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Emmanuel

I LIVED AND WORKED IN COPENHAGEN, Denmark, for six years. After moving to the United States in 2005, I returned to Denmark every year to give talks, see old friends, and attend the PhD defenses of my former students.

When Susanne Bregnbaek successfully defended her doctoral thesis in the fall of 2010, I was invited to her apartment in Christianshavn to celebrate the rite of passage with family and friends. Curiously enough, Susanne’s thesis, though based on fieldwork in Beijing, resonated with a conversation I would have later that evening with Emmanuel Mulamila, a Ugandan who was married to one of Susanne’s closest friends. Susanne had written at length of an ethical dilemma experienced by many tertiary students in Beijing, who were torn between a desire for self-realization and family pressures to take care of elderly parents or government pressures to contribute to the well-being of the nation. This conflict between self-sacrifice and self-actualization weighed so heavily on the minds of many young Chinese students that some chose suicide as the only way of freeing themselves from the double bind.

Susanne’s friend Nanna had also been a student of mine at Copenhagen University, and had met Emmanuel in 2002 while doing fieldwork in Uganda. After introducing me to Emmanuel, Nanna explained that he had been reluctant to accompany her to Susanne’s graduation party. His situation was depressing, and he did not go out much. Emmanuel was thirty-nine. After marrying and securing a work permit in 2003, he completed an eighteen-month course in Danish language and culture, followed by a second degree, in applied economics and finance, at the Copenhagen Business School. But the only work he had been able to find was as a tour guide in the summer of 2004 and, more recently, a night job sorting mail in the central post office. It wasn’t only the hypercritical rejection letters from potential employers that had worn him down; it was the dispiriting effect of having to negotiate ever-changing state decrees and regulations governing aliens and the unemployed. As Emmanuel described to me the Kafkaesque rigmarole that circumscribed his life, I found it easy to understand his bitterness. “I have given up on ever getting a job that matches my qualifications. I have lost my self-worth. I am at the end of the rope, and there seems to be more pressure now than ever from the government in regard to immigrants getting and staying in jobs. I have become completely demoralized.”

I was drawn to Emmanuel and deeply moved by his story. I said I wished I could help in some way. I wanted to suggest that I apply for research funds, offer him a stipend, and publish his story, but I did not wish to seem opportunistic or voyeuristic. I said I would like to keep in touch and left it at that.

Over the next six months, I drafted and submitted an application for a grant to cover the costs of fieldwork among African migrants in three European cities—Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and London. When my application was rejected on the grounds that it was “thinly conceptualized,” lacked any “specific research questions,” and failed “to engage sufficiently with the extensive existing anthropological literature of migration from Africa,” I was thrown, for despite repeated efforts I had not succeeded in getting an anthropological research grant for thirty years. However, I consoled myself that my experiences of negotiating the world of professional anthropology brought me closer to Emmanuel’s experiences of trying to find a way through the labyrinth of a society in which he felt himself to be a persona non grata.

In late August 2011, I traveled to Denmark for yet another PhD defense, this time at Aarhus. My modest honorarium allowed me to spend a weekend in Copenhagen, where I was determined to spend as much time as possible with Emmanuel and Nanna.

When I visited their apartment on Smallegade, I found Emmanuel in an upbeat mood. “We hardly recognize him,” Nanna said, laughing. “We’re only now getting used to the old Emmanuel again.” Emmanuel explained that he had recently found work. It was unpaid and probationary, but there was a very real probability that if he did well the position would be made permanent.

I spent that Saturday with Emmanuel, Nanna, and Alice Maria, their three-year-old daughter, enjoying their company and getting acquainted. Emmanuel cooked Ugandan food—rice with vegetables and peanut sauce. Nanna made cinnamon rolls, which we ate with cups of herbal tea. I talked about my experiences in Sierra Leone and with Kuranko friends in London. And that evening, as I prepared to return to my lodgings, I felt comfortable asking Emmanuel if he had thought more about my suggestion that we record his story and explore ways of publishing it. Emmanuel agreed without hesitation, and when I turned up at his apartment the following morning with a borrowed digital recorder, we began work immediately, sitting at the kitchen table while Nanna and Alice Maria read books, watched TV, or did jigsaw puzzles in the adjacent room.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Every biography entails some history. Events that occurred before one was born or in a faraway country may shape one’s destiny as much as more immediate events that one had a hand in shaping. This was immediately evident as Emmanuel began recounting his story.

He was born on 23 September 1971, in Mbale, his mother’s hometown in eastern Uganda. Had custom determined events, Emmanuel’s mother would have been living in her husband’s place, and her son would have been born and raised among his father’s kin. But Emmanuel’s father was living in Tanzania, where he had a job in the Department of Agriculture of the East African Community (EAC), an intergovernmental organization comprising the five East African countries of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. After returning to Uganda for the birth of his second-born, Emmanuel’s father decided that the family should return with him to Tanzania. When the EAC collapsed in 1977, Emmanuel’s father moved his family to Kumi in eastern Uganda, where he thought he might find work with a former employer. When I asked Emmanuel if his father hailed from Kumi and had family there, Emmanuel said his father was originally from the Ruhenjeri Prefecture in Rwanda, a region that bordered Uganda, though he had only learned this recently.

Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda and Burundi has a long history, though most ethnohistorians agree that it had its origins in the loss of Hutu autonomy as Tutsi pastoralists entered the country from as early as the fourteenth century, imposing, by the mid-sixteenth century, a quasi-feudal state on the autochthonous Hutu majority. Nonetheless, at the time of colonization in the late nineteenth century, there was little to distinguish—culturally, linguistically, or ethically—the people whose “differences” would be played up, played upon, and racialized under successive colonial administrations and postindependence governments.

As countless oral histories testify, almost everyone in Africa was once a migrant, belonging to an ethnic minority that displaced people already settled in the lands they would come to consider their own. Some arrived as pastoralists (like the Tutsi) in search of greener pastures; others came as conquerors, and still others as refugees from religious persecution or hunters looking for forests replete with game.

In the late 1950s, as the Belgian administration tried to engineer a more equitable balance of power between Hutu and Tutsi, ethnic tensions increased. Following municipal elections in 1960, the Tutsi monarchy was abolished, and many Tutsi fled the country. On 1 July 1962, Belgium, with United Nations oversight, granted full independence to Rwanda and Burundi. As the Hutu revolution gathered momentum, so did Tutsi guerrilla raids from bases in Kivu (Congo) and Uganda. Tens of thousands (mainly Tutsi) were killed in these clashes, and as many as 150,000 were driven into exile, including Emmanuel’s father. The Hutu-dominated government of Grégoire Kayibanda now established quotas to increase the number of Hutu in schools and the civil service. This effectively penalized Tutsi, who were allowed only 9 percent of secondary school and university seats, consonant with their proportion of the population. These quotas were also extended to the civil service. The Kayibanda government continued the Belgian colonial government’s policy of requiring ethnic identity cards and discouraging “mixed” marriages. Following more violence in 1964, the government suppressed political opposition and executed Tutsi rebels, who were called inyenzi (cockroaches), an ominous foretaste of the large-scale genocides that would devastate this region in the 1990s.

The natural symbols are striking: the other as an insect, oneself as autochthonous—born of and belonging to the soil. I was also struck by the tragic ironies in Emmanuel’s father’s story, for not only does autochthony underpin Hutu claims for ur-belonging; it denies full citizenship to Tutsi, who are alleged to be second-class citizens at best because they were migrants. Driven from his homeland, Emmanuel’s father became a cosmopolitan, rootless individual whose tenuous identification with Uganda would shape the destiny of his son, who also wound up in a foreign land where autochthony was invoked to justify the marginalization of foreigners in national life.¹ As a child, Emmanuel was aware of his anomalous situation, raised in his mother’s village but with no real relationship with his father’s kin—practically an internal exile.

Emmanuel said his father and mother first met in 1969, probably in Kenya. His father returned to Rwanda with his wife and four children in 1974–75, but the mountainous region in the north, with its dire poverty, vertiginous slopes, and difficult living conditions brought them back to Uganda.

“The story is a bit cloudy,” Emmanuel explained, “because talking about how you met your husband and the intimacy and so on is something that people don’t share, especially the old generation. Maybe they met in a bar. Maybe it was in a restaurant . . .”

“So you are in Kumi . . .”

“We stayed there until 1979. April 11, I think. The Amin regime was breaking up. That same day, we learned that our father had disappeared.”

Idi Amin Dada (1925–2003) had come to power in a military coup in January 1971. Amin’s regime was characterized by gross human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption, and economic mismanagement. By 1978, Amin’s support was eroding, and he faced growing dissent from ordinary Ugandans dismayed at the crumbling infrastructure and ruined economy. Following the murders of Bishop Luwum and ministers Oryema and Oboth Ofumbi in 1977, several of Amin’s ministers defected or fled into exile. In November 1978, Amin’s vice president, General Mustafa Adrisi, was injured in a car accident, and troops loyal to him mutinied. Amin sent troops to confront the mutineers, some of whom had fled across the Tanzanian border. Amin accused Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere of waging war against Uganda and ordered an invasion to annex a section of Tanzania’s Kagera region. In January 1979, Nyerere mobilized the Tanzania People’s Defense Force and counterattacked, supported by Ugandan exiles calling themselves the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA). Amin’s army retreated, and despite military backing from Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, Kampala fell and Amin went into exile on 11 April 1979. After a year in Libya, he settled in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi royal family allowed him sanctuary and provided him with a generous subsidy on the understanding that he would stay out of politics.

Emmanuel’s mother was adamant that her husband had not been politically active during the Amin years. But eastern Uganda opposed Amin, and Emmanuel’s father was associated with the opposition simply because he lived in that part of the country. He was detained only days before Amin’s government collapsed. “After he was picked up, we never saw him again,” Emmanuel said. “Apart from a bloody pair of shorts and a shirt they brought us, indicating that he had been killed, we have never been completely sure what happened to him.”

“Who brought the bloody clothes?”

“Strangely enough, it was his friend. They had been traveling together. His friend brought back the clothes and said he’d been given the clothes by the security people. So he brought them to my mum. It was a message that he had been killed. But we never saw the body; we never got any results or any information on where the body was or what happened to the body, so we took it that he had been killed. But in that situation, where we hadn’t seen a body and we had no proof that he was actually killed or by whom, we kept hoping that he was in prison and would come out one day, or he was playing a game, leaving the clothes to confuse the security people. But he never came back. Up to now, that hasn’t happened.”

“Do you have memories of your father?”

“To tell you the truth, no. I don’t think I have anything I can remember about what he looked like physically, apart from the stories I was told about him when I was young. He was a massive man, very big, tall. I have never met his relatives, but when I sent them my picture, they told me that I’m a replica of my father. And this brings me back to the issue of why my mum never let me go, never let me visit my father’s relatives. Maybe that was the reason, because I looked exactly like him. But no, I don’t have a memory of him. Sadly, even pictures, the two or three pictures we had have worn out with time, and now when you look at them you can’t actually see many details. There’s one picture my brother sent me, but it’s not that clear either. So I don’t have any visual memory of him, and I can’t even remember whether we played together or he carried me, though those who knew him said he had a soft spot for his children. Which was very strange because with most fathers back then, their work was to look for food, to be away working, that kind of thing.”

“Did your mother ever talk to you about him, describe what kind of person he was?”

“It was . . . it was, eh . . . what can I say? It was a topic that one wouldn’t want to go into, even asking her. Because we tried one time, as children, asking my mum, ‘What was our father like?’ and ‘How were you people?’ and she just said, ‘Well, I can’t say much, he’s not there.’ It was as if something in her . . . as if we were cutting her heart into two. She seemed to be in pain. Talking about our father by then was horrible for her. My mum is a very hard person. I can tell you, I have seen my mum cry twice in my life, twice. And that was not the time when my father passed away, no, because I didn’t know whether she was crying or not at that time, but the time my grandmother died and the time she had the toothache.” Emmanuel gave an embarrassed laugh, then quickly went on. “So when we asked about our father and my mum went inside and came back and her eyes were red, I knew there was something horribly wrong. So we didn’t bother asking my mum about our father again. But even though she never sat down and told us intimate things about our father . . . about how he carried us, how he was at home, whether he mistreated us or was sweet to us, or brought us presents or not . . . she did tell us where he came from and who his relatives were. She gave us information about him. That was the only thing that we got from her. Anyway, when my father passed away, or rather, disappeared, it was left to my mum alone to make sure that we safely left that village, because we were not from there. Our presence alone would raise eyebrows, because westerners—especially those from Rwanda, the migrants—were called cowboys.”

