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THE SACRIFICE ZONE [The Riverton City Dump] by Diana McCaulay
‘I’ve lived in Cooreville Gardens all my life,’ Maurice Benderson tells me. We’re speaking by telephone, but I’ve seen him on television, a quiet-spoken, well-dressed man in his thirties. ‘The house I live in now is my godmother’s house. She bought it just after it was built – it was her dream house: central, close to Half Way Tree, Cross Roads, downtown. She’s migrated now. The smoke from Riverton affected her health.’
I know he’s married, because I follow his wife, Narda Benderson, on Twitter. She often posts about the fires from the nearby Riverton City Dump. She’s listening to our conversation. ‘Do you have children?’ I ask Maurice.
‘Two beautiful daughters,’ he says.
I’ve called Maurice because my Twitter feed tells me the report on the 2018 fire at the Riverton City Dump has been released. It’s been six weeks since the main garbage dump for Jamaica burned and it’s by no means the first such fire or report. I know what will be in the report without looking. There’ll be the Executive Summary – the whole disaster compressed into two pages for busy decision-makers. There’ll be the graphs and the tables and the many mysterious polysyllabic words – Dichloromethane, Trimethylpentane, Carbon Tetrachloride. There’ll be the limitations, which boil down to: We really don’t have enough equipment or local lab facilities to cope with a raging dump fire. There’ll be recommendations, including steps that have been underway for decades, as if they’ve just been conceived. There’ll be promises of health surveys and new laws and higher fines and zero tolerance and more equipment. I can’t face it, but I do.
The 2018 fire started on 29 July and smouldered until 12 August – fifteen long days.
‘So has the Riverton dump always been a problem?’ I ask Maurice.
‘No. There were fires every now and then when I was young, but maybe seven years ago things started to get bad because of the scrap metal trade. That’s when they started to burn tyres to get at the copper inside.’
Narda says, ‘Now it burns every back-to-school time, every Christmas and every Easter.’ The fires are not always as big as the recent one and often garner no attention, except from those who live nearby.
‘When I was young, you would not know the Riverton City dump was there,’ adds Maurice.
*
Riverton City in Kingston, Jamaica is both a community and the main garbage dump for the island. Riverton-the-dump, or Waste Disposal Site, as government regulators prefer to call it, is a landscape of humanity’s waste, a sacrifice zone for the entire island, an away place we don’t want to think about, although people live there, right next to the dumpsite, their dwellings built on old garbage. Some of the dwellings are government housing, ovens in the heat of the day; others are cobbled together with discarded plywood and tarpaulins. The road into the dump is strewn with garbage. Garbage floats on the adjacent Duhaney River and clogs the mangrove roots. The dumpsite itself is a hill of garbage. Thousands of Jamaicans live and work in the communities in and around Riverton. Others travel to the dump to eke out a living as waste pickers.
This dump and all Jamaica’s dumps contain every type of human detritus – discarded batteries, car tyres, electronic waste, rotten meat, plastic of breathtaking scale and variety, construction waste, the paper of industry, the cardboard of a throwaway, mobile, developing country, even medical waste on occasion. Asbestos is buried in shipping containers under supervision by the University of the West Indies.
Riverton has few of the attributes of a landfill – it is not lined, there is no capture of gases or leachate, it is covered only when funds permit. It is perceived as a lawless place. Water quality monitoring programmes have ended due to threats of violence. Heavy equipment has been vandalised. Administrative buildings have been torched. Trucks have been hijacked on the entrance road by scrap metal traders. A truck driver was recently murdered by ‘unknown assailants’ at Riverton, wishfully called a landfill by the reporter. Nearby, men set waste tyres on fire. Not one single condition of the required environmental permit issued by government regulators in 2005 to improve management and conditions at Riverton was adhered to. The permit expired in 2010 and was only reissued in 2018.
Jamaican law requires waste disposal sites to have an environmental permit; Riverton is a towering reminder of our willingness to tolerate breaches of the law, even when – perhaps especially when – they are committed by the state.
And the dump burns. When it burns, the smoke contains a list of gases and pollutants many of which cannot be tested for locally, most without established standards. As for why it burns? It is an open secret that the fires are deliberately set when funds are needed, and during the dry time when the breezes are strong – so they spread quickly. Riverton is set on fire because the fires generate work – for the owners of heavy equipment, for the holders of cover material, for the operators of quarries and trucks, for the people who live near Riverton. Money runs. All will be enlisted to help extinguish the fire, and, because it is an emergency, government procurement procedures will be abandoned and the work – which amounts to a multi-million-dollar windfall – will be awarded along political party lines.
