An April 7, 2024, this column lost one of its most ardent readers. Bazaire Kabumba was also my mother. She often offered her compliments regarding those pieces she especially liked.
Perhaps not unsurprisingly, her favourite column was that which ran on December 20, 2023, which reflected on the life of Prof Ijuka Kabumba, her husband of 43 years. She usually read the online version of the column (age had progressively made her movements difficult, and she increasingly relied on a walking cane).
On that particular occasion, she asked me to buy five copies of The Observer, and take them to her home in Bunga. I did so. To her immense credit, she never once in all those months ever questioned the contents of any one column. I have absolutely no doubt that there were many issues she might have found objectionable – in part because of her deep and abiding Christian faith; and in other part because of her broad (although itself not uncritical) support for the NRM.
In this regard, she followed in the example of my late father, who never once attempted to abridge my thoughts or their expression. This is why I am often amused by (and I must admit not a little contemptuous of) persons – in some cases even total strangers – who take the liberty to try to censor some of the ideas I have chosen to express here.
Her departure from this world was rather abrupt. She came down with an infection, which was treated. When she did not respond to that initial treatment, she was placed on a stronger course of antibiotics. Unfortunately, she passed away one day after completing the dose of the second-line antibiotics, after which she would have been due for review.
My siblings and I were confident she would recover from what we assumed was only a bothersome episode of sickness. Having to handle burial arrangements on the morning of April 7 was, therefore, in many ways a surreal experience.
As I drove behind the car carrying her, from the hospital to the funeral home, I had to contend with a difference in the terminology adopted by myself, on the one hand, and that used by the assigned contact from the funeral home. While I referred to ‘my mother’, and used ‘she’ or ‘her’, he kept referring to ‘the body’. A couple of conversations later, I acceded to his language, and also began to refer to ‘the body’.
It became clear to me that while her passing had been sudden, it was also quite final. And while my siblings and I had to quickly grapple with the reality of her death, it was also clear that the rest of the world was moving on. This simple truth was affirmed by the time – two hours – it took to move from hospital to the funeral home in Mengo (a journey which ordinarily would have taken about 15 minutes).
On that cold morning, most roads were blocked, traffic being controlled by the Uganda Police – necessitated by the numerous runners celebrating, through a marathon, the birthday of His Majesty Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II, the Kabaka of Buganda.
While her death seemed rather nondescript, it was clear to me that her life was anything but this. My siblings and I mainly knew her as ‘mummy’. An important role – a critical identity, which embraced and fulfilled with distinction. Over her life, though, I also had a window into her professional life – as a teacher (English and Literature) and school administrator (initially Deputy Headmistress of Kitante Hill School and later Headmistress of Kololo Senior Secondary School).
She carried students’ books and examination scripts home – and often, as a child, I saw her grading these at the dining table. Sometimes her eyes looked over her reading glasses as she did so (perhaps when confronted with particularly terrible grammar!). As a child, I also had the privilege, on occasion, of witnessing her as an authority figure in the work space – both at Kitante Hill School and later at Kololo Senior Secondary School.
I recall drinking the tea, and eating the cakes and samosas that were usually at her desk in those respective offices (a memory which for some reason has stuck in my mind). At the same time, I recognized that while mummy was a mother to my siblings and myself, and a wife to my father – on the one hand; she was also an autonomous person, with agency and an identity outside the world that was our home.
In this sense, she conveyed life lessons through her action and example, even though she did not really bother to pontificate on these issues through words. She navigated matrimony and motherhood, including through the turbulent 1970s and early 1980s, when my father was away in the United States, and later France, studying.
My older siblings know better than myself of the deprivations of that period. My younger sister and I were raised in comparatively easier times. Nonetheless, I too experienced a glimpse of the balancing act she had to perform between meeting financial necessities and fulfilling the innocent desires of her children.
I recall once, walking with her in a certain marketplace (I must have been around eight years of age or so) and asking her to buy me something (I forget what – it might have been a toy or some kind of confectionery). She said she had no money. A few moments later, she stopped to purchase some groceries.
In the naivety of childhood, I considered her to be a most dishonest person. How could someone who had claimed not to have money at the same time make a purchase shortly thereafter with a straight face? This was one occasion in which her unwillingness to explain – being a person of few words – lent her to being misunderstood.
