Akafuuzi

I don’t speak Rukiga so I knew my great-grandmother the only way I could. There was the warm smell of millet woven into the folds of Mukaaka’s dress that wrapped around me as she pulled me in for a hug, her smile as she watched us play, her bouncing laughter that filled every space she was in, her gentle stubbornness – she insisted on handwashing her own clothes until she was physically unable to – and the echoes of the hymns she often hummed. 

In the early 1990s, when my great-grandmother was still in her own home and I was small enough to fit on her lap, my grandmother would drive, all of us bundled into the back of her ancient Benz, the eight-hour journey from our home in Entebbe across the ever-bustling Kampala, through the literal land of milk and honey to the high hills of Kigezi. I would fall asleep shortly after crossing the Equator, sweat-glued to the seat, and wake up a hundred-plus kilometers later to lush green hills with peaks that often hid among the clouds. Just beyond a carefully tended flower garden, Mukaaka would be standing in front of her house, no walking stick even at eighty, with a wide smile and arms spread open in greeting. Mukurikeyo! Welcome back.

The day-long journey always brought us to her doorstep at teatime. I would crouch by Aunt Flora and watch as she sliced potatoes – so thin you could almost see through them – before dropping them with a popping sizzle into a pan balanced over the charcoal stove. We, the children, would then sit on a mat, mugs balanced on small knees, the sania of fresh homemade potato crisps between us, and eavesdrop on the adults. When Mukaaka noticed our mugs were not emptying fast enough – unpasteurized milk tasted too much like the cow it had just been tapped from – she would tell us a story with pronounced hints about the importance of not wasting food, while my mother or grandmother translated. We always interrupted, begging instead for the story about the ogre who liked eating children. She would pretend not to know this story, but we would persist until finally she gave in. 

‘Mbaganire, mbaganire,’ she would begin, and wait. 

At first we would whisper among ourselves. 

‘You have to say something so she can keep telling us!’

‘Yes, but what?’

‘I don’t know!’

We would hesitate while our mothers shook their heads. Finally Mummy or Aunt Alice would whisper the opening sound of the word we needed to utter: ‘Te!’

That would unlock our memory, so full of English we had pushed the Rukiga to the far corners. 

‘Tebere!’ Agasha would say first, but she was the smallest and quietest. The rest of us would crow, drowning her. 

‘Tebere!’

Mukaaka would widen her eyes and shake her head, cupping her ear with a hand. ‘Tinkuhurira.’ I can’t hear you. She would repeat, ‘Mbaganire, mbaganire?’

This time we were ready. ‘Tebere!’ we would chorus.

That would satisfy her. With a wink, she would begin, ‘Once upon a time, long long ago, there was an ogre…’ She would stop to look at us.

‘Tebere!’ we would respond eagerly.

‘He used to walk around villages with a huge drum in which he would put the children he found …’

‘Tebere!’

‘But how?’ one of us would interrupt.

Before Mukaaka could answer we would respond with pinches and shoves. ‘Shhhh!’

The offender, sometimes me, would submit with a grumble and Mukaaka would wait for us to settle before she would begin the story again. ‘One day there was a girl who didn’t want to take the goats to pasture …’

‘Tebere!’ We repeated after each line until we were so enraptured by the story we forgot to reply. Mukaaka would raise and drop the tenor of her voice to amplify the magic until it seemed like the ogre squatted just outside the door in the shadow of her matooke plantation. Later at night, when an owl hooted or a tree branch snapped, she would laugh as we jumped. 

‘Town children,’ she would say, ‘I thought you fear nothing.’

I wonder sometimes, as I battle the ogres in my story, what Mukaaka feared. What scared her the most?

***

Tebere!

Once upon a time, before she was our Mukaaka, our great-grandmother was a girl called Kangarurayo. On this particular day Kangarurayo’s mother was bedridden. 

‘My child,’ Maama called, voice hoarse with pain. Kangarurayo didn’t hear the words so much as feel them. A stranger would have had to lean closer to where Maama lay beneath a pile of animal skins to ask, “What did you say?” But this was Kangarurayo’s mother, and when you are someone’s child their voice is written on your bones. You do not need to hear it to know you are being called. 