Now that we have drones, images of the extent of the big fires are quickly uploaded to the internet. The smoke spreads over the nearby communities of Seaview Gardens, Riverton City, Riverton Meadows, Callaloo Mews, Duhaney Park, Cooreville Gardens, New Haven, Riverside Gardens, over the dozens of businesses, large and small, on Spanish Town Road and Marcus Garvey Drive. From Highway 2000, the cranes and commerce of the Port of Kingston appear draped in gauze when Riverton burns. The acrid, harmful smoke settles at night and spreads out over the greater Kingston Metropolitan Area where roughly one million Jamaicans live. Then, when the sea breeze comes up at about ten in the morning, the plumes of smoke are driven to middle-class residential communities five or six miles away. During the major 2015 fire, which burned and smouldered for three weeks, a lecturer from the University of the West Indies tweeted, ‘Riverton has reached the halls of the academy.’ Others posted that since uptown Kingston was being affected (instead of merely the poorer areas), Riverton would be fixed at last.
It wasn’t.
*
Riverton is one of the places that was a catalyst for my quarter-century journey as an environmental activist. In 1990, when I first visited, I had given no thought to where the bag of garbage I put at my gate ended up. It was a shock to confront Riverton’s mound of stinking waste, being combed through by hundreds of people, including children. I stood there in my decent clothes and sun hat and tried not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of rotting meat and shit and burning plastic. I watched a boy in torn-up underpants wade into the scummy grey water of the Duhaney River. He waved to me. I took a photo of him, this child in polluted water which would have made me instantly and seriously ill, his hands raised as if in celebration, and I used that photo in my environmental talks – my ‘we must do something’ talks – which lay ahead.
*
The situation at Riverton has the deepest of roots. It was established at least 50 years ago by the then Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation or KSAC, Kingston’s municipal authority, to take most of the city’s waste that was being dumped at various smaller sites. The waste was to be transported to Riverton, sprayed with insecticides and covered with soil, to a depth of at least nine inches, a process which took all day, according to an article in Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper of 23 July 1969. The KSAC’s main problems were described as the maintenance of their trucks – at least half of the fleet was off the road at any time – and the failure of citizens to properly containerise their garbage. There was no indication in the article of any long-term plan for the island’s solid waste. Take it away and forget about it was – and remains – the guiding principle. Today, still, any article on Riverton will mention the hurdle of the broken-down trucks and the failure of citizens to containerise their garbage.
A 2009 Social Development Commission community profile on Riverton City, renamed Riverton Meadows, described the area: ‘Characteristics of the community include high unemployment, crowded and dilapidated housing, and poverty-stricken appearance. The Riverton Meadows’ residents faces (sic) various hazards from the industrial waste pollutants dumped in the Duhaney River and small gullies by the industrial companies. The roads are filled with very large potholes, having a close relationship to dirt roads as resurfacing is needed.’ The major economic activities of the residents were described as buying and selling, the opening of massage parlours, and waste picking on the dump. The population in 2007 was estimated at 3,320 people, with an average family size of 3.9, exceeding the national average of 3.1. Most people were under 30, female-headed households dominated, and most heads of households described themselves as single. Generally, children in Riverton attended school, but the ‘vast majority’ of adults had no academic qualifications. Most people lived on ‘captured’ land, had been born in Kingston, and St. Andrew and had lived at Riverton for more than 30 years.
Most households had running water (at least in their yards), many had inside flush toilets, just under half of the respondents burned their garbage although there was collection by trucks. All households had electricity – although it was not stated how many were legally connected. Almost 30% of respondents to the SDC’s survey reported long-standing health problems, specifically sinusitis, asthma and hypertension. The study did not present a comparison with the health of those in a control community.
Just over 40% of respondents were self-employed; about 30% reported full-time employment. Almost half earned less than J$40,000 per month, about US$450.00 at 2009 rates of exchange. Most had other sources of income, including remittances from overseas and a network of support from friends and relatives. Youth unemployment was 38.3% and almost 19% had never worked in their adult lives.
According to this report, the people who lived at Riverton did not regard it as lawless or dangerous. Almost 90% said no one in their family had ever been the victim of a violent crime and 96% said they felt safe in the community. They were aware that outsiders did not regard Riverton in the same way, however, and 15% felt stigmatised by their address, reducing their employment chances. Main development challenges were high unemployment, high levels of school dropouts, and poor roads. The biggest public safety dangers were environmental – air pollution, flooding, vulnerability to natural disasters.
The community profile outlined Riverton’s history as follows, framed in decades:
1960s – Abject poverty. Small amount of concrete houses constructed, the ‘surrounding environment filled with swamp, bush, crab, flies, crab rice (sic) and an influx of people coming into the community….’
1970s – ‘Large increase in squatting and gang violence….’ First church and basic school established. ‘Tyres had to be burned for light and to get rid of mosquitoes’.
1980s – Only source of water is a standpipe. Waste picking begins, ‘high rate of school dropout’ due to potential earnings from scavenging. ‘Riverton was filled with swampy water and pigs could be seen everywhere.’ The landowner moved out and ‘full squatting’ occurred. The so-called community dons were killed. ‘Police shot pigs claiming they had rabies.’
1990s – Electricity available in some parts of the community, many people still using flashlights and bottle torches. Improvements in education, the beginning of the government housing project, called Operation PRIDE, less violence, greater involvement of the church, construction of a skills training center, a bee project, gullies were cleaned, more gang violence. ‘Introduction of a marriage officer in the area showed a direct increase in the number of weddings.’
