Getting Hitched

On 11 June 1994, John Bwomezi and I were married at an Episcopalian ceremony led by Father Brown at the United Nations inter-denominational Chapel in New York, across from the UN Headquarters. The wedding reception was held next door at the Hyatt which I now believe is a Millennium Hotel, followed by an after-party at Uganda House only meters away. We certainly did not need the stretch limousine that was hired for the event considering that I spent the night at the suite in Uganda House and all these places were in walking distance but I guess we considered it a part of the tradition. Like most major events in my life the occasion was not without its drama.
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In my community marriage is an elaborate process with the wedding being just the grand finale. It starts with a visit by a mutual friend of both houses to the woman's family in a ground breaking ceremony, the first hurdle. The visitor is usually welcomed but could be humiliated and must therefore be a highly respected risk-taker with developed diplomatic skills to handle the many questions that will be asked about the potential groom, his family, his clan, his ancestors, their burial grounds and anything that may make him trip and pay a fine. The happy couple who may have already exchanged engagement rings in more fashionable style in a city far away, do not participate in this ceremony at all and are at the mercy of the 'Katerarume' which literally means, the one who clears the path filled with morning dew.

If the Katerarume is successful, the stage is set for the next round where the father and close uncles of the man visit again to agree on brideprice. They are likely to meet a larger crowd than when Katerarume first visited and this is a crowd of tough negotiators with experience in assigning material value to a woman. (Yes, I can imagine your judgmental sneers.) Many factors go into the valuation including a woman's looks, education, the family's social status and the estimated purse-size of the groom's family. With time, religion and external influence, negotiations have been watered down to make this a symbolic ceremony where a price is set but never paid, but in some cultures the groom's family must pay up with cows, goats, cash or whatever items a specific culture dictates.

Assuming things go well and the brideprice is settled, a date is set for the introduction ceremony where the future groom is officially introduced to the woman's family and formally handed his wife. In true African culture, the marriage takes place on this day. The woman finally participates and is escorted out of the house to be handed to her man and his family. It is also the occasion when the woman's family gives gifts to the couple for their new home. The deal is not quite done till the ceremony is over and should the groom's party arrive late or break any of the many obscure rules of this 'Kwanjula' as it is known in Luganda or 'Okuhingira' in Runyankore, there will be fines to pay and tempers to cool. Moreover, it requires one to keep up-to-date with the requirements as they have continued to change and turned the Kuhingira ceremony into an obscene spectacle in this rite of passage. What used to be a simple and dignified event has become an opportunity to flash wealth and compete with the 'Joneses.' So where parents used to send their daughters off with a cow and a few household items the tradition now has no bounds and I have heard of girls getting Hummers, Mercedes Benzes and fully furnished homes as Uganda's glitterati compete to impress their in-laws and everyone else.

Yet at age 17 I felt empowered enough to sabotage all these processes to marry the first man I fell in love with. And I almost succeeded but failed on a technicality. Just before my18th birthday, I informed my parents that I was ready to get hitched to Charles but my parents would not hear of it. My mother insisted that I was too young even after I reminded her that she had married my father when she was 18 herself! My father was determined that I complete my education and get a degree before marriage. And when I persisted he closed the subject by saying that as long as he lived I would never marry Charles! I was as determined and stubborn as he was so lines were drawn in the sand and battle grounds defined. I started the biggest rebellion of my life by suspending all the above requirements of marriage and eloping to marry Charles. He had quietly gone to the registrar's office in Bushenyi and alerted them of our intention to be registered in marriage as husband and wife. The small issue of my being a minor and unable to enter a binding contract of marriage until I turned 18 was resolved I imagine with a small bribe. He then picked me from Kampala and we went to the registry and signed some papers. I did not care that there was not a soul in my world that knew it, in my mind, I was 'married.'

