I was telling you that my fate as a heathen was sealed through no fault of mine, and it was through no fault of Padre Leonardo Rubumbira either. Mine were neither sins of commission nor omission but there was nothing any padre could do, as long as they had to stick to the good Lord’s book.
My dreams of becoming a saintly man of God thus went up in smoke, and I settled down to concentrating on the only other alternative that could get me out of my ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ life in the refugee camp. This meant studying hard so that I could join secondary school and forget about battles with beasts, men and matooke.
Going to secondary school was marked by pomp and pageantry. You left your village folk with fanfare, everybody in the refugee camp in tow, accompanying you, to see off their future ‘intellectual’! This meant everybody chipping in with a gift, which, as a rule, could not be declined.
Fortunately, your wooden box was host to completely nothing, so you could afford to put in all the gifts. These included roast groundnut, the small ripe bananas (kabaragara), some cooked sweet potatoes, et al, on top of the many copper and few silver coins that you would put in the pockets of your tired (often well ventilated!) khaki shorts.
Your box would be empty because if you had any money to buy anything, you would do your shopping in Mbarara town, near the school you were going to join. A fact that had many advantages, including that of not tempting you into wearing your shoes when you were still at home – if you had them, which was often not the case!
Suppose, then, that you happened to have the shoes and you made the mistake of wearing them when you were still in the camp. You are at the head of a long line of escorts, and everybody is enumerating their desires, which you have to promise to buy for them as soon as you finish ‘all the schools’. As you get close to the bus-stage, the strong, tall man behind you carrying your wooden box — usually the late Rwizibuka, God bless his soul – points out that he can see your headmaster at a distance, coming in person to see off his boys and girls.
Your heart skips a beat, because you are wearing shoes! You remove them very quickly and hang them on your shoulders by their straps. Of course, our fatherly headmaster, Muzehe Rushanda, would see your dangling shoes and make a hearty chuckle, pointing at your bare ‘folks’, toes, to indicate that your shoes are supposed to be draping your feet, not your shoulders!
He understood though, and knew that you were trying not to appear arrogant, wearing shoes for the first time in the village, before even seeing the gate to your secondary school. After that he would give us all his final advice, pat our backs warmly and wish us well. The whole group would then shout their send-offs until UTC, the Uganda government bus, disappeared around the corner towards Rwamurunga, where we would pick another lot of bare-foot boys and girls going for their haya (secondary education!).
At ‘Mile 20’, another bare-foot group sat shyly waiting, after covering the more than 30-km trek from Kyaka, Juru, Gashojwa or nearer: Rwikubo, Gahirimbi or Rwimbwa. This was before the launch of the Lugaga bus service, so these young fellows would work up a sweat the whole night, to be at the stage in the wee hours of the morning. It was not an easy task for them, as few of them had gone through our Ngarama-Burumba-Ruyanga training of working for food – they being ‘cow-refugees’ and not ‘hoe-refugees’ like us (hoping you catch my drift)!
Of course it served them well, for why would strong, young fellows depend on exchanging fermented cow ghee for dry maize, which was their daily diet, as if they could not hold a hoe and remove weeds from a banana plantation? And it was this same cow ghee that proved to be everybody’s headache. Because, for instance, the bus is groaning its asthmatic way up Gayaza Hill on its way to Mbarara and then, for some reason, it tilts and discharges its cargo from the rack up.
The metallic boxes did not have any problem when they fell, but the wooden ones broke into umpteen pieces, which meant letting loose their contents: groundnuts, bananas, potatoes and – yuck! – the fermented cow ghee with its terribly offending smell! After apologizing to abataka (the local nationals), you picked up whatever you could salvage and resumed your journey. The subsequent problem was that you had to include a suitcase to your shopping list, if you had budgeted for more than just shoes and socks, which was an extremely rare case. It was more common to see everybody buy shoes and socks, try them on and, to the amazement of the Indian shop-owner, walk away in them: dirt, dust and all!
The rest of the requirements were provided, and if that was not a revolution, tell me what is! From lumpens we went through the ranks of the proletariat and were emancipated into the class of the bourgeois, overnight. It is when you started classes that you realized it was not going to be smooth sailing: you encountered new subjects, the ones you knew started to become difficult and some of the students that you mixed with, from all over the country, spoke English like your new teachers, who were native English. That scare, however, would soon fizzle out quickly, although not without claiming a few victims.
And here started the real life of adventure!