Kangarurayo tried not to cry. She held onto the limp hand, tracing the familiar rough ridges of her mother’s callouses. Its press in hers was faint. She had not been allowed to see her father a few days earlier and now he was dead. She wondered if he too had been so weak, if his skin had felt as rough and his eyes clouded with pain. When Kangarurayo lifted her mother’s hand to her cheek, the palm was sticky with sweat but oddly cool against the heat of her own skin. Maybe this was a good thing, better than the fever of the past month. 

‘You!’ The whisper-shout rang across the dim hut like the crack of a whip. Kangarurayo jumped, dropping her mother’s hand. When she turned to face the entrance of the hut, she found one of her aunts peering inside, a frown squatting on her face. ‘Out, now!’

‘Go,’ Maama managed to say.

Kangarurayo hesitated but then the aunt reached for her, pulling her out and away. 

Outside the hut it was bitterly cold. There was always a chill up in the hills of Kigezi. On some mornings the whole village was white with snow on the ground, fog in the air, and thick, heavy clouds in the sky. Kangarurayo had never minded the cold because inside the hut they called home it had always felt warm – the small space crowded with Taata, Maama, and her brothers. Lately, however, the cold had begun to creep inside. 

Kangarurayo’s aunt shook the arm she was holding, breaking the girl’s reverie.

‘Have you finished digging?’

‘I have.’ 

Earlier in the morning Kangarurayo had crept out as early as possible to loosen the ground around the potatoes, prepare the empty patch for sorghum and millet, and weed the vegetables. Fingers clumsy from the cold, she had rushed through the chore so that she could steal a moment with her mother. Kangarurayo knew her aunt wasn’t bothered about the vegetable garden.

‘Then why are you here and not with your brother?’

As if Bakye had been waiting to be prompted, his cry sounded across the kraal, rising from the spot where the three children had been isolated from their sick parents. It was a wild keening, especially unpleasant given its staccato interruptions. Bakye was gasping for air. 

The aunt frowned. Kangarurayo wrung her hands.

‘I just wanted to check on Maama.’

‘That boy has been crying all morning.’

Kangarurayo understood. With the barest of nods, she turned towards the hut she shared with her brothers just a few feet away.

‘That boy will not outlast his mother.’ 

The wind, gossip that it was, had carried the aunt’s carelessly muttered words to Kangarurayo as she returned to her own chores. Kangarurayo’s footsteps faltered for just a moment, but she continued on her way.

The sick boy wailed louder when he saw his sister. Their other brother was away, with the goats, or the cows, or playing with the other boys; Kangarurayo never fretted about him. Bakye, however, barely past two rains of Kicuransi, was her constant worry. Now she knelt to examine him, to see if he had finished his ebishaka, to hold him in her arms and rub his bony back as their mother had once rubbed it. Kangarurayo hummed a lullaby, but her voice was not their mother’s. Still, her brother’s sobs softened and slowed as he leaned into her small embrace. Finally Bakye fell asleep, clutching one of her hands in his. 

Alone, in a place where no one could see her, Kangarurayo began to cry too.

***

Tebere!

Every Easter break until I joined boarding school, my mother, her sisters, and their friends would bundle us, their assorted children, into borrowed four-wheel-drives so we could explore the country we called home. 

In 1996 we went to the Mountains of the Moon. We hiked in the misty rainforest, whispering secrets into ear-like mushroom growths on the trees. We stopped to boil eggs for our lunch in Sempaya and I refused to eat, gagging over the hot rich funk of sulfur. My left knee is still tattooed from my fall while gathering sparkly stones as we rummaged through abandoned copper mines, and for a year afterward I insisted there were gold and silver flecks along the small, raised lines of my scar. When we rode down the Kazinga channel, the smaller ones cried and clung to our mothers because the guide told us that sometimes the hippos overturned the boat when they owed the crocodiles breakfast. 

I didn’t pay particular attention when we stopped at the Mubende army barracks on our way back home; we always made stops to visit our mothers’ various relatives and friends. I was excited because it was my first time at a barracks and we were going to see where our uncle, one of my mother’s two brothers and an army clinical officer, lived and worked. We tumbled out of the car and followed our mothers in blind faith. The soldiers we passed went about their business as if we did not exist, stopping only when Aunt Gladys asked for directions. 

‘Why are we here?’ Agasha whispered to me as we wove between ramshackle buildings and shiny new unipots.

‘To visit Uncle Andrew, duh! He’s a soldier.’ 