2000s – Dump ‘converting’ to a landfill, majority of children in school, construction of two roads, bee keeping project providing ’honey and wine’, police holding church services, ‘more mothers left alone with children to love and care,’ fathers more involved in children’s lives.
These last paragraphs struck me as aspirational. The dump has never been converted to a landfill and the gullies remain filthy.
Here is a very different Jamaican story to the more common trope of the tropical island paradise. A humid, swampy, low-lying, mosquito-infested place slowly settled by people drawn from rural areas by the hope of employment presented by proximity to the capital; people escaping slum clearance or gun violence elsewhere in the city; people with nothing but each other. Perhaps they felt sheltered by Riverton-the-wasteland; safe, because it was too awful for anyone else to want. Here, there would never be hotels or villas, upscale townhouses or commercial buildings. Here was a land on the margins for the settling. In those early days, the Duhaney River must have been a good source of fresh water, and I see those first people in my mind, the ones with the bottle torches burning tyres to keep the mosquitoes away, slowly reclaiming the swamp and building their houses, planting banana trees and makeshift pens for the raising of animals, building a community. I think of the fierce defence of the people of Riverton of their home place, their ‘no place’ in the words of poet Lucille Clifton:
‘…and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
in the inner city
or
like we call it
home.’
*
A summary of the results of air-quality monitoring during and after the 2018 fire by Jamaica’s environmental regulators, the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) stated:
- There was a negative impact on the ambient air quality in Kingston and St. Andrew, as well as parts of St. Catherine, including Portmore and Spanish Town.
- The WHO 24-hour average guideline limit for PM10 was exceeded at the Spanish Town Road monitoring station on all days reviewed. .
- The WHO 24-hour limit (25µg/m3) for PM2.5 was exceeded at the Spanish Town and Duhaney Park monitoring stations.
- Marked increases in SO2 concentrations were recorded at the Spanish Town Road monitoring location.
- Seven exceedances of the 1-hour NO2 guideline limit were observed over the period on August 4 and 5, 2018.
- The results of the analysis indicate higher than normal concentrations of benzene and toluene. The recorded benzene concentration was 41µg/m3 at the Spanish Town Road location. This is approximately 2.5 times the highest benzene concentration detected during the 2015 fire. The highest recorded concentration for toluene of was just over 2.5 times the concentration recorded during the 2015 fire at the Riverton City Waste Disposal Site.
- Results indicate possible health impact especially to sensitive groups.
- Overall, it can be concluded that the fire from the Riverton Disposal Facility resulted in deteriorated air quality that affected Southern St. Andrew and Kingston, as well as sections of South Eastern St. Catherine. The areas of greatest exposure included, the Three Miles to Six Miles Corridor, New Haven, Duhaney Park, Cooreville Gardens, Washington Gardens, Patrick City, Pembroke Hall and Olympic Gardens. Based on the findings, it is being recommended that the associated health effects be provided by the Ministry of Health.
So the impacts to air quality were worse in 2018 than in 2015.
From the 2015 Report:
- The associated health and socio-economic impacts of the fire are not included in this Report. It is expected that the Ministry of Health will interpret the findings and predict the impact on human health. Similarly, other stakeholders in education and industry and commerce would have made insightful determination on the impact of the fire.
- PM2.5 was not evaluated, which is another particulate matter parameter that can be used to measure aggravated health related risks. Datasets (sic) on this parameter is not (sic) presently being collected within the Kingston Metropolitan Area due to the unavailability of equipment.
No report on the impacts of the 2015 Riverton fire on human health was ever produced by the Ministry of Health, but at least PM2.5 was monitored in 2018. It was progress of a sort. Riverton still burns, but we now know more about its dire impacts.
*
‘How’s your health?’ I ask Maurice and Narda. ‘And the health of your children?’
‘So far, we’ve been lucky,’ he says. ‘We have sinus problems, but no one has asthma.’
‘But our neighbours have left Cooreville Gardens,’ says Narda. ‘They got really sick.’
‘For now we’re healthy,’ says Maurice, ‘But we’ve seen in that NEPA report all the chemicals we’ve been exposed to over a long period of time – we don’t know what’s ahead for us.’
*
Nine months after the 2015 fire, 24 years after I first saw it, I was invited to a press conference to learn about the improvements at Riverton. Then, I was still the Chief Executive Officer of the Jamaica Environment Trust, but retirement was approaching. Suzanne Stanley, JET’s young Deputy CEO, was with me. It was her first visit to Riverton.