Months later am sitting in a Family Law class, in an advanced stage of pregnancy; and it is time to look at Uganda's Marriage Act under which all legally recognized marriages are registered. Lo and behold, I discover that the ceremony in Bushenyi was null and void abinitio because it was performed before I had reached the age of consent and my parents had not given their consent as required by law! Not only was I not married, we had probably committed some kind of offense! So now the secret was sealed by illegality and fear. I told Charles that we were not actually married and he ignored me as he had lately started to do now that he had me in his home where he wanted me. Eventually, the relationship ended but neither of us ever bothered to go back to Bushenyi to officially withdraw or invalidate the paperwork. It seemed of no consequence until eleven years later on 9 June 1994, two days before my wedding to John Bwomezi in New York.

Someone faxed the marriage certificate I signed in Bushenyi all those years ago to the Ambassador, my boss, in New York and outed my little secret. Dad and Mom were there as were a host of friends who had traveled from Uganda, Canada, and other states for the wedding. Luckily, I had told John about my elopement but imagine the surprise of everyone else when they learnt about my first void marriage! A flurry of legal activity now developed parallel to wedding arrangements as we tried to explain that the 'marriage certificate' was null and void. We had two days to complete this or else my wedding plans would go up in smoke and scandal but we eventually succeeded and on 11 June 1994, father walked me down the aisle and gave my hand to John in marriage.

I had missed all the pre-wedding ceremonies which happened far away in Uganda and without which my father and mother would not have come to New York. Now finally the day was here and while it was not an elopement this time round, it had all the drama required for a good comedy. At most weddings, when the question is asked if there is anyone who knows a reason why these two should not be married, there is just silence and the ceremony continues. My wedding video is a bit different because the dearly beloved who were gathered at that Chapel in New York turned to look around as though expecting someone to stand up and say something. We had two strong men stationed at the entrance of the chapel to keep out any suspicious characters but it turned out they were not needed. When the ceremony ended without incident, the palpable tension eased and the party started.

At 50 I know that I am fiercely independent and therefore take responsibility for the drama in my personal life. I have also learnt that there are instances where following tradition can protect you and your loved ones from distress down the road.

feeling naughty

The HIV/AIDS Pandemic

The scourge of HIV/AIDS came upon Uganda at a time when we were entering our most sexually active years and we were not ready.  Our society practiced a lot of sex behind closed doors but it was not a subject we discussed openly except perhaps in bars when we were inebriated enough to throw caution and modesty out the window.  Even then when we discussed sexual activity it was never about the many diseases it could cause but rather the many pleasures it could induce. It was unheard of to speak to your family about sex and in some extreme cases there were married couples who had sex regularly but never discussed it at all - if you can imagine that.

The dilemma now:  Here was an illness that you could not talk about without referring to sex in one form or another.  If the illness manifested itself, then the next order of the conversation was 'Who else do you think she/he was sleeping with.'  I think this was the proper beginning of 'outing' people in a very shameless way in Uganda.  Suddenly everyone was interested in who was sleeping with who and not for entertainment but for the purpose of checking if the network ended directly under your pillow.  Now you must understand that contracting HIV in the 80s and 90s was a death sentence. There were no ARVs to keep you around for a bit or help you manage the illness.  You were simply dead.  So unfortunately when the network ended under your pillow most people were not inclined to step up and own the virus.  These were the years that created heroes of men like Maj. Ruranga Rubaramira because he stepped up in front of cameras and microphones and said 'I am living positively.'

There were more cowards than Rurangas and then there were those who were just outrightly evil and decided that they would not go alone and must take as many others as they could.  So during the day everyone spoke of abstaining from sex but in the shadows men and women suspended reality and continued their multi-faced sex life, even when they knew they were infected.  Fear and shame nearly decimated a whole generation that had grown up in a quietly permissive sex culture.  The unspoken truth about sexual relations in some communities in Uganda can be summarized as: Anything goes as long as no one knows.'  HIV/AIDS apart from killing young productive people in my time also exposed bizarre sexual patterns in our communities.  And unlike Ebola which is easy to stop because victims are willing to tell how they got it, with HIV more than likely the only person the victim would blame for their ailment was the spouse.  So any other carriers went undetected.  The hypocrisy and pretentiousness of our two-faced culture came back to bite us.