I don’t think our mothers would have taken us along if they had known how sick we would find him. It was the first time we saw our mothers cry. Uncle Andrew died two months later. We were deemed too young to attend the burial, so our mothers left us – six children between the ages of three and thirteen – with the maid who was most familiar with our quirks while they laid our uncle to rest. 

Nobody had explained it to me. I was bundled with my four-year-old sister and a bag of our belongings into a car before being hurriedly dropped off at a house brimming with cousins. That week is one of my stranger memories. It was as if the world was tipped just slightly on its axis. We still played, still went to school, still had to finish large plates of rice and beans. At the same time, the absence of our mothers was palpable. I felt it most when the day ended without the click of high heels on concrete, or when the babies cried for mummy and none of our responses were good enough. Sugar lost its sweetness after three days of putting as much as I wanted in my porridge. Peace, at eleven, was the eldest girl and the one truly in charge. In the evenings she checked our homework and made sure our uniforms and shoes were ready for school. At night she slept curled up with her baby sister in the same bed, while I begrudgingly shared a bed with my own – she kicked – and complained bitterly about it to anyone who would listen. The sun still rose in the east but there was something slightly off with its shine. 

A week later our mothers returned, and with them life as we understood it, at least for a while longer. 

***

Tebere!

Kangarurayo’s mother never returned from the sick hut. The rwaramba mercilessly sweeping through Kigezi claimed her, just as it had claimed Kangarurayo’s father a month before. A week had passed since they laid Maama’s body to rest in the expanding graveyard. The time had come to decide who would raise Kangarurayo and her brothers, but no one spoke up.

‘Who will take them?’ one old man repeated. 

Kangarurayo sat beside her brothers. The boys, the youngest in the circle of elders and others now gathered, had been playing some sort of pinching game as their parents’ possessions were allocated to uncles and young male cousins. Kangarurayo had spent time trying to keep her brothers quietly entertained so they would not be chased from this gathering, so they could know what was happening. After promising that they would behave, Kangarurayo had wrangled a spot close to their uncle Rubabinda. In the days since their mother had passed, he was the one person whose smile warmed his eyes when he called the children to eat, do a chore, or go to bed. He was the one who walked by their hut every evening after their parents had fallen ill, to say, Murigye? Are you well?

Kangarurayo’s father, while not wealthy, had been a man of sufficient means, enough for his brothers to use in the care of Kangarurayo and her brothers until they were of age. But most of the property’s allocation had gone over Kangarurayo’s head. Cows to this uncle, goats to that one. The land they farmed was split likewise among her uncles. 

An aunt Kangarurayo barely knew cleared her throat. She looked not at the children but at the men. ‘I will take them if you give me more land since I will have to feed them.’

Another aunt lifted her chin. ‘The children already have a good share of land. There is no need for you to receive more than that.’

‘That one is just greedy,’ a cousin whispered. The people around her tittered. 

The first aunt twisted her mouth as she shrugged. ‘At least I am offering to take them. All of you are silent.’ 

The gathering buzzed. The uncles whispered to each other and their wives. Beyond this inner circle, cousins and neighbors discussed the children’s fate. Efuuzi. Akafuuzi. Orphans. The word bounced around the room, stinging with constant venom every time it was said. Kangarurayo’s parents had just died and already her name was overshadowed by this word that tied her solely to the recent loss of her parents. Her brothers had stilled on their own now, also aware that any mention of “orphan” concerned them. She wondered if her eyes were as wide as theirs were. 

Uncle Rubabinda cleared his throat. Kangarurayo turned her attention from her brothers to him. ‘Kangarurayo is a very mature girl. She can take care of her brothers until they are all of age, in their own hut within my kraal.’

The family erupted. 

‘You cannot leave three children alone!’

‘One of those boys is too sick for a young girl to take care of on her own.’

‘Cho!’

‘All of them are too young!’

‘… not right!’

‘Surely we are better than this.’

Kangarurayo’s heart was drumming in her throat. Alone? She had expected to end up with an aunt and a hut full of cousins. But just the three of them, even if in the safety of Uncle Rubabinda’s kraal? She did not know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. She looked up at her uncle’s blank face. The only sign of any emotion from him was the grip on his enkoni. She had only ever seen it used as a walking stick or to chase a herd of cattle.

***

Tebere!

