Around the Fire: A Celebration of African Family, Women’s Strength and Our Stories

By Susan Muwanse Kasedde

Like a casual walk in the park with an old friend, Fire is a stroll through the life and adventures of an African woman growing up and learning to build upon the love and guidance of women and family and to discover her identity, personal values and purpose. Through the pages, she navigates through thoughts and memories from her earliest years to years as a refugee and wartime Uganda. She revisits the warmth of childhood experiences that sparked hope and youthful curiosity. She reflects on a life journey that took her from Uganda to the United Kingdom, to Canada, the United States and back home again to Uganda, forming treasured, lifelong bonds, following her dreams and striving to deliver on promises not least of all, to herself. Through Fire, Kasedde shares with us old wisdom passed down in her culture in Uganda, as well as gems strung together in the forms of advice and insight gathered over time. Through her reflection, she shares how love and friendship - gifts encountered across place and time throughout her life, served as a prism through which she learned to study and better understand the world and her role and purpose in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665548953

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AROUND

THE FIRE

A CELEBRATION OF AFRICAN FAMILY,

WOMEN’S STRENGTH AND OUR STORIES

SUSAN MUWANSE KASEDDE

AuthorHouse™

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© 2022 Susan Muwanse Kasedde. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/12/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4896-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4897-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-4895-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900540

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

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this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1     Love

Chapter 2     Maama

Chapter 3     Stateless

Chapter 4     The War Years

Chapter 5     Mothers and Grandmothers

Chapter 6     Love Again

Chapter 7     Broken Pieces

Chapter 8     Breaking Away

Chapter 9     Discovery

Chapter 10   Home Again

For Maama

Amagezi muliro!*

For standing tall when all around you called you weak;

For seeing others when few bothered to see you;

For believing when no one else would;

For showing how to walk through doors firmly shut;

To take your seat uninvited yet deliver;

For always hearing what we ourselves feared to say

And doing exactly what was needed anyway;

For never bowing to just what was wanted;

And for defying every label, every limit;

For teaching humility, grace, and mercy,

Dignity, love, truth and fairness;

For never tiring or wavering in teaching

That its these things that make us strong,

Beautiful.

Each one of us,

Us.

For your unbreakable determination,

The magic in your eyes, voice, touch and presence;

For your faith in God, in us, in our dreams;

And for your total dedication

To making a way through—

Even and to your last breath, over you;

We are in debt, we are in awe,

Forever in love,

Maama!

*Amagezi muliro … bwe guzikira oguggya wa munno (Luganda proverb: Wisdom is a fire. When it goes out, you light it by getting more from a friend.)

Chapter 1

Love

Akutwala ekiro … omusiima bukedde

The need for gratitude is always clearer at daybreak

Storytelling is in our blood. I remember the sense of anticipation, fun, and fascination I felt as a child as I joined cousins and other children as we gathered to listen to a story. "Awo olwatuuka" … two words in Luganda would signal that the story had begun. We would fall silent with eyes glued to the storyteller and ears hanging onto every word and every twist. Waiting. Minds completely enthralled by the imagery and emotions brought to life by the words and tone of the storyteller, who for that time became a magician who transported us through time and perched us on our imaginary seats as we witnessed events in our minds. For that moment (awo), we were in the story!

"Awo nange (There too) … two words would announce the end of the story, and we would all join in to say the closing words…. We’nalabira (That’s what I saw"). And with that, we would be brought out of our trance and the analysis and arguments would begin-each one of us trying to cast some magic of our own as we made passionate cases for alternate twists that would certainly have improved the plot. Our storytellers would often sit back listening to us and smiling contentedly. Their job was done. The seed of imagination had been planted. The next generation of storytellers was already hard at work.

As long as we are alive, we each have a story to tell, and no matter our journeys, we can all win ardent listeners who recognize their stories, hopes, and questions in our tales. Our stories have profound meaning because they reflect many things at once yet offer different ways for each person to connect: a life lived, ideas nurtured, intimate conversations, privileged access, questions posed, answers unearthed, sights seen, emotions felt, lessons learned, battles won and lost, and identities discovered.

So this is my story. As I look back at my life, I see blocks of time that make up each chapter. But I also see countless brief and seemingly insignificant—at the time—moments that I fully appreciated only in retrospect for the momentous chapters or turning points they were in my journey. What amazes me most about all these chapters are the people whose stories intertwined with mine at each moment, the people who taught me through their words and actions, and shaped my understanding of myself and the world around me and thus sometimes gently and sometimes dramatically shaped my choices and journey.