People who died of AIDS were said to have died 'after a long illness' to protect their children, spouses, parents, and extended families from the stigma that came with contracting the disease.  Those who were well off left the country for medical exile to places where they could be treated but also to escape the stigma.  Those that stayed were hidden from sight until the 'long illness' had done its job.  The industry of 'Hope' survived, grew and got fattened off this misery.  People flocked in hundreds to witchcraft and to Church or both just in case the other did not work.  Pastors out did each other in 'curing' the illness though prayer. Churches mushroomed around the illness as did the shrines of medicine men; yet at the height of this crisis we buried someone we knew nearly every week.

As science fought back helped along by mavericks like Maj. Ruranga, society began to change but mostly in safe, superficial ways.  It became an ordinary event to watch a nurse on public television rolling a condom down a phallus shaped object.  No one giggled anymore as this was serious business upon which our very lives depended.  Eventually ARVs arrived on the scene and things stabilized , the death rate came down.  Ugandans fought the war against HIV/AIDS in their peculiar way and many survived but through it all, some Ugandan communities continued to avidly honor their sexually permissive culture.

At 50 I know that old habits die hard and it takes more than a pandemic of great proportions for ingrained behavior and culture to change.

 feeling concerned.

NRA Takes Kampala

Museveni's guerilla army, the National Resistance Army took Kampala in January 1986. At the time I was still banished from my childhood home following my father's displeasure over my pregancy. My son was 10 months old and Dad showed no signs of forgiving and forgetting.
My seventeen-year old brother Andrew, was a boarding student at Ntare School in western Uganda when the NRA rebels attacked from the Rwenzori mountains. He left school to join the rebels as did many of his school mates. The war had led to the closing of schools in the region and my friends at Makerere University who went to western Uganda towns for vacation in mid-1985 did not return until the war ended and a number of them joined rebel ranks. By and by we learnt that the road to the west had been cut off as rebels advanced towards Kampala from the Western Axis. Lionel's father Charles, had not returned home from a business trip to the region he was cut off. His buses no longer plied the route from the west to Kampala and one or two had been taken over by the rebels. I was stranded in Kampala without money coming in from the transport business so I turned to my mother for help.

The shop on Luwum Street was flourishing and father traveled to the UK with Emmanuel that month to shop for supplies. My mother was generous and I went home with enough supplies to see us through another week as I waited for Charles to return. He crossed to neighboring Rwanda in the south-west, took a plane to Nairobi where he planned to cross into Uganda from the East and return to Kampala. But before he could make it back to Uganda, the NRA abandoned peace talks in Nairobi and surged forward to take Kampala. Kampala was awash with rumors of an impending attack and gunfire rocked the city at night. 'Panda gari' operations had become a daily occurrence. A truck would appear and round up people suspected of being rebels and take them to unknown detention centers. Shops were looted in broad day light by gun wielding soldiers in army uniform.

Then one day while I was at Makerere attending classes, word reached us that crowds of people were running, pouring out of the city centre. I tried to make my way across town to reach Entebbe Road where I lived with my son but could not get through the heavy traffic. Taxis were racing frantically, everyone was looking for a way out of the city center. Thousands of people who were not lucky to board a taxi, truck or bus were running on foot in different directions. I drove up and down different streets trying to find a route home and when I failed, I retreated and drove to Nakasero where I found my mother crouched in her bedroom with my younger siblings trembling with fear. We thought the battle would subside and I would drive back to my child whom I left in the care of a very young nanny, but instead the battle was getting closer.