Emmanuel had touched on one of Africa’s oldest problems—the troubled coexistence of pastoralists and sedentary cultivators. It echoes the story of Cain and Abel, post-Neolithic conflicts between townspeople and itinerants, and age-old Asian struggles between valley kingdoms and hill peoples.² As settled populations struggled to protect themselves against mobile and marauding outsiders, nomadism became a synonym for barbarism. Seen to belong nowhere and everywhere, the nomad was stigmatized as the antithesis of civilization. As I write (November 2011), a spate of rapes and assaults in northwest Cameroon is being blamed on Akuh cattle herders, with whom Aghem cultivators have long been in dispute over rights to land.³ In Rwanda, Hutu farmers claimed that their ancestors had generously given land to Tutsi seeking pasture for their herds. But the Tutsi allegedly tricked the Hutu into servitude, and the very word “Hutu” became a synonym for slave.⁴ Elsewhere in Africa, pastoralists also tended to be in the minority, supplying cattle (for bridewealth and sacrifices) to farmers in exchange for access to grazing land. But as populations grew and herders migrated from drought-stricken lands, ancient cultural or religious differences were invoked to justify radical separation. In the Kumi district of eastern Uganda, many Tutsi refugees reestablished themselves as cattle herders, though most, including Emmanuel’s father, were obliged to work for chiefs or wealthy men on stock contracts.⁵ Among the Iteso, cattle were sources of bridewealth, prestige, and political power. It was often said of a heavy-set man that he had grown fat on the milk he had in his home.⁶ But owners feared and resented the outsiders to whom they entrusted their herds. They said, “We can’t allow these people to continue keeping our cattle; we have to keep our cattle ourselves.” Moreover, Emmanuel explained, “those who had sided with Amin assumed that the cattle keepers were aligned with the rebels.” And so, as his mother told him much later, “we had to leave that area because my father’s tribe was not accepted there.”

“I remember a very big truck. We were put in the truck and covered with banana leaves—literally covered, that’s what I remember, because I thought they were covering us from the sun or rain or something. Later on, I told my mum, ‘I have a fading memory about how we left Kumi. Why did we leave in a big car?’ My mum said, “No, we were hiding. We were being removed from a place where we could be harmed, and there were roadblocks along the road, so we had to be kept under cover.’ We went straight to the village where she had been born . . .”

“Mbale?”

“Mbale is a large town. My mum’s village is Busiu, which is about thirteen miles south of Mbale on the road to Tororo.”

“That is the Bugisu area?”

“Yes, mum is Bagisu.”

Mbale is a market town, famous for its arabica coffee. It lies at the foot of Mount Elgon, the oldest and largest solitary volcano in East Africa. The Bagisu occupy a broken landscape of hills and narrow valleys on the western and southern slopes of Mount Elgon. Tradition relates that their ancestor emerged from a hole in the mountain, though they probably arrived in eastern Uganda from the Uasin Gishu plateau in Kenya. In anthropological parlance, the Bagisu reckon descent patrilineally (through one’s father and his father and his father ad infinitum), and when a woman marries she customarily resides with or near her husband’s family. When the family moved from the area of Uganda where his father had made his home, Emmanuel found himself not only fatherless and without contact with his patrikin; he was now subject to the authority of his matrikin. Ordinarily, Emmanuel would have expected to find affection, care, and freedom among his maternal kin. In fact, the opposite proved to be the case. Moreover, in the absence of a husband to support her, Emmanuel’s mother had to become the breadwinner, and Emmanuel was obliged to assume a role that would normally be assigned to an elder sister.

“So when we came to Bugisu, we came to a village where my mum was born and raised, only to face a new set of problems there. I had to grow up fast—not physically, but in understanding that life is not easy. My mum was pregnant when our father died, and she gave birth to a baby girl in 1980. I was nine years old. Because I was closest in age to Barbara, I had to take care of her.”

“But you had other siblings, didn’t you?”

“My elder brother Deo had been living with an uncle in the city for many years. My younger brother Peter lived with one of our mum’s uncles, three miles from Busiu. And then there was Mariam, my other younger sister, who lived with me and my mum in Busiu.”

“You were saying that life was not easy there.”

“My mum’s sisters and the older women in her family did not concern themselves with our well-being. They were focused on their own survival, and they did not want to sit down with us anyway because we were from a different part of the country. I didn’t know any other life. Not like now. But life in that village was not easy for me. It was horrible. Looking back, I would have preferred to be in prison. A prison in Uganda would have been better because you would know you had done something wrong and were being punished for it. But from the word go, people started telling me, mainly because I was so outgoing, so ready to help, ‘No, no, you can’t do this, you can’t come in here, because you are this and this . . .’”

“The fact that you were your mother’s son didn’t count?”

“No.”

“You were considered a stranger, because you were from your father’s part of the country?”

“Exactly. I was not welcome, and by the way, what made it worse is that, traditionally, when a girl left a village to go and get married, she’s not meant to come back. So you see, my mum coming back with us meant sentencing us to some horrible punishment.”

I found it ironic that though Bugisu and Kumi had been equally opposed to the Amin regime, Emmanuel’s family was nonetheless regarded as outsiders and ostracized. Emmanuel agreed, pointing out that most members of Milton Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) hailed from Bugisu. But political affiliation counted for much less than customary determinations of identity and belonging.

“They should have protected us, really, but they didn’t care that we were on the same side. That was not important. What mattered was that we were from the wrong place, that we came with our mother and lacked a father. I’ve been avoiding the word ‘bastard,’ but it is actually used more in our culture than it is here in Denmark. Here it is used as a figure of speech, a way of annoying you. There it is well defined. If you lack a father or if your father and mother are not married, you are basically a bastard, and so you are not welcome. Worse still, my mum was not staying with any man by then because my father had passed away, and most people didn’t even know who my father was. This might sound a bit complicated, but in my culture relations with in-laws are a big deal. A husband doesn’t visit his wife’s home that often. He has to be invited, or he has to send a message that he is coming, so the in-laws have time to prepare. And he doesn’t stay with his parents-in-law, but with a friend or brother-in-law.”

“So your mother’s people were outraged that you should turn up on their doorstep, because, in effect, it was as if your father had appeared uninvited and unannounced to impose on their hospitality?”

“Yes, we were strangers in that place. We had no right to be there. And what made things worse was that we didn’t know the local language—we didn’t speak Lugisu; we were speaking Swahili and a bit of English. We knew Swahili because we went to preschool in Tanzania, and we spoke Swahili with our father. In Kumi, in the Teso region, we didn’t know the Teso language, and so the only language we spoke was Swahili. So language became an issue for us too. I had a problem learning the local language because I had no one to speak with, and if you spoke with anyone they would actually laugh at you, and so you shut up and gave up. I felt the same way when I came to Denmark. People made no allowance for the fact that I was from another country and could not speak their language. It had the effect of making me feel like a stupid child, just as I felt back then in Uganda.

“The problem was, we had to go to school. With the benefit of hindsight, I think nobody really cared what we were going to experience at school. They just herded us off. ‘You are going to that school,’ they said. We didn’t know Lugisu, we didn’t even know much English, but they just put us there. Now came an additional difficulty. From years five to eight, classes are taught in Luganda, because the Baganda, the largest tribe in my country, influenced the education system. Just imagine, you speak Swahili, you know a little English, you don’t know your mother’s language, and then they go and teach you in yet another language that it is impossible to understand!”

WHEN KINSHIP IS NOT ENOUGH

Emmanuel’s story not only underscored the ways in which cultural ascriptions can be radically destabilized by the impact of social violence and enforced migration; it raised the question of whether any identity is immune to the exigencies of life. Consider kinship, the prevailing idiom in rural Africa for placing people and determining how they should relate to one another. “Kinship is like your buttocks,” they say in Bunyole. “You can’t cut it off.”⁷ “Kinship cannot die,” say the Bagisu.⁸ The consternation among Emmanuel’s maternal kin when he and his family turned up in Mbale, effectively as refugees, indicates how inflexible people are when faced with an anomalous situation. But the fact that Emmanuel was fatherless, obliged to follow his mother to her natal country and become a surrogate mother for his little sister, reminds us that even the protocols of kinship can be traumatically disrupted, though they are regarded as immutable and natural. Nor is this necessarily a contemporary aberration, a repercussion of ethnic conflict in a neighboring country (Rwanda) and Idi Amin’s despotic government in Uganda. The history of Africa’s peoples is a history of upheavals and migrations, every one of which must have entailed the kind of disorientation and suffering that Emmanuel experienced. Under such circumstances, the idea of normativity is more like a consoling illusion, a source of security that people fall back upon when the gap between actuality and ideality becomes intolerably wide.

There is wisdom to be had, therefore, in approaching the social through the biographical. Although the notion of the human subject is construed very differently in different societies and through the history of European thought,⁹ it is in the experience of persons—not of groups, animals, or things—that the world makes its appearance, albeit fragmentarily and fleetingly. The whole world does not exist for anyone. It is an idea. What exists are worlds within worlds, and the more we penetrate these microcosms, the more we come to question the generalizations we make concerning the hegemony of the macrocosm, whether this is conceived historically, culturally, or ethnically. It is therefore the indeterminate relationship, the lack of fit, the existential aporias between a person and the world in which he or she exists that become the focus of our anthropological concern.

ALL I COULD DO WAS USE SIGNS

“So they push us to school. To tell you the truth, Michael, my first years of school, probably up to when I was eleven—I have no memory of them. Either I intentionally shut them out or something like that, but I don’t remember anything good or interesting because I didn’t understand anything the teachers were saying. All I could do was use signs. I would just sign, ‘Oh, where are they going?’ and go there. ‘What are they doing?’ I’d do that. Games—I couldn’t play games because I didn’t know what anyone was saying. Somebody tells you to run across. I didn’t know what he meant. So I’d be excluded from doing that, whatever it was. The worst thing was, I couldn’t tell anybody about my problems because, if I did, I’d be punished for trying to get out of going to school. So I kept quiet. It took me a long time to be as talkative as I am now. It wasn’t until I was in secondary school that I began to speak a bit, because by then I’d made some friends and learned a bit more English. But even then, I wouldn’t say much. I was a bit hesitant about communicating with people because of my fear of making a mistake or saying the wrong thing.

“Those primary school years were also difficult because before going to school in the morning, I had to work in my grandmother’s garden, the shamba. You had to go dig before you did anything else. You’d wake at five o’clock in the morning, then go with your grandmother and dig, and after tilling the land you’d come back home and go off to school. You didn’t have time to clean up or wash off the sweat. The problem was that the school was three kilometers from the place where we were staying, and if you were going to get there on time you’d have to run. If you walked, you’d be late and get punished. And so, you leave the shamba and run to school. No time to bathe, and anyway, to bathe you’d have to fetch water from the river, which was four kilometers away—the Manafa, as it is called. So after coming from the shamba you only had time to clean your hoe. The rule was simple: you are not supposed to leave sweat on it because it could rust. So you are supposed to clean the hoe and leave the hoe clean. Cleaning yourself didn’t matter. So you run to school. And then you are caned. I don’t remember any day during that period that I was not caned.”

“By the teachers?”

“Yeah, it was like breakfast.”

“Because it was a daily occurrence?”

“Truly. Every day. It only stopped when I was sixteen and went to secondary school. Up to then I don’t remember a single day that I was not caned. The reason could have been because I was dirty every morning, or I was late (because I was late almost every day), or I was sleeping in class (which also happened every day). Now I know it was because I was tired and hungry, but at the time I didn’t understand. And the beating was not like someone coming along and giving you a rap or a smack. No, no, no. Beating was like an activity on its own. Teachers set aside a time to do it. I mean they could set aside half a period of teaching just for punishment. And I was almost always the first to be beaten because I was late, dirty, or had been caught dozing. Minimum every day I would receive six strokes of the cane. You had to lean over with your hands on the table, and they caned you at the base of your spine. Six for being late, six for being dirty, and six for not answering questions correctly. For me, the problem was that I couldn’t even understand what the teacher was saying. I couldn’t understand the questions, and I couldn’t give the answers. And then there was after school, when you were supposed to run home, meet grandma, get your hoe, and go back to the garden for more work until seven o’clock, when it is too dark to do any more digging.”

