Long time ago, when my chin was as smooth as that of a newly born baby, I was the envy of many a girls both in my village and those yonder. True to my word, if you doubt my word, why don’t you take a trip to my birth place and ask for the times and tribulations of the only guy who shares the name with his villager (the villager). They are likely to spend days if not weeks spilling both the beans, g-nuts and if not peas about me, the villager. Of all incidents to have ever happened to me, I regard this story as one of the most spectacular though not the mother of all stories, if I may borrowing a phase from the Late Irak (as uncle George calls it), the late Saddam Hussein (R.I.P). If you are old enough to remember, during the reign of Uncle George senior, the mighty USA decided that, enough was enough and they walked across the Arabian sands to invade Saddam Hussein’s troops that had occupied Kuwait’s territory in the guise that, Kuwait had been part and parcel of Iraq and that, it was time to unify or is it conquer the territory and annex it to mother Iraq. When Iraq leadership made that ultimate decision, Uncle George wasn’t the least amused and he decided to drive the Iraq forces out by forces. At that juncture, Saddam warned that, if America (read USA) went ahead and invaded the Iraq troops in Kuwait, that would be a mother of all wars. Back to the story, this was somewhere up on my “Richter scale” but not so high to cause alarm bells a headache. Now, the whole episode began as a joke. There was this nice looking; can I call her a girl or a woman (name withheld, I will call her Girlwo)? Well, sometimes, the distinction between the two can be so elusive that, it becomes just as contentious as that!With boiling blood in our young veins, no body cared whether she was the former or the latter, what mattered was just the subject matter full stop. Those were the good old days when we had nothing to care about, just living for today. I will not go into the nitty-gritty but to what actually happened. As you may know, being “basiniya” (guys in Senior Secondary Schools), only the sky was the limit. I will admit that, I used to eye this village belle; she was much older than me though and was a student at the “forsaken” Kinyamsika TTC (Teacher Training College). It’s this element of her age that raises the doubts of whether she was a woman or girl. Incidentally, I had a girl friend that hailed from the “land of Twariire” (Bushenyi) and so, I did not want in any way to jeopardise my Kyebambe chick with that from “ZONE”. Zone was the name given to Kinyamasika by St. Leo’s ancestors, most probably, because the Kinyamasika students were regarded as “old women” and ZONE from the gas term of OZONE; put two and two together and you will get what I mean (no offence intended). Now, as the saying goes that “a distant stick cannot save you from a snake”, once in a while, the nearer stick always saved me from the snake, more especially, when we were back in Mfashumwana on holidays. By the time we completed our A-level, Girlwo had long “graduated” and she was a sort of “headmaster” in a school close to Fort Portal town, about three kilometres along the Fort Portal Kampala road. One day as I was at school, I was summoned to the Headmaster’s office to answer a phone call. In those days, there were only one or two phone lines in the whole school, one being at the secretary’s desk and the other in the headmaster’s office. Whom do I find on the other end of the line? Girlwo, she was hysterical, she told me that she had conceived! That was a bomb shell, I suppose, like the scuds Saddam rained on Israel during the first Gulf war. I felt as if my whole world was coming to an end. How was I going to handle this situation? I was still a student and now here was a crazy woman insisting that I had to marry her or else face the law! I nearly ran amok. I did not want to dramatise the whole episode and so, I assured her that, I would willing marry her but then I had to first complete my HSC (High School Certificate) that was about a year to go. She did not want to hear of that nonsense; she wanted it to be sooner than latter. Little did I know that, she had already informed her peasant parents, who had in turn informed mine. Those days, a school teacher and a head teacher for that was seen as an ideal woman to marry, but on my side, an inner voice kept telling me not to. I kept buying time until the end of the senior six exams and then I fled into exile in Kampala. Girlwo’s parents wanted me to be found and arrested but where could they find me? My old man was under so much pressure that he almost got a heart attack. As the “Wazungu” say, Eventually, the straw that broke the camel’s back was, when Girlwo gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, “my first born”, It was un heard of, for man not to see his first offspring! Behold, the baby was more of a Mzungu than an African. There was no history of any one being a “Mzungu”, leave alone an “Muhindi” and hence, the child could not be mine. This marked the end of my exile, but then It also saved me from a “life imprisonment” with Girlwo. Contact: Mfashumwana@fastmail.fm
