Tribute to the strength of our papas

There are many things that happened when our people went into exile in the late 1950s but perhaps first among them were the transformations that the old men underwent. From happy men who used to ooze confidence and generosity, they turned into shifty, furtive-eyed and grumpy old men who seemed to cling on the smallest trinket as if their lives depended on it. Where we used to pick any of our old man’s shirt-coats and put them on when our clothes were drying, for instance, now if you made that mistake the old man invoked the demons above to visit all their curses on you, without forgetting to give you a wallop that you’d not forget in a hurry........First, that shirt-coat. It was a cross between a shirt and a coat, with short sleeves. It is part of a khaki safari suit that tourist tend to don. You wore the shirt-coat in place of a shirt and shorts because it covered you down to below the knees. If not that, the alternative was borrowing old mama’s spare shawl and knotting its corners of one side around your neck to let it hang down over the rest of you. With this alternative, you became the object of ridicule, a reason why a shirt-coat was better........ But back to grumpy Old-man. The next thing that became a no-go area was his radio set. Because he used to be kept busy outdoors before exile, you could listen to the radio and play with it, dismantling and re-assembling it, all you wanted. With nothing to do now, he became inseparable to his radio. He and a retinue of his fellow male refugees would spend the whole day crouching around it, waiting for any news on Rwanda, their home country.This listening ritual was a complicated affair. At cockcrow, you’d hear him shout out to any of us boys, where we were spread out on mats on the floor, to come and put on his radio. At the sound of his voice, pandemonium would break out among us, with everyone struggling to move away from the edge of the mats that served as our communal “bed”. One minute of delay and he’d impatiently march to our “bed” and lash out with his dreaded stick. Woe unto you if he caught you on the edge of the bed!Whether he broke your arm, leg or bruised your bottom, you limped your way to his radio and switched it on. If you had any grumbling to do, you did it when you were safely tucked back in the mats. We light sleepers would silently listen with mirth to the usual lament: “Ingrate! Yesterday I was trekking to and from Cahafi Lake to fetch water. In between I had to go looking for firewood, where there was no wood. Then it was looking after his cows. And now I can’t get a few minutes of sleep?” We’d be listening in amusement, knowing it was the very same lament we’d been making and that we’d continue to make, forgetting that whatever we were doing was for our sake. After that we’d fall into a lull and those given to snoring would re-start up. But it’d not be for long because soon our old mama would be shaking us gently to remind us that it was time for our chores. Our sisters were up and on their way to Cahafi, she’d inform us. But we’d ignore her pleas, feigning sleep, even if some of us knew we were insomniacs. It’d not be until she invoked the name of Old-man that we’d spring out of bed.Back from Lake Cahafi in the afternoon, we’d find the men still crouching around the radio set but chattering as the radio played music. We’d stand near, pretending to be preoccupied in doing something or other, while actually listening in, trying to catch snippets of what they were saying. They’d usually be arguing, with an occasional triumphant shout from one of them of: “Yes, I heard it. You lot don’t understand Kiswahili, so shut up and listen. It said King Kigeli is coming back!” Another would shout: “No, it said ‘kigeni’ not ‘Kigeli’!” but he’d be shouted down.In truth, they were arguing about a sentence in Kiswahili: “Na sasa, habari za inchi za kigeni” (And now, news in foreign countries.) The newsreader meant that he/she was going to read foreign news but what interested our old men was the word “kigeni”, which they wilfully misinterpreted as the name “Kigeli”!By the end of one year, however, our old men had become disillusioned after coming face to face with the reality that their king had no power to lead them back to their country. By this time they’d been scattered and some of them, including Old-man with us in tow, found themselves in Belgian Cong (D.R. Congo today). Old-man forgot his radio and took to the hoe, tilling the land, with such gusto that we could not believe he was the same man who’d been sub-chief. Wherever they were, our old men got down to work with strength that befuddled us. Bless them all, they were ironmen. Remain tuned in for transformations of our mamas!