Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

‘No man is worth your tears; you hear me? Keep them for your children.’

Especially because throwing girls out of education ensured one thing: their babies would be born into poverty. When the girls were led out of the San to get on the school bus, Kirabo pondered. The boys who had made them pregnant would carry on as before, their lives uninterrupted.

The Ganda did not celebrate birthdays – ‘What nonsense. Children do absolutely nothing on their arrival that warrants presents every year. If anything, they should give presents to their mothers, who come close to death.’

‘Can you imagine being an Indian nurse and making grown-ups lift their clothes, so you prick their buttocks? I wonder how many buttocks you would see in a day?’

But then again,’ she sighed, ‘with well-off people, you never know where their privilege first came from. Often someone bled, someone sweated, someone cried or died to make them rich. That is what my father says.’

For a long time, the girls synchronised their play of mothers and nurses so well that they did not notice the difference in their aspirations.

When a person wished for the impossible, people would encourage them: Don’t lose hope. With these Europeans coming to our world now, the sun could rise at midnight. Ganda months, which had been transient, coming and going depending on the moods of the seasons, were being replaced by the static European calendar.

But not everyone decried this disruption of Ganda time. Rich people became even more powerful. They were the ones who could afford to buy time and fasten it on their wrists after the British took the natural clock out of the sky and chopped the day into twenty-four segments. Children were now seen running up and down the road to go to the rich and ask for the time.

Does a monkey summon the forest? she asked herself. This is how he starts to rule you from the beginning.

I think you are the girl I deserve. I would like to know you better.’ He paused and looked at her. ‘Would you like to know me and see if we can…maybe start a love on which to build a home?’