Mbirizi
My memory of Mbirizi Town is etched in a permanent orange hue, like the glow of a sun that hangs too late in the sky when the cloud is lifted after a day of incessant rains. The memories themselves are more fleeting; some vivid, others randomly beaming at the most inconceivable of times only to […]
Footsteps In Rubbish-Town
The receding night was still alight with a few twinkling celestial lights, like a reversing twilight, when you ambled from your crumpled bed and made for the road. You looked up and tried to count. You got to seven and gave it up. You’re not an astrologer, and the exercise makes your head ache. Life […]
If Only Fathers Were Sold At Flea Markets
The Crucifixion Of Barabbas
Mukasa-Oyet wore his vulnerability like a freshly circumcised coward – too honestly, and with too little pride. His soul, it turned out, contained not enough of the impassive, immovable man to whom we had – over the few years of his young family’s tenancy in our little township – grown accustomed. And on this particular […]
BlackRedBlue Miracle
Bonsu was engrossed, he did not notice how beautiful the tiny little village looked now that the sun was beginning to cut through the mist. The tea-women working in the fields, dressed in tired rags, carrying straw baskets on their backs supported by long strips of cloth that went round each basket, and then round […]
How Eagles Court
When the September rains fall, the houses of Kinawataka get submerged in soil. River-like torrents sweep away layers of up-hill Kampala and dump them in Kinawataka like tippers, browning every white wall and making magnets of the existing excuse for roads. By and large, grass, like a timid once-beaten-twice-shy adolescent, has learnt not to grow […]
Red-letter Day
11:38 AM He woke up to the stench of burning flesh and the taste of blood. The lids had thickened around his eyes, squirting hot fluid, and the tongue, unsure, ran slowly across gums on roll call for teeth. His head felt heavy against the left cheek, the left arm throbbed beneath the weight of […]
The Law School Project
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was on the road to the deep, inner South West. I was beginning a one-year Legal research diploma the next day in Nyende — a small, lesser-known town which many non-natives would never consider visiting. There was nothing much to see or do in Nyende, except this newly-built […]