We started at the local government ministry in Kingston. The minister went through the improvements at Riverton, the journalists writing furiously. The tipping face had been reduced to a three-acre area and the rest of the dump had been covered. There were new methane vents. A scale would soon be provided, so trucks could be weighed to calculate tipping fees, and the area around the scale had been fenced. A fire suppression system had been installed, including a water tank and mobile pumps. A secure site had finally been found for the waste tyres, which posed a major risk at the dump due to their flammability. The administration building had been refurbished. The road leading into Riverton would soon be paved – ground had been broken, although work had not started. Perimeter and access roads had been improved so that patrol by security forces was easier. Governance and management measures had been implemented at the National Solid Waste Management Authority, or NSWMA. The 2015 fire had been caused by arson, but no arrests had been made. Seventeen new trucks had been ordered. The journalists asked their questions about drain cleaning, whether the Riverton dump itself was to be moved, and then one directly to me, ‘Ms. McCaulay, are you satisfied with these improvements?’ I rattled through all the things that remained to be done – garbage separation at source, leachate treatment, methane capture, recycling, composting, significant improvement in Jamaican attitudes to waste. Then, Riverton was operating illegally, without the permits required by law, as were all Jamaica’s ‘approved’ Waste Disposal Sites.
We boarded buses for Riverton. It had been raining and the skies over the mountains were dark. Riverton is a place that floods easily and I wondered if the buses would get stuck in the as-yet-unimproved access road.
We drove into the dump. The muddy road was still lined with meagre dwellings and garbage and pile after pile of scrap metal. Pigs rooted in the drains. A dog ate a chicken carcass. A thin child, a girl of maybe eight, in a purple dress, stared at our bus. A piece of heavy equipment was stuck in the mud and we had to wait for trucks coming out to get by. We turned into the parking lot of the administration building, the bus doors hissed open and there was Riverton’s smell. ‘My God,’ Suzanne said softly. She had not yet said anything about what she was seeing. Other people murmured. Perhaps it was their first time at Riverton too. I saw two security guards or soldiers – I was not sure which – in bullet-proof vests, carrying long guns on the steps leading up to the building.
We were given high-visibility vests, water boots and dust masks, but there were not enough for everyone. I took a vest, but the boots were much too large. Suzanne was not offered protective gear.
The Duhaney River was still and black in one area, choked with water hyacinths in another. I thought again of the boy I had seen on my first visit – he would be a man now, if still alive. Was he now a waste picker or an arsonist, or had he beaten the odds, become the first person in his family to complete secondary school, working perhaps in a government office or at the front desk of a hotel on the other side of the island?
We milled around and the tour felt leaderless. From where we stood, I could see the hill of waste that was covered after the fire, and the open tipping face in the distance. I wanted to be alone, to remember what Riverton had looked like when I first saw it, to remember how I felt. I climbed the hill, picking my path carefully. Much of the dirt was reddish – maybe it came from excavated bauxite pits in other parts of Jamaica. Garbage showed through everywhere – black plastic bags, Styrofoam, soda bottles – and I remembered reading how plastic ‘floats’ in landfills. I watched my footing over the big ruts made by heavy equipment. The hill was empty, and I was ahead of everyone else.
At the top, the air was sharp and clear because of the rain and I lifted my eyes to the glorious Blue Mountains – a gift to all Kingstonians, rich and poor. Everyone in Riverton has this view. Turning, I saw Kingston Harbour, the high-rise buildings of New Kingston and the cranes of Gordon Quay at the Port. I saw the south coast of Jamaica, the Port Royal cays, the houses of Portmore and Independence City, the businesses of Spanish Town Road, the communities, including Cooreville Gardens, along Washington Boulevard. I looked in the direction of my own home, near to the green lawns of King’s House, and the low hills I had driven up every day while the 2015 fire was burning to send out a fire report via social media. I saw the tipping face of the dump, with its flocks of birds, taking to the air and settling. I saw the piles and piles of waste tyres with a few trucks lined up, no doubt for our benefit, to take them away. I saw the river and the big mangroves on the western side. I saw a single waste picker, a man, who had evaded the heavy security, walking over the hill, a bag over his shoulder. I called to him, but he did not turn. The communities of Riverton, Shanty, Riverton Meadows spread out to the north and east. I saw where the Sandy Gully meets Kingston Harbour, a conduit for enormous quantities of trash every time it rains.
Did the Riverton Waste Disposal Site look after the improvements catalysed by the 2015 fire? It was certainly emptier of people, but I knew that could have been easily organized for a few hours. The big water tank and the pumps were a definite improvement, but they would have to be maintained. A large area had been covered with soil. Riverton looked better managed, and it was less likely that a fire would take hold and spread. The new tyre location fell through and the tyres never left Riverton. The covering became less thorough. Fires were set and put out quickly, before they could spread, until August 2018, that is.
I saw it from my house on the Liguanea Plain – on the way to climb the same hill from which I sent my fire reports with my sister. ‘The dump is on fire,’ I said to her.
‘You’re sure those aren’t clouds?’ she asked.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. When we were heading home after night fell, we could see the flames at the base of the clouds of smoke.
I thought then about the 2015 tour. The people of Riverton had stared at the uptown people in the air-conditioned bus, visiting their place for a few hours. Those people were still there in 2018, in the smoke, in the place they defend as home. And so were the Bendersons and all the other Jamaicans living around the dump in the middle-class communities.