One of the first Rukiga words I learnt was akafuuzi. “I was an orphan,” Mukaaka would often say as she sat meditating alone in the days after my grandmother, her eldest child, moved her into our home so that the family could keep a close eye on her health. And when, playing in the compound, I ran past Mukaaka and the young aunt who had been brought to keep her company, I sometimes heard my great-grandmother say, ‘I was an orphan.’

One of the first bad words I learnt was bastard. I was seven years old and the Christian primary school I attended had arranged for us to see a play in the city, Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames. Dante’s Inferno, kiddie version. The trip was every child’s fantasy: sugary snacks and drinks, minimal parental guidance, and a bus full of friends on an adventure to Kampala Pentecostal Church. They took us to the front of the cinema-turned-chapel so we could see clearly. I have never been as thrilled and terrified as I sat watching the show. At the end of the play, fully cowed, I filed forward with the others to get saved and avoid Hell. 

When it was time to go home, the adult in charge of us had disappeared so we were instructed to stay where we were and behave after being corralled into a corner next to a group of women who chatted as they waited for their own charges. 

‘Oh wow, they have Somalis in that school,’ one of the women said. 

Immediately I knew she meant me. Refugees were entering Uganda and my dark skin coupled with hair whose curls were looser than the average Ugandan’s suggested Horn of Africa origins rather than Bantu ones. It didn’t help that as a child I was a picky eater. I always looked slightly malnourished. 

‘No, that’s how all her father’s side looks,’ someone else replied.

‘Who is he?’ 

‘Some man here in Kampala.’ It was the way she said it, her voice lowering into a whisper, that made me pay attention. 

‘She’s a bastard.’ 

I didn’t know what it meant but I knew it was bad because the women all went silent for a moment. I was afraid to look up so I stared at her legs. Black Mary Janes with a short blocky heel. A knee-length navy blue skirt that revealed knees darker than her burnt-yellow legs.

‘Kyoka you!’ One woman giggled and then they all joined in before changing the subject to my friend’s hazel eyes. 

When I got home, I asked for the dictionary and found the word. A person born out of wedlock. Was that me? Parents rarely explain the complexities of their relationships to children. I had been given the broad strokes: my brothers lived elsewhere with their mother, I lived with my sister and mother, while my father existed somewhere in the vague in-between. Was “bastard” the word for it?

Nobody ever called me a bastard in my hearing again. My mother transferred me to another school the following year, but reverberations of the word sounded across my life in other ways. I quickly went from being open about my love for my father to being more guarded, giving nothing more than was necessary until finally I was not even open with myself. I have only just begun to disentangle this puzzle. Sometimes I am convinced that unlearning the idea that I am flawed, through no fault of my own, is my Sisyphean task. 

***

Tebere!

‘Do you understand what you are doing, Kangarurayo?’

Uncle Rubabinda’s face was grimmer than Mukaaka had ever seen it. The lines she associated with laughter were set firmly against her. His eyes, just beginning to disappear into wrinkles, were stone-cold. 

‘It is Eseri now.’ The name Kangarurayo had been washed away in baptismal waters.

Her uncle shook his head as if he could physically shake the name away. ‘Why would you do this?’

‘For a life. For safety, for my children, my husband and my home. There are so many reasons. You of all people should understand …’

‘It is because I understand that I do not see how you can do this,’ he interrupted. ‘How can you turn away from your family like this?’

Eseri considered her uncle, suddenly tired. She had told her husband she would do this by herself. And she had. She had come to her uncle’s home and tried to explain. But how to start? She had been curious about the Balokole and the life they promised, especially when they spoke of things that she had hardly allowed herself to dream about. It didn’t cost much: only to believe in this Yesu Kristo. The Bakaturiki that her father’s brothers had embraced focused on sacrifice while the Balokole spoke of a victorious life. Who wouldn’t want a victorious life as well as hope after death and perfect peace?

Best of all, she was not akafuuzi among the Balokole. She was a child, again, of this Ruhanga. She was Eseri, no different from others in the church; they were all brothers and sisters in Yesu. Eseri had been cautious, critical even, but the warmth felt genuine. Slowly she found herself choosing to spend more and more time with these people, listening and eventually believing.

She had heard whispers up and down the hills of families torn apart as some chose the way of the Bakaturiki instead of the Balokole, or the other way around. She had not realized she would have the same story to tell. Some days her determination wavered and she felt it was not too late to change her mind and keep her father’s people in her life. 

