Tombstones and Banana Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

would get banana leaves and bend them over to make a small canopy that we would all sleep under. At least we were safe from this predator, even if we were exposed to many others: cobras, hyenas, jackals.
    If we were at home and my father came back but did not want to beat us, he might want us to sing for him. He would wake us in the middle of the night and demand that we sing him to sleep. It could take a long time, and even after he did eventually pass out we would sleep around him because if he woke up and noticed that we had stopped we would have to start up again quickly or suffer the consequences.
    It must be said that, if a man behaved like this today in Uganda, the police would arrest him. But in those days, there was little that anyone would do. My mother begged the local leaders to intervene, but they never helped. In their eyes this was just a case of a man doing what men did, and of a Rwandese woman having an over-inflated sense of her own self-worth.
    She thought about taking us back to Rwanda, but life was getting even harder for Tutsis back there, and no matter how cruel the beatings, they were better than the threat of death by a machete-wielding mob. It was not until 1999 that I first went back to Rwanda, in search of any of my mother’s relatives. I could not find a single one.
    And so we had no choice but to endure the abuses of my father. I still do not know quite what caused his bile, but his rage was horrific. It was not limited to physical acts either. He also employed verbal violence, using abusive language all the time. Those sorts of words delivered to a child can really affect self-esteem, and for us they added emotional insult to physical injury. I still tell people that in those days it was as if he had a degree in Teargasology: Just as he proved when he staged the dramatic rejection of us by the pickup trucks, he was capable of unleashing verbal bombs that would leave us stunned and in tears, almost completely helpless. It created chronic negativity, and it took me years to begin to recover. Later the physical and emotional abuse were joined by financial abuse. Despite the fact that we were trying to live without salt, sugar, or school fees, our father would be drinking every day.
    We prayed in those days. We prayed for him to die. The government cared for widows and orphans, but we did not count. My father was there in body, even though he was financially and emotionally useless. We used to feel jealous when we heard about other children losing their parents, and we dreamed of the day when we could bury him. You must know that he tried to kill me before I was born, aiming drunken kicks at my mother’s pregnant belly. Nine times during her pregnancy my mother lost blood. Nine times she thought I was dead. He even refused to give my mother money to travel to the hospital, leaving her no choice but to squat beneath the banana trees and hope that from her bruised belly would come a healthy boy.
    There is a proverb from Nigeria: If your face is swollen from the beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
    Perhaps I might agree with this a little more today, but as my father’s rage, drinking, and number of wives increased, smiling was the last thing we were going to do. By the time I was six my sisters and I knew he was getting out of control, and his attacks on our mother were particularly savage. We realized that if they were allowed to continue, then she would surely end up dead. And where would that leave us? We would either be killed too or thrown out of our home and left to take our chances in the wild. Either way, we knew that our mother was the only person on earth who could protect us. We must protect her as well.
    We made a pact that if it appeared that her life was in danger, we would do all we could to step in. This might not seem like a controversial plan today, but in our culture, in those times, a child who fought his parent was an abomination of nature. We had