The Caine Prize for African Writing was awarded to Ugandan Arac de Nyeko for a compelling Bildungsroman on the lives of two Ugandan girls as told in a letter from Anyango to the long lost Sanyu, exiled to far-off London by her parents.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sanyu wrote just once, a brief note enflamed still, after the long trip across the water.

A.

I miss you.

S.

This is a tale of two East African girls battling with something inside them whose name they do not even know. Society has taught them, without calling its name that this something is wrong, that it must be fought. Yet it persists, it refuses to go gently, even many years on, in spite of trips to the Church to do penance, in spite of the shame that stalks Anyango, tagging itself to the hem of her skirt. Anyango remembers the passion,

And that feeling that I had, the one that you had, that we had-never said, never spoken - swelled up inside us like fresh mandazis.

Arac

This is a battle every modern young person faces, not in as stark a reality, but a battle nevertheless, between their individuality and the pressure to conform. Between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the rigours of communal discipline, struggling against the passions of youthful discovery and rebellion. It is about the struggle to find oneself, and the legend of a passion unfulfilled. Anyango wistfully writes,

‘You left without saying goodbye, you had to, I reasoned. Perhaps it was good for both of us. Maybe things would die down that way. Things never did die down. Our names will forever be associated with the forbidden. Shame.

Anyango-Sanyu.

Anyango's reply is our story, a recounting of the length of their ardor, from the day they first acted on their feelings in the Jambula Tree, ‘the day you first touched me. Mine was a cold, unsure hand placed over your right breast. Yours was a cold, scared hand, which held my waist and pressed it closer to you,' to the day when it all started unraveling and finally when things fell apart one night under the Jambula tree.

But this is more than a story about sexuality; it is a tale of the gulfs that exist within our societies. Gulfs in wealth, in opportunities and in outcomes. Anyango's mother, abandoned for a younger woman by her father is a poor copy typist, able to buy meat only once a month. Anyango is often called out at school for non-payment of fees, and sent home with a letter to remind her mother she must pay. Anyango wishes she had a mother who could buy happiness from the market, like Sanyu's mother. Sanyu has no such troubles, her father is an engineer at the railway company with big dreams for his daughter, he is full of money and different from the other men in the village. He does not go with them to the bars and nightclubs; he does not have a string of girls he is chasing after, like the soldiers in the streets, or Mama Atim's sons.

Instead he has Sanyu, who suffers his attentions stoically. She cannot tell her mother for her mother will not believe her. You always want to scream here, ‘how can a mother not know?', but this is foreign terrain for most of us, much unlike the rest of the story which is set in a housing estate on the outskirts of a big Ugandan city.

These themes are our themes, the constraints of a conservative society built on hypocrisy. The abandoned women, the unemployment, the strict school uniforms, the selection of schools after class eight and the broken friendships that follow the progression to secondary school. The smattering of Swahili injects an even closer familiarity into the narration, as does the account on second hand clothes ,microfinance institutions and the struggle with widespread poverty. Uganda it seems is not so alien a land. Still, other ideas are a little more exotic. Soldiers in the streets, panties made by the Mother's Union and I have still not figured out what the Jambula tree is.

Stop Kampala

Several characters could be denizens of a Nakuru estate as much as this Ugandan high-rise built on an acre of land. Mama Atim, the village's lecturer, a nickname she has earned from being able to speak like a machine-gun- firing off from her mind which is the repository of accounts on all the sexual activity in the estate. She has been cursed with good-for-nothing licentuous sons and with wives who show not much more self-control. And it is this Mama Atim, with her bed taken over by her debauched sons, who puts an end to our girls' union of souls. Stalking steadily in the dark of the night, she finds them under her tree, on the green leaves, in the green grass. And then things fall apart. Sanyu is sent to London, and her mother to the depths of shame.

But this is not a sad story, Sanyu is coming back from London, which the unyielding Mama Atim declares , 'is no refuge for the immoral'. So it is that in all the sadness of this tale, runs a thread of courage under fire, of the stubborn resilience that sees a broken-hearted Anyango still qualify to work as a nurse. Her mother accepts her difference, and Sanyu, dear Sanyu is coming back.

Written in an effortless soulful voice that lives through the story, this is a story of innocence, and of nature. It is also a story that could be ours, ours sisters, our daughters, our friends. It is a monument to the indefatiguable human spirit, and one that should give pause to the hateful crusades waged both in our country, and in Uganda, by elements of the religious establishment, and the media that promotes and justifies their hatred.

 Here's a link to African Love Stories , the anthology in which this story is told. Although this story stands out in the book, the rest of it is beautiful too, including one from Ngozi Adichie and Wangui wa Goro.