We are always drawing lines – over here is the dump, over there is not the dump. The Members of Parliament have their constituency borders, the political parties their ‘garrisons’ – areas where people vote homogeneously for one party or the other and entry is controlled; small states within a state. There is a line between uptown and downtown, blurred and evolving, it’s true, but still there. Uptowners have their gated communities, hotels their red-and-white barriers, businesses their security guards, shopping plazas their get-out-of–jail cards, you people, those people. This street corner, that street corner. My turf, your turf. Inner-city, middle-class community. We spend our lives in pursuit of a selective isolation, desperate to be with our own kind, disconnected from those outside the lines we draw, those we are willing to sacrifice. But the smoke still reaches us. We draw a line between humanity and nature, sacrificing living rivers to make drains, turning the watery world of mangrove forests where sea folds into land and land into sea into garbage dumps, fouling everywhere we touch. My own waste went to Riverton to be handled by the people of the sacrifice zone. And I was happy to have them deal with it, and still I argued for the closure of their place, for their removal, because I stood somewhere else and was sure it was best for them, best for all of us.
*
I ask the Bendersons why more people don’t speak out regarding the poor air quality. ‘Hopelessness,’ says Maurice. ‘They don’t think anything will make any difference. And they are middle-class communities with no tradition of protest. Not like people from an inner-city community.’ I think of the threats to light the dump which are made by those living and working there at every announcement of reform, even though they and their families would be the people worst affected.
*
In March 2018, the environmental minister, the Hon Daryl Vaz announced a zero-tolerance approach, particularly to the burning of tyres around Riverton. The newspaper report quoted him as saying, ‘The police are on board, the soldiers are on board and the major stakeholders are on board. The time for action is now; the time for talk has passed.’
*
The government of Jamaica hopes that a state-of-the art waste-to-energy plant built by foreign investors will solve the Riverton problem, and a high-level enterprise team to manage the process is slowly doing its work. I cannot imagine the set of investors who will find it worthwhile to tackle Riverton. There is also a plan to take the waste tyres to the kilns of a cement company. But, for now, for the foreseeable future, the communities of Seaview Gardens, Riverton City, Riverton Meadows, Callaloo Mews, Duhaney Park, Cooreville Gardens, New Haven/ Riverside Gardens remain within the sacrifice zone.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IN THE FOREST OF OUR CHILDHOOD by Iryn Tushabe
Read time: 18 mins
There are many ways to carry the past with us: to romanticise it, to invalidate it, to furnish it with revised or entirely fictionalised memories. The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.
– Yiyun Li.
I was born under a pawpaw tree on the edge of Kibale Forest in Western Uganda. Now, thirty-three years later, I live in Saskatchewan, a province in Canada that I’d read about in my North American Geography lessons at Kibubura Girls’ Secondary School. The flat-flat terrain covered with fields of wheat, the long winters with short days, the hot summers with short nights. On paper it sounded poignant, exotic. What I didn’t know, when I came here following love and the promise of a better university degree, were the details. That the winter season lasted close to six months each year; that during this time grey skies smothered the sun’s warmth and the air grew sharp teeth.
One morning, a few weeks after my arrival, I trudged to the university, the howling wind whipping fresh snow into my face. By the time I ducked into a warm hallway at the University of Regina, my eyes were nearly frozen shut with involuntary tears. Rather than continue to my English 100 class, I stole into a phone nook and called my ninety-year-old grandmother, Kaaka Grace. I whined, telling her about the darkness that persisted into the morning, the biting air, the death of plants, the departure of colour.
‘Oh, you want a rose garden to lie around and play’? Kaaka said. Having migrated from Rwanda as a child and settled in Kabale, where she was married off at thirteen, my grandmother was a hardened woman. So was her love. Perhaps that’s why I’d called her and not Dad or my siblings. She believed that pity was dangerous in small doses and poisonous in excess.
‘I will tell you this’, she continued, speaking in our mother tongue, Rukiga, in a way that slowed time. ‘Every migrant grieves for the way of life they’ve left behind, until they forget it’.
Until she called me omufuruki – a migrant – I hadn’t thought of myself as one. I was only an international student who was having a hard time liking it here. The food tasted bland, the weather was punishing, my professors spoke rapid English; I could barely take intelligible notes. While my Kaaka continued to tell me how fortunate I was to be studying in Canada, I made a mental list of things I missed about my childhood home in Kiyoima: the afternoon smell of the forest, the perfume that the earth produced after first rain, the taste of a passion fruit fresh off the vine. ‘You must work hard’, my grandmother urged me in singsong Rukiga. ‘Then you will have enough money to buy yourself a piece of land’.
‘What? I don’t want land’.
Kaaka gasped. ‘You should want land’.
Dad had said the same thing to me before I left for Canada. As soon as I had some money, he wanted me to send a bit of it back to him so that he could buy land in my name. He’d mail me the title. ‘A piece of earth that you can call your own’, he’d said, squinting up at me from where he sat on the concrete steps of my second childhood home in Kamwenge. I nodded my agreement, smiling fondly. My father, if given the opportunity, can talk about our tribe’s placelessness for hours ― and it is rude to stop him. Land ownership is only one of many triggers that will set him off.
