Chapter 1
The First Day
The taxi to Kampala left Kyotera at six in the morning, and by half past five the whole family was standing at the stage in the cold.
Amara's mother had not slept. Amara knew because she had heard her moving about the house all night, the small sounds of someone who was trying to be quiet. The stove. The basin. The zip of a bag that would not close. At four o'clock Amara had come out of the bedroom she shared with Esther and found her mother sitting on a stool in the kitchen, tying groundnuts into a cloth.
"Go back and sleep," her mother had said.
"You also."
"I will sleep when you reach."
So nobody had slept. Now they stood in a line at the stage like people waiting for a funeral car. Amara had the suitcase. Joel had the mattress, rolled and tied with banana fibre, and he held it against his chest as if it might run away. Esther, who was nine and did not understand why anyone was sad, held a small plastic bag with one boiled egg in it and kept looking inside to check that it was still there.
At Amara's feet sat the sack of matooke. It was a big sack. Her mother had cut the bunch herself two days before and wrapped the fingers in banana leaves so they would not bruise.
"They sell matooke in Kampala," Amara had said.
"They sell it for double," her mother had said. "And it is not our matooke."
That was the end of that conversation.
The sun was not up yet. The road was grey, and the shops along it still had their shutters down. A woman was lighting a charcoal stove for the first rolex of the day. A boda man sat on his motorcycle with a blanket around his shoulders, looking at nothing. Somewhere behind the church a cock crowed, and another one answered, and Amara thought, I will not hear that for a long time.
She had not expected to think that. It made her throat hurt.
"You have the money for the registration?" her mother asked.
"Yes, Mama."
"Show me."
"Mama, I showed you at the house."
"Show me again."
Amara opened her small bag and took out the envelope. Her mother did not take it. She only looked at it, at the corner of the notes showing through the paper, and then nodded, once, like a person checking that a door was locked.
The money in that envelope had a history. Amara knew all of it, because she had been in the room when the decisions were made. There had been the goat, a brown one with one white ear that Esther had named Pastor. There had been the plot of land behind the church, a quarter acre where her father had planned to build a house before the lorry hit his boda on the Masaka road. There had been the savings group at the market, where her mother had gone on her knees, almost, to ask for a loan that the other women had to vote on. Nobody had said no. But Amara had seen the faces, and she had seen the way her mother smiled afterward, too brightly, thanking everyone twice.
One million, nine hundred thousand shillings for the first semester. That was the number. She said it to herself at night the way other girls said prayers.
"Eh, here it comes," Joel said.
The taxi turned in from the main road with its lights still on, a white Toyota Hiace with a dent in the door and a sticker on the windscreen that said God Is Able. The conductor jumped out before it stopped. He was a thin boy of about seventeen with a cloth tied around his head, and he looked at the sack and the suitcase and the mattress and said, "Eh, madam, are you moving house?"
"She is going to university," her mother said.
She said it loudly. She said it so that the woman with the charcoal stove could hear, and the boda man in his blanket, and the conductor, and God.
"Ah," said the conductor. His face changed. "Congratulations, sister. Which one?"
"Mwanga Hill," Amara said.
"The big one!" He grabbed the sack in both arms. "Then we must carry you carefully. You will be a minister one day, and you will remember this taxi."
Everyone laughed, even her mother. Then the laughing stopped, because the boys were loading the mattress on the roof, and it was time.
Amara hugged Esther first, because that was easiest. Esther smelled of sleep and woodsmoke. "Bring me a pen with a light on it," Esther said into her stomach.
"I will."
"A pink one."
"I will find a pink one."
Joel did not hug her. He was fifteen and had decided some months ago that hugging was for children. He stood with his hands in his pockets and said, "Call when you reach."
"I will."
"And don't let those Kampala boys disturb you."
"Joel."
"I'm just saying."
She pulled him in anyway. He stood stiff for a second, and then his arms came up, awkward, and she felt how thin his back was. When he let go his eyes were wet, and he turned away and pretended to check the rope on the mattress.
Then there was only her mother.
Rose Nakamya was not a tall woman. She was broad in the shoulders from years of carrying loads, and her hands were hard, with cracks at the knuckles that never fully closed. She wore her good dress, the green one with small yellow flowers. She had ironed it. Amara could tell, because the creases at the sleeves were sharp, and her mother never ironed for the market.
"Come here," her mother said.
Amara went. Her mother took her face between both hands and held it, just held it, looking.
"You are the first one in this family to go there," she said. "Do you understand that? Your father's people, my people. Nobody. You are the first."
"I know, Mama."
"I am not telling you this to put weight on you." Her mother's voice was very steady. "I am telling you so you know that you are not going alone. We are all in that bag with you. Your father also."
