The first time I walked into a supermarket alone, I was ten or eleven. I had been there before with my father when we’d gone shopping. He knew the supermarket’s owners; never mind we had only moved into the neighbourhood less than a month prior. He always knew people. Frajo Supermarket was an open mart by the roadside with a large hard-to-miss parking space. It was the big thing in Buziga along Katuuso road. I had returned since but was always in the company of someone else until I found out about Simka ice cream. To my surprise, my father had offered to buy me one even without my asking, nor did my mother protest this.
You see, the ice cream I’d been used to came from an ice cooler on wheels and was served in an edible brown cone. You would eat your ice cream in phases; first, the ice cream and then the cone, leaving no trace behind. The cholera outbreak in the late nineties and early 2000s ended this. I made peace with not having it anymore. It had become taboo to eat it, with my ever-conscious mother protesting, “I doubt they boil the water and that they are clean enough.”
Then I discovered the tinned ice cream. The kind that you could say went to an international school. The kind that if it were to speak a language, it would be either Spanish or French, given its smoothness on the tongue. This ice cream lived in an enclosed estate in a big refrigerator, frozen away and waiting to be picked up! So the next time I was given pocket money for school, I did my best to save it all to buy this ice cream at Frajo. This became part of my weekend to-do list. The journey between home and the supermarket, approved without hesitation, was one I looked forward to. It covered up for my lonely long weekends, which were spent mostly indoors. There was hardly anything else for me to do outdoors in my Buziga neighbourhood.
Buziga had endless roads that snaked around the hill. Some wound up at gates as others coiled further on. All you saw were plumes of dust rising in protest for disturbing their peace. The plants by the roadside were dressed in red dirt, but they seemed unbothered. Trees went about their days waltzing to the breeze from the lake shores in Ggaba and Munyonyo. The stillness of the graceful Lake Victoria lay visible from the top of the hill. And the silence. If you paid attention, you could learn a bird’s song in one sitting.
The houses in the neighbourhood were fenced to the teeth, with perimeter walls competing with the trees for height. Seeing a home without a perimeter wall was a bet worth taking. Dogs behind these walls spent the better parts of their days barking inside their prisons. The lucky ones would stick their heads under the gate, waiting for a passerby to bark at them. It was rare to see anyone outside these long and high line-ups of fences. The few people I saw were always in a hurry. In the late afternoon, children came out to ride their clean ‘changer’ bikes escorted by an adult or two on the way to shopping. Unlike in Kawempe, where we went shopping at Kanywani’s shop, people went to Frajo supermarket here. It was rare to see a child walk alone unsupervised. No one walked to school. Everyone was dropped off by their parents, in a school van or Boda Boda. I had none. We lived within walking distance of the school.
I never got to gel well with my new schoolmates. They were different in the things they talked about. It was all a big weird world out there. At home, we turned on our analogue coloured TV and watched just the usual TV stations. My classmates were watching DSTV. I had no slight idea of where the DSTV things began and ended. Save for the big TV Dishes I saw in people’s compounds; I could scarcely tell what that meant. So I made peace by avoiding conversations that I had nothing useful to contribute to.
One evening while walking with my father, we met Muhumuza, who would soon become my friend, walking with his father. Our fathers knew each other. When they started talking to each other, we were left with no option but to speak to each other. And that is when the ice broke. We were both in Primary Six (P6). He went to a boarding school. His family lived on the avenue behind ours. Another beautiful, quiet and lonely stretch. Their house, like ours, was not fenced off, and they, too, had no dogs. During the school breaks, Muhumuza was my guy. I would go over to his place or he to mine, and we would spend the time playing board games. We were no longer running about chasing anything. For once, I realised a day could pass by with my clothes remaining clean. The era of injured toes, limping feet, and open wounds from hard-to-recall encounters quickly faded behind me.
As time passed by, I recoiled further into myself. I didn’t want to engage in conversations in which I did not have much to say. I preferred to read more novels and newspapers, which were in large supply at home. My mother was winning. I did not bother much with leaving the house. Buziga made me doubt my decisions. I walked the streets like a criminal on a wanted list. My mother became different too. In Kawempe, where I’d been younger and more reckless, she had not seemed to care much about my whereabouts. But now! She would interrogate me for being away for an hour.