*
I write stories for a living now and perhaps that constant visiting with my past is what has deepened the longing for my childhood spent near the forest. Whenever I attempt to write about my family’s life there, my mind grows quiet in the swelling bubble of soft memories. There are the animals – baboons, monkeys, colourful birds with long beaks. I can smell the fragrance of sunny days that lingered like overripe fruit. I close my eyes and hear a cicada chorus at night. I also hear the sound of my mother’s open-hearted laugh. I see her big eyes smudged with happiness. There’s Charlie Pride on Dad’s record player singing All I have to offer you is me.
I fear it’s all too good to be true, so I text my oldest sister Patience in Kampala. ‘Do you ever miss Kiyoima? The forest. The river’.
My sister’s texts arrive in a succession of pings, nanoseconds apart:
‘We had headlice’.
‘We used to kill each other’s headlice, remember?’
‘We didn’t have shoes’.
‘Remember the jiggers’.
‘You always had binyira. Yr nose was wet. All the time’.
‘Sheesh’, I text back. ‘Glad I asked’.
‘And OMG the school was far!’
‘We spent our childhoods walking to and from school!’
‘Now g’nite love. Miss u’.
It’s late afternoon in Saskatchewan, past midnight in Kampala. I’ve woken my sister for no good reason. I scroll through her texts and my scalp tingles from the remembered sensation of the tiny critters crawling around my hair. I can almost feel the sharp needle prick as Mum dug fat fleas from the flesh underneath my toenails.
I pour myself another cup of coffee and fire up my laptop. I write my earliest memory of a story. We’ve come to the forest, my siblings and I, to fetch firewood. But we end up, as we almost always do, at the river. We’re sitting on slimy rocks arranged in an approximate semi-circle right in the middle of the creek. Shallow amber water kisses our feet that rest upon the stream’s pebbled bed. I feel safe. There’s Patience to my right. Alex to my left. Our eldest brother, Magezi, sits in front, facing us. He’s just returned from his second boarding term at Nyakasura Secondary School in Fort Portal where he’s picked up some bizarre notions like organised religion is crapand time is relative.
‘Mbaganile, mbaganile’, he begins in his deepening adolescent voice.
‘Tebele’, we respond in unison.
‘Mbaganile, mbaganile’, he reprises, sinking into his melodious storytelling voice, which silences the sounds of the forest around us.
He tells a fable, the saddest one, about a little boy who liked to play pranks on his father. The boy who cried wolf. But he doesn’t stop at the natural ending of the folktale as we know it. He’s come up with a new ending charged with his newfound ideologies.
‘The father’s sorrow was so deep and powerful it created a crack in spacetime’, Magezi says.
My mouth hangs open. What’s spacetime?
‘He’s trapped inside a wormhole, forever falling through it’. My brother leans forward and drops his voice to a near whisper. ‘He’s that voice on the wind. Can you hear it?’
We listen for the old man’s voice. And by god, we hear it.
I want so badly to become as good a storyteller as my brother. His name, Magezi, means knowledge.
*
It’s 2016 and my husband has spent a hundred-thousand Airmiles points (and quite a bit of money) to buy me a ticket home. There’s a literary festival there ― Writivism ― that I’ve been desperate to attend. But I’ve also managed to convince Patience and my youngest sister, Dora, to join me on a trip back to Kiyoima. Dad will meet us in Bigodi, a trading centre thirty minutes away from the village and less than an hour by taxi from our second childhood home in Kamwenge, where he still lives.
The reason we left Kiyoima is not unique to my family alone. It is also the story of my tribe. Many centuries ago, men and women who carried inside their bones the makings of mine came to Uganda through the south, by way of Rwanda. In the highlands of Kigezi, they were welcomed by the native Batwa until rapid population growth gave rise to disputes, often bloody, over land. So, the Bakiga dispersed yet again in search of parcels of land where they could settle. But my great grandfather stuck it out in the cold mountains of Kigezi. His son, my grandfather Bigyere, too. It was my father, Ntwirenabo, who broke camp and moved.
Dad had been teaching English at a primary school in Kigezi for some years and was due for a career change. He wanted to live quietly and till the land like his forefathers. When he learnt that the government ― in a bid to alleviate overpopulation in Kigezi and other regions of the country ― had been resettling people to Western Uganda, east of Kibale Forest, he wasted no time packing up.
But the proper areas designated for resettlement filled up so quickly that my father and many other late arrivals were allocated land on the west side of the forest. This was near, and later within, the grassland corridor that connects present day Kibale National Park to Queen Elizabeth National Park at the southern tip of the forest. Dad put down roots inside the fertile corridor, a savanna populated by elephant grass, sparse trees and a lot of wildlife. Some of his neighbours were baboons, monkeys, and chimpanzees. And, with continued migration, people. This growing village was called Kiyoima.
Soon, overpopulation in the area threatened the health of the forest reserve. The migrants relied heavily on the land and its resources were quickly getting depleted. Kibale forest reserve, home to one of the most diverse primate communities in the world, became a high priority for conservation.
