By Dilman Dila
It is November 2060. I celebrated my thirteenth birthday last week, and my mum gave me a camera as a gift. I’ve always wanted a camera, a proper one with a zoom lens with which to photograph birds. I fell in love with birds since it is my mother’s job to study them. We live on a hill way outside Kampala. Mum says that mostly the rich and the politically connected people live up on hills, since low-lying areas are prone to flooding and some suburbs of Kampala like Bwaise are permanently submerged, but we can live on a hill because Mum is a biotechnologist, tasked with looking after one of the few remaining forests, and studying the birds that appear in it at certain seasons.
Today, I’m going into the forest to find a sunbird. I’ve seen one fluttering around flowers, but I’ve never taken its photo. “It’s not really a forest,” jjajja told me yesterday. “When I was a young woman, way before I gave birth to your mother, forests had so many trees that they were dark and scary, and full of animals and birds.” This place is only a collection of trees, most of which were recently planted, but to me it is a forest, growing right next to a swamp that is being restored, and it has a lot of sunbirds. I have to get a good photo of one….
Ah! A bird flies onto a branch, and it makes me jump. It’s a big black bird, very big, with a red beak and a red ring around its eyes. Aah! What bird is this?! It’s so big it makes the turkeys jjajja keeps look like dwarfs. Is it really a bird, or some kind of spirit? My mouth goes dry in fear, but I’m thirteen now. I shouldn’t get scared of spirits. They exist only in jjajja’s stories. The thing I see in front of me is a bird, just a bird. A rare one. Quick, I take out my camera and snap, snap, snap.
Nope. I haven’t gotten a good picture. The branches, the leaves, hid it. And now, perhaps it has sensed that I’m taking its photos, for it jumps and flies away. Its wings make a big whoosh-whoosh sound as it races into the forest. Aha! I won’t let it go. I have to show it to Mama. I follow it, but then, one of jjajja’s stories comes to me. She is quite a storyteller, and one of her favorite stories is of a man who saw a beautiful bird and followed it into the forest. Only that the bird was a spirit and the man followed it into “the bush of ghosts”, where he got lost and never returned to the world of the living.
I stop for a moment, afraid to go on. But again, what jjajja said last night comes back. “It’s not really a forest.” It was planted recently, so this bird can’t be a spirit. It can’t lead me to the bush of ghosts, where only the dead and spirits exist. Besides, I’m thirteen years old! I’m no longer a child. I know every tree in this forest. I’ve been here countless times with my mother as she does her work. I can’t get lost. So I follow the bird into the woods.
It hops from tree to tree, and finally lands on the biggest tree in the forest. And the oldest. Way older than even the kingdom, for it is about a thousand years old. Mama says that they planted the other trees on this hill to protect it.
Jjajja calls it the Nakairu Tree, and she has told me so many stories about it. The one she repeats over and over again is that the tree was once a queen, the first ruler of the kingdom, who was tricked out of her throne when she married a crafty man. Out of sadness, she transformed into a tree. Since then only kings have ruled, but this tree is important in their coronation rituals, and so it has been preserved. In the past, medicinal plants grew around it, and healers came from all over the world to harvest. It is so big and tall that, from a distance, it looks like a hill of its own.
I like to play on this tree. It has eighteen ‘rooms’. Well, they are not really rooms like in a house, but that’s what jjajja calls them. The trunk has chambers, and in some parts the roots grew in such a way that they formed rooms, each room being a shrine and bearing a unique name. Jjajja is one reason that this tree has survived. She is a healer, and she said in her youth people worshiped at the tree and she would guide them. That has not happened in a long time.
Now, I see the bird walk to one of the shrines, the one jjajja calls Kibuuka, and I wonder about the name. Kibuuka means ‘flight’. This shrine used to be the most important, jjajja said, since kings sought blessings from it before going to war.
The bird pecks the ground with its long red beak, as if searching for something… perhaps for offerings. Perhaps it is indeed a spirit! My hands tremble as my finger presses the camera’s shutter button, and it clicks, and clicks, and the noise disturbs the bird. It stops pecking, and turns its eye at me. My bones freeze. We look at each other for a moment, and then the bird jumps into the air, its wings beating with that whoosh-whoosh sound, and off it escapes.
