Her Husband’S Crown

By Katherine Namuddu

A fascinating exploration of the changing face of social customs and gender politics. Kirkus Reviews

Nansamba is married off aged sixteen to young Ggalabuzi from a neighboring village. It is an arranged marriage in 1940s rural Uganda and she works hard to build a prosperous household together with her easy-going and hardworking husband.

Twelve years into the marriage, Ggalabuzi exercises his male right to enter into a second marriage without telling his wife; and does so with her younger sister Mucwa. Nansamba navigates this hazardous marital and familial road with extraordinary wisdom, courage and dignity.

At twenty-eight, educated, city-born Biiti is considered an old maid. Her anxious relatives find her a rural husband past his prime and with a secret history. He soon destroys their marriage and she abandons it to become a successful businesswoman and anchor of her family.

For a quarter of a century relatives, friends and in-laws from Nansamba and Biitis families crisscross each others lives and create much drama and many children, including four sets of twins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Dec 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482803990

Katherine Namuddu

Katherine Namuddu was born in Uganda and educated there and in the United States. She taught at Makerere, Nairobi, and Kenyatta universities. She worked for many years with the Rockefeller Foundation of New York. She is advisor on African higher education and lives in Kampala and Nninzi Village in Kalisizo Township.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The year is 2011. An eighty-five year old woman ascends the stairs of a three-storey hotel. She is supported and urged on by a troop of fourteen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. One of the granddaughters owns the hotel to be opened at a ceremony the following day.

The hotel is located in a modest dusty town called Kenzo, 135 miles south of Uganda’s capital city Kampala. Kenzo emerged during the early 1900s when the government built a hospital there and extended a bus route to the border with Tanganyika, eighty-five miles away. Today Kenzo boasts of about 20,000 residents.

Her grandchildren get the woman on the uppermost floor and lead her to the balcony of a large bedroom. As she steadies herself, holding on to the railings, she scans the horizon. She points out the Catholic mission in a distance, and tells the grandchildren that all her five children were baptized there. She directs her grandchildren’s attention to the town’s landmark, the hospital, and laughs, ‘All our children were delivered there.’

Her grandchildren pinpoint a couple of petrol stations and several primary and secondary schools. They also gossip about several rows of small and medium sized shops owned by well-known residents and relatives and show the woman trading verandahs, alleyways, markets, small eateries and slums all of which have sprouted since the late 1960s.

The woman remembers that there used to be a coffee curing plant built in the 1930s and asks what has happened to it. Her gaze is directed toward a rickety building housing a carpentry shop owned by the neighboring secondary school. ‘What a pity!’ She quips. ‘In my time coffee was the crop to grow. Anyone who was going to be anything had to be in the coffee business.’ Before she leaves the balcony she asks, ‘Where is my grandson’s ‘Dippo’ that I have heard so much about?’

Her grandchildren laugh in unison at her pronunciation of the word depot and then steer her to another side of the balcony and point out below in some distance a huge, featureless and windowless cement structure standing at the farthest point of what used to be the main street of the town in the 1950s. The children tell her that the Dippo is not just her grandson’s building but also the whole stretch of road of about a kilometer which is taken up by clusters of small bars, discos and video showing rooms. They explain that these enterprises serve beer and other drinks to their thirsty customers. Hundreds of crates of drinks originate from the nearby storage depot, thus the name.

‘All this drinking of beer from morning till daybreak,’ the woman snorts. ‘People should be growing coffee. That is where wealth is.’

She descends to the ground floor again and insists on going outside to see the compound. She is amused to see that the outside of the hotel is painted beige and explains, ‘When your grandfather decided to put paint on our houses made of red-fired bricks in Bulyambwa village, he chose beige and then told us that it was a color of sophistication. Of course, I didn’t think so, but I left him to do as he wished.’

She is escorted back to a lounge and takes her seat between her grandchildren all with sparkling and admiring faces. Her granddaughter who owns the hotel emerges from the kitchen carrying a large birthday cake. She places it right in front of the eighty-five year old woman.

One of the grandchildren says, ‘Jjaja, grandmother, before we cut the cake, you should tell us how you came to have a co-wife. You have been promising to tell us the full story all these years. I suspect that after you have blown out all eighty-five candles, you will be out of breath.’

Everyone laughs and the woman takes in a long sigh and starts, ‘I was born into the Bushbuck (Ngabi) clan and married a man from the Elephant (Njovu) clan. One day he got me a co-wife. The problem was that he had not told me this on the day he carried me on a bicycle from my father’s home to his small house. If he had told me, I would have never married him.’