I knew, of course, growing up, that she was not ostentatious. She sought to make life easier for all around her – without pomp or fanfare. She did not write or talk about her generosity – but generous she was, to a fault.
I have lost count of the number of persons – her siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews, friends and even strangers – who have testified, since her passing, of the various financial outlays she made to make their lives easier: a woman she supported with money, food and even cosmetic items (an important detail going to the issue of dignity beyond the basics of life) when her husband died leaving her with children to support, and without means of sustenance; some of her siblings whose educational journeys she supported from secondary school and beyond; nieces whose university tuition she paid from start to finish – and others.
I am proud of her. I am especially proud that, in a world where human beings are wont to do little, and then trumpet this from the mountain tops, she quietly did a lot to advance the cause of humanity. Evidently, there was much goodness and humanity behind the quiet, unassuming and rather inscrutable smile she often wore.
Her siblings told of how she was probably the first girl from Sheema county to make it to secondary school – a pioneer in her own right – making it to Gazaya High School for O-level, Namagunga Girls School for A-level and then on to Makerere University. As a family, we are most grateful to all these communities – old girls of Gayaza and Namagunga, and former staff of Kitante and Kololo – who spared time and resources to commiserate with us.
We are also deeply grateful to our several friends and colleagues from Namilyango College, King’s College Budo, Namagunga, Makerere University (current and former students and staff), the Bunga community who were her neighbours; as we also are to our various relatives (from Nyakitabire and Itendero), in-laws and friends.
Her Gayaza classmates (1966-1969) recounted interesting anecdotes of her time there – noting her assertiveness and confidence, on the one hand, and playfulness on the other. It was rather amusing for me to think of my mother as a young and mischievous girl – from Sheema – holding her own against the (then largely expatriate) teaching staff at Gayaza.
She was all these things: friendly, but firm where necessary, never taking life too seriously nor too flippantly. I rather naively assumed she would live for a very long time. Around two years ago, I told her (half-seriously) that I would not mind dying at about 70 years of age, since most years after that were usually marred by sickness and suffering.
She told me then that she herself fully intended to live to at least 94 years of age. I suspect she meant it. In the event, she left this world at 74 years of age – far too young, by her own apparent estimation and planning.
A postmortem revealed the cause of her death to have been metastasized lung cancer – a finding which was as surprising to us as I am sure it would have been to her. Aside from a persistent cough, and some gradual weight loss, there was little to indicate this. The fact that she was a non-smoker also rendered this finding the more surprising.
One can only surmise that it was perhaps one of those morbidities which might have arisen during the Covid-19 period. How many of us – myself included (I have had persistent chest discomfort for the past three years, whose implications continue to elude doctors) – are walking around with unknown results of that strange period? I do not know.
On the night of the last Tuesday before her death, I had one of those few dreams whose contents I continue to recall on waking. I witnessed a wedding – but it was a sad one. For some reason, the couple appeared to be wearing white and green clothes. When, the next Tuesday, we buried my mother next to her late husband, the significance of that dream became evident to me.
If heaven exists, I am sure it is one in which they have been reunited. Reader, when last I wrote this column, on April 3, 2024, I informed you that I would be taking a three-week break to complete the heavy teaching load at the School of Law, Makerere University.
It seems, like my dream, this might have been the universe warning me that I would need that time to nurse, and eventually bury, my mother – while at the same time also meeting my teaching obligations. You will forgive me that I found it necessary to take an additional week of rest and recuperation (to make a total of four weeks rather than the originally envisaged three).
In the column next week, I will address a separate reason for a different kind of grief I experienced in April: one arising from a 203-page decision – issued on April 3, 2024 by five justices of the Constitutional Court of Uganda – which, in my view, shredded several fundamental and core parts of the 1995 Constitution.
I will endeavour to explain why, in time, this decision will come to be recognized as one of the worst, if not the worst, ever rendered by the Constitutional Court of Uganda.
The writer is a senior lecturer and acting director of the Human Rights and Peace Centre (HURIPEC) at the School of Law, Makerere University, where he teaches Constitutional Law Legal Philosophy.
Source: The Observer
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