In 1992, by presidential decree, an expanded Kibale National Park was formed by combining the forest reserve and the grassland corridor. At that time, all land use within the newly established national park was immediately banned. An estimated 200,000 people who had settled in and around the corridor were served with eviction notices. Dad was one of them. A former teacher with a penchant for big English words, he contested the eviction — “vehemently,” he said — in the courts of law. He had, years before, acquired a legitimate land title in order to mortgage his land and acquire the bank loan that enabled him to purchase agricultural machinery. Now that he couldn’t farm, he also couldn’t make the loan payments. The bank seized everything they could.
He lost the case in the lower court and hired counsel to appeal that ruling in the High Court. He was gone a lot for the next few years. Whenever he came back home, he passed his days reading — Dale Carnegie comes to mind — and listening to the BBC World Service on a dial radio he held close to his ear, shutting us out of his internal world. There was an aura of futility about him. One day, at dinner, he said, ‘It doesn’t matter where we go. We’ll always be the ones who got there last’.
Meanwhile, gun-wielding game rangers and conservation officers had materialised as if out of the blue. They wore army fatigues and mean looks. A few families’ thatch houses mysteriously went up in flames and they blamed the fires on the rangers. These men meant business and their business was to expel everyone from the park; there was bound to be collateral damage. Dad gave up trying to salvage what was already lost and started building a house in Kamwenge, then only a burgeoning town. When finally the High Court’s judgment came, he had been awarded financial compensation for his estate.
Other families weren’t as fortunate. They hadn’t gone to the trouble of securing titles and were forced out of their homes without any sense of where to go. Stories of forcible evictions from areas near reserve lands still populate the news in Uganda. They appear under headlines like Kibaale residents accuse minister, NFA, of illegal eviction. NFA, or the National Forestry Authority, is the arm of government that manages forest reserves throughout the country.
*
We leave Patience’s house in Kampala three days after my arrival. Dora and her daughter Maria slept over the night before so that we could hit the road at the crack of dawn. We’ve hired a driver, a quiet Muganda man named Kyeyune. He has a head shaved so clean it glistens in the predawn light. He laughs politely at our jokes but never contributes any of his own. I worry that we are too loud for his comfort and he’s going to be cooped up with us for at least ten hours today.
‘Will you quit apologising?’ Patience says over Kenny Rogers on the stereo of her Toyota Spacio. ‘You’ve become too Canadian’.
We merge into the early morning traffic on the Northern Bypass. The day is opening out.
‘While we’re on the subject’. I lean toward Patience in the front passenger seat. ‘Could we change the music up a little?’
She glares at me. ‘You don’t like country anymore?’ That she asks me this in Rukiga adds weight to the question. I try but fail to find the right words to say I still love country music, of course, but now I also hate it a little. So, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton continue to be islands in some stream.
As we near Mubende Town, I remind Patience and Dora about Magezi’s fable, as I recall him telling it at the river. Do they remember that?
‘Nope’, Dora says. She was only five years old when we moved and remembers mostly the animals and the fat green snake that curled like a tire on our compound one afternoon.
‘You weren’t there at the river’, I tell her. ‘You were too small to fetch firewood’.
Patience remembers Magezi’s storytelling, just not the setting. ‘We took turns telling stories at night if we couldn’t sleep’.
I wonder. Is it possible Magezi told that tale twice and one of those times was at the river? ‘You remember the river though, right?’
Patience does. ‘Alex almost died there, remember that?’
All I recall of that frightening incident is the three of us squatting over Alex after Magezi had pulled him from the part downriver where the current was as swift as fate. On the riverbank, Alex lay on a bed of wet underbrush, his eyes unblinking. Magezi shook his shoulders and kept calling his name. Alex. Alex. Ruhanga wangye, yimuka.
‘I’m alive?’ Our brother finally said.
We laughed. Then we cried. What is it about relief that makes us weep?
*
On a map of Uganda, run your finger southwest from the capital, Kampala, and now you’re with us in Fort Portal Town. Move it east over Kibale National Park and right there, on the other side of the forest, is Bigodi trading centre where Dad waits for us.
A left turn after the bridge over River Mpanga delivers us to a dusty murram road. Soon, our car is grinding up a steep incline, kicking up loose gravel. The hilltop offers a breathtaking view – a wide vista of tea plantations rolling greenly into Kibale Forest, which rises then falls away to the foothills of Rwenzori Mountains, known to us as the Mountains of the Moon.
‘Man’, I say.
‘You romanticise this place’, Dora says, distractedly rubbing my niece’s back.
‘It’s all those brutal winters of Canada’, offers Patience; she who has a degree in Psychology and Counselling.
I marvel at the long shadows in the meadows, at the afternoon light spilling golden on the tightly terraced hills. It’s all so picturesque. Exotic like Sasketchewan was ten years ago; when it conjured for me green-gold wheat fields and greeting cards with images of snow gently falling on cedars. Why do we love most the places that least belong to us? I’ve become a tourist in my own home.