“Without having eaten anything all day?”

“Not always, because you’d often get the chance to take some leftovers from home, like a piece of sweet potato, cassava, or millet bread. You would hide it in your shorts or in your armpit, because no one would want to eat it if it had been kept in one of those places. Or you could spit on the food when everyone was looking, and so keep it until break or lunchtime without it being taken from you. The problem was that whenever you came to school with food, you reeked of it, and there would be those small, young boys waiting for you, waiting to take it away from you. So I would get used to going without food during the day, from eight in the morning to four or five in the evening. Sometimes I would be able to find some banana peelings and eat the softer part of them. Or you could go for the peelings of sweet potatoes from outside the teachers’ homes. They peel their food, so you go and get those peelings and eat them. They were actually very fine and sweet.”

“Would you eat in the evening, then, when your work was done?”

“Yeah, but you could never be sure of that meal either, because visitors would often come, and they had priority.”

PUNISHMENT, PERSECUTION, AND PERVERSION

Food sharing is at the core of kinship. Providing succor and support to those who are dependent on you for their very existence is the moral basis of family life, and commensality affirms the mutual well-being of the household. However, throughout East Africa, men have migrated from rural villages to find work in towns, and lives have been lost to HIV/AIDS, leaving countless children orphaned. Grandmothers have had to bear the burden of growing crops and feeding the orphaned grandchildren who now depend on them. Not only is food in short supply and farm labor exhausting; competition for scarce resources breeds resentment and ill will. As Erick Otieno Nyambedha observes in a recent study on western Kenya, “The sharing of food, once a token of warm relations between grandmothers and their grand-children, has now lost its charm and beauty and become a frugal part of day-to-day survival in a grim world.”¹⁰ One might also note that denying food was a traditional way of punishing children for being lazy, though deliberate starvation of children would not be tolerated.

It is also worth noting that among the Bagisu, physical punishment was a precondition for the attainment of manhood, and initiation (imbalu) was a kind of graduation ceremony for boys who had proven their ability to with-stand extreme pain. Each boy had to stand stock still while his foreskin was cut and subcutaneous flesh stripped from around the glans penis. “The degree of pain entailed is never underplayed; the most commonly used descriptive phrases being ‘fierce,’ ‘bitter,’ and ‘terrifying.’ Only those who have faced this fact and overcome their fear can undergo the ordeal successfully.”¹¹ Given the high value placed on male strength (kamani) and self-determination in Bagisu society, it is possible that Emmanuel’s ordeals were seen as a necessary preparation for manhood. Certainly, his growing ability to endure painful beatings without complaint, achieving complete detachment from the ordeal, resonates with conventional Bagisu ideas about the need to dissociate oneself from emotions of fear and humiliation to attain transcendence. In Bagisu parlance, initiatory ordeals were forms of “punishment,”¹² not for an offense committed but to stir the neophyte into developing metaphysical power. This power consisted in being able to control one’s emotions rather than being controlled by them.¹³ Manhood was therefore a matter of deciding to submit oneself to the ordeal rather than shrinking from it. As one initiate put it, “No one has asked us to do it. No one is forcing us. We ourselves have overcome our fear. Now it is my heart itself which wants it. No one is forcing me. Father has not ordered me. It comes from my heart alone. Let me explain it this way, even though I am here talking with my friends I feel like a [disembodied] spirit-shadow (cisimu).”¹⁴

Clearly, Emmanuel achieved this dissociation and disembodiment. But where Bagisu initiates gained metaphysical power from mastering their emotions, Emmanuel gained nothing. His personal fortitude was not recognized by others, and therefore gave him no social advantage. Proving himself capable of withstanding hardship entailed no redeeming transfiguration, no new social status, no right to assert himself. He remained like a child, unable to act and without a voice. He could do nothing except bow to the will of others, following their orders, doing what he was told, enduring their punishments. Reduced to the status of an object, he gradually became desensitized to life as if he was, indeed, a mere thing—without will, without consciousness, without feeling. In a sense, he was already a migrant, adrift and disoriented in a foreign environment, ignorant of the local language, lacking a place he could call his own.

Dismayed that there seemed to have been no one he could turn to, no place of refuge, I asked Emmanuel if any of his mother’s brothers showed concern for his plight.¹⁵ “No. In fact, they were avoiding us. And that’s another problem I have with my uncles, by the way. I don’t like my uncles because of that. By that time, my mum had got a job as a cleaner in the municipal offices in Mbale. She was living in town, and I was left behind in the village with my younger sisters. There was no one to protect me from my uncles and aunties. I was living with them, but they never liked us, no, no, no.”

“So you were staying in your grandmother’s house?”

“Yes.”

“And your grandmother was the person taking care of you?”

“Yes.”

“And your mother was how far away?”

“Uh, let me see. Thirteen miles.”

“How often did you get to see her?”

“At first, she went early in the morning and came back in the evening. But it was expensive, transportwise, so she rented a room in the city center. We used to see her over the weekend, when she came back. But she was away most of the time. The problem for me was that I was stuck in my grandmother’s house, and her sons and daughters were coming there regularly. You couldn’t avoid them, even if you wanted to. They would come and eat supper with us. It was a kind of millet porridge, halfway between porridge and bread. My grandmother would break a big piece off behind her hand and hide it in a cloth. She would give my sister and me that piece later, because she knew we had not got enough to eat, because my uncles and those relatives would just grab food very fast, and we were very slow and young. So she used to give us that food afterward when we were alone, when we were sitting somewhere. We didn’t have electricity in the village, and the only source of light was a candle that was actually powered by kerosene, and kerosene is very expensive, so she used to blow it out and say, ‘Eat, eat this fast before they come, eat.’ So that’s how we used to survive. And then there were days, of course, when we used to sit at home and she would prepare lunch. The problem is that when she prepared food, we had to eat it alone, because as soon as my uncles and the others came, that was it, you weren’t going to have food. These big people wanted to eat, and they didn’t care much about the rest of us. My mum was not told about any of this. And we did not dare tell her because the problem was, if we told her she would ask my grandmother, and if she asked my grandmother, my grandmother would ask the brothers and the sisters, and we would end up having even more problems.”

Emmanuel tended to move between past and present tense, as if the events he recalled from twenty-five years ago had the force of something that had occurred only yesterday. There was a similar slippage between “I” and “we,” as if he was mindful, as he spoke of his own tribulations, that they were shared by his younger brother Peter—when he returned home on visits—and his younger sisters, Mariam and Barbara.

“Yet they punished us, and when I talk about punishment it was not just a matter of refusing to give us food, no, these relatives would go drinking, come back drunk, and then unloose their sorrows on us. They’d just call us, saying, ‘Line up and lie down.’ Being beaten was not a problem for me, but my sister Mariam and my brother Peter, that was too much for me, so—I don’t want to use the word, but I hated them from that point. These are kids, you know, I was ten years old, eleven. I could take it, but the two kids could not.”

“What kind of abuse was it?”

“Actually, the name they called us was a name they called the cattle keepers. They called them ‘bararo.’ It was a term of abuse, like the word ‘nigger.’ The way I understand the word ‘bararo’ is the same way I understand the word ‘nigger.’ Originally, it was negro, meaning black, and not really a term of abuse at all. It was like calling someone ‘Asian.’ The same with ‘mulalo.’ It defined a people who came from a particular place, people who herded cattle for survival, but then ‘mulalo’ became a term of abuse.”

“You say you were beaten as well as abused verbally.”

“I got used to the word ‘mulalo.’ I didn’t really understand what it meant anyway. But being told to lie down on the ground was actually preparing you to be caned. When they come back in the evening they are drunk, or if it’s the weekend they start drinking in the morning and come back in the middle of the day. They call you from the house, where you are probably in the shade because it is very hot. We’re talking about a heat of about thirty to thirty-two degrees Celsius, but they tell you to lie down. So you lie down. There was the grave of my great-grandfather in the middle of the courtyard, and so they tell you to put your feet up on the grave and then you lie down in that slanting kind of position, me first, then my young sister and my young brother. And these guys are celebrating beating us, caning us. Whether they gave excuses I don’t remember. I just remember the beatings and how I could just control the pain. What was really painful for me was watching my younger siblings get punished for no reason. It still pains me to remember. Even today, I would rather somebody beat me than beat the next guy. I always knew that I could take more beatings than the guy next to me, and until now I still have the same feeling. Even with Nanna, whenever she is sick, I say, ‘I would prefer being sick because I can take it.’ Of course I can’t really take the sickness away from her, but that’s the feeling I have. That’s how I developed it and how I became protective of other people, especially Barbara, my youngest sister. She was never caned. Yet she ended up being the loser because we could not care for her properly. She wasn’t getting fed regularly or being bathed, because they were either caning us or sending us on funny errands or taking us to the gardens or something like that.”

“In one of your letters to me last year, you described how demoralized you had become in Denmark. Did you feel as demoralized as a child, suffering these beatings and unable to help your more vulnerable younger siblings?”

“There was one time I felt like that. This is a bit tricky. It was the lowest point. My auntie—”

“Your mother’s sister?”

“Yes, her blood sister. What she did probably prepared me for everything that I could stand. I woke up one morning when my grandmother wasn’t there. I didn’t know she had gone, but she wasn’t there. My auntie had been doing bad things to us for some time, but this morning she wakes up and tells me to undress and tells my young sister Mariam to undress as well, and then she calls her brother—she had a young brother called William—called him to come. And we are all in the same room, and then she is telling me basically to lie together with my sister and telling her young brother to lie with her in the same room. When we resisted, she throws me and my sister out of the room. We’re basically naked, and I didn’t care about that as much, but then she, she, she goes—how do you call that, how do I put that politely? She goes to the toilet, she excretes in the room, in the house itself. In the village wedon’t have toilets in the house, we’re supposed to walk and go to a latrine, but she really does it in the room, and then she calls me and my sister to clean it up.”

“When you say that she made you and Mariam lie down together, you mean—”

“Yeah, she wanted us to have intercourse.”

“Seriously!”

“Yeah, it was very serious. And when I say, ‘Your aunt cannot ask you to do something like that,’ she punishes me and my sister by telling us to clean up her excrement. And by the way, we’re not supposed to come with a hoe or anything, we’re supposed to collect it with our hands—yeah—literally wipe it up like cow dung and then take it out. So as I was hesitating, not wanting to do what she says, she says, ‘Now, Emma, you go and get leaves and come clean me up.’ And by the way, I’m talking about an auntie who is over eighteen years old—she was a big woman, she had boyfriends, we used to take messages to them, so she was an adult, she was not a young kid. So she tells me to clean her, and I think that was the point when I started to think of running away from that place. But what kept me going was the thought of my siblings. The problem was that there was no one I could ask to help. If I told someone, my auntie would get to hear of it, and there would be another war. Anyway, I think she was very good at convincing each and everybody that everything was okay. The problem was that she was almost always the one left to take care of us whenever the others went away. So that was how I got to the point where I could take anything. I didn’t care, didn’t blink. Even today, anything you told me to do, even walk around naked, I would do it without a second thought and come back here, pick up my coffee cup again and be okay.”

“Did your auntie resent having to look after you and your sister?

“Probably.”

“And she had to express that resentment by being unkind to you.”

“I wouldn’t think so, because, first of all, this is the most strange part of it—when my grandmother wanted to rest or have a free day at home, my aunt actually offered to look after us. If my grandmother was going for a burial or some other event, my aunt would offer to stay behind and keep us. She was never forced to do this. The problem was that no one ever questioned her. She was like a queen in that village. Everyone knew her. No one would believe our word against hers. And so we went on being punished, receiving the same treatment over and over again. She didn’t resent keeping us, no. I think she had this funny feeling of wanting to bully us, and probably because everybody was doing the same thing, she did it too. Ironically, she got pregnant, and then she died eight months into the pregnancy. There was a complication, and she passed away. Even at that moment, I refused to go for the burial. I said, ‘No, I can’t,’ even though it was really bad in our village not to go to a burial. But I didn’t, I didn’t go. And when I left that village in 1984 to stay with my mum, I did not return until 1990, when my grandmother passed away. She was the only person I would go there for, the only reason that would take me back there. Her death was the last time I went to that village, until 2007, when Nanna wanted to see the village. I went with her. Even then, they did not want us there, and I have extremely bad feelings whenever I go down there. Extremely bad feelings.” Emmanuel interrupted his narrative and called to Alice Maria, “Are you okay?” Maria responded in Danish. She was fine. But I couldn’t help remarking the connection between his sudden concern for Maria and his painful recollections of Peter and Mariam. And for a fleeting moment I asked myself whether Emmanuel’s spontaneous responsiveness to the ordeal of his siblings—answering the summons of their suffering, as it were, and suffering the eclipse of himself on their behalf—exemplified the ethical responsiveness of which Levinas spoke.