‘Grandmother we want to hear the full story.’

‘Quite,’ the old woman acquiesces. ‘But there is an important additional part to that story and I have not given you its short version.’

‘Oh yah?’ The owner of the hotel laughs.

‘I escaped getting a second co-wife, a beautiful young woman who was well educated and rich. That is a story with so many wonderful and not so wonderful people, most of them women, who were in and out of wedlock. At the time my husband liked to refer to me as Muyuuguumya, the shaker. I didn’t mind since I knew that it implied that I had mastered him despite the enormous power and advantage that culture had bequeathed to him.’

CHAPTER 1

A Village Betrothal

Nansamba is a tall, busty, beautiful sixteen-year-old girl born into the Bushbuck (Ngabi) clan. She had completed her lower primary education but there were no upper primary classes at her village of Ssemuto. The village was located seven miles from Kenzo town, some 135 miles south of Kampala.

Her father was called Iga and her mother was Namale of the Air Potato (Kkobe) clan. She was a stout and devout Catholic. Namale opposed her husband’s proposal that their daughter should walk the ten miles everyday to attend the nearest upper primary school. She was afraid for her first-born daughter’s safety and so Nansamba had left school aged thirteen in 1939.

The year is now 1942. Fifteen miles from Nansamba’s home and thirteen miles from Kenzo in a village called Baa lived a man called Mbazzi of the Elephant (Njovu) clan. He had married a heavy woman called Zawedde of the African Civet (Ffumbe) clan. The couple raised four sons: Ssozi, Kakembo, Batte and Ggalabuzi, the youngest was born in 1922.

Mbazzi and Zawedde sent their sons to the local Catholic primary school. Just like his elder brothers, Ggalabuzi was a good student. However, unlike his eldest brother Ssozi who was passionate about school, Ggalabuzi was ambivalent about the value of a long education for a boy such as himself. He left school in 1938 at sixteen and started working in his father’s coffee plantation.

As a salary his father paid him a commission of fifteen percent for every coffee bag that he sold. Soon Ggalabuzi was earning a handsome amount. His mother kept the money for him since he did not trust the post office at Kenzo where one could open a savings account.

After two years of hard work, Ggalabuzi asked his father to find him land to purchase. Ggalabuzi bought a thirty-acre piece of land in a village called Bulyambwa, eight miles away from Baa and five from Kenzo and started to develop it. He made fired mud bricks to build a modest four-room house that he roofed with pieces of tin.

He married at twenty in 1942. By then he was six feet tall with broad shoulders and a commanding presence accentuated by a deep voice. He was handsome, a sharp-dresser, preferring to wear trousers with a shirt rather than the men’s long caftan known as Ekanzu which most men in the village wore.

He had aspired to marry the type of woman that his mother had been wishing for him: obedient, hardworking and able to bear several children. He decided that unlike his elder brother Ssozi who had found himself a wife in Kampala where he had migrated, he would accept an arranged marriage, a custom that many still adhered to.

He informed his father that he was ready to get married. Mbazzi talked to his friends and soon word came back that in the village of Ssemuto, the Iga family had a marriageable daughter called Nansamba. Ssemuto was two-and-a-half miles from Bulyambwa village where Ggalabuzi had settled.

Mbazzi embarked on consultations that a father had to carry out in order to ensure that the girl would be suitable for his son. He first determined that the girl’s mother and father were not born into his or his wife’s clan. If any of the girl’s parents belonged to the same clans as Ggalabuzi’s parents such a marriage would be absolute taboo.

Next Mbazzi had to ascertain that the girl came from a hardworking family. He visited Ssemuto where a friend who was familiar with the village took him past Iga’s house. The compound was neat; the coffee and banana plantations were not only extensive, but also well mulched and productive. There were several raised racks alongside the compound on which coffee beans were being dried for eventual sale. Mbazzi counted about ten large bundles of firewood leaning against the back verandah of the kitchen, implying that the racks inside the large outer kitchen house were full. He was satisfied that a girl from such an industrious family was likely to be a hardworking woman.

Lastly, Mbazzi had to gauge whether the girl came from a good family. He was trying to answer questions such as: Is the family active in the modern religion? Are the parents of the girl a decent married couple that has no strife in the home? Is the girl good mannered and would she make a respectful daughter-in-law? Has the family produced healthy children or have there been miscarriages, stillbirths and deaths of young children?

