Every Maid

Saawa ya kola —Fred Sebatta

I
These lazy maids! she cursed. The madam, Esther Nambi, woke up this morning and her husband, Geoffrey Olupot, was gone to work. These were the gendered roles of factory work: He went to one factory, and she stayed at another. Except most people did not say that the factory at home supported the other factory where all the men went for the day. Who fed the men? Bathed them? Clothed them? Cleaned the sweat off their backs? That morning the live-in maid did not alert the madam that her husband had already gotten out of bed and hastily left the house to go to work, and the madam was now bitter because her husband drove to work that morning having spoiled the child’s doll. So what will baby Martha do without her doll? These lazy maids! she cursed. Martha will cry all day long and disturb me.

II
The coming of a maid is a ritual. Some say that the family waits patiently in the living room to inspect the maid. Others say that the maid arrives unannounced and without pretext. The home produces maids – as in a factory, the home finds its division of labor, its factory workers and supervisors. In the factory, she will become part of the family album.

When Judith Namala arrived early that evening at Esther Nambi and Geoffrey Olupot’s home in Ntinda-Kiwatule, a suburb in Kampala, they were not expecting the kind of meticulously dressed woman with a model’s face who walked in. She appeared like Diouana, a character invented by Ousmane Sembene: a Black girl sauntering elegantly into her white madam’s house.

Judith Namala wore her hair in neat cornrows, which she partially covered over with a silk headscarf. She wore a long floor-length maxi skirt, and a bright pink flowing blouse. Judith Namala arrived at the house at night rather than during the day because, as per ritual, both the husband and wife are to be present at the arrival of the maid.

Judith Namala sat down in a manner that proved that she was raised by parents in a home and not like a malnourished dog feeding in a rubbish heap. The way to kneel in Buganda, the society she came from, is to kneel without clumsily falling over onto one side, and without holding onto anything for support as you slowly descend to the floor. You should kneel with care and make a slight movement with the lowering of your eyes to acknowledge the presence of those to whom you would like to give respect. Judith Namala’s kneeling was without falling to either side. Her kneeling was refined. It was the mark of style and elán. Judith Namala sat neatly on the woven sisal mat without planting either of her forearms in a way that faces outward and shows the inside of the elbow, the cubital fossa. She sat for what seemed like an eternity. Her spine was as sharp as a needle. It was the act of a gymnast or competitive athlete. She was barely a woman, but the children would come to call Judith Namala auntie. When she appeared in the family album she would be sitting on the woven sisal mat eating with the children, their cousin and the cousins’ maids. Her madam Esther Nambi would sit in the upholstered chair with the real aunties—the blood relatives.

III
Every maid is a reflection of her madam
Every maid is created by her madam’s economic need

Every maid will become her madam
She will become the madam she swore never to become

When she grows up, a maid will leave her home
And go into the house of a stranger

Every circumstance in a maid’s life will
bring her to this moment

Every maid wants to be head of household
Every maid dreams of taking over her master’s house

IV
A madam is a woman with a busy schedule. A madam has a schedule and a garden. The madam is self-aware: She knows that having a maid is really about playing madam, like Zukiswa Wanner tells us. The madam is a play. Its main character shuttles between the various rooms of the home and the cultivated patch of land in her backyard. The maid is also a character in this play, though her role seems hidden. She is not at center stage. She is offstage and occasionally haunts the set of the play. She brings about the moral of the story. A Greek chorus. A ghost rising up to haunt the home. Where the story takes a sudden turn.

V
It is seven in the morning. Ntinda-Kiwatule is already buzzing with people trying to get to work—you can hear the cars honking and swooshing by on the tarmac outside their home. Judith Namala at this point has already gotten the breakfast going and is setting the table. She prepares some millet porridge as usual, with some African tea. She lays the table, giving the children their metal enamel cups called gammas and placing the porridge into plastic bowls. She brings two flasks (one for porridge and one for African tea) and places them on the table for Geoffrey Olupot and madam Esther to serve themselves. The breakfast is accompanied by escorts, a colloquial term, of steamed muwogo, or cassava, and lumonde, or sweet potatoes, Tip Top bread and Blueband margarine. The children, Tendo and Awuor, rush to spread their Tip Top white bread slices with margarine. Judith Namala then sits down on a sisal mat laid on the floor next to the table. She holds baby Martha and feeds her with a bottle. The entire family eats in silence. Then all at once Geoffrey Olupot declares: “Saawa ya kola!”

VI
When Judith Namala had retired from doing house chores in the late afternoon, and sometimes in the early evening, she would go outside to smoke taaba—tobacco leaves wrapped in thin paper. The house had an area for smoking in the backyard, next to the small patch of land on which Esther Nambi would keep her fruit-bearing matooke, or green bananas, as well as her yams (she had a variety, including a rare white yam called balugu) and ebijanjaalo (beans, a staple) and muwogo (cassava, another staple). It was a tradition: Every young woman once she entered into her own home would secure a patch of land to grow food.

Relatives would warn Esther Nambi to care for her garden by clearing the kikolo, or banana root, and by covering over any roots with dried leaves so as not to provoke the curiosity and ire of witches who would take advantage and leave hostile spirits in her garden.

Judith Namala, though a country girl, took up smoking once she arrived in the city. It was a habit she started in her teen years during the ’80s. The three-bedroom house had one back door that led to the yard and garden patch, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The kitchen greeted everyone from the front. It was as though the architect had wanted the entire family to enter the house through the kitchen, an unusual design decision that went against convention. A parlor room usually came first, facing the front and welcoming guests.

