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SHORT STORY: The slum legend of Kifumbira walks old Kiira road

Friday November 25 2016
fred man

Nobody seems to know where he spends his mornings or even his nights. But at around eleven every day, cars slow down at Old Kiira Road as he floats across the road near the Kamwokya market at Kobil petrol station. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGAH |

Everybody gets out of his way when they see him coming. The young children would sometimes run after him shouting but mostly their mothers won’t let them. The mothers shout, “Come back here or I will whip you so hard you will have no more tears left.”

The older children look up from their phones; the men do not mind him. But everybody keeps an eye on his shuffle.

Jane stretches out her hand to give him a banana from her fruit stand.

Katongole, a round, talkative commercial motorcycle rider, watches the Kifumbira slum legend shuffle by. He long quit asking Jane why she gives him fruits.

Nobody seems to know where he spends his mornings or even his nights. But at around eleven every day, cars slow down at Old Kiira Road as he floats across the road near the Kamwokya market at Kobil petrol station.

Schoolchildren keep their distance then follow behind. In fact, anyone who has difficulty crossing the busy Old Kiira road just follows him.

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He crosses the road as if in a daze.

You have to be quite tall, over six feet, to be able to look him in the eye. However, most people can’t look beyond his thick matted hair, which is brown because of the Kampala dust. He is frightening, when you see him for the first time.

Although he is homeless, he does not look starved. He is well built because of carrying around discarded brake disks, wheel caps, broken mirrors, cracked headlights, rusting grills, and twisted fenders. His armour clinks and clatters and jingles as he walks.

On his back is what was once an army grey gurney sack, which he rarely puts down on the ground.

There are many insane people in Kampala with matted hair, but very few who have thick, long locks like his.

Very few people in Kifumbira have heard him speak clearly. Stopping every few steps, head thrown back, he mumbles to himself, shakes his head then walks a few more steps.

He peels the banana Jane has given him and eats it in just two bites. He then carefully throws away the banana peel into the waste box that Jane has next to her stall. He does not say a word to Jane.

In the principal’s office on the third floor of Kamwokya Primary School, opposite Jane’s stall, Kaddu Benedicto looks down the road to see the mad man passing by.
Twerinde calls out to him, trying to get him to talk, but the mad man just keeps walking.

When he has a moment from his creaking Singer sewing machine on the Mazima building’s veranda, Abdul teases Twerinde.

“But what kind of Mukiga are you? You are always talking instead of frying your fish. How does a man from the mountains even end up being a fisherman? You might not be a real Mukiga,” Abdul tells Twerinde while laughing.

The mad man continues his walk down into Kifumbira. His jingling, clinking sack announces his approach. The boda boda riders whose bikes squeal over the sloping, uneven, narrow road do not hoot for him to make way. Instead, they wait for him to pass or find a way to ride around him.

Brown is often the first one to see him coming into Malaya Close. Her Friends Bar at the corner as you turn into Malaya Close is open from morning until evening, every day. If the previous night was good to her, she usually shouts out, “Come and taste the warmth of Kinshasa in Kampala! You know you like it.”

However, if the night was bad and one of her girls or customers is in Mawanda Road Police Station, she sends out an appeal, “Why don’t you tell your brother we also need to survive?”

Those who hear her laugh. Especially those passing through Kifumbira.

Sometimes he will stop at Friends Bar and Brown will order one of the girls to bring a bench for him to sit on, in the shade away from the sun. She brings him a glass of Enturire and he drinks the thick, brown, concentrated liquid slowly.

Brown talks to him.

Two young men dressed in red Chicago Bulls basketball jerseys, cutaway shorts, walking by, shout, “Prostitutes are shameless. They even want a mad man’s money.”
But Brown does not talk to him like he is mad.

She talks to Fred, the former landlord of Kifumbira zone. She talks to the man at whose feet she threw herself in a Bunagana police station, pleading not to be sent back across the border 20 years ago. He made sure she was not deported.

She talks to Fred, the father of her dead child Francis.

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