While Mbazzi felt satisfied with the answers to most questions he was ambivalent about the findings on the last one. Iga and Namale had three daughters named Nansamba, Mucwa, and Lwensisi but only one son named Ludoviko Sebalya who was the first-born. He was twenty-four years old, married and living in Masa regional town fifty miles away from Ssemuto, his family village. Finding out that Iga had only one son was not good news, according to Mbazzi. He returned home downcast and told his wife that this did not seem like a family endowed with the gift of producing many sons.

In response his wife snorted, ‘Men with sons! Are you going to mount another search?’

‘I’ll give Ggalabuzi my advice and it’ll be up to him to decide.’

When the matter was put to Ggalabuzi, he consulted his elder brother Ssozi whom he admired and who was working as a legal clerk in an office in Kampala. Ssozi advised him to follow up on the girl.

To advance the processes of pursuing an arranged marriage, Mbazzi had to identify a paternal aunt, Ssenga, of the girl who would act as her proxy in introducing Ggalabuzi to the girl’s parents. He learned that Iga, the girl’s father had a sister who lived in Bulyambwa village about two miles away from Ggalabuzi’s house. Her name was Ssolo.

Mbazzi paid her a visit at her house. He told her that his son would like to open a dialogue between him and her niece’s parents. She was excited at the prospect of being a key player in her niece’s marriage. She gave Mbazzi a date on which his son, Ggalabuzi should visit her.

On the appointed date, Ssolo got up early to tidy her small house bustling with excitement as she tried on various Busuti, the traditional women’s dress, for the occasion. Although she was over thirty years old, she was considered beautiful.

Ssolo and her five siblings, two girls and three boys, including Iga were raised near a Catholic mission and had attended school where she had become literate. She married at sixteen in 1920 a man called Nyombi of the Bird (Nnyonyi) clan. Nyombi was a soldier and moved from place to place with his family of two sons for the first twelve years of his marriage. During the period Ssolo enjoyed a lifestyle of relative ease and independence most of which she spent gossiping with other soldiers’ wives who lived in the barracks. Nyombi retired in 1932 and bought a small piece of land in Bulyambwa. Ssolo had become used to living the life of a soldiers’ wife and was forced to change her lifestyle from that of a provisioned housewife to one who had to grow all her food, something that she found hard to do well. In 1939 after nineteen years of marriage Nyombi left her. As soon as she learnt of his whereabouts she took her sons and left them at his doorstep. She told the boys that their new home was where their father resided. Since then, she had lived alone.

A friend of Ggalabuzi’s called Kimbugwe of the Bohor Reedbuck (Njaza) clan accompanied him to Ssolo’s house. Kimbugwe was thirty-eight years old with a dark complexion, an ebullient character and a burly figure of more than six feet tall. He had come to Kenzo town in 1930 and set up a trading shop. The two men became friends when Ggalabuzi started buying building materials from Kimbugwe’s shop in 1941.

After the two friends presented themselves and requested Ssolo to introduce Ggalabuzi to Iga’s household, she expressed delight exuding calmness, politeness and immense charm. She promised to address the matter right away.

She approached her brother Iga and his wife Namale and briefed them about a potential suitor for Nansamba who was not informed about the emerging arrangements as everything was kept a secret as custom demanded.

It was now Iga’s turn to conduct his own covert research on Mbazzi’s family and in particular his son Ggalabuzi. He found out that all was well with Ggalabuzi. He however, informed his wife of one incident in Mbazzi’s married life that had caused him some concern. Iga had been informed that Mbazzi had brought a young woman into the home as a co-wife, something that contravened church teaching and caused his first wife to leave him.

‘So is the wife in the home now this young woman?’ Namale asked.

‘No. It appears that she didn’t last long. After she left the first wife returned to the home.’

‘Do you think that Mbazzi’s son may do the same once he marries our daughter?’

‘No one can answer that question. I’m satisfied about the boy’s good standing within the community and that’s the most important thing,’ Iga concluded. He informed his sister, Ssolo to go ahead with the processes.

Ggalabuzi, his cousin, a woman called Suubi and Kimbugwe arrived at Iga’s house on a Sunday afternoon. Nansamba and her sisters had been sent away on an overnight errand so that they would not be curious about the visitors. The discussions about how much dowry Ggalabuzi would pay for marrying Nansamba were carried out between her brother, Sebyala, Ggalabuzi, Kimbugwe and Iga. Women on the girl’s side of the family were not allowed to take part in such important negotiations.

