The Ambitious Struggle

THE AMBITIOUS STRUGGLE THE AMBITIOUS STRUGGLE An African Journalist’s Journey to Hope and Identity in a Land of Migrants by Yasin Kakande FAP BOOKS FLORIDA ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. Gainesville, FL Copyright © 2013 Florida Academic Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or manner, by any means, mechanical, electronic or other including by photocopying, recording or via information storage and retrieval systems, without the express permission of Florida Academic Press, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in reviews. Published in the United States of America by Florida Academic Press, Gainesville, FL, October 2013 Front cover picture designed by Anibal Rodriguez Text and cover by David Greenberg Communications, Inc. CIP Data pending Dedicated to my mother, Hajjati Khadija Nakkazi Contents Acknowledgements ix My Roots 1 The Road Map to Dubai 43 Reporting from Dubai 103 The New Society 149 The Color of My Skin 193 Kings, Presidents, and Rulers 239 Epilogue 287 Acknowledgments The prophet of Islam once said whoever cannot be grateful to thank the people who have helped him or her, that person cannot even be- gin to be grateful to thank God. Let me start with thanking Dr. Les Roka, my editor from Salt Lake City, who has helped me throughout this challenging journey to de- velop this book. Many to whom I mentioned I was writing this book winked and simply said, “You are not a celebrity so why waste time.” However, Dr. Roka went through the first drafts of my work, always encouraging me that there were many great stories to tell. I would also like to thank David Greenberg of David Greenberg Communications for designing and proofreading my work, as well as Dr. Sam Decalo and the staff and board of Florida Academic Press for having the confidence to accept this book for publication. I also must certainly thank my entire family, my wife Sauda Bukirwa for her consistent willingness to take our children to play in the park on many evenings while I went to the libraries in Sharjah so I could work on the book. And, of course, I am forever grateful to my children whom I love so dearly. I also must thank Abdul Wahab Matovu, my younger brother, for going through the family materials and ascertaining that everything was accurate. Lastly, my deepest thanks go to my parents, as there are no words to express my gratitude for raising me and giving me the gifts and skills to make a successful, fulfilling life: Kalule Edirisa, my father who will be able to see the fruition of this important project. My mother departed this world at about the time when the first draft of this book was completed. She always was interested in the day-to-day progress of this book, even asking many questions during the last days of her life. I believe that we will meet again and I will be able to share with her everything about how this book finally came to be published. MY ROOTS Chapter 1 Gombe Hospital is one of the oldest and biggest government in- stitutions of its type in Uganda. Situated in the town of Gombe— the heart of the Butambala district—the hospital is about seven- ty kilometers from Kampala and only three kilometers from my mother’s home village, Bukkogolwa. I have been in the hospital a couple of times visiting ill relatives or picking up relatives who had given birth there. I can pinpoint rooms in each hospital ward where a close relative spent the last days on earth or where new- born infants slept with their mothers after their birth. I still remember the details of every hospital visit except obviously for where my mother Hajjati Khadija Nakkazi stayed on October 21, 1980 when I was born. I could not imagine what my grandmother Hajjati Maryam Nassozi a.k.a. Musebeeyi felt during that month because three of her daughters gave birth in the same hospital. Jamida Namutebi a.k.a. Mamma Jamida—at seventeen, the youngest of the three—had delivered her first-born Bukenya on October 9 and, after Mamma gave birth to me, another daughter Jalia Nansubuga a.k.a. Mamma Jalia gave birth to her second child on October 29. One would have thought the women either had engaged in a unique competition or had deliberately agreed upon a schedule choosing the same periods for conception, delivery, gender, and clan fathers. However, Bukenya and Matovu belonged to the Ng- abi clan while my mother faulted on this one with her boy Yasin Kakande (me) being born into the Ngenye clan. I was the third born among my mother’s children, following Mayi Nakubulwa and Faridah Nanfuka, and the ninth among the children of my father, Edirisa Kalule. As a matter of clarification, in Ugandan culture, all children call their mother’s sisters “Mam- ma” and to avoid confusion, one appends the person’s name—for example, Mamma Jamida. However, I would refer to my natural mother simply as “Mamma.” After I became an adult, Mamma Jamida told me I was returned to the village when I was just one so that Mamma could resume her nursing career at the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council Hospital in Kampala. Mamma Jalia followed Mamma’s example and returned her son Matovu. With Mamma Jamida’s child, the 4 trio of one-year-olds was reunited under the same roof and under the care of Museebeyi and Mamma Jamida, who stayed at home. Six months afterward, all three of us contracted measles. I was the sickest of the group but all three of us were admitted to Gombe hospital. The nurses referred to Mamma Jamida as the teenaged mother of triplets, a reference she never bothered to correct. She wrote to Mamma about my sickness, with the letter being delivered by way of the Uganda Transport Cor- poration public bus system. The bus traveled to Kampala in the morning and returned to Bukkogolwa in the evening, so a passenger who missed the morning connection had to wait until the next day. Likewise, the same situation applied to the afternoon trip from Kampala. The next day, my mother came to Bukkogolwa on the evening bus, insisting upon carrying me back to Kampala that night but she had no option, as there were no buses at that time. In the morning before any nurse could appear in our ward she had re- moved the IV drip that had been attached to me and took me in her hands to wait for the bus. A nurse who worked in Kampala, she obviously paid no at- tention to the warnings from village nurses concerned about the risks of taking a small ill boy on a public bus, according to Mam- ma Jamida’s recollections. Mamma was mostly unhappy with the treatment I received at the village. As soon as I entered the hospital in Kampala, Mamma Jalia came to visit, following Mamma’s actions and bringing her own child to Kampala as well. Mamma Jamida told me later that she felt annoyed—even betrayed—that everyone just picked up their sons and left without any word. No one had compensated her for the costs of our care and she also was not working. Because of the numerous inoculations I had been given at the village hospital, my left leg became infected and, as a result, I could not walk well like the other two. Once I recovered from the measles, my mother resumed the battle with doctors, moving from one to another in order to have my leg properly mended. Musebeeyi always reminded me that had she not struggled so hard or had spent all of her money I would have ended up lame for the rest of my life. Even today, I still walk with a slight limp. Chapter 2 Bukkogolwa has a population of fewer than twenty families with vir- tually everyone related to each other. At the time of my birth Butam- bala was just a county among the eighteen that comprised Uganda. It was also under the Mpigi jurisdiction, up until 2010 when the Mu- seveni government separated Butambala from Mpigi, making it an independent district as part of the nation’s decentralization program. My parents divorced four months before my birth and neither ever bothered to explain why they separated. However, I also dared not disturb the need for discretion or privacy, as our culture treats the parents’ marital life as such. However, my paternal grandmother Hajjati Safiyya tried to explain the circumstances when I was a teen- ager. She was curious whenever I visited about whether or not my mother talked about her. I had never heard my mother mention her at all. Yet, she was not convinced, as she continuously pestered me but my answer at each interrogation was the same. At one point, I asked her why she thought my mother would talk about the grandmother to the children. She replied, “Me and your mother were two parallels. In fact I was responsible for your parents’ divorce.” This momentous revelation came as we placed a bunch of cassava on our heads as we completed the morning chores of digging in the field. “Kalule,” she said, referring to my father, had always made mistakes in choosing his spouses. She continued, “Before your mother came, he had Joyce, the mother of Sarah, Sauya, Saida, and Sophia (my elder half sisters). We warned him about getting married to Joyce because she was an educated girl and a Christian but he wouldn’t listen.” Now, my grandmother was on a roll.

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