I was distraught, hysterical fearing for my son’s life but the battle for Kampala raged outside and my mother forbade me to leave the house. Instead she begged an Uncle who had joined us to hide from the madness on the streets to walk the ten miles to Najjanankumbi and bring back my baby and the nanny. He left his car behind and walked to Najjanankumbi but after hours of waiting I did not believe he was coming back so I got up and left in spite of my mother’s pleas. I joined the stream of people who were hurrying along Bombo Road towards town. There were no soldiers in sight and the gunfire sounded distant. Rumor had it that the rebels were heading to Entebbe to shut down the airport. There was no time to be afraid, I had to reach my son before nightfall and we would somehow make our way back to Nakasero the next day.

Luckily before I reached Kampala Road in the center of town, I met my Uncle carrying my baby on his shoulders and dragging the young nanny behind him. They had packed a few things which the nanny was carrying in a small bundle. I turned round and hurried back with them to stay with my mother and siblings as we prepared for the coming onslaught.
We did not sleep the night of 24 January 1986; as guns blazed and Museveni's National Resistance Army overrun government strongholds in Kampala City.

At 50 I now laugh at myself for running to my parent’s home in Nakasero which was down the road from the residence of General Tito Okello, then President of Uganda. State House was an obvious target for the approaching rebels.

feeling shocked

Journey of Exile

I left Uganda on August 6 2001. My nineteen months old baby Hannah was sleeping in her cot when I picked up my bags and headed to the airport knowing it would be a long time before I held her in my arms again. Her older sister Joannah would turn three in November while I was on my way to political asylum in the USA. As soon as I arrived in the United States on an H1B visa in February 2002, I started plotting means of bringing them to join me in the United States. When I left Uganda I was in a highly charged and defiant mood, angry at what I perceived to be a great injustice of violent and highly irregular national elections. My attitude was negative and aggressive and it came through in every interaction I had. I had not stopped to think how leaving the country stealthily and launching a transnational campaign against a government might impact on my family and whether indeed it might mean not seeing my children for a very long time. Their father John; a military officer and I were separated before I joined opposition activism, nonetheless he took time to visit me in Kololo and warn me that the consequences of my outspoken activism would have adverse consequences for him personally and the family. I ignored him.

The morning after I left Uganda the girls’ nanny called John and told him I had left and he needed to come and take the children into his care. My separation from John had been a bitter one but despite our political differences, irreconcilable domestic arguments and hot tempers, I had never doubted John’s love for his daughters. Now settled in Washington D.C, I applied for dependent visas and the US Embassy in Kampala would only grant them with the written consent of their father. He gave his reluctant consent and on May 15 2002, I went to Dulles Airport to pick my two daughters who were accompanied by my mother. I had not seen them in nine months and it was a tearful occasion, made even more poignant when my baby girl called me ‘Auntie.’ Hannah-Banana could not remember her mother.

Two short months after my mother and daughters arrived in D.C. I was out of a job and had lost my H1B status. My brother Andrew had moved to live in the USA from Britain in September 2001. He worked as a radio frequency engineer for Motorola and lived in Florida. Andrew opened his home for us and we moved in to wait for the long immigration process that would give me employment authorization. My mother tagged along and remained with us for a while before returning to Uganda. I lived with my daughters at Andrew’s house for a year before being granted asylum and getting that all-important employment authorization card.

Now that I could return to Washington to take up my Fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) the full impact of being a single mother in the US hit home like a rock. After my brother dropped us outside the airport at Fort Lauderdale we were on our own. So as the summer of 2003 drew to a close I moved into an apartment community in White Oaks, a woody suburb of Silver Springs, Maryland. Hannah was all of 3 years old and I pushed her in a stroller with 5 year Joannah tagging along with the three or four large bags that were our worldly possessions. We moved into an empty apartment and our first purchase was a queen size air mattress which we shared that first night. Sabiti a family friend who had helped us find the apartment was a pillar of support in the nightmare that followed as I tried to juggle lining up for food stamps, shopping for groceries, cooking dinner, enrolling Joannah in the nearest public school and finding day care that would be safe for Hannah once I started on my Fellowship.

