Celebration of female voices

There were as many questions about identity which, in many ways, dissected information around appreciating one in their skin; people talked about many things that included sexuality, feminism or what made one a man and a woman.

It was about that time that Crossroads came out.

Crossroads is a story collection edited by Christopher Conte, a writer, editor and journalist that had in the past lived in Uganda and considers it a second home.

What made the book such a collectors’ pick was the fact that it is a documentation of life by 14 different Ugandan female writers.  

And they were from different backgrounds, most of them were former or practising journalists at the time the book was published which made their scope of life experience even broader.

Think about Shifa Mwesigye, then a reporter at The Observer sharing experiences of facing a senga who is attempting to keep alive an ancient Ugandan tradition. 

Her story is a single day experience with one Senga Hamidah, she is not your ordinary senga, she’s a professional one whose services had to be paid for.

Of course, the story was already showing you that Crossroads generally is documenting a woman in the 2010s that was trying to move with the times but somehow had to do all it took to stay in touch with their values and norms.

This theme of a woman at crossroads in one way or another is very present in many of these stories, yet this was not something they were intending to highlight, in fact, the book cover clearly suggests that these were supposed to be stories of a Ugandan woman coming of age.

Nevertheless, they presented that woman coming of age in many different ways; for instance, the story that opens the book is Nakisaze Segawa’s My Name. Nakisaze is one writer or Ugandan that raises eyebrows a number of times, and at times it is not really about her writing, but her names. With two Luganda names, she walks into places and at least a person or two will question if she has an English name.  

Her story My Name is exactly about this topic, people expecting her to have an English name or looking at her like she has forgotten some vital information. She wonders whether one can be Christian or Muslim without necessarily borrowing names from their worlds.

Nakisaze’s story is a continental story that many Africans regardless of gender can relate with; it is an African conundrum that people regardless of beliefs are expected to have some sort of a foreign name to identify them with at least a religious denomination.

But she still drives the point home when she talks about an experience at a hospital where one of the attendants insisted that their computers are set to accept an English name and a local one - she goes on and on about her exchange with the lady.

The confusion in Nakisaze’s story is a fact that she doesn’t seem to get support from those around her, in fact, she gets a lot of ridicule with one of the people in line asking her if she practises witchcraft.

Well, the deeper meaning to her experience is that many of us even when we pretend to appreciate Africanacity and all that, we draw a lot of our identification from what the colonial masters set.

We relate with it so much that nothing else really matters, for instance, in her case, she was easily judged for not having an English name, in a snap, she was a witch, yet on another day, the people that judged her would interface with a real witch doctor, but since they will have an English fancy name, they would not suspect them.

The genesis of Crossroads is an interesting one, apparently, Conte was in Uganda for work in 2008. It is at this time that he met another journalist, Lydia Namubiru and they started sharing stories; the result was collecting stories by different people that were like hers. 

Conte says his goal was to present culture through autobiography - “I had no interest in producing yet another travelogue in which an outsider would dissect Africa, and the authors wanted no part in any attempt to fit African stories to stereotypes that depict the continent as long suffering and helpless,” Conte writes in his introduction.  

Different writers joined the project and at the end of it all, the result was Crossroads, a collection of 15 stories.

Crossroads offers some of the best from Uganda’s literary world at the moment with writers such as Harriet Anena, Rosey Sembatya, Namubiru, Hilda Twongyeirwe, Laura Walusimbi, Segawa and Sophie Bamwoyeraki .

Crossroads, the title story was done by Carol Ariba, then a health reporter. It isn’t surprising that her story partly happens in a remote health centre, where she found a young woman also  had given birth to her fifth child in six years - the sad part is that this wasn’t the last baby she was having. Her crisis was that all her five children were girls and she wanted to have a boy, thus was going to keep trying or else, her and the girls would inherit nothing.

In the story, Ariba talks about her own crossroad,  she says, for less privileged women that only live by the culture, being educated is a dream. This is the belief that with education, you have jumped the bullet of culture, much of which is skewed against women.

She wonders if she indeed jumped the bullet while she is more privileged than the new mother, in many ways, their fate  could be the same.

“The only way I can ever own my father’s property is if my brothers let me, since they own all the land that previously was passed on to my father by his father.”

Ariba tries to compare her situation with that of the woman in hospital, looking at how one day she could fail to give her future husband a son and probably even when he will be an educated man himself, he will not force her to have as many children but will probably look for a son elsewhere.

Generally, Ariba says,  regardless of the education and what many women achieve in life, many and very many at that can never separate themselves from the same cultures that seem to violate them which leaves many of them at crossroads.