“So the punishment went on, and the worst of it was not what happened to me but what happened to my young siblings. I didn’t want anybody to touch them. Even when we went to school, the worst part was that we got separated. I went to one school and they went to another, and that almost killed me. I did not want to go to a different school, I wanted to stay with my younger siblings. I was not strong. I almost gave up. I ran away from home, from my grandmother’s place. I took off. I walked and walked and ended up in somebody’s home, where I started cleaning the house. I didn’t know them, but I cleaned their home anyway. They asked me where I’m from. I didn’t want to tell them, because I was scared they would send me back, just like that.

“It was from that period that I stopped being immobile, I stopped being home. That’s the time I realized that if life got too hard for me, I had the alternative to leave.”

When Emmanuel got up from the table to talk to Maria again, I asked myself whether this was what people do in an impasse, with all passages blocked. Desperate to recover some sense of freedom in mobility, they hit the road. Had the seeds of this solution been planted in Emmanuel’s mind when, as a small child, he learned of his father’s flight from Rwanda, and later, when his family fled the Iteso region where they had no right to be, no way of making a viable life?

Emmanuel returned to the table and apologized for the interruption.

“Were you in school during that period?” I asked. “That period when you were moving from place to place?”

“No, no, I wasn’t in school.”

“When you said before that you were not strong, what did you mean?”

“I was not strong enough to protect Peter and Mariam.”

“From what?”

“From the bullying at their school. But I developed a sense, a trick or ability to make friends, and I started making friends that I thought could help protect my brother and sister. I started finding ways of getting friendly with the bullies, so they could actually save my brother and sister, or let them be. And I also developed a trick of making friends at the school where I went, because it was the only way.”

“What was the trick?”

“The trick was complicated, rough, but to me it was very simple. I stole some of the things that we came with from Tanzania, things we came with that were very rare in the village. I stole them from home. My trousers, the shirts we were not allowed to wear because we would look strange in the village. I would carry them, hide them, and take them to the bullies so I could buy them off.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, I literally bought them off, you know. Things like spoons, the things we had before we came to Bugisu. I gave them out, and mum has never recovered them, even now.”

“But she must have known they were disappearing.”

“In the beginning, no, because they were locked away, and she was never there. So I had a way of breaking the box on the side. I could pull out one thing at a time and take it to buy off those people. It was the only way I could survive the bullying. I bought them off with those small things we got when we left the village where my father disappeared. And I did the same thing to help protect my brother and sister, right up to the time we all left my mum’s village and went to the same primary school.”

“When was that?

“Around 1984. My mum was still working as a cleaner in Mbale, and she had met our stepfather, who was a primary school teacher in that area. We all moved to where he lived, and he encouraged me to go back to school, even though I had to begin again at primary five. Most kids were starting secondary school at my age, but I was far behind. The prime of my life, I lost it. But my stepfather helped me with my English, so now I began to understand most of the things the teachers were saying. Although he is my stepfather, we have always called him father—so my father got me tutoring with other teachers, for other courses, and I ended up performing quite well with that assistance, so when I reached primary seven, I was under his wing and he tutored me, trained me, and we became very close. It is in that period that my mum got pregnant and had twins, though one of the twins passed away. He had a hole in his heart, and at that time, of course . . . money, issues of knowledge, and so on . . . we didn’t know that could actually be repaired. So David passed away, though Paul is still there, our sixth in the family. That is why we say we are six. So I became a babysitter for Paul as well as the others. I was very good at looking after children, and Barbara and Paul grew up without much age difference between them. They became my kids, and I paid their school fees right up to the time they finished their schooling. Even when I started working and came to Denmark, I continued paying their fees.”

“Can I backtrack a little and ask you to talk more about the changes you experienced when you moved from your mother’s village to live with your stepfather in Mbale?”

“For two years, from primary five to primary seven, I hardly ever got punished for anything. I mean, I could get punishment if I got a lower mark than I was expected to. I accepted caning as part of the system. I didn’t care so much about caning. I developed a mechanism in me whenever I was going to be caned. You could actually tell me to lie down and you could cane me, but I would just allow very little pain to go in. I learned how to do that because there is no way that I could take being caned every day. Basically, some teachers make it a point that if you cry out, they add to the punishment. If you talked or said ‘Ow,’ you’d get two more strokes. So you learned to be a corpse as a way of dodging the pain. I also learned to accept caning as a punishment for low marks or laziness. I used it as a way of pushing myself to do better.”

“Did you ever see your mother’s people during those years?”

“By the time I finished primary seven, the relationship between me and my relatives, my aunties and uncles, was at zero—I had nothing to do with them. In fact, whenever they would come visiting, I would go away for a day or two, stay with my friends or something, and that has continued until now.”

BUILDING SMOKE

There were moments, as Emmanuel recounted his life story, when I felt as if I was listening to a tale from the Brothers Grimm or the corpus of Kuranko oral narratives that I recorded in northern Sierra Leone forty years ago. Emmanuel’s story was as stark as the experiential ground it covered. First, there were the dramatic contrasts between an absent father or lost paternal heritage and the harsh realities of everyday life in his maternal village. Then there were the Manichean contrasts between innocence and malevolence: the famished and persecuted child whose plight was only momentarily relieved by running away, bribing bullies, and preparing to be beaten by turning himself to stone.

In his recourse to what he called “tricks,” Emmanuel calls to my mind the trickster figures in African folktales who reclaim by fair means or foul what has been unjustly withheld or taken from them. Many years ago, Kuranko informants helped me understand the ethical reasoning that governed the structure of these tales.¹⁶ The initial situation is one in which a person in a vulnerable and relatively powerless position is treated unjustly by someone in a position of authority. The paradigmatic relationship is between younger brother and elder brother, though other relationships of inequality are also implied: between junior cowife and senior cowife, between husband and wife, between father and child, between chief and commoner. Crucial to the story that unfolds is the characterization of the authority figure as a slow-witted dolt, by contrast with the quick-witted underling. It is the underling’s superior intelligence that enables him to turn the tables on his oppressor and thus prevent the latter’s continued abuse of his authority. Indeed, the denouement of the story often involves the clever, small, and agile status inferior actually displacing the status superior, effectively combining the virtue of moral intelligence and the social position with which it is ideally associated.

If one can reduce the ethics of the trickster story to a single principle, it is this: that trickery and deceit are justified when they help redress a social wrong, but not when used to secure a personal advantage. Paradoxically, therefore, the restoration of moral order depends on actions that are, strictly speaking, amoral. This implies that the difference between ethical and unethical action is determined not by measuring an action against some abstract norm but by considering its context and social consequences.

This pragmatic perspective helps us understand Emmanuel’s ethical stratagems for surviving an oppressive and nonnegotiable childhood situation. When he steals clothing from the trunk in his grandmother’s house, he is acting like Jack in The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk. Just as Jack steals from the ogre articles that once belonged to his father (whom the ogre dispossessed and murdered),¹⁷ so Emmanuel lays claim to his inheritance as a way of transforming a situation he has, up to then, been powerless to act upon. He is, indeed, playing the role of a trickster or daemon, redistributing possessions to create a more equitable and endurable situation, not only for himself but for those who are dependent on him. As for Emmanuel’s action of running away, he suffers remorse for having abandoned his siblings but achieves a sense of freedom to move in a world that had previously been constrictive and closed. However, the absolute deprivation he has suffered in his mother’s village now translates into an assumption that he has the right to a life elsewhere. The ethics of reciprocity informs his every move. In cleaning the homes of strangers, he justifies a claim on their hospitality and help. He is already a migrant. Rather than suffering the degradation of being in a place where he has no voice and no freedom of movement, he chooses degradation in the place of a stranger, in the hope that the natural home of which he was deprived through no fault of his own will be found elsewhere. Choice is the operative word. For even though he continues to be abused, he embraces the abuse, even boasting of his ability to withstand what others could not possibly endure. Sartre perceptively refers to this tactic as “provocative impotence,” since the disempowered individual “reacts with an aggressive show of the passivity to which he has been reduced, and arrogantly takes on himself what the other did to him.” Sartre goes on to say that this attitude “in its pure form” is found “among colonized peoples at a certain stage of their struggle . . . when they become conscious of their oppression yet still lack the means to drive out the oppressor; in this case, the challenge, an ineffectual ideal, demonstrates at once the impossibility and the necessity of revolt.”¹⁸

In every folktale there is also a supernatural helper, a powerful intercessory without whom the questing hero could not survive the vicissitudes he encounters or the obstacles thrown in his path. Throughout Emmanuel’s narrative, the figures that would customarily provide support fail to do so (his maternal uncles), while the figure of a stepparent, the embodiment of evil in so many folktales, becomes the means by which his dreams are realized.

Emmanuel did so well at school that he won a scholarship to one of Uganda’s top secondary schools, renowned for the political leaders who had gone there, including Milton Obote. It was a boarding school, and Emmanueldescribed it as “the Eton of Uganda.” But even though he drew increasing satisfaction from his studies, Emmanuel continued to find himself marginalized because of his impoverished, rural background and stigmatized by the wealthier kids. “I had the smallest mattress in thickness, the smallest blanket in width and length, and the smallest pair of sheets on my bed. I had no pillow. The bed was one of those you can fold up and go traveling with. A safari bed, we called it. I was the only student with such a bed. All this was another big problem for me. I had to work out how best to survive this new situation. So I developed a sense of making fun. I became the funny guy, making fun of everything and making friends that way.”

To his repertoire of “tricks,” Emmanuel now added an existential strategy common to the oppressed in every human society—the strategy of currying favor with one’s oppressors by acting the clown, subverting an oppressive situation through ridicule, mockery, and gallows humor.

“Did you ever make fun of yourself? Put yourself down?”

“No, no, no, I avoided that totally. The fun I used to make was related to experiences I met along the way. Telling stories but in a funny way. Whenever I could make people laugh, I was the happiest person around. I did the same with Nanna. In the beginning I had to really make sure Nanna was happy, but of course I sensed later that the mode of our storytelling is cultural, based on Ugandan experience. Nanna is Danish and could not understand it, so there are times when my jokes or the funny things I say get lost in translation, and Nanna no longer responds—”

“Can you give me an example of this style of storytelling?”

“Yeah, like an example could be . . . it’s a long time since I’ve done this, but I could tell a story, for example . . . there was an old man, and the old man had a daughter, and this daughter had a problem because she could not get pregnant. She was married but she could not conceive a child, so she had to seek the medicine man’s help. So the witch doctor advises the girl or the woman to wake up one morning when it is still dark and go to an anthill. On the anthill she will see a mushroom that has not yet widened and resembles a penis. She will go and sit on it. [Emmanuel laughed, and so did I, recalling an identical Kuranko tale.] She will sit on that and get pregnant. So whenever I would tell this story, I would tell it quickly up to that point, and then everyone would burst out laughing, knowing exactly what I was talking about.”

“Did you make the stories up?”

“In most cases, yes.”

“But these are so typically African, you must have learned to tell such stories—you must have known this style of storytelling.”

“Yes, the style of telling and the creation of suspense and mystery—that was what I learned as a child.”

“And the exaggeration!”

“I was very good at building smoke, as we used to call it. I would build smoke on the story, even if the story was sad. I didn’t want to tell sad stories. I used to turn even the folklore stories that were very sad into something funny, because I didn’t want people to be sad. I wanted people to be laughing, because I grew up not laughing. If you laughed, you’d be asked, ‘Why you are laughing?’ you see, so I wanted people to laugh. People would laugh, and sometimes they would come and push me and tap me, and that felt good to me. And that is how I could survive most of the bullying and the pressure on me. Whenever you make fun and people laugh, they’ll share bites to eat. So I could get my basic necessities that way. It was a survival thing I developed. I started it with my brothers and sisters. Creating stories from what I heard from the older people, making them into funny stories. If I met a person on the way, I might notice his clothes or his way of walking and turn that into something interesting and funny. Instead of abusing someone or describing something that was wrong, I would work out how to tell it in a funny way. But when I started telling stories like that to Nanna, it was lost in translation—she couldn’t get it. She would ask, ‘What do you mean?’ But when you are telling something funny and somebody asks you about a detail, you lose the story. Yeah, you lose the whole trail and it is no longer funny. And Nanna and I began to lose that ability to make fun of the hard things we were up against in our life.”