Amara nodded. She could not speak.
"Three things," her mother said. "Don't walk with bad company. Don't borrow what you cannot pay. And don't forget who you are."
"I won't."
"Say it."
"Don't walk with bad company. Don't borrow what I cannot pay. Don't forget who I am."
"Good." Her mother kissed her forehead, hard, the way you press a stamp on paper. "Now go. Go before I start behaving like a village woman."
"You are a village woman."
"Then I will behave like one properly. Go!"
Amara climbed into the taxi. It was full already, and she had to squeeze in next to a man holding a live chicken in a plastic basket. The door slid shut. Through the window she could see them in the grey light, her mother standing very straight, Joel with one hand raised, Esther waving the little plastic bag with the egg inside.
Her mother did not wave. Her mother only stood and watched, with her hands folded in front of her, and she kept on standing there until the taxi turned the corner and Amara could not see her any more.
The road to Kampala was two hours and fifty minutes when it was good, and longer when the taxi stopped at every trading centre. This one stopped at all of them. Women got on with baskets. Men got off with sacks. A schoolgirl in a blue uniform slept against the window, and the man with the chicken ate a boiled maize cob and offered Amara half, which she refused, and then accepted when her stomach made a loud noise.
She watched the country change. Banana plantations gave way to bare hills, and then to the long wet green of the swamp near Lukaya. At Masaka there was a jam. At Mpigi the vendors ran along beside the taxi, holding up roasted meat on sticks and bottles of water and packets of groundnuts, calling in Luganda, "Sister, buy! Brother, buy! Fresh!"
Amara bought nothing. She had one million, nine hundred thousand shillings in an envelope sewn into the lining of her bag, and she was not going to touch it for a stick of goat meat.
Around the time the road began to climb toward the city, something happened in her chest. She had been feeling it since the stage, a tightness, but now it opened a little, and underneath was a different feeling. It was excitement. It came in a rush, and she was almost embarrassed by it.
She was going to Mwanga Hill University.
She had wanted it since she was fourteen, when a visiting speaker came to her secondary school in a grey suit and talked about banks. He had said that every business in the world had a person in it who understood the numbers, and that person was usually the one who was safe. "Be the person who understands the numbers," he had said. "Everyone else will always need you." Amara had written it in the back of her exercise book. She had underlined it twice.
She had worked for it. People who said she was lucky had not seen her studying by candlelight when the power was cut, or heard her mother shouting at her to sleep. She had passed her A-levels with grades that made the head teacher shake her hand in front of the whole assembly. She had cried that day, and then she had gone home and sat on the kitchen floor and watched her mother count how much it would cost.
It will be hard, she told herself, in the taxi, with the city coming up around her. But it is simple. Work. Study. Don't waste it.
The first thing she noticed about Kampala was the noise. It came through the windows before the buildings did, a wall of horns, engines, preachers, music, radio. A man standing on a table at the roadside was shouting about Jesus through a microphone. Thirty metres further, a man was shouting about a sale on mattresses through another. Boda bodas slid between the taxis with inches to spare, carrying passengers, mattresses, stacks of eggs, a whole wardrobe once, tied on with ropes.
The second thing she noticed was the number of people. She had been to Masaka and thought it was crowded. This was something else. It was a place where nobody looked at you, because there were too many of you to look at. For a moment this frightened her. Then she thought, Nobody here knows me. And that thought was quiet and a little thrilling, like opening a window in a house where the air has been used too long.
By two o'clock she was standing in front of Lucky Star Hostel, in Kikoni, with a suitcase in her hand, a sack of matooke at her feet, and a boda man named Hassan who wanted five thousand shillings more than they had agreed.
"We said ten," Amara said.
"That was before the stairs."
"What stairs? There are no stairs. You just stopped here."
"The stairs of the hill, sister. The hill is stairs."
She paid him eight. He complained all the way to the corner. She stood a little longer in front of the building and looked at it.
It was a four-storey block painted a cream colour that had once been brighter, with a green gate and a security guard in a plastic chair. Washing hung from every balcony. A girl on the second floor was singing along to a radio, loudly and badly. The place smelled of frying onions and drains, and next door a church was already holding a service in a tent, with a drum and a woman crying out, "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!"
Amara loved it at once.
She had rehearsed this moment so many times. She had imagined a bigger place, maybe, with trees and a library and a clock tower, and in a way there was that too, up the hill where the university was. But this was hers. She had paid for it with her mother's savings. A room in the building cost three hundred and fifty thousand shillings for the semester, shared, and she had the receipt in her bag.
The guard checked her admission letter for a long time. Then he checked the stamp. Then he looked at her face as if the face might be forged, and finally he said, "Room fourteen, third floor. The lift is not working."
"There is a lift?"