In the madam’s house, one room was for the children (where the maid slept), and another for Esther Nambi and Geoffrey Olupot, as well as a guest bedroom. Like most of the houses in the Ntinda-Kiwatule area, Esther Nambi’s house was made of bricks and red-tiled roofing. Wooden beams in a raised ceiling kept the house cool on hot days. The veranda had short, white concrete columns, colloquially called pompeii, a reference to classical Greco-Roman building. Like most homes, this building had a gate that was larger than life. The gate had spikes at the top. When Geoffrey Olupot honked his horn at the gate, Judith Namala opened the metal doors outward. Geoffrey Olupot would not smile at her, as it was said that smiling at the maid was a sign of mal-intent.

VII
The Baganda had a strict cosmology. In this cosmology, plants played an important role. Young women like Esther Nambi, despite their Christian missionary education, were often inclined to grow a garden of food. If a young woman did not grow food, she was often looked down upon. In her home, Esther Nambi would grow matooke rather than the mbidde, which bore only seeds. This latter plant would be found in the home of a father of twins. It was considered auspicious, as it brought wealth to such men. Buganda society collectively maintained the diversity of the banana plant. This varied greatly from the large-scale industrial farming of bananas in northern Colombia and Ecuador, which specialized in only one type of banana. Had Esther Nambi been a bit more adventurous she might have grown gonja, or plantain, in her small garden behind her house in Ntinda-Kiwatule. She could have grown ndiizi, which is a smaller kind of yellow banana. As her relatives told Esther Nambi, extreme caution was exercised in a garden to avoid the ire of witches. For example, if you left your plants untended, the dried banana leaves and uprooted roots and cut stems strewn about in a disorderly manner, you were prone to receive what you were looking for. Witches would come to your garden and perform rituals with these discarded parts, as if teaching you a lesson in tending to your garden. It was a lesson for which you paid dearly.

VIII
In the kitchen, Esther Nambi shows Judith Namala the various electrical appliances. While Judith Namala indeed came from Masaka town, she at the very least knew how to operate basic electric appliances. This is called a blender. We use it to make juice. Now, watch me and let me show you how to use it. Firstly, wash these mangoes and passion fruits. Esther Nambi said this, pointing to a heap of fruit on the countertop. Secondly, peel and cut the mangoes into small cubes and cut open the passion fruit and scoop out the juicy seeds. Thirdly, empty the peeled fruit into the blender and switch it on like so. Esther Nambi turned on the blender, which immediately made a loud screeching noise. Judith Namala, having never heard the sound of a blender, jumped up in terror: “Mama nyabo!” she cried out. “Miss mother!” She ran out the kitchen door holding up her skirt so she wouldn’t trip and fall on her way out. Esther Nambi laughed out loud. She said, “Ekyaalo kijja ku kugwaamu.” Soon the village will leave your body.

Whenever this was said, it was not meant as a compliment. It was worse than: You speak good English. It was said to remind whoever was addressed that they were closer to barbarism than to civilization. If they were not careful, they would easily slip back. It was as if Esther Nambi did not know the saying “You can take me out of the hood but you can’t take the hood out of me.” Or, as the English idiom goes: Once a villager, always a villager. Esther Nambi found Judith Namala hiding in the children’s bedroom, where she slept on the lower deck of a three-decker bed and the children on the top two levels. “Auntie Esther n’ekanze nnyo,” she said. (Judith Namala called Esther Nambi auntie, addressing her as children addressed her.) Judith Namala’s terror was so intense that she was visibly sweating. Esther Nambi, by now having realized that this was not comedy, told Judith Namala to calm down. The blender was incapable of murder. Soon enough, she would get used to the sound.

IX
The home is a factory. An itinerary for household work may include: (1) Daily washing of the car at 6-6:30 a.m., because the roads are dusty in Kampala and the car will be covered in dirt each day; (2) preparing millet porridge and black or African tea (made with cinnamon, cardamom and milk) for a family of five or more for breakfast; (3) ironing the school uniforms for the children (this is done between ages four and ten, after which the children can iron their own clothes); (4) mopping the house floors (often by hand); (5) doing the laundry (often by hand); (6) sweeping the yard (usually with a long broom); (7) preparing lunch (and packing it in heated flasks) and delivering the lunch to Geoffrey Olupot’s office in Old Kampala; (8) returning home from a long commute to give the children lunch, if the live-in domestic worker has not picked them up from school; (9) taking dry clothes off the clothesline; (10) ironing bedsheets, ready for the madam to make her own bed, and making the children’ s bed, where she also sleeps; (11) serving dinner; (12) cleaning up after dinner; (13) guarding the home against thieves, thugs or break-ins at night. Such a factory often requires four live-in domestic workers, including an askari, a house boy, a house girl and a nanny.

During those rare occasions when she was finished with her chores and had nothing to do but carry her own fingers, Judith Namala liked to smoke her taaba next to the pawpaw tree. It had ridges in the trunk and was tall enough that she could lean on it. In those cool evenings, Ntinda-Kiwatule would cool down like a pot that’s been set down from the clay cuisinère, black with soot. Sometimes this place felt like that. Judith Namala longed somehow for a reprieve from Esther Nambi’s house, from Mr. Olupot and their children, but she knew that her reprieve was not coming until the end of year. Then she would finally return to Masaka and see her mother, her grandmother and her sweet baby girl.