Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic

Letters from Uganda

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030475239
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A narrative ethnography about a Ugandan woman and her relatives, this novelistic, fine-grained volume shows how global questions of responsibility and inequity travel in family networks and confront people with decisions about life and death. It is a story of existence under extremely challenging conditions, about belonging and marginalization, about the opacity and ambiguity of social relations, and about growing up in a country haunted by violence and civil war only to be later lifted by optimism and devastated anew by the AIDS epidemic. The story draws on long-term fieldwork and letters from the woman who takes centre stage in the story, while at once providing unique and privileged insight into the ethical challenges of a research method that demands personal involvement that is ultimately withdrawn for scholarly analysis.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. O. MogensenSecrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an EpidemicPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Missing Letters

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen¹  

(1)

Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

 

 

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

LettersAgencySecrecyResponsibilityGrief

End Abstract

‘This is the story of my mother who loved my younger brother more than me. Life was not easy, but I am a survivor’.

He knew I was watching him. The words on the screen were written to me. I told him he was wrong.

‘It’s just a story’, he murmured, eyes aimed at the dusty cement floor.

‘But you’re wrong’, I repeated. ‘I have your mother’s letters right here in my computer. Read them and you will understand how proud she was of you’.

The many letters had made Kate, Okoth’s mother, stand out from the crowd. One day in 1995 she had moved into the house that I shared with her mother, Alexine, in a village in eastern Uganda. It took some time before I understood that Kate lived with us and that she was the one who rose before sunrise, rolled up the mats in the living room and lit the charcoal stove behind the house to prepare millet porridge for all of us. Even after realizing that Kate and her small sons had joined our household, she continued to be one of the crowd for some time. One of those family members who came to seek a bit of shelter and food before they returned to their lives elsewhere. She moved around silently, she almost hovered along the walls like a shadow you sense without noticing. When she sat on the floor next to me and cautiously served herself from the same dishes as me, I admired her straight back, high cheekbones, the tightly braided hair that twisted around her head in neat patterns, and the tattoos on her cheeks that gave her face a cat-like grace, which was underlined by her sweetness and silent elegance. She was there, and yet she was not, like a cat, with slender, flexible limbs, which sometimes wants your company, but which, suddenly, silently and without explanation, leaves again on soft paws, in favour of its own world. I got to know her during the year we lived together in the village, but I also learned that she was not somebody whom one easily noticed. She never hissed.

Then one day she started writing. She sent me long letters. Numerous dense pages in each envelope. The flow of words, both on and between the ruled lines and in the margins, gave her voice and shape in a way that one year by her side in the small grey house had not managed to do. She stepped out of the silence and obscurity with her vivid and intense texts, written in Ugandan English. Phonetic spelling and no punctuation, but sparkling with sincerity and vitality. Cautiously and somehow frightened, I put the letters away, wondering what to do with them. Kate looked down when others were present, but she looked straight ahead when she held a pen in her hand, and her letters set a story in motion that has only just begun. A story that is not just about her, but which was also her way of acting in the world.

‘Comfort always got more food than me’, said her now 15-year-old son, Okoth, to me, after I had commented on the sentence he had typed on the computer.

‘But she didn’t love your brother more than you,’ I replied.

‘It was me that she sent away. Comfort continued staying with her.’

‘Honestly, Okoth, don’t you know why?’

‘Anyway, it is just a story’, he said again, and started deleting the sentence, one letter at a time. He refused to look at his mother’s letters. Silent tears rolled down his cheeks as he slowly and painstakingly started a new sentence: ‘Gulliver set out to find freedom’.

‘Do you remember?’ had been his first words, when I had found him in his grandfather’s compound in a settlement in the middle of a field of sugarcane in central Uganda. The car had scrambled along the muddy road winding through the green light of the tall sugarcanes, until it reached the small dilapidated sheds of wood and tin, and occasional cement or reddish bricks. Everything was reddish-brown from red mud, dust and rust. Garbage piled up along the road and between the sheds, but inside the grandfather’s house were soft couches, only slightly odorous from sweat and children’s pee. Through the back door I caught a glimpse of a carefully swept courtyard with cackling chickens and pots and plates drying in the sun on racks of sticks, raised above the hard-packed red soil, out of reach of chickens and goats.