Comedy is a common antidote to tragedy. In Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions, his main character, David Zimmer, loses his wife and two sons in a plane crash just one week short of his tenth wedding anniversary. Many months later, Zimmer is surprised to find himself laughing at the antics of a Chaplinesque figure in a silent movie. He searches out more movies by this long-forgotten slapstick star and gradually begins writing a book about him. “Writing about comedy had been no more than a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me.”¹⁹

It is often said that comedians come from unhappy childhoods. Speaking of the defensive power of humor, Art Buchwald commented, “When you make the bullies laugh, they don’t beat you up,” and John Dryden claimed that “the true end of satire is the amendment of vices.” But it is to Henri Bergson that we owe one of the most compelling analyses of the comedic power of exaggeration.²⁰ An event or experience is tragic because it utterly overwhelms us. We cannot rest for thinking of what has befallen us, rehearsing it in our minds, unable to shake it off. We are, in effect, possessed. We are at the mercy of our situation. Our power to act or speak is nullified, and we are rendered immobile and mute. But by telling a story about the events that devastated us, we reclaim a sense of agency. Not only do we now call the shots, but we separate ourselves from the events as they were originally experienced. However, this dissociation or detachment requires that the events we ourselves suffered be recast as events that befell a depersonalized character. A woman who cannot conceive a child is a potentially tragic figure, but in the tall tale she becomes a figure of fun, a stereotype. We laugh at a situation that in reality is too close, too real, too tragic to entertain. To use Emmanuel’s own words, we “buy off” the situation by rendering it ridiculous. We separate ourselves from the hapless victim and recover our power to determine events as retrospective commentators on the human condition. The comic is not the opposite of the tragic so much as a strategy for countermanding the tragic with distance and indirection. Tragedy befalls us like a bolt from the blue, a natural disaster, a physical accident, a random act of violence. Such traumatic events eclipse and diminish us, and we withdraw into ourselves, feeling singled out, silenced, and powerless in the face of forces we can neither comprehend nor control. Though tragedy is suffered in solitude and silence, comedy opens up the possibility of transfiguring the original event by replaying it in such dramatically altered and exaggerated form that it is experienced as “other.” It is often said of tragedy that healing takes time. With distance comes release. The comedic is the ultimate expression of this kind of distancing and release, and it entails three critical transformations in our experience. First, the comedic restores a sense of agency. Second, it fosters emotional detachment. Third, it entails shared laughter, thus returning us to a community of others. In taking us out of ourselves and eclipsing our emotions, comedy returns us to the world, allowing us to see that we are a part of la comédie humaine rather than a victim of it. In this sense we are able to review the human condition from a general rather than exclusively personal standpoint. This is why comic characters are always stereotypes—“the mother,” “the daughter,” “the senior cowife,” “the wicked stepmother”—rather than particular individuals, why they are often depicted as animals rather than persons, why they have one-track minds rather than complex sensibilities, why their personalities are one-dimensional, and why what they have in common is given more weight than their idiosyncratic features. Moreover, insofar as they transcend private and particular identifications, funny stories can be more widely shared than tragic ones.

But there must be events that defy such imaginative reworking, that cannot be escaped, disguised, or bought off. And so I asked Emmanuel if we could go back to the time when his aunt tried to force him into an incestuous relationship with his sister.

“Actually,” Emmanuel said, “I think you are, if I’m not mistaken, only the fourth or the fifth person I’ve told about that. The reason is that one of the main taboos where I come from is against seeing the private parts of your auntie. It is a very big taboo, because aunties have a very serious and strong role in your upbringing, in your mannerisms, in your life, in your future marriage, and so on. So having seen what I should not have seen became something I had to put aside, something I could never tell anybody, because if I told it to someone, especially in Uganda, I would be the person, not the auntie, who would be in trouble. Now, having seen my auntie in that condition and having been made to do what I did became a no-go zone in my life. I never even told my mother. The only people who know of it are Nanna, my sister, and my brother-in-law, because he had to know where his wife was coming from.”

“So there are things a person simply does not joke about, that are too serious to—”

“Precisely. You couldn’t make any fun out of it. You cannot make fun out of your aunt telling you to have intimate relations with your sister. It is beyond belief.”

“It would have been breaking an absolute taboo.”

“The worst taboo. Nothing rivals it. Even seeing your sister naked is a taboo, or thinking sexual thoughts about your sister. Until I grew up and started dating or having girlfriends, I could never speak of it.”

“It seems unforgivable.”

“Yes. If a person was a serial killer, that would be a different issue altogether. You could explain that in many ways. Even though killing is wrong, you could understand why that person might be driven to kill. But if a person tells you to have intimacy with your sister, or with your brother, and they do that—well, until recently, I couldn’t put words on that. It’s what sent me out of the village, it’s what made me dislike or hate everybody related to my auntie, apart from my mum. I excused my mum, but I don’t know whether it is a biological reason or if I had justification for it because she was busy or something like that, but I never really told her.”

“Did your mother ever find out from others or ever have any idea?”

“I think she did, or maybe my grandmother told her, because I think my uncle, my young uncle who was also in the same village, must have told my grandmother, yeah. She could have been told. Because I realized later that whenever my mum talked about going to the village, she would make sure my aunt was not there before we went. And whenever my aunt came to visit, my mum was very prickly, you know. But being sisters, that close relationship, I think she had no choice but to avoid the whole topic. But I don’t think she knew about this issue of us being naked in the room. She knew about the punishment my aunt was subjecting us to, but I don’t think—”

“It would have been devastating if she knew the full story.”

“Yes, it would, for her. Until recently we didn’t talk about it, but then I had a talk with my sister when I was back in Uganda this January. It was the first time we ever talked openly together about what happened. I call her Mama Ali, because her firstborn is called Ali. I said to her, ‘Mama Ali, do you remember our auntie Namibia?’ She said, ‘Yeah, our witch auntie?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Do you remember what she did to us?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I do. I wanted to tell Dada Ali [her husband], but I haven’t.’ I said, ‘Okay, no problem, you tell him.’ You see, she was thinking of my position if she told him the whole story. I told her, ‘No, tell him what you think.’ Because there were times when my sister would get angry over some small thing, and my brotherin-law would call me and say, ‘Your sister is angry, and I don’t know why; I don’t know what has happened.’ So I told Mama Ali, ‘You’d better tell your husband about the way you feel sometimes and about what is affecting you.’ There were two things affecting her: that experience with our auntie was one, and the other was not knowing where our father came from, not knowing any of his family. So first we solved the issue of our experiences. We talked about everything—we had a very long day that day talking about everything, and I can tell you I’ve never seen my sister so happy. After that day, she was really a very excited woman. A weight had been lifted from her head. I think she had been carrying it—maybe she thought she had imagined it, maybe she was not really sure it had happened at all. So then, the next thing was to solve the issue of where our father came from. Luckily, we did that as well. We dealt with the two things that had been weighing so much on her. In my case, I dealt with these things by learning to hold them in and thinking of only one small bit at a time, never wanting them to affect me. My biggest fear was that those experiences would make me have a negative reaction or relationship to other people. But luckily, I think that by and large I turned that experience into something positive. But I never told anybody the story about my auntie and the issue of cleaning her and so on, and that picture has remained in me up until now. It is a very bad picture, and I didn’t want anybody else to experience it.”

Once again, I was struck by the ethical emphasis that Emmanuel placed on relationships. He appeared to be less mindful of how the infringement of a moral law affected him—a trauma suffered or a shame endured—than on how it had damaged relations among the six individuals closest to him. In having recourse to silence and forgetting, Emmanuel might be accused of avoiding an issue that required a talking cure, a confession, an expiation. But, as a Ugandan, the ethical priority was not revisiting the past but looking toward the future. Moving on, as we say. Finding a way around an obstacle rather than confronting it head on.²¹

And so, after reminding Emmanuel of how he dealt with bullying by becoming an entertainer, a comedian, I asked, “How did you deal with this other issue, concerning your aunt?”

“By not thinking about it. By trying to forget it. I literally closed it down. I mean I never spoke of it before the day I talked about it with my sister. I could never bring it up in any situation, never. I totally killed it off. I continued to have a very good relationship with my sisters, my brothers, and so on, but I closed that memory totally and never told anyone about it. It was simple, really. I pretended it never happened. The bullying was a daily thing, a daily activity, so I had to find ways of dealing with that. There is only so much you can take. I could take any verbal abuse—anyone could start abusing me from morning to evening, from now to next year, and I wouldn’t care. But physical abuse—there is a limit to what I can take. Especially, I hate being punished for something I have not done. If you saw me being punished for something I didn’t do, you would soon see how those old memories come back, how everything will come up again, and I will be remembering how they punished me when I was a child even though I had done nothing to deserve it. You would see me change. I would be very different.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand your experience in Denmark, because, in a sense, when you were telling me yesterday about your experiences here, it was as if you were being punished every day for something you hadn’t done.”

“Precisely, yeah.”

“You had done everything right—you had done everything that was expected of you here in Denmark—yet you were still not finding work. You were still being punished, as it were. So this was the limit for you? This is what you could not take?”

“Yes. After six, seven years, it was really pushing it, and the reason was that Nanna and I had chosen to have this relationship. I was part and parcel of it. I was there, half-half, so there was no way I could just back out of it. But even so, it reached the point where I said, no, I cannot live in a place where there is nothing I can do. There’s no way you can tell me that in the whole country there is literally nothing for me to do.”

“You said that when you were a child, in Uganda, and the situation become unbearable, you could always move. You could always find some other household—”

“Yes, or some other place.”

“But here you were totally stuck.”

“Yes, totally, between two places, here and Nanna’s parents’ place. And I tell you, Michael, I got tired of it. I never get tired of anything, but I tried everything I learned in my life, in all the books I read, to survive this situation—avoiding going to Nanna’s parents’ home for a period, maybe for three months at a time, giving excuses for why I wasn’t working or why I wasn’t visiting them. Or I would lie to my friends. Even to Nanna I would lie. Nanna, this weekend I’m going to see so and so. So and so has called me, so I’m going there.”

“You were ashamed to be seen without work, without prospects?”

“Yes. I was ashamed. What kind of person am I, who cannot find work, who cannot support his family? I would stay here, lock the door, and watch TV, or browse the Internet or sometimes read a book, though not much. I became very selective of what I would read, you know. I’d say, ‘What can I reread now.’ I’d say, ‘Ah, let me look at the atlas.’ So I would start studying geography again. But why? Because I did not want to sit and think, ‘Should I take a beer?’ Or, ‘Should I go and smoke?’ Or, ‘What should I do now? What can I do now?’ So this was basically me, here. To tell you the truth, for six years [Emmanuel chuckled], I was never stuck for something to do!”

“Like you said earlier, it was like being in prison.”

“Yes, and as I told Nanna, it is a wall-less prison.²² You’re in prison, there are no walls, but where to go? Traveling to Uganda, you need money. If I left Denmark for a certain period, I would not be able to get back into the country. How do you call that? Status, your residential status is reviewed immediately, so coming back becomes very hard. The excuse that you are coming to see your family might not work again. And going to Uganda without money is worse than being in Denmark without a job. Because how are you going to start again? Even those who might be sympathizing with you say, ‘You left us here and went to Denmark—what happened?’ Even if they are not laughing at you, you definitely know that everybody is going to be cynical. ‘Welcome back, Emma, how are you doing? How did you do in Denmark?’ I mean, such questions kill you because in your small world you say, ‘Why did I even come back?’ Going to stay with my mum would be very difficult, too, so I was driven to stay on here. And not only that, I was thinking of the money I had spent on my education in Denmark, so much money. Two years of education in Denmark is a horrendous amount of money—it’s too much—and then you sit at home and they start telling you what to do. You are literally told everything. Come here, do this, send this application, go here, go there. When I tried to be proactive, like going to the municipal office here that finds people to fill vacancies in Danish companies, I would say, ‘Ma’am, can you help me? Do you have companies that need anybody, from a cleaner to anything?’ She says, ‘No, sir.’ They send me away, this office that is supposed to help me. Michael, I didn’t need to go walking around looking for jobs. That office could tell me, ‘Here’s a company that wants this and this. The official language is English. You speak both Danish and English. You might apply there.’ But no, I am told there is nothing, over and over again.”