Now, as she faced her uncle Rubabinda, Eseri realized she was not just his brother’s child anymore. She was the mother of the little girl sleeping on a mat nearby. Just then, baby Joy chortled in her sleep, revealing the gap between her front teeth. Fat arms pushed at the thick cloth she was wrapped in. A soft smile broke across Eseri’s face as she tucked the blanket more securely around the girl. She wanted Joy to always laugh freely like this. With her hand resting on the slight swell of her stomach, Eseri hardened her face as she raised her gaze to meet her uncle’s searching look. 

‘This is what is good for my family.’

Rubabinda’s frown lines deepened. ‘Get out.’

‘What?’

‘Get out,’ and there was a rise in pitch with each word. ‘You are no child of ours.’ For the first time in her life, her uncle raised his enkoni at her.

***

Tebere!

My grandmother, Erina, died in November 2015 as she was being prepped for her first chemotherapy treatment. A week later my cousins and I stood outside All Saints Cathedral, the order-of-service booklets piled high beside us. 

‘Did you know Kaaka had her own name?’ I asked. It helped to focus on trivial things like this rather than the fact that our grandmother was dead. Because, yes, underneath a picture I had helped choose, was written a middle name I had never heard of: Kabwimukana. I had always assumed that Erina, the Kiga version of Eleanor, was her parents’ only nod to our roots in Kigezi. 

Peace nodded. ‘Yes, I’m named after her, but I changed it.’

I stared at my cousin, confounded for a moment. My cousins and I adored our grandmother, to the mild consternation of our mothers. While our grandmother had been distant and strict as a mother, she was the epitome of patience, love and kindness to her grandchildren. To find out that Peace had been named after Kaaka and changed it?

‘The meaning isn’t great,’ Peace said.

Mukaaka’s choice of name for her daughter, before she converted to Christianity and became Eseri, hints at her complicated relationship with happiness. The naming conventions among Ugandans from the west often says something about the parents’ frame of mind when a child is born. Life as Kangarurayo had known it had been filled with agonies. It wasn’t just losing her parents. She had also lost her first baby in a difficult childbirth, following which she had been assured she would never carry another child or walk again. Kabwimukana is hard to translate, connoting a bitter resignation or tentative joy following a miracle. I imagine that cradling her second child, the first living child, must have felt for Eseri like teetering on the edge of a high cliff: any sudden move might precipitate a fall, too much joy might tempt doom.

By the time the Church Missionary Society found its way to Kigezi, diverted there by colonial machinations following the Treaty of Versailles, they must have found Kangarurayo a perfect candidate for conversion. She would have been willing to try anything that gave her growing family a chance at a better life. The evidence is in the names she chose for her daughters. Her second daughter, born shortly after Eseri converted to Christianity, was named Joy. My grandmother’s first name, Erina, is a wonderful corruption of Eleanor, or “God is my light.” Most telling, though, is the name my great-grandmother chose for herself when she began this new phase of her life: Eseri, the Rukiga approximation of Ethel, which means nobility or grace, possibly alluding to the good fortune she hoped she’d have as a believer.

***

Tebere!

The church thundered with dancing, bits of thatch falling from the roof. It was Palm Sunday sometime in the 1950s and Kigezi Diocese was doing the ekizino. The matooke leaves everyone had carried in place of palm fronds lay discarded on the floor. Everyone stomped and jumped in time with the steady drumbeat and the jingle of the shakers. The women lifted their hands, mimicking the swaying movements of their long-horned cattle, while the men kept their arms at their sides so they could jump higher. Ululations filled the church.

It was one of the largest buildings Eseri had ever seen, made in the new way, no rounded walls but square ones with a triangular roof. Unlike their huts whose walls were made of wattle, the church’s walls were made of mud brick, brown little squares repeated in neat lines all the way up to the roof. The rafters were high and covered with the same thatch as the surrounding huts, dry long grass that filled the space with the soothing aroma of the hills’ meadows. Long thin tree trunks had been carefully selected with direction from the mzungu priest and the Baganda clergy who had accompanied him to this backwater. Only they held the roof up against the dancing of the people below. 

‘Bantumwe, muteirehi amasiko g’amagara. Agangye gary’owa Yesu omwiguru!’ Eseri sang, lifting her voice in concert with the others.

‘Abagurusi,’ the choirmaster chanted, ‘mwije owa Yesu!’