I waited in the dim light inside the house. His grandfather—the head of the household—had called me earlier on my mobile phone from somewhere in northern Uganda to let me know that I was welcome to take Okoth to Denmark with me. I told him that it was not what I had come for and continued waiting for Okoth to turn up. I was dazzled by the bright sunlight and crashed into Okoth as I stepped out into the courtyard to look for a pit latrine. The water drops glistened on his black skin. He had wanted to take a bath before greeting me. Dark, much darker than his mother, muscular and slim, closely cropped hair, long and straight nose. I noticed that he had the same vivid, curious and determined eyes that he had always had.

‘Of course I remember,’ I replied. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and tried to shake my hand while still holding the dripping basin.

I remembered that ten years ago, in 1995, when I was living with his mother’s relatives in the eastern village of Saya, he was a lively five-year-old boy, lying on the porch of the small grey house, drawing, while keeping an eye on the beans on the charcoal stove. I also remembered that he fetched water on an adult-sized men’s bike with his baby brother tied to his back. His small feet on the pedals and the body twisted around the upper bar of the bike. Strangely enough, he managed to keep his balance along rough muddy paths with a brother on his back and 20 liters of water in a large yellow jerrycan tied to the luggage carrier with rubber strips from a used bicycle tube. He remembered I had bought shoes for him because the wound on his toe refused to heal as long as he ran around in the dust on bare feet kicking soccer balls made of inflated condoms and banana leaves. He was now 15 years old and had completed seven years of school in one of the country’s ill-equipped village schools, with a far better result than what one might expect from a boy like him who had looked after cattle more than he had been to school. He now spoke English, which is the language used in Ugandan schools. I asked if he wanted to come with me to find a boarding school where he could continue his schooling.

‘Yes’, he replied, without giving it any further thought. He had probably expected me to come for just that. He immediately crammed his scarce belongings into a tattered little backpack and placed himself in the corner behind the couch, waiting for me to finish my conversation with his grandmother and aunts. The aunts—his father’s haughty sisters—who had driven Kate away from here. I had heard so much about this place and these sisters over the years but never been here before. It was here that Okoth was born. It was here that his mother had met her first great love, and it was also here in the midst of the sugarcane fields that she had lost faith in love.

I thanked them all in the customary way for their hospitality, for taking care of the home and of Okoth, and for carrying out their daily tasks. They thanked me for having arrived safely, for taking Okoth with me and added a series of other thanksgivings as is befitting when somebody is about to leave. Okoth shyly pushed the tattered backpack under the seat of the car. I bought him a new one and equipped him for a new life in one of the best schools in the eastern part of the country. I also took him on a trip to the capital, Kampala, and put him in front of a computer to teach him how to write emails. That was when he wrote the abovementioned sentence.

* * *

The previous year, Okoth’s aunt, Jane, had taken me to one of the many small internet cafes that had suddenly sprung out of Kampala’s red soil. Kate had often told me about her younger sister Jane, but I had only met her a few times before the summer of 2004, when I asked their uncle to help me find her.

The first time I met her was a week after my arrival in Uganda in 1995. One morning she suddenly stood in the doorway of the small grey house in the village in eastern Uganda, where I lived with her mother Alexine, and where Kate later moved in. Jane scanned me, wondering yet indifferent towards me. She must have been around 16 at the time, born in 1979, because she was also called Alwenye, ‘born during war’—the war when the Tanzanians had chased Idi Amin out of the country, her mother told me. I assessed her sceptically, expecting that she, like so many others, was there to ask for money and I had a hard time navigating the sea of ​​ boundless needs in which I had landed.

Jane was tall. Gleaming black skin, straight back and full-bosomed under a close-fitting short t-shirt—as if she had suddenly grown in several directions at once. But she had grown out of her clothes with strength and dignity. Confident and lush, encircled by the sunlight behind her while I sat on the dusty floor, preoccupied with my notebook and whether she was there to ask me for money. I did not exchange a word with her that day, the next day she was gone again and she did not become part of the story at that time. It only happened many years later, when I found her on the outskirts of Kampala working as a maid in the home of a revivalist preacher. She knelt for me—as women do when they greet—with the same dignity as she had stood in the sunlight and dust many years earlier. She asked if I had received the many emails she had helped her older sister, Kate, write to me. Again and again they had sent the same message. It said, ‘Please come? I need medication’. They had forgotten a dot in the email address.