“How did you explain this to yourself?”

“Simple, my rationalization was simple. I used to think, yeah, the economy is not good, so they are not hiring. Or they probably need somebody with longer work experience in Denmark. Or they need someone with a different qualification.”

“So you were giving them the benefit of the doubt.”

“Precisely. And that is probably what kept me sane. If I admitted that I was not getting the job because I’m black, that would have killed me. I would have probably given up a long time ago. But I kept on telling myself that with the qualifications I had, including a master’s in applied economy and finance, there must be somebody out there, and I would find that somebody. But by 2009, 2010, there was no longer that hope, no longer any explanation I could come up with.”

“At that point, did you come to the conclusion—you were honest with yourself and said, it’s because I’m Ugandan that—”

“Yes, I started even telling Nanna now, openly I told her, ‘Nanna, these are the real problems. First, my age. Second, where I come from. Third, the way I look. I don’t think it is qualifications, I don’t think it is a lack of positions to be filled, not at all. It’s those three things. This was in 2009, 2010. By this time, Nanna would ask me something and I would not answer. It was too painful to respond to her questions, even when she greeted me. She might ask, ‘Emma, today you sent an application, where did you send it?’ I wouldn’t answer, because it had reached a point where I told myself I would never get a job in Denmark ever. I even went looking for a job as a sweeper or cleaner, but they told me I was overqualified. I looked for jobs that suited my education, and they told me, ‘Ah, there are many who have applied for this position who are more qualified than you.’ Those were the answers I was getting from almost everybody. Either I was overqualified or there were people more qualified to take the job.”

CHEAP PLASTIC SANDALS

By the time Nanna suggested we break for lunch, I had lost track of time. Emmanuel’s story had, by turns, absorbed, amused, and perturbed me. It had also made me angry, despite my conviction that decrying the injustices of this world is seldom the best method for dealing with them, for the perpetrators of social violence are often immune to our outrage and indifferent to the consequences of their own actions, while the causes of social injustice all too often remain beyond our power to change. It was for this reason that, over lunch, I turned the talk to the ingenious ways in which Emmanuel had come to terms with his situation and the uncanny similarity of coping strategies in cultures across the world. One of these strategies is to rework our experiences of adversity as stories, thus sharing with others the ordeals we have undergone. Not only does confession free us from thralldom to what has been repressed; it clears the way for a fresh start in relationships that have been lived under a cloud of ambiguity and shame. There is no more moving example of this transformation than Emmanuel’s trip to Uganda and his decision to recall with his sister Mariam the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their maternal aunt and to clarify exactly what had happened. I remembered an e-mail I received from Emmanuel in October 2010 in which he expressed gratitude for my willingness to remunerate him if I published his story and for providing a “breath of hope and an eye opener.” Just as Mariam had been liberated by Emmanuel’s recounting of events that she had, for many years, scarcely believed to have actually occurred, so Emmanuel, inspired by Mariam’s desire to know more about their father, seemed to have come to his own reckoning with the past. I had been so troubled, however, by the echoes in Emmanuel’s humiliations in Denmark of his maltreatment and marginalization in his mother’s village, that I had interrupted his story about his schooling in Uganda and now suggested we go back to his boarding school years.

“Initially,” Emmanuel said, “I didn’t perform very well. Too much of my time was taken up with appeasing my classmates and catching up with the schooling I had missed.

“I was much older than the average student. At least two to three years older. So by the time I began secondary school, I had to deal with the pressure of meeting my basic needs and the pressure of being older but not yet able to convert that into being better or the best in class. I failed to do that. Why? Because I was spending more time solving the basic needs thing, getting something to eat from others, appeasing them. And though I passed my O-levels with a poor performance, considering my abilities, I now faced new pressures because of the opposite sex. There was an understanding in the school that every boy should have a girlfriend. Those who had girlfriends were good at sports or studies, or they had money or were popular. I didn’t know how I was going to survive this new experience. I was the oldest in the class, every class I was going to, and all the boys had girlfriends except me. The girls communicated with me. But I was afraid of them. I had no money to buy them presents. And I was spending all my time amusing and appeasing the other boys. So there it was, silently killing me, and since I really wanted to be like the other boys, I also wanted to have a girlfriend. And that brings me to my second most memorable situation in secondary school. When I reached the third year, I was suspended from school—for a full month. I was sent home because I had been working so hard to get a girlfriend that I ended up being caught sitting with a girl.”

“How did everyone else get away with having a girlfriend?”

“That’s the point—they knew the system. Me, I was a newcomer, and you know, I had never developed a sense of having relationships with the opposite sex. I learned later that the others did it by avoiding being seen, because even touching a girl’s shoulder warranted expulsion. They would hide at night, get out of the dormitories through windows or whatever, and go and meet their girlfriends in the bushes. I thought it was, you know, okay if I did that too, so one evening I was sitting with a girl, and I got arrested and suspended. The problem was, how do I go and explain to my mum that I had been suspended from school because of a girl? She’s struggling to pay fees and everything, so I didn’t tell her, I didn’t even go home, I went and hid at my friend’s place. The problem is that my mum got a letter. The school was very wise. They give you a letter of suspension, and they also send one to your mum [Emmanuel laughed]. So when you go back to school after the full month, you are required to come with your parent. So how do I convince my mum? I went around and found a friend. I had become so good at making friends, amusing them with stories, entertaining them; I had made friends with a full colonel in the military, and by then, in the ’80s, having a friend who was a soldier, a colonel—[Emmanuel whistled to emphasize this value of this connection]. So we had become friends, and he is the one I took to school as a ‘parent.’ But they didn’t allow it. They said, ‘Emma, I thought you said your father was dead? So who is this?’ Of course they caught me in the lie. I couldn’t explain—”

“You really are a trickster!”

“That was the problem. When I started secondary school, I didn’t tell anybody that my father was dead. Nobody knew. Because being an orphan was a very negative thing.

“A stigma?”

“Yes, indeed. And so I had told lots of stories about my father.”

“And you had to turn up with someone?”

“Yes, I had to come with someone. But I was so occupied with trying to convince my friends that my father was alive and was a soldier or something, that I forgot that when I registered for school I had actually registered as an orphan [Emmanuel laughed at his entanglement], so I was caught in the lie. So they told me, ‘Go back and bring your parent.’ I had to go to my mum. That was the first time that I had approached my mum with a problem. What has helped me a lot in life is knowing that when you have no alternative but to do or say the wrong thing, things will only get worse unless you go back and correct your mistake. So if I lied about something, I would immediately start thinking, ‘Oh, what lie will I have to use next?’ So I usually went back and corrected my mistake. I went straight to my mum and told her, ‘Mum, for the last month I have been away, suspended, and I’ve been living with so and so. When I went back to school, I went with somebody that was not really my parent. I didn’t want to bother you, but the school knew I didn’t have a father, and they sent me away to collect a parent. I told them I would go and collect you.’ I didn’t know what to expect from my mum. My mum just kept quiet for a while. Then she said, ‘Okay, when do they want me?’ I said, ‘They want you tomorrow.’ So my mum never reacted. And Michael, that was new to me, because one thing my mum was good at was appeasing, but another thing she was good at was punishing, though my mum would never punish you for what you had not done. I think that is why I love my mum. By the way, when I talk about punishment, where I come from it is part and parcel of growing up—being caned and being punished for what you have done. So my mum did not punish me—she just asked me, ‘So when do you want me to go?’ That almost killed me. It was something I did not expect from her. She just told me, ‘Okay, they want to see me tomorrow? Now go home, go eat, something is there for you to cook. Then bathe and prepare for tomorrow. I will be coming later in the evening.’ She gave me transport money to get from town to where we stayed. I went home, but I can tell you, I was unsettled. I was home, I bathed, I cut my nails, I made sure I didn’t give her an excuse to punish me for anything but being suspended from school for a month. I was waiting for my mum, but by the time she came home in the evening I was sweating, I was panicking, everything I touched was falling, and she comes back home and says, ‘So have you eaten?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I had lunch.’ Then she asks the girl who used to help us cook. ‘What are we having for supper?’ Then she says, ‘Emma, come, we’ll go and buy sauce.’ To tell you the truth, I thought Mum was planning to bury me alive. I don’t know [Emmanuel laughed], it was so unlike her. So we went to the butcher, came back, prepared the sauce, and ate. In the morning we woke, prepared, and went to the bus stop and on to school with all my things. She went to the office and talked. When she came out, she gave me some pocket money, two hundred shillings. Most of my friends spent two hundred shillings in a day, but that two hundred shillings was supposed to last me for half a term. You see [Emmanuel laughed again], it was a bit tricky to survive on that. So she gave me money and then said, ‘Okay, I hope you don’t get suspended again!’ Then she left.”

“Seems like your mother had a sense of humor too!”

“Yes.”

“Could your stepfather have helped out in any way, when you got into that jam?”

“He could and he did. He was probably the one who told my mum, when they got the letter. My father has always raised us from a teacher’s view on child development. He’s always been like that with us. At home, my father has been like an angel. And this is strange, to have a stepfather who basically does not behave like a stepfather. I grew up in situations where my friends had stepfathers who punished them on a daily basis, but with us, no, it was our mum who punished us, not our father, though he had the authority to do so. At school, he also had the authority to cane us, and he used to cane us when we failed or did something wrong, but if we got caught doing something wrong somewhere else, he would not let anyone else cane us. He’d say, ‘You call me. I don’t want anyone to touch my kids.’ So he was the only one to cane us, and immediately he was finished, he’d say, ‘Go to class,’ and then he’d come after maybe an hour and say, ‘Emma, come,’ and also my brother if he was there, and he’d take us to a stall where they sell bananas, ripe yellow bananas, mangoes, and, oh, it was heavenly to be bought a full cluster of yellow bananas—it was like being a king, you know. So he buys us each a cluster of bananas and says, ‘Eat, you have to eat before you go back to class.’ Then we would sit and eat. In the evening, when we got home, the first thing he would tell our mum was the punishment he gave us. He had this policy, he never wanted to punish us and mum knew this. So he would come home and say, “Uh, by the way, Jen, Emma and Deo did this and this today, but I punished them and everything is okay.’ My mum knew of it. At home the coolant was our father. Whenever our mum was burning up, he would say, ‘No, no, Jen, take it slow, there could be a reason why he did this, can we ask him why he did this?’ And then they’d ask us, and we would explain. My father would say, ‘You see, Jen, even if he’s lying, at least he has an explanation for it.’ So that’s how they raised us. Even though they are no longer together, my stepfather and my mum, he is the closest thing I’ve had to a father, and he is the closest adult friend I have had. So I usually go to him, and we talk, we argue, we discuss. Our behaviors are mostly copied from him, because he has never drunk, he has never smoked, he was always a hundred percent sober at home. If he punished you, it was because he was sober and able to understand your problem, not because he wanted to vent his anger or frustration on you. That was only at school. Never at home. He would always ask you to explain why you were doing wrong. And my father could convince my mum not to react immediately. He would always talk to her.”

By the time Emmanuel left secondary school, he was at the top of his class. “I did nothing but study,” he said. “I didn’t care what anybody else was saying, I didn’t care about food, I didn’t care about anything, I just read books.”

“You stopped being the joker?”

“I’m telling you, I stopped totally making fun. People began to be afraid for me. They said, ‘Eh, Emma, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Be quiet, I’m reading. There were four streams, and I was the best student in stream three.”

“What drove you to work so hard at academic success?”

“What pushed me is the way my mum reacted. My mum never abused me, never pushed me. Instead, she was very positive.”

“So you felt you owed her a positive result at school?”

“Exactly, a good report card. And when I brought it home, my mum was so happy she bought me my first pair of shoes, yeah. By the way, Michael, I didn’t tell you, but that was the first time I put on a pair of shoes.”

“You wore sandals until then?”

“Yeah, plastic ones, like these.” Emmanuel got up from the table, went to the front door, and returned with a pair of cheap plastic shoes. “See, they were made like this. Open here, on the sides. But I can tell you one thing, believe me when I say that you would rather put your feet in the fire than wear these plastic shoes in Uganda. We had to wear them from seven o’clock in the morning up to six in the evening. The problem was, at six you were supposed to remove those shoes and go to sleep, but you couldn’t remove them in the dormitory—you had to go and sit outside because the smell was worse than a dead cat. You literally got rotten feet in a day, and when I say rotten, we Africans are good at handling awful smells, but this you couldn’t stomach—your feet stank like a dead cat, so bad that you had to sit out there for two or three hours.”