‘Eh, mazima!’ Eseri boomed with the rest of the congregation. 

On and on the choirmaster sang, calling all men, women, children, the sick, everyone to the church. The singing stopped as the sound of drums, ululations, and clapping rose. The dancers jumped higher and higher, lost in the ekizino.

Eseri scanned the room for her children as she sang and found them with the other youngsters, also dancing. Jairus, her youngest daughter, moved with the most abandon, shining among her peers. Although Eseri had taught Jairus the steps of the ekizino, her daughter had since surpassed her. First you had to learn how to clap, because the clap gave you the rhythm. Once you had the rhythm you could move with the steps. Once you had the steps then came the natural sway of the arms. Watching all of her children, Eseri couldn’t suppress the grin that broke across her face. Suddenly her feet itched and her waist began to sway as she was overcome with a wild feeling of joy. She stopped clapping to lift her hands as she raised her arms and began to jump.

‘Eseri, you’re dancing?’ exclaimed her friend beside her.

‘Yes!’ 

***

Tebere!

The sitting room was brightly lit with sunshine. The curtains, white with a light pattern of blue flowers, were pulled neatly to the side and the windows were thrown open. The coffee table was piled with glasses, mugs, bread, jam, margarine, groundnuts and samosas. Mukaaka sat where she always sat in the evenings since she had moved into her daughter’s house, on the red velvet sofa that was going pink with age. It was directly across from the photo of her youngest son, Topher. Sometimes when she looked at his photo it was hard to remember that he had been dead for twenty years already. But today she wasn’t looking at Topher. She was looking at this little girl who looked a little like her own offspring, especially with that same shy wide grin. Mukaaka turned to Kaaka, who stood to the side, smiling.

‘Erina, ogu nooha?’ Mukaaka asked. Erina, who is this?

‘Omwana wa Rhona. Nibamweta Hannah,’ Kaaka said. Rhona’s child. She’s called Hannah.

Mukaaka squeezed the little girl closer. The girl squealed and the other children exploded in laughter. They chattered like a bright flock of chittering birds in the language of the bazungu. Mukaaka caught snippets. 

‘Maama Kaaka!’

‘Kaaka’s maama!’

‘Mukaaka!’

Kaaka translated for Mukaaka as the children teased their small cousin. ‘They are telling her you are my mother. They think Mukaaka is short for Maama of Kaaka.’

Eseri, the little girl who once was Kangarurayo and now was our Mukaaka, hugged the little girl closer. She began to laugh too, eyes crinkling with mirth.

***

Tebere!

In December 2016, a year after Kaaka died, the extended family came together for her memorial. When it was time for her siblings to speak, they rose with their cousins to make their way to the bare space between the tents. We, Erina’s grandchildren and Eseri’s great-grandchildren, were still young enough to be ordered around but old enough to be trusted. We were working the function, serving drinks, ushering people to their seats, and gossiping about the elders when no one needed us as we stole sips of the sweet boxed wine.

The other kaakas, my grandmother’s sisters, wore matching bikooyi in a dusty rose pink that my grandmother had favored. Similar to the style of their departed sister, they each had a scarf or shawl around their shoulders. I couldn’t look at Kaaka Joy too long, for the fold of her features mirrored our deceased grandmother the most. Uncle TK, their last living brother, wore a soft rose shirt. The deejay was playing a Kikiga song as they gathered themselves. Kaaka Grace squeezed the paper containing her speech. I paused when I heard the familiar drumbeat. It was a song I had learnt in Sunday school. 

‘Look at the kaakas,’ my cousin Peace said to all of us. 

Our surviving kaakas had begun to do the ekizino. The youngest of them had danced with fluid grace and all her sisters, usually too dignified to dance at such functions, had followed her. The force with which they leapt and the precarious angle of their features told of their love for their older sister. Their daughters and nieces rose to join them, making a large circle in the green space between the tents. For a moment we all stared and then, from where we were, at the edge of the tents, my cousins and I began to dance too.

I was slow at first, hesitant, my hips and shoulders heavy with embarrassment. I did not stop, though. No, I pushed through the self-consciousness until I had my arms raised and my feet stomped the ground in tandem with the drumbeat. As I did my mangled ekizino, at first I laughed, at myself and my wayward feet, and then I laughed at what our departed Kaaka would have said. My laughter turned into tears, but I kept moving.▪