Jane also showed me the dirty and torn drafts of letters that Kate wrote to me during the last months of her life. Letters that had never reached me. On one of the sheets I read how proud she was of her son, Okoth, about her hopes that he would have a good life, about the way he had cared for her during her illness. But a year later, when I wanted to show him these words, now typed into my computer, he refused to read them.

On another of the torn sheets she had written: ‘Thank God for my uncles. They have helped me so much and tried so hard to get treatment for me’.

‘I really do not understand why Kate wrote like that about the uncles’, Jane said, when we went through the letters together in her muzigo, a small one-bedroom house, in one of Kampala’s alleys. ‘It isn’t true at all. They just came and threw her right there outside my door every time she had been to their place’.

© The Author(s) 2020

H. O. MogensenSecrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an EpidemicPalgrave Studies in Literary Anthropologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9_2

Begin Abstract

2. Girls with Fast Legs

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen¹

(1)

Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

AminMuseveniCivil warChild affiliationDomestic workPetty trade

End Abstract

One of the things that Kate clearly remembered from her early childhood was when she and her sisters, Nelly and Suzy, ran on fast thin legs, full of expectation, scrubbed and dressed in their best clothes, along the narrow paths in the millet fields to attend the biggest social event of the week. They sat on the earth-packed floor in the shade of the red bricks and iron sheet roof that constituted the local Catholic Church and listened and sang and clapped their hands for hours. Small children rocking on the mothers’ hips, slightly larger children dancing on their bare feet in the red dust. Or mud. Depending on the season. It was the best day of the week.

Kate and her sisters Nelly and Suzy were some years older than their half-sister Jane, whom their mother later had with another man. The three older sisters grew up in their father’s home in the part of eastern Uganda called Padhola. It was in the 1970s. Idi Amin had assumed power, and their mother, Alexine, had left their father a few years earlier. He was married to wife number two, their mother’s co-wife, whose arrival had caused Alexine to pack her stuff and leave. But the girls knew nothing about that. For many years, they believed their stepmother was their real mother, and Kate’s memories of Amin, Obote and all the others who fought for power over the next few decades coalesced in her memory. Kate did not know when she was born. The white ants had eaten her birth certificate, but Alexine believed she was born just before Amin assumed power in 1971.

When I got to know Kate and her family in the mid-1990s, Uganda was still recovering from nearly two decades of the political turmoil and civil war that had ruined the country’s economy. Yoweri Museveni had been in power since 1986, when he and his rebel movement won the war and replaced the horrors of Amin and Obote in the 1970s and 1980s with a kind of peace and stability that made Museveni the darling of development agencies in the Western world in the 1990s. He was praised for his attempt to reinstall democracy and decentralization and his hospitality towards donors and their development projects, and not least his openness about the AIDS epidemic, the country’s new challenge, which most other African countries still refused to face at that time in history. When I met Kate she was in her mid-twenties and a mother of two. She was not used to having anyone ask her to tell about herself. But she gladly did so, sitting on the cement floor in the small grey house where we lived together, back straight and legs stretched out in front of her. Or walking slowly by my side with her youngest son, Comfort, on her hip, all of us swathed in Uganda’s warm soft air, tall millet stalks, gently swaying axes, and the heavy thumps from large wooden mortars and pestles in nearby compounds, pounding millets and groundnuts. Thatched roofs of small huts popped up here and there above the swaying millet as we trudged around on the small paths between the dwellings. She always looked down when talking, unsure whether she really had the right to tell her story, but happy that someone wanted to hear it. Especially when that somebody came from that distant part of the world where everything is better and where one hopes to be able to go to one day.

Kate and her sisters were now and then sent to Amin’s military barracks outside of Tororo, the nearest provincial town, to sell cassava to the soldiers or swap it for beans. Being so close to the soldiers was a little scary, and they always hurried back afterwards. But the soldiers never did anything to them. They always made it back through the tall grass with bundles of beans on their heads without anybody bothering them. No one told them that they had a mother who worked as a school teacher in the barracks. They just knew that they had a mother back home. Someone whom they called mother, because that is what you call the wives of your father. Children of a man’s different wives are all siblings, not ...