Stories can serve as a compass; they can tell about where we’ve been and thus illuminate lessons about context and decisions and their consequences. In my culture in Uganda, traditional songs are passed down from generation to generation to tell the tale of great warriors, wise leaders, and fools. We learned these songs as children, danced to them, laughed heartily at the storylines, or acted them out with all the energy and drama that children’s imagination can inspire. As children, we understood instinctively that stories, like music and all art, were life’s invitation to dream and imagine, let our minds wonder free for precious moments without the restraints of reality and the dictates of social order. Like bare feet running free on grass or warm bare earth—connected-our minds, once back from the wandering, were richer, lighter, brighter yet grounded as they had visited and touched new possibilities and would now be inspired by these, resolved, defiant as we tackled our day to day.

I learned to play the traditional Ganda drums in high school, this traditional instrumental element a merciful mandatory requirement in the musical curriculum for students like myself at the time who had been attracted to music by love of the piano and the opportunity to master it. Every Saturday at boarding school, after our mandatory practice, our music teacher, Ms Janice Hobday let us play a structure-free, unsupervised jam session on our drums. The session was a highlight for the whole school as the sounds mixed and floated across the campus and cast a spell reaching deep into the private space in the minds and souls of the 700-strong student body. There are four drums in the Kabaka’s Court (the King’s Court) in Buganda. The largest of these, the Empuunyi, when hit at the right spot with the steady, rhythmic heel of the hand, delivers a beautiful, regal, reverberating bass sound that slowly connects with the soul inviting the body, mind and soul to awaken and connect to the rhythm and the emotion that it conjures. The smallest of the drums is the Nankasa. Played with wooden sticks and fingertips alternately striking the leather top and the wooden exterior, the Nankasa complements the bass and playfully teases, sets and switches the tone and leads the body, mind and soul deeper into the musical and spiritual odyssey, adding a sense of urgency and foreshadowing the energy and invitation to expression that are to come. If the Empuunyi and the Nankasa are the conducter and choral support in the ensemble, the final two drums in the set, the majestic Bakisimba and the chatty, indomitable Engalabi, are the flamboyant, free-spirited performing leads. The Bakisimba and Engalabi are melodic storytellers, each one patiently first, then increasingly urgently, passionately filling in important details of the same story, each one understanding perfectly the power in its voice, its moment, its story, in the song. The drums tell a story individually yet richer, immeasurably more powerful and complete only together through rhythms passed down over centuries, rhythms that traveled entrancingly in bass, playful rat-a-tat-tat, elegant point and counterpoint through the air at school every Saturday morning, through notes to hearts, minds, bodies and souls, inviting us to imagine, to remember, to celebrate, to persevere, to dance, sing and to live up to the promise of an incredibly strong and rich heritage that is still to be fully discovered.

Uganda’s educational system has not done enough to exploit and elevate our treasury of traditional Ugandan art, music and stories. My mother-in-law, Maama Abisagi Semambo, one of the wisest people I have been privileged to know, always told me she had been her children’s first teacher, teaching them through stories. While I was pregnant with my first child, Bunyaga, she happily showed me a collection of large-paged, brightly-illustrated storybooks that she had bought from a street seller for my unborn baby—stories she planned to read to the baby over and over again over the years. The tales had common themes: respect for the elderly and the central role that they play in family life; the importance of honesty, work ethic, authenticity, patience, dependability, social responsibility, and so on. The books were well-read and my daughter Namugenze (Genze) enjoyed them too, multiple times a day. I’d come home from work to pick the children up at Maama Abisagi’s house and often found the children sitting leafing quietly through the books with their pudgy fingers and they’d ask me to read them the stories again and again, giggling as they got to the parts where I had to imitate a grandmother’s footsteps or as I voiced the part of the frightened grandmother and her grandchild who trembled inside the house as the cow plodded around outside their window all night. Bunyaga and Genze are 22 and 20, and Maama Abisagi is gone now but rather than discarding the tattered books over the years, Maama Abisagi lovingly and painstakingly taped every tear and kept them together, knowing that there would be many more children that would read and come to love and treasure the tales.

Maama Abisagi with Bunyaga (R) and Genze (L)

These stories combine traditional art, age-old wisdom, humour and history about character and values; they were designed to offer insight into our rich and complex cultural identity and philosophy but are relegated at best to the most basic use during instruction of very young children, a valuable yet wholly insufficient investment of this resource. There is virtually no place for these old treasures in formal instruction on history, literature and analysis for older children to help them understand and develop a mastery and