"There was."
She laughed. It was the first real laugh of the day.
It took her four trips to bring everything up. The matooke was the worst. By the third floor she had stopped caring about the banana leaves and was dragging the sack up the steps by one corner, stopping on each landing to breathe. Doors stood open along the corridor. Radios played different songs at the same time. A girl in a towel walked past her carrying a basin of water and said, without stopping, "First year? Don't bring that sack to this corridor, the rats will follow you."
"Is there a rat problem?"
"There is a life problem," the girl said, and was gone.
Room 14 was at the end, next to the window that looked over the back lane. Amara pushed the door open with her foot.
It was a small room. Two beds along opposite walls, with thin mattresses and a single wooden wardrobe between them. A table with one drawer. A window with a net curtain that had been mended in two places. The walls were painted pale green and covered in old marks, hands and shoulders and the ghosts of posters.
On the right-hand bed sat a girl with a Bible in her lap, who looked up and smiled so quickly and so completely that Amara almost stepped back.
"You are Amara!" the girl said. "Praise God, you came! I have been looking at that door since morning. I am Brenda."
She stood and shook Amara's hand with both of hers. She was shorter than Amara and rounder, with a round, honest face, and she wore a long skirt and a blouse buttoned to the neck even in the heat. Her hair was tied back in a plain scarf. On the wall above her bed she had already hung a printed card that said The Lord is my shepherd, and next to it a timetable, neatly written in three colours of pen.
"You are very organised," Amara said.
"It is a gift. Also it is fear." Brenda took one end of the suitcase and helped her pull it in. "My brother said if I don't have a plan from the first day, Kampala will eat me. Where are you from?"
"Kyotera."
"I am from Mbarara. Ah, you are a Muganda, that is why your name is Amara. Is that Luganda?"
"I don't think so." Amara sat down on the left-hand bed and tested the mattress with her hand. It was thin. She would use the one from home on top of it. "My father found it in a book. He said it meant grace."
"Grace. That's beautiful."
"It's also Igbo, I think. From Nigeria. He liked the sound."
"Then you are an international person," Brenda said, delighted. "I will be careful with you."
Amara laughed again. Something in her shoulders loosened. She had been afraid of the roommate, of course. Everyone had. In S6 the older girls had told stories about roommates who stole credit, who brought boys at night, who kept strange habits. But Brenda sat on her bed with her Bible and her three-coloured timetable and asked, "Do you snore?" as if it were the most important thing in the world.
"I don't think so."
"Because I am a very light sleeper. If you snore, I will tell you straight away, and you must not be offended."
"I won't be offended."
"Good. Then we are going to be friends." Brenda looked at the sack. "Is that matooke?"
"My mother."
"Then your mother is a wise woman. Cooking in this place is a war. The kitchen is on the first floor, and there is one stove for forty girls. But I have a sufuria, and you have matooke, and tonight we will eat like queens."
They ate like queens at eight o'clock, which was when the power came back.
Before that they sat in the dark with the window open, listening to the neighbourhood. The matooke steamed in Brenda's pot on a charcoal stove in the corridor, along with five other pots. The air was thick with smoke and talk. Girls leaned in doorways swapping stories about registration. One said she had stood in the queue for the finance office for six hours. Another said she had been sent to a different building three times by three different officers, each one pointing in a different direction.
Amara had been in that queue herself. It had been the strangest part of the day.
She had gone up to the university at four, after unpacking, because Brenda said that if you did not register on the first day you would be doing it on the fifth. The hill was steeper than she had thought. The road went up past a bank, a stationery shop, a row of tiny restaurants with names like Mama's Hope and God's Time Eatery, and a long wall covered in posters for parties. Then there was a gate, and a guard, and a wide lawn with a statue of a man nobody seemed to be looking at.
The queue went from the registrar's office all the way across the lawn, three lines wide. Hundreds of students. Some stood alone, holding folders to their chests. Some stood in groups and laughed too loudly. A boy in a suit that was a size too big held his admission letter in both hands and read it again and again, moving his lips.
Amara had joined the end of one line and found, to her surprise, that she was not afraid. They were all in the same situation. All first years. All nervous. It was something she had not thought of before: that she was not the only person who had wanted this.
"Is this the right queue?" said a voice behind her.
She turned. The girl was tall, taller than Amara, with long braids dyed a soft brown at the ends, and she wore white trainers that looked as if they had never touched a road. Her jeans were cut at the knee. Her bag was small and leather and she held it as though it were a pet.
"I think so. For registration. If it moves."
"It won't move." The girl looked at the line with deep tragedy. "They told me it takes three hours. Three hours! In this sun, with these shoes. I am going to die and they will bury me at the registrar's gate."
"Then you should have worn other shoes."
