I never knew how much we remember from childhood
until I wrote this story, The
Puppets of Maramudhu. One reviewer, when talking about it, said “Dilman's story is unique, not that it is alien or
experimental. It is neither of these. In fact, it is the kind of stories we
love to tell, orally, but which we rarely ever write, unfortunately, perhaps because of our quest to remain
realists.” Read
the review here. I always wonder why we endeavour
to remain realists, yet our socialisation process conditions us to believe in
the supernatural, to point at spirits and unknowable forces when explaining
strange phenomenon. As children, the stories we loved to hear the most were
those with magic in them. Why is it that as adults we shy away from them?
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| Razor Blade, a street child rapper, and his audience. |
I think every
child will come across a story of a real-life person who resurrected from the
dead, long before they ever encounter Lazarus. It is the same with folk tales,
for you will find narratives in an African society that are similar to those of
a South American society that it has not had known contact with. These
similarities often arise because all human beings share the same fears and
emotions. If you look into your past, into your childhood, you will remember
hearing about a person, maybe who lived down the street, or in the next
village, or in another town, often someone you know, who will become a bogeyman
of sorts, and you will remember that such a person once died and resurrected.
In my town, we
had such a guy. They say he was buried for three days (why
three days, like Jesus?), and one time a group of children were picking mangoes
from a tree near the public graveyard when they heard something knocking under the
ground. They fled. The knocking did not stop for several hours, until a few
brave men dug up the grave and found the man alive. We called him Bubu (or was it Abubuna), which
was not a polite word, for it mean deafmute. He could not speak, could not
hear, for it is said what he saw in the world of the dead had to remain a
secret. It’s probably because of him that I’m always fascinated with the living dead, like the jothokwo in The Terminal Move, and like Maramudhu in The Puppets of Maramudhu.
We would follow
Bubu around the streets, trying to make him speak, and often he would ignore
us. He was docile, non-violent, and I sometimes feel bad for pestering him. We used to follow ‘mad people’ around as well. I say 'mad people' in quotes
because it is not the politically correct term to refer to people with mental
disorders. I think most of these people were schizophrenic. They offered us a
daily dose of entertainment, with their oddities. We followed them to eaves
drop on the conversations they were having with the imaginary creatures
bothering them, but often we followed them to provoke them into a fight.
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| A woman with a mental disability poops in the streets. Banepa town, near Kathmandu, Nepal. |
After she had
eased, she resumed running away, though we were no longer chasing or stoning her.
We crept to her poop. It had a variety of colors, almost like a rainbow. I had
never seen such colourful poop, and never have. We were so enthralled by her
poop that we kept watch over it for a whole day, until it decayed and lost its
brilliance. For a moment, we thought the poop had magical powers. We wanted to
scoop it up and keep it somewhere safe, where we would discover what powers it
had and – well, I don’t remember what stopped us.
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| A Street Child Rapper Entertaining Women in Kampala |
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| An Acrobat Entertaining in Kyaliwajala town, Namugongo, near Kampala. |
There was even
once a man who came with a TV show. This was the 1980s, a time when the TV
set was a mystery to many of us. Our family got its first TV set in 1990,
because that is also the year the world cup was broadcast live to Uganda (I
think), but we got the bonus of watching the Gulf War live as well. It was a
black and white thing, and when the pictures when totally fuzzy, we sat and
watched anyway for nobody knew how to get a clear signal. So when this guy came
to town and said he had a TV show, a small crowd gathered. It turned out that
he had only a set of still photos, which he hid inside a big black box, and he
only allowed you to look at these photos through a pair of eye-holes. He did
not make much money, once people figured out he was a big con. We thought we
were going to see moving pictures, not a slideshow. His box show ended up in The Puppets of Maramudhu, as the cart the evil sorcerer dragged around.
What this documentary I made, about a family of street musicians
The puppeteer
who stuck to my head, and who eventually become the title character in the
story, Maramudhu, was Abe Mukibuga (I think that was his name). Or I might be
confusing him with another one. Maybe there were two puppeteers, I cannot
remember well, but I remember the song they used to sing, as they made their
puppets to dance. It went 'mayo ni mayo, mayo ni wempe' (whatever those words mean) and then another line 'sasa wewe kijana moses, shika bibi yako', one of the puppets was called Moses, and he had a female partner with whom he danced. Well, this song ended up in the story as well, not the same lyrics though, but the same tune. I wish I could make a film out of it, to preserve this song that has never left my dreams.
The stories behind Mukibuga (that should mean town-man, or an urbanised man) were weird, as well. Nobody knew where he came from, even though he used a show name from Buganda. Nobody knew his age. He seemed to be the same age for decades, from the seventies when he started to pass by the town, to the late eighties when I first saw him. They said he never traveled in vehicles, that he pulled his cart on foot, from Kinshansha to Mombasa, staging shows from town to town. This particular detail impressed me so much that I had to write a story about him.I feel guilty for making him an evil man, but I guess I was only trying to make the dreams go away.
The stories behind Mukibuga (that should mean town-man, or an urbanised man) were weird, as well. Nobody knew where he came from, even though he used a show name from Buganda. Nobody knew his age. He seemed to be the same age for decades, from the seventies when he started to pass by the town, to the late eighties when I first saw him. They said he never traveled in vehicles, that he pulled his cart on foot, from Kinshansha to Mombasa, staging shows from town to town. This particular detail impressed me so much that I had to write a story about him.I feel guilty for making him an evil man, but I guess I was only trying to make the dreams go away.
I feel I have
not exhausted the story, of a showman who walks across the continent
entertaining people. I think he will come again, sometime in the future, and
maybe this time he will not be evil.
Three Stories on Amazon
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