Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Quotes

• “men doing all they could to keep women as migrants on land.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Once we shrunk, men had to look after us, and it was not long before they started to own us. Fathers sold daughters; husbands bought wives. Once we became a commodity, men could do whatever they wished with us. Even now our bodies do not belong to us. That is why when they need it, they will grab it. Things were so bad in some cultures, women had to be hidden away to protect them, in separate spaces where no men were allowed. Soon, they had to be spoken for by men.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “But the Bible says that God created Adam and Eve in his own image.’ ‘If he created them in his own image,’ Nsuuta snapped, ‘then afterwards Adam re-created Eve in his own image, one that suited him.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Remember, be a good person, not a good girl. Good girls suffer a lot in this life.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Stories are critical, Kirabo. The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “I told you Grandfather is easy. Tom, I mean my father, is the same: they don’t put barriers against me. It is Grandmother, it is always other women, apart from you, who put up barriers against girls and on themselves. I know men can be tyrants, but a lot of women are nasty to women – everybody says it, unless you have not met Jjajja Nsangi, Grandfather’s sister.’ ‘Kirabo, have you seen God come down from heaven to make humans behave?’ ‘No.’ ‘That is because some people have appointed themselves his police. And I tell you, child, the police are far worse than God himself. That is why the day you catch your man with another woman, you will go for the woman and not him. My grandmothers called it kweluma. That is when oppressed people turn on each other or on themselves and bite. It is as a form of relief. If you cannot bite your oppressor, you bite yourself.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Often, what women do is a reaction. We react like powerless people. Remember kweluma?”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “But on the ground, history looks nothing like this clash of nations and empires and states, however true and valid such stories may be on their terms; on the ground, history is the accumulated prejudices, hopes, and superstitions that we carry even if we don’t understand how we acquired them, everything we don’t know that makes us who we are. History is a fabric of memories and fear and forgetting, of longing and nostalgia, of invention and re-creation. History is bunk, and sometimes it’s a good thing it is.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Kirabo’ – Gayi’s voice was soft – ‘you cannot sit like men. Always kneel. You will not offend anyone that way.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “After Independence, Uganda -- A European artefact -- was still forming as a country rather than a kingdom in the minds of ordinary Gandas. They were lulled by the fact that Kabaka Muteesa II was made president of the new Uganda. Nonetheless most of them felt that 'Uganda' should remain a kingdom for the Ganda under their kabaka so that things would go back to the way things were before the Europeans came. Uganda was a patchwork of fifty or so tribes. The Ganda did not want it. The union of tribes brought no apparent advantage to them apart from a deluge of immigrants from wherever, coming to Kampala to take their land. Meanwhile, the other fifty or so tribes looked on flabbergasted as the British drew borders and told them that they were now Ugandans. Their histories, cultures and identities were overwritten by the mispronounced name of an insufferably haughty tribe propped above them. But to the Ganda, the reality of Uganda as opposed to Buganda only sank in when, after independence, Obote overran the kabakas lubiri with tanks, exiling Muteesa and banning all kingdoms. The desecration of their kingdom by foreigners paralyzed the Ganda for decades.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “In the media, an avalanche of negative images of an Africa quickly sinking into anarchy so soon after independence overwhelmed him. Horror stories were broadcast with glee and broke the resolve of so many black activists.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values shunning westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern the vivid colours of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Handicap,’ she said eventually, like it was a diagnosis. ‘This girl grew up in that deep, deep patriarchy which trembles in the presence of the Mighty Vagina.’ The Bunsens caught their breaths at the V word, but Kana did not pause. ‘A patriarchy that cannot make up its mind whether to fall on its knees in worship of the gateway into the world or to flee the crisis, the orgasmic paroxysms.’ ‘Watch it, Kana, that kind of mwenkanonkano is radical.’ ‘Any mwenkanonkano is radical. Talk about equality and men fall in epileptic fits.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Like a car accident.’ Tom’s wife’s voice. ‘I made it clear right from the start; I’m not bringing up children who are not mine, full stop. Look at Mother. Every time Father took a walk, he came back with a child. Mother reared them all. But what has she gained beside ingratitude? Me, I’m not. Besides, you accept one child today, tomorrow he brings another. Not me. It is me, my children, full stop.”

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• “Aunt Abi shuffled to the edge of her sofa in earnest. ‘Look, Kirabo, don’t delude yourself. Everything about us, our entire world, is built on how men react to us. So yes, in that respect we elongate because men can be inept. They are also supposed to guide them to the bean if you are still dry. Child, never let a man rush you. Tell him I am not ready, show him how to use his member to whip the labia, slow and gentle at first, then fast. Within a minute, you are ready. If you land on the kind of husband who does not know what to do, pack your bags and come home – hmm, hmm. An inept husband is a life sentence.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “It was true. Aunt YA took the whole thing of being a woman too seriously. She was extremely married. Her whole being revolved around pleasing her husband so he did not cheat on her. She distrusted maids. They came to work and to steal husbands. She made hers wear ugly uniforms, no jewellery or make-up on the job and certainly no sitting on her sofa. If Aunt YA sat with her husband in their car and they gave a lift to a man, she left the passenger seat for the man so not to emasculate him, while she sat in the back. Everyone at Miiro’s knew the car belonged to her. They knew she paid her children’s school fees but made them thank her husband. He behaved like a petty”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “And did all the women shrink?’ Kirabo steered Nsuuta away from Grandmother. ‘With that kind of perversion, who would not shrink? Who would want to be huge, or loud, or brave, or any of the other characteristics men claim to be male? We hunched, lowered our eyes, voices, acted feeble, helpless. Even being clever became unattractive. Soon, being shrunken became feminine. Then it became beautiful and women aspired to it. That was when we began to persecute our original state out of ourselves.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “Unlike Giibwa’s parents, who did not monitor her, Grandmother had kept Kirabo close to her elbow for the past year. Whenever Kirabo left the house to go anywhere, she had to be in the company of other family members. She was at that perilous age where if a girl talked to a boy, grown-ups panicked: ‘Eh, eeeh, that girl does not fear men.’ Thus, girls performed outrage when a boy spoke to them.”

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• “When women bite themselves because they are powerless.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “It means he’s read a lot of books.’ ‘Listen to that, a doctor of books! What use is that to this village?”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “I fight with the boys – they don’t pass the ball to me and I throw them off my grandfather’s pitch. I hate chores, I hate kneeling and I cannot stand babies. Sometimes I feel squeezed inside this body as if there is no space. That is when one of me flies out.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “For knowing and refusing to know.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “poverty and wealth were constructs after all. Rural poverty was different from urban poverty.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “But then again,’ she sighed, ‘with well-off people, you never know where their privilege first came from. Often someone bled, someone sweated, someone cried or died to make them rich. That is what my father says.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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• “You are a girl, Kirabo,’ as if the world could forget. ‘A woman breaks, my child. Don’t stiffen yourself. I see hardness in your eyes, Kirabo. Don’t be like your Aunt Abi. A woman’s knees bend. Even when your man is wrong you allow him to be right. The women you see without marriages are the stiff ones.”

  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

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