simmel, George, 100, 159, 160, 185, 186, 234, 235 Southall, Aidan, 44 Stoller, Paul, xiv stranger, 51, 100, 159, 160 symbolic pollution, 117, 124 T TASO – The AIDS Support Organization, 163, 173, 174, 181, 182, 185, 191, 193–196, 203, 205, 206, 213–216, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 229, 234 Tipo, 145 Tororo, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 22, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 48, 68, 74, 90, 93, 98, 218, 219, 221, 226 U Uganda, xiii, 2, 4, 8–11, 13, 15, 17–19, 21, 25, 27, 30–37, 40,

43, 48, 49, 53, 61, 65, 66, 79, 87, 89, 93, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 109, 111, 112, 115, 117, 132, 137, 141, 144, 159, 163, 167, 172, 174, 183, 184, 189, 190, 192, 196, 202, 204, 205, 210, 212, 216, 220, 221, 229, 233, 238 eastern, 1, 4, 7, 29, 30, 37, 65, 80, 90, 159, 237 northern, 3, 18, 37, 39, 80, 97, 101, 137, 213, 237

V Van der Geest, Sjaak, 80 Violence, 100, 137, 238 domestic, 137

W Whyte, Michael A., 27, 43, 79, 101, 124, 184, 206 Whyte, Susan Reynolds, xiii, 27, 43, 61, 79, 80, 101, 124, 184, 206, 241 Wiles, Ellen, xiv witchcraft, 160 Women, 5, 17–19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 33, 35, 44, 50–52, 56, 59, 61, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78, 80, 85, 88, 91–94, 100, 101, 108, 110, 114, 132, 139, 143, 156, 158, 185, 209, 211, 213, 221, 223, 240 Single, 80