Many times I sat in crowded rooms waiting for a social worker to explain my next course of action in building the American dream. I wondered how I had gotten to this new low in life. I reflected on the great irony of completing education at some of the best Universities in Uganda and England only to realize that nothing prepared me for a world where degrees would not get me what I needed in life. A good education in Africa and Europe does not prepare you to find a suitable baby sitter in Maryland and if you mention to a social worker that you went to LSE for your Master of Laws degree they stare blankly at you and ask ‘where is that?’ I had tried to get our loyal nanny in Uganda to come along with the children but the US Embassy in Kampala had denied her a visa. I realized that until they came to the USA I knew next to nothing about my babies. Hannah spoke her baby words in Runyankore with a thick ‘Kiga’ accent because the nanny was a Mukiga. At times I had no clue what she was saying and I relied on Joannah to interpret her demands for milk and for attention.

Until I lived with them alone, I never knew how difficult it was to raise toddlers and preschoolers. In Uganda, the nanny was assisted by a crew of relatives who passed through the home on visits. The girls always came to me after they were bathed and properly dressed and I cooed and cuddled them without thinking of the work that went into making them look cute and ready for bed. I marveled now at the great gift of a society that raised children communally. I considered the irony that in the developed world where women were vocal and fought so hard for their rights they found it next to impossible to have children and a career concurrently because the system was run in such an anti-family manner. I longed for Uganda and all the neighbors and villagers whom my kids still called ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie.’

At 50 I know that we still have many advantages from communal living and community support but I will always be thankful that America gave me the fortituous opportuntunity to bond with my daughters in a very special way.

feeling special

Death in the Family

The spare hospital furnishings in the private room where my brother Emmanuel died were a luxury in comparison to the general wards at Mulago national referral hospital in Kampala, where hapless patients lay waiting for treatment. When I had stripped my mind of all the memories of his death, it was the stench of the hospital that remained. Nauseating smells that made me think of untreated wounds oozing with blood and pus; unwashed linen soaked in urine. The toilets could be accurately located from the overwhelming odor of the urinals and bowls that had not been flushed for days. My brother refused to use them and for as long as his strength matched his pride, he asked someone to drive him the short distance to our home in Nakasero so that he could use the clean toilet there. Soon he was too weak to move from his bed and suffered the humiliation of using the bed pan.

I had not noticed how thin he was until he extended his bony hand in greeting. His large eyes now seemed to be popping out of his skull. His fair skin seemed translucent and even more delicate than that of my baby, Lionel. Emmanuel had always been of slight build and his weight loss had not been noticeable until he was skin and bones. He was a twenty-two year old medical student with one year left to complete his degree and become a doctor like Uncle John, my paternal Uncle whom he resembled physically and aspired to imitate in everything. Now here he was lying as a patient in the hospital where he normally wore a white gown and followed doctors around learning and preparing to become one. They did not seem to know what ailed him and my father grew impatient with this diagnosis and that misdiagnosis as his son withered and writhed in pain.

One day my father slapped a nurse in frustration and was promptly arrested and walked to the nearby Wandegeya police station. He had been trying to evacuate Emmanuel to a hospital in London but the doctors said he was too weak to travel. The medicines that were needed were in short supply and everyone was getting desperate. When my father was jailed it seemed like a bad omen. I rushed home to tell my mother what had happened. She had left his bedside for lunch before returning to him and had missed the slapping incident. When I hurried in breathless, she thought my brother was dead and the news of my father being in jail was a relief, a minor nuisance. She would not be bothered with the details of father’s jailing and after telling me to tell his lawyer, Uncle Yusuf Kagumire, what had happened, she rushed back to sit by my brother’s death bed.

He deteriorated so fast and in one week the drip bottles that were emptied into his body through his wiry arm had no impact on his condition. The pain was too much, could they not at least have controlled the pain, I wondered?