*
Kyeyune pulls over at a shoulder in the road in Bigodi, a tourist village with a population of 1,300 people. Dad emerges from a convenience shop and strides over to us. I run to him. He wears a sun hat and seems to have lost at least two inches of his height since I last saw him nearly five years ago. My embrace nearly topples him.
‘What have you been eating in Canada?’ He laughs. ‘Ogomokire!’
‘But you’ve shrunk, Dad’, I say in Rukiga.
He guffaws and claps his hands. He may be small at seventy-five years old but, for now at least, he remains strong, his voice robust. He rounds up some passenger motorcycles. A boda boda for him, one for Maria and Dora, another for Patience and me. Kyeyune elects to wait with the car in Bigodi.
The unpaved road to Kiyoima is circuitous and ribboned with finger hallows. Our boda boda bangs in and out of potholes; it’s impossible to sustain a conversation with Patience, who is sandwiched between the cyclist and me. So, we ride quietly and stare at the passing fields.
Everything seems different but what did I expect? Time alters everything in touches. The swamp that often flooded is bone-dry. There are matchbox houses with tin roofs. We ride past others built of mud and wattle with thatch domes for roofs. The church we attended and the nearby buildings that constituted our nursery school are in a state of decline. A group of shirtless boys abandon their game of soccer on the school’s sprawling compound and chase after us, waving as if they know us.
A quick two minutes later, the bikes come to a stop. We’ve reached the end of the road, right here in the middle of someone’s banana plantation. We dismount and wander down a path that leads to a mud shack with a rusted iron sheet roof. A young man and a woman sit on a mat in front of the house sorting cured tobacco leaves.
Dad approaches the couple. ‘Charles?’ he says, tentatively at first. ‘Little Charles!’
The youngest of four siblings whose parents were our family friends, Charles was the same age as I was when we packed up and left.
He stands, tilting his head. ‘You’re who, sir?’
‘G.G Ntwirenabo and company limited’. He’s a flamboyant man, my father.
‘Mr. G.G!’ Charles gapes. ‘Then you must be Patience. And you’re Doreen. And you’re Iryn’.
We take turns embracing Charles, then he introduces his wife to us. His shy son, a bit older than Maria, hides behind a vigorous coffee bush whose branches droop with ripe cherries. As Maria runs off to join the boy, Charles tells us his siblings moved away to Bigodi and Fort Portal, his parents to another village near Bigodi. ‘They’ve all left, except me’. Charles’ Rukiga is perfect though he’s a Mutoro, the tribe native to these parts.
Dad pats him on the back. ‘Nke’kishaija mwaana!’
‘Where have you left Aunt Anna and Magezi and my best friend, Alex?’
‘I’m afraid they’re the ones who’ve left us, son’. Dad’s voice gets thin. Magezi was the first to die in 2000; lung cancer, we think. Mum followed him nine months later, the length of time she’d carried him in her womb. Patience puts her hand on Dad’s back as he speaks of Alex’s more recent death: a motorcycle accident that had him in a coma for a few days before finally claiming his life.
The setting sun edges the sky with fire as Charles leads us past the border of Kibale Forest National Park. It’s marked with a row of trees where his banana plantation stops. He parts dense elephant grass and cuts stubborn reeds with his panga to make a way for us into the jungle.
After about ten minutes of walking, the elephant grass opens out to a much shorter underbrush of ferns and yam-like plants with broad leaves shaped like hearts. There are trees that seem about half a kilometre tall. My niece chases butterflies perching on some epiphytes growing on other epiphytes growing on a decaying tree.
‘Amatafaari’, Charles beckons us to where he crouches amongst a thicket of creeping vines. Bricks.
We hurry over to him and squat down to touch the debris. It’s soft with moisture and crumbles to red dust between our fingers.
Dad sighs as he claps his hands clean of the dust. He says, ‘If we told anyone that we lived here once, they’d laugh and call us mad’.
Yiyun Li writes that our memories tell us more about now than then: that we choose and discard from an abundance of evidence what suits us at the moment. But the present, she says, does not surrender so easily to manipulation.
Here’s the present I cannot change: my father, handsome and strong, is massaging the fat trunk of a tree he’s sure either he or Mum planted. ‘It was a requirement, you see’, he says. ‘If you showed you could take good care of the land you’d been given, you got to keep it’.
And here is my big sister Patience talking about Mum, about how she never learnt Rukiga well and in the end spoke a language all her own; a mash up of Luganda, the language of her birth, and Rukiga, her husband’s dialect.
‘Ninyija kukubita’, my little sister Dora illustrates, a perfect imitation of Mum threatening to punish one of us for some misbehaviour. Our laughter resonates through the forest.
And there standing next to Dad is Charles Basariza who wrote me my first love letter when we were seven. It began, ‘Ahari omukundwa wangye’. My dear beloved. Does he remember that? Dare I ask him?
I bet that’s Magezi’s low voice on the wind telling me it doesn’t matter if I embellish a little; I’m the storyteller he taught me to be. Though in the telling of this particular story, I’m careful to leave room because it’s not mine alone. It belongs also to everyone standing here on this patch of forest, with roots so deep it will survive us all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Iryn Tushabe
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