“And the other kids? They had leather shoes?”

“Yes, they had good shoes. Some of them had normal sandals like the ones I’m wearing now, but me, I was in those ones. They were plastic and too small for my feet. So my feet really got burned. The signs disappeared as I grew older, but my heels used to be white and my toes . . . here, some of the scars are still here . . . after twenty years. Yeah, my feet were totally burned. And whenever you remove them at night, the smell comes off them and you have to take them outside, then put your feet inside your blanket because of the smell. I used my sheet and blanket to cover my feet. The top part of me had no cover. And then I had only one pair of socks. That is, until my mum bought me a pair of shoes from Bata—”

“I remember Bata shoes from Freetown—”

“Shoes from Bata were not real leather, but at least they were better than those plastics. They were made by a company, a foreign company that came in from Europe, I think. So these guys from Europe were making these shoes, and we bought them because they were cheap and well shaped, but I don’t think our parents knew how bad these things were. My feet almost got deformed, because even though your feet were paining you, and you are dying in your heart and your brain is burning, in the compound you had to pretend to walk normally. So when I got my shoes, I was very happy, and I finished senior three and went on to senior four. Then, three months into the second term, I messed up again. I left school without permission to escort a friend who was leaving for America. I didn’t know we were supposed to get permission. We got caught up in the emotions of Teba Henry going to America. Anyway, we got caught off the school premises, and I was expelled for a term. I went straight home. I thought they had expelled me for a reason that was so flimsy. I thought they would be more kind and understanding, with our friend leaving us in the middle of the term to go to America. So I went home, knowing my mum would understand, which she did. I did most of my schooling at home, then, right up to my O-levels at the end of senior four.

“Next year, my mum took me to a new school. Maybe she was angry with me or had given up on me, but she took me to a school where no one in his right mind would take a child. The school had no toilets, no latrines. There are some tribes in Uganda where latrines are not allowed. It is not allowed to shit in a latrine or toilet. It’s not that they don’t have toilets; they just don’t use them, that’s their culture.”

“They go in the bush?”

“Yeah.”

“But they must designate areas in the bush, otherwise—”

“I think so, yeah. Some of them don’t really care. They consider shit to be part of nature, manure for the land. And this part of their culture—I don’t know whether I’m using the word ‘culture’ properly here—this was part of the school’s culture too. It was a boy’s school. I was put in there. I didn’t understand anything. So when I woke up in the morning and said I needed to use the latrine, people were laughing. I said, ‘Why are you laughing?’ They said, ‘Ah, Emma, you don’t know? You’re supposed to go to Beirut’ [Emmanuel laughed]. Yeah, the place they went to shit they called Beirut! So they said, ‘Ah, everybody goes to Beirut, man, you’d better go there.’ So I went with a group of people in the morning. We walked, we walked, we walked across the school, and I asked, ‘Excuse me, where is Beirut?’ So they say, ‘You’ll find it.’ And sure enough, just as I step outside the main compound of the school I step into a minefield of shit. That’s what they called it—mines. Everyone was using military language. The shape of a shit indicated whether it was a machine gun, a certain caliber bullet, a missile, or—how do you call it, that gas, that chemical they spread in war zones? They used to name everything according to how it looked. Now they told me, ‘Yeah, you’re a new fellow, you’re going into the minefield, and the rest of us are going to the gun ships.’ These were places where the ground was still clear, and you could squat down all right. But where I was, there was nothing but mines. First you had to place your leg, and then—”

By now, Emmanuel was in stitches, and I was laughing too. I did not need to be convinced of his ability to transform a potentially degrading situation into slapstick comedy.

“Well, you get the picture! You had to be careful not to bring more shit back from that place than you took there! And then it would rain! You know what tropical rain is like? Ah, you leave that place in the morning, and you’ve completely lost your appetite. You’re hungry—food is hard to come by, but you can’t bring yourself to eat. And then later in the day, you have to go back. Nature is calling!”

“I’m laughing, Emmanuel, but I’m sure it wasn’t funny at the time.”

“When I tell this story, everyone laughs, even Nanna. But let me tell you, being in that situation was no joke. No, no, no. When I told my brother-in-law, who is actually Ugandan and has been to secondary school, he could not believe it. I even told my brother, Deo. He couldn’t believe it. A secondary school, senior five, A-levels, where you are preparing yourself to go the university, and you don’t have a latrine!”

“What was the quality of the teaching there?”

“Actually the reason I was sent there was historical. Like a prince going to Eton, then twenty years down the road sending his son there. My school was called Katchonga Senior Secondary School, and my father remembered his older brother having gone there and later getting a very big position in government. Also, Charles Onyango-Obbo went there.²³ By the way, that is what mostly influences people. They look at who has been at a certain school, then say, ‘Ah, that’s the school you should go to.’ But the school I went to was not the school they thought it would be, and I stayed only a year and a half before leaving.

“Did you finish your A-levels there?”

“No, I decided to go to a day school, even though my mum wasn’t keen on it.”

“How old were you when you finally finished your A-levels?”

“I finished them in 1994. I was twenty-three years old, four or five years older than anyone else in my class.”

“Yet considering your circumstances, that was quite an achievement.”

“I had to work terribly hard. I didn’t want to repeat or fail a class. With my very poor primary education, I had a lot of catching up to do. I had to work out a system for studying. Coaching and extra tutoring became central. Some of the teachers who helped me have remained friends to this day. One of my main helpers was also called Emma. I could not have passed without his help and advice. I was very good at some subjects, like mathematics, and so I took mathematics, economics, and geography as my specialized subjects for A-levels. But I still didn’t have enough points to go straight to university, and I had to find a college in Kampala. I spent two years there doing a commercial course and paid for my education by doing odd jobs. I was thinking I would become a teacher like my father, so when I finished the courses I got a teaching assistant’s job at my brother-in-law’s school. I used to help in accounting and commercial courses, marking and helping students who were not understanding in class. It was actually my brother-in-law who suggested I go to university.”

“This was Mariam’s husband?”

“Yes. Mr. Kitez. He’s the one who actually said to me, ‘Emma, you have this certificate, why don’t you use it to enroll at university?’ I said, ‘Yeah, that would be okay.’ He said, ‘I can help you get in contact with a university. Would you go there if they offered you a place?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m willing.’ I went to my mum and presented my suggestions to her. My mum was excited, but the university was private and funded by an Islamic organization based in . . . I think . . . the United Arab Emirates. It sponsors Islamic universities in many African countries. This one was in Mbale, where I came from. The dream of most people in Uganda is to go to Makerere. Makerere is like Oxford in the U.K., or Harvard in America. But even though it would have cost no more to go to Makerere, I really wanted to go to IUIU.”

“Can you explain why?”

“Commitment of the teaching staff. Let me say they are not drunkards—there are no unserious people there . . . no professors and lecturers who look at you and want to give you less marks because you may have shorter hair than someone else. The standards at Makerere University have fallen, because politicians got involved and academics became corrupted. I wanted to go to an institution that was seriously concentrated on helping students, an institution that allowed students to develop their own understanding of things rather than being forced to think in only one way. It was there that I was brought out of limbo. I was happy to be there. If professors gave you 20 it was because you had earned 20; it wasn’t because you were a Christian or a Muslim. And the girls didn’t have to show their breasts to get more marks, like at Makerere. Also, I didn’t want to get distracted. There were no bars, no dance halls at IUIU, so you could focus on your academic work.”

“And no expectation that you should be Muslim?”

“No, no one ever came to me in the three and a half years I was there, no one asked me, ‘Emma, are you becoming Muslim?’ In fact, Muslims don’t do that. They want you to actually admire what they are doing, so you become a Muslim because of their deeds. We mistakenly think that Muslims are like Pentecostals. But they don’t try to convert you at all. I almost married a Muslim girl, but she never once asked me about becoming Muslim. She was willing to accept me the way I was, though probably her family could not have done so. But this is the thing, I was comfortable at the Islamic University because they let you be who you are. You have only to follow the rules: don’t come drunk to school, don’t smoke in class, don’t kiss or fondle females or do anything that makes people lose their concentration. These are rules that would apply anywhere. Anyway, I liked Islamic University because there was nothing to drag me from my goal, and so I succeeded in performing quite well. When I finished my bachelor’s, they actually wanted me to continue with a master’s there, but then I came to Denmark.”

THE SCAPEGOAT

Emmanuel’s story brought to mind René Girard’s work on the scapegoat. I had already noticed the close kinship between Emmanuel’s narrative and the folktale, for despite the deeply personal nature of what was being recounted, the minimalist and austere style of the folktale prevailed, as if Emmanuel were recounting his experiences from afar or through a lens that lent objectivity to what might otherwise have been an unbearably intimate and abject catalogue of misfortunes. It was perhaps this paradoxical juxtaposition of the idiosyncratic and the stereotypical that gave his story a quasi-mythical dimension, as if it were an allegory of Everyman.

In calling a story mythic, Girard means that private, historical, or geographical details play a secondary role in what is essentially an archetypal form, in this instance “a persecution text,” examples of which can be found in all human societies. Girard’s insights into the conditions under which such persecution texts are born and his argument for why certain elements recur in them are directly relevant to Emmanuel’s story. First, Girard notes, stereotypes of persecution tend to draw on a cluster of closely related words that suggest deep affinities linking critical events to criminality and condemnation. Thus the Greek verb krino, meaning “to judge, differentiate, and condemn a victim,” is the etymological root of our words crisis, crime, criteria, and critique.²⁴ It is worth observing, therefore, that during the critical period in Emmanuel’s childhood, when, following the death of his father and the family’s exodus from central Uganda and migration to Bugisu, Uganda was suffering civil unrest, widespread famine, and the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic. Moreover, from as long ago as the mid-twentieth century, Bugisu had the highest density of population per square mile in Uganda, and in the 1960s increasing pressure on scarce land meant a growing intolerance of the landless poor, who were not only resented but often accused of witchcraft and thievery.²⁵

In 1980, despite post-Amin turmoil, the first elections for eighteen years were held. But in many parts of the country, only half the population was self-sufficient in food, and infant mortality rates had increased tenfold.²⁶ To keep his baby sister alive, Emmanuel fed her small balls of moist clay, while he survived by drinking cattle urine and eating leaves from bushes. His mother, who had traveled far and wide in search of work or money, returned to the village on one occasion to find Emmanuel so weakened by starvation that he was hospitalized, unable to walk, and for two long weeks it was not known if he would live.

When the world falls apart, people are typically thrown into panic, despair, and rage. These emotions tend to be projected onto the cosmos or polis, which is described as corrupt, rotten, or awry, as well as onto members of the community who are seen as outside the pale, anomalous, or abnormal.²⁷ That is to say, in crisis the moral order is suspended, and it is this very suspension of normal moral constraints that opens up a space for both aberrant and exemplary behavior. On the positive side, one might cite the risks that Emmanuel’s grandmother ran in feeding her grandchildren. For the philosophical ethicist, K. E. Løgstrup, this is an example of what he calls “the sovereign expressions of life”—spontaneous and unconditional acts of compassion toward another that eclipse any consideration of the cost to oneself. Such actions are both free and ethical, Løgstrup argues, because they are not wholly determined by moral rules. Nor can they be instrumentalized and generalized after the fact as moral norms.²⁸ What Løgstrup fails to mention, however, is that the very crises that often bring out the best in people also bring out the worst in them, and immorality is part of the fallout from this state of moral anarchy.