By the time I turned ten, Kawempe had taught me that each inch of land mattered and that I had to watch every step I took like cows walking in a single file as they go to drink water. With time, I had grown accustomed to the fast-paced footsteps of men and women shoving past everyone to make their way. The road was left for the mad cars, boda-bodas and bicycles to rip each other apart as they each struggled to prove a right of way on what should have been a pedestrian walkway. I learnt the different shortcuts—the one from home to school and the kool-kool bar outlet. I learnt many other shortcuts. Shortcuts while running away from neighbours fighting or landlords arguing over sewerage channels. I learnt to jump over naked electric wires carrying smuggled electricity into shanty houses and to avoid the route that led past the incomplete mizigos where half-dressed women religiously gathered smoking three-throne pipes as they poured out chants. And learnt to trust my legs to Usain Bolt through the corridor between the church and the ROKO fence where red-eyed stone-faced men and women sat playing cards and emitting nimbus clouds of weed.
I learnt to walk with straight feet, making sure I didn’t step on the malwa-drying tarpaulin. Never mind, the tarpaulins were spread out across the pathways. It was my business to mind my steps lest a sentence was cast upon my mother. I had to learn, too, to balance the expectations of me at home and in the community. I marked those older people who would report me to my parents for bypassing them without greeting them. I kept in mind too, which of the shops, Maama Derrick’s or Kanywanyi’s, was giving away switi kamotoka. But most importantly, I learnt to escape from home to play in the neighbourhood. Once upon returning home, my mother promised to give me a gift if I ever returned with dirt-free knees or a clean white shirt, a gift that never came.
Until we moved to Buziga, I never had an issue with making friends. In Kawempe, we were not restricted from going outdoors to play. Besides, that’s all children ever did. You saw Enock and Joshua playing and just joined. The following day you would be best friends. That is how I was with Victor and Collin, who always came out to play every afternoon in clothes that were always still clean in the afternoon. Especially Victor. The Victors stayed a safe three houses away from ours, making it easy to always link up with them. It was a different case with the Mayanjas who lived across the road from our house. Here is where real life happened. Their mother had a menvu stall, commonly called Maama Menvu’s. No matter the season of the year, she always had sweet bananas. That also meant that whenever we went there to play, she let us have a cluster.
Robert and Andrew were the kings of making cars out of wires. They would make angular curves of wires that would be joined together using nkoba, very thinly cut tube rubber. After building the ‘car’, they would cut old Umoja slippers using a red lid of jerrycan to attain the same size as the tyres. Those would range from four to six or even twelve, depending on the type of car being made. A long stick fitted with a ring at the bottom of the car was made for the bearings. A steering wheel also curved out of wires and wrapped with nkoba would be inserted to complete the assignment. And the car would be ready to hit the road.
Before this could happen, though, we’d have to move around the village collecting the raw materials to be used. I would leave home, escaping through the backdoor to join the Mayanjas, where we would launch out to go wherever the road would lead. This usually happened mid-morning. The afternoons were about cutting, breaking, assigning roles, and dragging shorts in the dirt as we got lost in beating deadlines. Finally hitting the road driving your own wire car was a joy Spear Motors had nothing on. There was a lot to improvise, though. The engine was revved from the deepest part of your tummy and you hooted with the whistle of your lips.
Being children, the excitement of making cars would wane as soon as it came. A few days later, the attention would shift to ‘riding’ a discarded tyre car or motorbike. The Mayanja brothers and other boys like Derrick and Junior would go to a garage and ask for the discarded tyres, which they would later sell to the rest of us. We would then find cassava stems which we inserted inside the belly of the tyre, oiled with water, and pushed. Trouble would come from hitting a pothole and having those stems prick you in your tummy. But that was never a deterrent.
When the tyres and the running were not inviting anymore, we turned to football and imitated the players with our own ‘super tele’ tubeless balls. Whoever owned the ball made rules by which the game was to be played. Brazil and France had been the most recent hotcakes. We played football under the moniker of our favourite players, not our own. It was your duty as a player not to disgrace the player whose brand you’re carrying. Organised football too was boring. We turned to jji luyi. Jji Luyi was very simple; there were not so many rules. One had to guard against the ball passing between their legs. In case it did, slaps would rain on them. It was always exciting when it was someone else being slapped. I do not have a long history of playing football because of Jji Luyi. I quickly qualified for the shower of slaps for ‘laying the egg’. That is how I left football behind. I didn’t find a convincing reason to go and be beaten.
Today, while walking through Carrefour supermarket, I picked a purple container of ice cream after so many years of a forgotten beloved. DairyLand Vanilla Chocolate, to be specific. As I sat down to drown myself in this melting affair on my tongue, I leafed through Wanjiru Koinange’s Havoc of Choice. My mind raced back to those glorious days only left to memory. I thought of all those boys, now men and how they turned up. I grew up to settle into the lone company that dives into pages of the written word devoid of much human interaction. I thought of the ever-changing faces of people and places and the moments that never last. I thought of the fleeting things of life. The impermanent things of life. The people we become and all the good things we leave behind. I resigned to fate; that to each their own.