In the end Iga pledged his daughter’s hand provided a dowry was paid, comprised of three pieces of fabric for making Busuti: one for Namale, one for Ssolo and one for Nansamba and two white Ekanzu, one for Iga and the other for Sebalya. There were also calabashes of local beer, bunches of bananas called Matooke, meat, sugar and salt. At the end of the discussions a date was set for the official introduction.

A few days after these agreements, Namale called Nansamba aside and told her that she had become betrothed to a man called Ggalabuzi who was due to return for the introduction ceremony at which the dowry would be paid.

Nansamba was not surprised by the news; she had known as soon as she had left school, something that she had not wanted to do, that the next step was for her parents to marry her off.

Namale however, had expected her daughter to break down and cry at the prospect of leaving her home; but Nansamba did not do so. Instead she said, ‘I hope this man will be as good to me as my father is to you.’

Namale was caught by surprise by her daughter’s comment and, asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, Ssenga Ssolo no longer lives with Nyombi and I suppose he wasn’t a good husband since he is the one who left her and now lives with another woman whom he didn’t marry in church. My father is still here; he hasn’t married a second woman; no one in the village has mentioned that he has children with other women and he doesn’t cause commotion here as I’ve heard that some men do in their homes.’

‘You are right,’ Namale said. ‘But I should warn you that a good man in marriage comes from a good wife. Soon you’ll be required to be a good wife to Ggalabuzi. But I can’t tell you what being a good wife to him will involve since I don’t know his character. That’s going to be your first task, to study him and know all his ways, good and bad. Then you can over time bend him into a good husband.’

‘So it’s you who has bent father into what he is?’ Nansamba smiled.

‘More or less,’ Namale smiled too. ‘But it takes time and patience. Sometimes you have to issue veiled threats, at other times it is open threats, but most often you have to pretend to be a fool. The one thing that you will find that men hate and I’m sure Ggalabuzi will be no exception, is the idea of an intelligent woman with a brain that thinks like that of men. Men despise women except of course, when the woman dies and she has to be buried like any man. But even then you will find that the manner in which dead women are mourned, buried and their heirs installed is nothing compared to the high drama of men’s funerals. All men subscribe to the wisdom of the proverb that says that for a hearth to have fire at all, there has to be only one main piece of wood to which all other pieces of wood must never be equal in length and width.’

Nansamba let out a long sigh and concluded, ‘I guess Ggalabuzi has had a conversation similar to this one with his father telling him how he must bend me.’

‘Yes of course, and with his mother too,’ Namale asserted. ‘But none of them will advise him to bend you gently. Chances are that they have told him to ensure that he makes you understand who’s the king in the home from the word go.’

‘Even his mother would tell him that?’

‘Of course!’ Namale emphasized. ‘Why do you think a mother-in-law is the most difficult person for a married woman to deal with? You should count yourself lucky because I hear that Ggalabuzi has set up home more than eight miles away from his parents’ house. You will not have to cope with daily intrusion into your affairs from your mother-in-law.’

‘I’ll tell you how it goes,’ Nansamba sighed.

‘No, you’ll not,’ Namale admonished. ‘I don’t want to hear what’s going on in your marriage. All I want to see is you building a strong marriage in which you’re content to stay.’

‘I will remember that,’ Nansamba promised.

CHAPTER 2

A Wedding in the Capital City

Biiti was the daughter of Kikuya, a man born in 1891 into the Leopard (Ngo) clan in a chief’s family. On completing his education in a school for the sons of chiefs he got a job as a clerk in the department of lands of the Buganda government’s offices at Mengo. He built a house and settled on a large piece of land given to him by his father in Lugala village near Kampala. In 1910 he married a woman called Ttale, a chief’s daughter born into the Lion (Mpologoma) clan. In 1912 the couple had their first and only child, a daughter.

Biiti did well at primary school and won a scholarship to a boarding junior secondary school. She then completed training as a teacher in 1930 at eighteen and started working. She became an excellent teacher, but this resulted in a major drawback. She was often transferred from one school to another as a way of using her expertise as a model teacher of reading. This constant movement made it difficult for her to develop relationships with men who were not in her immediate working environment. Yet she did not want to marry a man in the same profession as hers.

By 1939 she was twenty-seven years old and her parents were worried that she might never get married. They put out word through friends and relatives that their daughter was searching for a Catholic man of good standing. The news that filtered back was not encouraging. Most people thought that Biiti was too old to make a good wife who would be able to bear many children for her husband. However, Biiti did not give up hope.

Then one Sunday afternoon in 1940 Biiti’s mother and her paternal aunt called Loza, a widow, arrived at the teachers’ house where Biiti lived. After the greetings Loza announced, ‘You are about to be rescued from the tragedy of remaining a childless spinster for life.’ The visitors had come to inform Biiti that she had become betrothed.