At about 1:00 am in the night I heard the familiar honk of my father’s Peugeot pick-up truck at the gate and I knew at once that Emmanuel was dead. My brother Andrew who had recently returned from fighting a war alongside Museveni’s guerillas; walked in and confirmed the news of Emmanuel’s death. Now that he had died they seemed sure of his ailment- Hepatitis B. It didn't matter anymore.

My first reaction was relief. The pain had to end somehow and if death freed him from that excruciating pain then death was the better option. It took a while to register that I would not be seeing him again, that he would be sealed in a coffin, interred in the ground and that my brother was gone for good. Even when I went to the mortuary to view his body, I felt nothing. He lay on the mortuary floor at the medical school, not the regular mortuary where other dead people were taken at the rear end of the hospital. I was angered that they would place his body on the floor while a dead Frenchman, killed by unknown gunmen the night before; lay on the only gurney in the room. Was there no end to the inferiority complex that plagued Africans? Even in death they were discriminating against their own. My misdirected anger enabled me to look at my brother’s body without feeling.
They had opened his head and stitched it back together again. I saw the crude stitches on his forehead and wondered whether they had not killed him again by doing that. Now he was surely dead. Later I learnt that they had also opened his chest and abdomen but I never saw those stitches because someone had dressed him up before I arrived. He was an organs donor and the mortician had handed over the parts that the medical school needed and left us this shell to bury.

I recalled a conversation we had a while back. We were having lunch at home when he started talking about his anatomy class. He complained that he had been given the cadaver of a very old man to dissect and he could not find the old man’s veins. I was nauseated and fled the dining table fighting the urge to vomit and he grinned mischievously knowing he had scored one against me. He could not have imagined that he would be at the other end of a dissecting knife in a few months.

For as long as I could remember I was afraid of death. I feared that it would hurt so much and then it would be dark, cold and lonely. My fears had always been in direct contradiction of my mother’s hopes of passage to a beautiful place where the streets are paved in gold and angels sing sweet melodies in God’s praise. Heaven was both mystical and mythical when I was 20. I wanted so much to believe in heaven when my brother died but I was not sure. One of Emmanuel’s atheist friends assured me that his body would rot and be recycled into the earth by worms. He told me not to fantasize about life after death because there was none. I did not know whether to hate him for painting such a lurid picture of death when my brother was fresh in the grave or whether to thank him for dispelling my fantasies.

When death finally knocked on our door that 23rd day of March in 1986, I was numb with shock and pain but I do not recall being afraid. The fear that I had lived with through his illness that he might die, the cold sweats at night all disappeared in the bustle of funeral arrangements. After the burial when mourners left the graveside, the fear returned. A fresh new fear of not knowing what could happen tomorrow. And with the fear came a terrible sense of loss, a pain so deep it was indescribable. I could not find words to describe it but easily recognized it in my mother’s eyes and my father’s stoop.

At 50 I know that death is a rite of passage as inevitable as birth itself yet it still breaks my heart when 30 years on another family loses a loved one in the same hospital for lack of medicine and equipment that is easily accessible in countries right next door.

feeling heartbroken

Letter to my teen daughters - about love...

1. There are many kinds of love and it is important to distinguish them and know the kind of love you may be feeling at any one time. They are different even though they may all lead to a very nice, warm feeling of contentment; their consequences are not always the same.

2. There is the love of God which religion makes compulsory but my prayer is that you may come to love God and know His love voluntarily, through building your own understanding and through the depth of your own spirituality. I strongly believe that no one can teach you God - you need to find Him yourself and you will experience a deep respectful and awesome love like no other. That love is all enduring and never changing. You can depend on it entirely.

3. The love of a father and mother is perhaps only next to God's in its purity and totality. It pains me that you have not known your father's love for as many years as I have known mine. Good parents treat you like princesses and see the best in you all through your life from the day you are born. They know you very well and remember your innocence as a child and to them you will always be the personification of their own love. You can trust the love of a parent to remain strong throughout your life but remember that unlike God, parents are human and their love comes with all their human failings and frailties.