"Excuse me?"
"I mean, they are very nice shoes," Amara said, "but the ground is not nice."
The girl looked at her for a second, and then she laughed. It was a big, free laugh, and heads turned.
"You are right. I am Shanice." She held out a hand with long nails painted dark red. "Everyone calls me that. My real name is Shanitah and I hate it. You?"
"Amara."
"Amara. Pretty. What are you studying?"
"Business Administration. Accounting."
"Me too! BBA. Oh, thank God, I have a friend. I came in with nobody." Shanice dug into her bag. "Do you want a sweet? I always carry sweets. It is my only talent."
Amara took one. It was a strawberry one, and it melted in her mouth, sticky and warm from the sun.
They stood in the queue for three hours and ten minutes. Shanice talked the entire time. She told Amara that she was from Entebbe, that her mother was a nurse, that she had spent her whole senior vacation arguing about which university to attend, and that she had chosen this one because she had heard the parties were good. She said it with a straight face. Amara could not tell if it was a joke.
"And you?" Shanice asked. "Why this one?"
"For the course."
"The course." Shanice smiled, and there was no unkindness in it. "You are serious. I like it. Somebody has to be." She adjusted her braids. "Listen, Amara. I will tell you something now, so you don't have to find it out the hard way. University is not only about the course. It is about who you meet. A degree is a paper. The people are the real education."
"That sounds like something people say when they don't read."
"Ha!" Shanice pointed at her. "You see? I knew I liked you."
When they finally reached the front of the line, a tired officer stamped Amara's form without looking at her, and she felt her whole body go light. Registered. It was real. It was stamped, in purple ink, with a date.
Outside, in the late sun, Shanice linked an arm through hers as though they had known each other for years. "Come. I will take you to the cafeteria and buy you a juice. You look like you have not had one all day."
"I can't. I have to cook with my roommate."
"Cook? Cook what?"
"Matooke."
Shanice made a small, kind noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "My dear. You really are fresh from the village." But she said it warmly, and when Amara did not laugh, she squeezed her arm and said, "I'm joking. Tomorrow, then. You and I, juice."
"Okay."
"Give me your number."
Amara had to give it in two tries, because she was nervous. Shanice saved it with a small heart. Her own phone was in a gold case, and it was bigger than any phone Amara had held in her life.
"You have made a friend already," Brenda said at dinner, when Amara told her. They were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Room 14 with the plates on the mattress, and the matooke was soft and yellow and smelled like home. "That is a gift from God."
"She's not like us."
"Like us how?"
"She has nice things. She talks like someone who is used to people listening."
"Ah." Brenda peeled a piece of matooke and considered it. "Be careful. Not because she is bad. I'm sure she is nice. But sometimes when someone has too much, they forget what other people don't have. And you don't know what she is carrying."
"How do you know that?"
"I don't. I'm just saying it." Brenda smiled, a little embarrassed. "My brother says I talk like an old woman."
"Your brother is right."
"I know." She looked pleased about it.
They washed the plates in a basin on the balcony. The power was back, and the city had turned itself on below them. From the third-floor balcony of Lucky Star Hostel, Amara could see the lights of Kampala spread out over the hills, thousands of them, yellow and white, with the red tail lights of the traffic moving slowly along the roads. Further off, the tall buildings of the city centre glittered against the night. Somebody's radio was playing a song she did not know. The churches next door had stopped. The air smelled of rain.
Her phone buzzed. It was a message from her mother, sent through Joel, because her mother did not type.
Mama says, did you reach? Did you eat? Is the room good? She is sitting by the phone like a statue.
Amara looked at it for a long time. Then she typed, I am in my room. I have a good roommate. We ate matooke. Tell Mama the money is safe. I am fine. Don't worry about me.
She read it again. All of it was true, apart from the last sentence. But that one she said every time, and every time it was only a way of saying I love you.
She sent it. Then she stood on the balcony with the phone in her hand and watched the lights.
She thought about the girl who had come up that road this morning with a sack of matooke at her feet. She thought about the queue, and Shanice's shoes, and the officer's purple stamp, and the long hot hill. It had all happened in one day, and it felt like a week. She had left a small town where everybody knew her name, and she had arrived at a place where nobody did.
She felt, for the first time in her life, that she could be anyone.
It was a dangerous kind of freedom. She did not know that yet. She only knew that the night was warm and the matooke had been good, and that somewhere below her a hundred thousand people were awake, going somewhere, wanting something.
Something is going to change, she thought. I don't know what. But I am going to change with it.
Behind her, in the room, Brenda had started to pray. It was soft, and quick, and sounded like a woman who was used to talking to someone who listened. Amara caught her own name in the middle of it.
She stayed on the balcony until the first drops of rain began to fall.