Biiti took a deep sigh of relief and asked, ‘Who is the man?’

Loza explained that in six weeks’ time Biiti was to marry a man called Kitaka of the Lungfish (Mmamba) clan from the village of Banga sixty miles south of Kampala. ‘The man’s parents are dead but his younger brother called Mpinde accompanied him to pay the dowry.’

‘He has paid dowry even before he has met me?’ Biiti frowned. ‘When do I get to see him?’

‘On your wedding day,’ Loza quipped.

In later years Biiti would confess that she would have not married Kitaka had she heard his life history before.

At the age of fifteen in 1915 Kitaka, the first-born, realized that he came from a large family of more than twenty children. His father Musolo was born and raised in Kakondo village near Lake Nalubaale. By the time Kitaka was ten his father had acquired three more wives in addition to his mother.

Kitaka was a lanky young man of over six feet in height. His mother, Mbuga of the Mushroom (Butiko) clan, doted on him and his younger brother, Mpinde. She was trying to ensure that either Kitaka or Mpinde were in their father’s sights to become main heirs to his extensive pieces of land.

But Kitaka was a restless boy. By eighteen he had tried his hands at the three main activities that his father was known for but none had managed to hold his interest. Musolo was a well-known producer and curer of bark cloth. Kitaka tried the task of de-barking and curing bark cloth but he was not happy with it. His father then advised him to concentrate his energies on farming. Kitaka knew how laborious and exhausting cultivating with a hoe was. He was not content with the idea of doing the hard work in his father’s gardens without having any say in the disposal of the income from cash crops such as cotton, coffee and tobacco. He told his father that what he wanted to do was fishing and Musolo bought him nets and hired a small dugout canoe for the purpose. He embarked on fishing but he found it overwhelming. After a couple of months he gave up and his father told him the extent of his disappointment with him.

Musolo allowed Kitaka to accompany him on several trips to various trading posts where he sold bark cloth and smoked fish. In 1919 he heard of an opportunity to send two of his sons to work at a new Catholic parish that was being established at a place called Bwera some eighty miles north of Kakondo village. He selected Kitaka and his younger brother Mpinde.

It took the young men three days to walk the sixty miles to Masa where they found transportation on a lorry to Bwera, which was twenty miles away. They joined other young men to learn to read and write and acquire arithmetic and practical skills for carpentry and masonry. Mornings were spent on building work and afternoons in the classrooms and workshops.

At twenty-one Kitaka left Bwera as was the practice with most apprentices. He did not return to his father’s home and together with several young men traveled to Masa and started doing odd jobs in the market. He got work as a clerk at an office of the cooperative society, which marketed coffee. He traveled within the region with his bosses as a general handyman during meetings with members of the society.

He saved money and bought three acres of land in a village called Banga, which was about sixty miles South of Kampala and built a four-room house. In 1930, new ways of working in the cooperative society were introduced. He was redeployed as the overseer of a series of small cooperative society stores dotted along a 265-mile stretch of small rural roads from the border with Tanganyika to Mpangi, a town near Banga where Kitaka had built his house. He spent a lot of time on the bus traveling between townships, staying in small lodges on the way and then inspecting the stores. He would write a field report and post it to his bosses at the headquarters in Masa.

He kept in touch with his family and would pay visits as well as attend family events such as weddings. But he would shun funerals whenever possible. He remained close to his younger brother Mpinde who had left Bwera in 1923 and bought extensive pieces of land in a village called Musambya. Mpinde established himself as a farmer and married in 1925. Kitaka would go to visit him during his leave, sometimes spending more than a month enjoying his brother’s hospitality. While visiting he would also drop in to see his half sister called Prisca who was married and lived in a village called Miti, six miles from Musambya.

Kitaka’s father died in 1929 but not before selecting Mpinde rather than Kitaka as his heir. If Kitaka was disappointed by his father’s decision, he kept his feelings to himself. He kept his job with the cooperative society until 1935 when it was terminated by new management. A new rule required that anyone serving in his position should be proficient in reading and writing in English, something that he was not. He returned to the home that he had built in Banga village.

In 1940 Mpinde prevailed upon his older brother to get married since he was forty years old. There was a belief then that parish workers knew of good mannered Catholic women who were looking for husbands. Therefore Mpinde accompanied his older brother to Bwera parish where the two had been trained more than fifteen years earlier. They were connected to a woman who knew Loza,