Individual or social differences that were tolerated in times of plenty may be dramatically exaggerated and seen to be implicated in the misfortune that has befallen the community. But the person or persons to be blamed are not simply marked as different by virtue of appearance, personality, age, or gender. They are strangers within, outsiders masquerading as insiders, bent on mischief or worse. Emmanuel was therefore already a potential victim when he arrived in his mother’s village in 1979. His mother had forfeited all rights in her natal village when she married and moved away several years before. That she was widowed and did not have her late husband’s brothers to take care of her made no difference. As for her children, they had no claims on their mother’s kin, who were within their rights to treat these refugees with kindness or drive them away. Given the terrible conditions of food scarcity and political uncertainty, the die was cast against the strangers. Not only was their social status considered anomalous, but the older children spoke neither Lugisu nor English, were bereft of any adult male guardian, and came from elsewhere. Whatever they did and whatever they said only reinforced the impression that they were outsiders. It was but a short, logical step to seeing them as threats and imagining them as monsters. If they were bullied at school and persecuted by their aunt, it was not necessarily because their oppressors were motivated by malice; rather it was because the oppressors fell prey to the pressures they were under in a critical situation where, morally, politically, and economically, the world seemed not only disordered but perverted. Under these extreme conditions in which the moral order is in abeyance, it is not inconceivable that incest and bestiality should make their appearance as signs of the times. But there is another logic at play here, for the victim is not only persecuted for not belonging to the place where he or she had hoped for asylum; he is persecuted because he is made morally responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen that place. To save themselves, the local populace drive the foreigner from their midst, believing that he will carry their affliction out into the wilderness and free them from it.

Persecution becomes a double-edged sign. For the victim, it sets in motion a fantasy of being owed recompense for the pain and deprivation he has suffered. If he is guilty of no wrong and has been the victim of a series of gross injustices, then he has earned the right to one day reclaim his lost dignity, his lost life, and this sense of possessing a natural right to redemption will henceforth govern his thinking. For the persecutor, a very different transformation occurs, since no one robs another person of his or her humanity without losing something of his or her own humanity. The persecutor has only two options in dealing with this loss. He can attempt to erase from his mind and conscience all memory of his victim. To achieve this, he hopes the victim will disappear (dying of starvation or driven to flee), or he actively drives the victim from his sight and his community. Alternatively, he may beg the victim for forgiveness, thus erasing the moral difference between persecutor and persecuted, as the virtue of a humble apology cancels out the hurt the former visited on the latter, who, in accepting the apology, grows in moral stature.

Long before Emmanuel’s story was finished, I was aware of the symmetry between its two chapters—the first located in Uganda, the second in Denmark. Both chapters were persecution texts, though their background situations were very different.

Emmanuel’s arrival in Denmark in 2002 coincided with the adoption, by the recently elected Liberal-Conservative (Venstre-Konservative) government, of immigration legislation that made it difficult for foreigners, as well as Danish citizens with immigrant backgrounds, to obtain family reunification with non-European spouses. This legislation reflected post-9/11 anxieties about Muslim immigrants in Europe, as well as a growing concern in Denmark over the depth and sincerity of migrants’ attachment to Danish culture and their ability or willingness to integrate. Underlying this concern was an implicit distinction between “real” and “not-quite-real” Danes.²⁹ As Bertel Haarder, the former minister of integration, put it in a newspaper article published in September 2003: “We [the Danes] have a job, because we care about what our family and neighbors think about us, and because we want to set a good example for our children. But foreigners do not feel these inhibitions in the same way. They live in a subculture outside the Danish tribe. That is why they so quickly learn about the possibilities of getting money [out of the welfare system] without making an effort.”³⁰

It was against this background of xenophobia and cultural fundamentalism that Emmanuel experienced his first inklings of what it would mean to live in Denmark, married to a Dane, and of what he might stand to lose by leaving Uganda. “It was during that period when I was in university that I met Nanna. I was beginning my thesis at the time, and we first came to Denmark the day after I handed it in. It was supposed to be a very brief trip to meet Nanna’s parents, because I had to return to university to complete my second and final year. But with the new Conservative government in power, and the new immigration laws, we decided to get married immediately. Ordinarily, we would have waited so my family from Uganda could attend the wedding, but we felt pressured because ‘family reunion’—which is the official name for applying for permission to come and live with your spouse in Denmark—would only be possible if we were married. This was my first dramatic encounter with the Danish system, a system I have come to know extremely well.

“So I didn’t have time to think about the offer the Islamic University had made to sponsor my master’s there, and I didn’t even respond to offers of work from companies and friends. I didn’t even consider them, because I thought that I would also find openings in Denmark.”

“You felt sure you’d find work here?”

“Yeah, I sincerely did. I knew people were more organized here, the system was more open, more efficient than back home, and I knew that I had an education I could use. I was also willing to work. I didn’t want to just come here and sit back—I never wanted that—so when I came and found that things were very different from what I’d imagined, it became a bit of a disappointment to me. Nanna will also tell you that I have always considered Denmark one of the best places to live.”

“Did you speak any Danish at that time?”

“Oh no, I didn’t even understand ‘good morning.’”

“What kind of work did you think you would find here?”

“Firstly, I knew that people in Denmark spoke English. Secondly, I had read a lot about Denmark in my university courses, and so I knew about the big international companies that are located here. Maersk, for example, has very big operations in Uganda. Thirdly, I knew of another company called Schmidt, a transportation company, so I knew there would be something I could do. Even if there was no work with these big international companies, I could do office work, or deskwork as they say, or drive, or do cleaning work. What I didn’t know was that even cleaners in this country have to have a special education. So when I came, I thought cleaning was simply a matter of getting a broom and, you know, dusting things and carrying dirty things. But no, cleaners have an education; there are institutions that train them. So that was the first blow, because the first job application I sent off was for a lowly job. I’ve always had this view that to get satisfaction in your career you should start from a lower level and feel that you’re actually growing with an organization, so I thought that entering an organization as a messenger or a cleaner would help me get a better understanding of the organization, help me learn the language faster, become socialized, and probably make friends. What I didn’t know was that even if you wanted to be a messenger there was a proper administration for that.”

“Did you have a work permit at this time?”

“After I went back to Uganda to finish my degree, I had to wait more than six months before I was permitted to return to Denmark and start a new life there with Nanna.”

Emmanuel called to Nanna, who was in the bedroom with Maria, reading a story. Emmanuel asked Nanna to explain the bureaucratic obstacle course she had had to run.

“First,” Nanna said, “I had to prove that I earned enough to support us both. I had to show the Danish authorities my pay slips, because it was not permitted for my parents to help with our living expenses. I was still a student, writing up my thesis. So I had to postpone finishing the thesis and find work. Then I had to put up a guarantee of fifty thousand Danish kroner, which was roughly equivalent to ten thousand American dollars. This money had to be available to the state in case Emma and I became a burden on Danish society. The money had to be available for seven years but would be reduced gradually as Emma acquired skills in Danish language and knowledge of local customs. Even so, I had to relinquish my rights to Danish social security, even though every Danish citizen is entitled to it. For as long as our marriage lasted, I would not be permitted to receive anything from the state. These were the financial obstacles. But an evaluation would have to be made to see whether our attachment to Denmark was stronger than our attachment to Uganda. How could Emma show attachment to Denmark, when he had never lived here? Then we had to have our apartment evaluated to see if it was big enough for both of us and that it was not rented. We had to actually own it. Finally, we both had to sign papers where we agreed to follow all the new government initiatives for integrating migrants into Danish society—learning Danish language and customs in a relatively short time and agreeing to DNA testing in case we were genetically related. All these requirements had to be satisfied; otherwise the state had every right to send Emma back to Uganda. Michael, I cannot tell you what it is like living under this pressure. And in a country, my country, internationally know for its humanism.”

“So I returned here in the summer of 2003,” Emmanuel said. “I had only just arrived when I received a letter from the municipality stating all the necessary steps to be taken for becoming integrated into Danish society, which of course we had to agree to. I was required to attend a cultural and language institution, where I spent the next one and a half years learning Danish and learning about Danish culture. The process included meeting and making new friends, learning about life in Denmark, the Danish kitchen, the school system, the legal and political systems. Showing I was not here to suck the state coffers dry.”

In the summer of 2004, Nanna helped Emmanuel find seasonal employment as a guide for a tourist company, welcoming people off cruise ships, advising them on sightseeing, and escorting them to the airport. In 2005, Emmanuel discovered that he could enroll at the Copenhagen Business School, where courses were in English and required no fees.

During this time, he continued to network, send out job applications, and attend four-week training programs organized by the municipality. But even after completing his master’s at CBS, Emmanuel could not find a job.

“I would provide every kind of information, describe my abilities, say what I was willing and able to do, but nothing happened. I wanted to work in Denmark and pay Danish taxes as a thank-you for having received a free education at CBS. This was my genuine desire, to work and pay back taxes. Why? Because I come from a country where schooling is not free. There is no way you can wake up one morning and get such a very high standard of education free of charge. This only happens in some of the wealthier countries of the world. At first, I wasn’t so pressured. I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s just the beginning. I’ve only been here for two years, three years, four years, five years, so it’s okay.’ Then I began giving myself excuses: the jobs are going to people who have been here longer than me; I need better qualifications. But then it dawned on me that this had become a permanent problem. It was a little easier in the summer, because I had that part-time job to look forward to. But there was a catch. You’re not allowed to work beyond a certain number of hours per week. If you go over the limit, you miss out on your right to receive unemployment benefits. But even if you work as many hours as you’re allowed, you still may not earn as much as the unemployment benefit. So staying home and doing nothing often earns you more money than going out and working in these part-time jobs. I was not used to sitting at home and receiving cash payments for doing nothing. I don’t want to be a man who sits at home while his wife goes out and works. I’m not lame, I’m not blind, I’m not deaf. Even people with those disabilities find work, so what’s wrong with me? I have an education, two degrees. I didn’t care where I found work, even if it was in Jylland. Because Nanna was an anthropologist, we had agreed that she might end up getting a job anywhere in the world. We had agreed to go where the work took us, to Indonesia, to Greenland, to Brazil. But it was trickier for me, because I could easily find work in Kenya or Uganda, and Nanna had a problem with that. I couldn’t understand her. I asked myself, ‘Why is it that Nanna prefers me sitting here, being upset, being demoralized, to letting me go where I can find a job?’ This compounded my frustrations, because Nanna seemed unwilling to go to places where I could find work, even though I was willing to go anywhere her work took us.

“At the same time, I was struggling inside myself with the fact that even when I tried to explain why I was not working, I wasn’t sure whether I had the right explanation, whether it was because I was Ugandan, whether it was because I had studied the wrong things and was unemployable, or whether it was because I was going to the wrong companies or something like that. But then I would contradict myself by saying, ‘Well, there’s no company without a finance department, and this is what I am qualified to do, so why can’t they just give me a job or at least try me out, put me on probation?’ My complaint was that the government was trying to help people find work, but it had created so many rules and regulations that life had become unlivable. They want to make sure you’re not here under false pretenses, but they make life impossible for you. I don’t want to get handouts from the government. I want to work and earn money and keep my family. I don’t want to get money from a government that I’m not working for. So the war within myself has been over whether to sacrifice my relationship with Nanna and Maria by going to Uganda and finding work, or to stay here as a homebound father who has everything but nothing. Already, my daughter has begun to understand the concept of going out to work, so I can’t just sit here every morning with her knowing that Mummy is going to work and asking me, ‘Dad, where do you work?’ or ‘Dad, when are you going to work?’ Sometimes I tell her I am going to work, pretending I will see her in the evening. And even Maria likes to say that she’s going to work when she leaves for kindergarten in the morning. She says that kindergarten is her workplace, and she says, ‘Come and visit me there.’ So how could I tell her, ‘No, I am not going to work, I am just going to sit here the whole day.’ That would not make sense to her. So even though this might seem trivial to you, it killed me basically, it cut off my feet. I was growing older but not doing anything. Changes were happening to me, but I was changing nothing.”

“How did you pass the time when you were here on your own?”

“I hate to admit it, but I watched television. Can you imagine yourself watching television and not even bothering to check the mail for responsesfrom companies you’ve written to. You are even too lazy to do that; you don’t want to think anything outside of what you’re seeing there; you don’t want to think about the job situation and the frustrations associated with it. You concentrate only on the television.”

“Did you ever go out?”

“Well, I took up running. I ran. This became my focus. One kilometer, fifteen, but not because I wanted to get fit or feel fit. It was to avoid the apartment, to get away, to do something rather than nothing.”

I told Emmanuel about a Sierra Leonean friend of mine who had spent more than a year in prison as a political detainee, expecting every day to be led from his cell to be executed. Even though S.B. Marah was in solitary confinement, he would spend time every day running on the spot, imagining that he was running through the streets of Freetown. At every place he passed, he would say aloud where he was. “I am approaching my house now, I am getting close to home, I am coming to the compound, I am saying to Rose, ‘How are you? How are the children?’”³¹ S.B. called this routine his “exercise,” but it was not simply a physical exercise; it was a technique of existential survival.