4. The love for friends ranges from deep to superficial and sometimes you may not think of it as love at all. But remember that each time a friend picks you up when you are down they are showing you love. Learn to recognize those random acts of kindness and to return them because you will one day need some affectionate and thoughtful loving person to hold you steady in the changing fortunes of time.

5. The love for material things is at best superficial. When you say you love those shoes or that watch, think also of other verbs that you could have used to describe them - nice shoes, pretty watch; and know that they are inanimate objects incapable of loving you back. No matter how many things you 'love' and collect through your life, you will never feel the warmth of love from any of them and if you do not learn this early on you will wonder why you still feel empty inside even when you own so many things that you 'love.'

6. Cupid's love! I saved the best for last because I know this is the one you want to hear about. You probably think am too old fashioned to know anything about Cupid's love, huh? Do you know how long Cupid's been around? Think about that! I have accumulated more experience on the subject than the years the two of you have lived - put together. This love is perhaps the most heady of all, most deeply felt and most frightening because it leaves us vulnerable to another human being. It can be very passionate and make us compulsive making us believe that the subject of our feelings has super-human powers to make us happy or unhappy. It is so powerful that we are compelled to believe that there are no words that can express it fully and we feel the need to express it physically through many enjoyable acts of love. It can be the most rewarding and fulfilling if it is returned respectfully. It is also a love that bares your heart and soul and if the other person does not feel the same way that you do or has ulterior motives and recognizes your vulnerability, the consequences can be really hurtful and leave you wounded for a very long time, even for life, if you do not allow yourself to heal. Have no fear that you will be too old to love because Cupid is always at work and even your old mom may surprise you.

At 50 I know you can count on God's love and my love. My prayer is that you never let one bad experience blind you to the fact that you are the most lovable creatures and if someone fails to recognize that then it is not your fault.

— feeling in love

Coolness

My daughters just do not understand my taste in music but I have been here long enough to know that their kids will probably say the same thing about their music - I listened to my mom's pop in the 70s long enough to know. She loved Miriam Makeba and Tabu Ley Rochereau and to her credit they were Maestros of their time. I have fond memories of listening to their songs played back on Uganda Television (UTV) from concerts that my parents attended. But later they dropped this pop culture and fell in love with 'Songs of Praise,' leaving me and my siblings on our own to discover what pop was 'on the knob.' I have not had conversations with them about their favorite musicians of that time because I know what answer they might give.

But I remember the wide array of tunes that were played in my childhood home from Congolese classics, to Peterson Mutebi, Jimmy Katumba and the Ebonies and the songs in the Sound of Music. My father probably thought the family oriented songs in the 'Sound of Music' were the safest music to counter my late brother's love for Reggae. Emmanuel who lived a very short 22 years had a thing for Bob Marley and introduced him into our home with a vengeance. We hopped to the popular 'No woman, No Cry' with the same veracity that my mom sang her Hymns. Torn between choosing which was more popular we often leaned towards my brother who was younger and more hip.

One day we had a party in the house at Nakasero and thought for once our Dad was the coolest dude on the block. The kids from around Nakasero congregated in our dining room and we jumped away to 'Redemption Song' and other Marley revolutionary songs until we broke my father's patience. He came out of his bedroom in pyjamas and nightgown to ask 'Which of your parents would tolerate this in their house at this time?' It was close to midnight and he had a point but it put a dumper on things and everyone scattered. Darn it! In one minute our Dad transformed from being the coolest Dad on the block for hosting this teenagers party to being the guy who chased our friends out when we were having the time of our life! We pulled apart the music system, put the dining table and chairs back in place and then headed to bed wondering how the neighborhood kids would treat us the next morning.

At 50 I know that balancing the image of 'Cool Mom' and 'Sensible Mom' can be quite challenging!

feeling cool