I check my camera. Yes! I got very many good shots of it! I’m the happiest child in the world! Yes!
I run back home, excited to show Mum the photo of the bird. She might want to know about it, since she is always looking for new birds in the forest. But Mum is busy in her lab working on seedlings, and when I come bumbling in, even before I can say anything, she snaps.
“Didn’t I tell you to knock before entering? Get out! Don’t come back!”
I want to argue, to show her my camera, but well, when she uses that tone, she might punish me by taking the camera away for a month. Maybe she has already seen this bird. I can’t risk angering her anymore, so I slink back toward the door.
“Sorry, Mum. I’m so sorry.” And I run back out. I’ll show it to her later.
The excitement continues to bubble inside me. I have to show someone this bird. I run to jjajja, who is dozing under the orange tree behind the house, and she won’t be happy when I wake her, but well, she isn’t like Mum. She doesn’t mind being disturbed at all. I fall to my knees beside her mat.
“Jjajja!” I shake her awake, and she opens her eyes with a scowl. She has no time to berate me for disturbing her siesta, for I shove the camera’s LCD screen at her. “Look!”
She comes fully awake on seeing the bird, and the way lights dance in her eyes, I know the photo stirs memories in her.
“The black stork,” she says. “He has returned!”
“Returned?” I say. “Who?”
She struggles to her feet, and I think I can hear her bones creaking. She takes her walking cane and staggers into the house, leaving me with more questions. Is the bird indeed a spirit? Is that what she is talking about? Jjajja, after all, looks after the shrines, and the way the bird went straight to the Nakairu Tree, straight to the Kibuuka shrine…. Oh!
She has given me a clue, a name. The black stork. I run to my room, and turn on my computer, and search the internet, for surely there would be tons of information about this bird. I’ll soon know if it is indeed a spirit… Aah. Not a spirit. Just a migratory bird.
Back in the day before the big rains came, it would fly all the way from Europe, escaping the cold of winter, and nest in many parts of the country, especially around Lake Victoria. Then countries in Europe and America emitted a lot of carbon into the air, and that caused the big rains, and the lake rose and swallowed up a quarter of Kampala, and then the migratory birds stopped coming because the shores and wetlands they called home at the end of every year were no more. Their absence contributed to the further devastation of the ecosystem around the lake. Today, part of Mum’s work is to restore the balance of nature in this area. Perhaps a semblance of the old world is back, perhaps the flood waters have receded enough that the migrant birds can again make homes here, and that is why the black stork has returned?
Out of the window, I see jjajja carrying a small pot into the forest.
I jump off my seat and run after her. It’s not too hard to catch up for she walks real slow. She doesn’t say anything when she sees me, though I was afraid she would tell me not to follow her. She reaches the tree, and goes right to the Kibuuka shrine. I frown. I never told her that the bird went to this shrine… and I had only shown her an extreme close-up photo, in which the telephoto lens blurred the background beyond recognition. There is no way she would know where the bird had pecked the ground, but somehow, she knew, and now she stands at the shrine, right where the bird stood, and she pokes at the ground with her cane, the same way the bird poked with its beak. She scoops some strange things out of her pot. They look like crumbs of millet bread, and she scatters them on the ground. I look up the trees, expecting the black bird to return and eat the offering.
“Did I ever tell you about Kibuuka,” jjajja says. I turn back to her, and she is smiling with her toothless gum. My muscles tense, for I know a great story is coming. “He was a great warrior who could fly….”
She sits down on the grass, to tell the story properly, and I sit down beside her, eager to consume it.
Dilman Dila is a Ugandan writer, filmmaker, and social activist. He is the author of a collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun. He is currently working on his debut sci-fi novel, Dreams of a Yellow Balloon. He has been listed in several prestigious prizes, including the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2013), and the Short Story Day Africa prize (2013, 2014). His short fiction have featured in several magazines and anthologies.
Let’s Follow up
- What is happening in the story?
- Who is being affected by the story?
- Can you identify the aim of the main character?
- What outcome or change has been depicted in the story?
- Can you separate fact from fiction in the story?
- Pick a minor character mentioned in the story and imagine what they were doing on the same day.
- Describe the future as depicted in the story. Imagine that you work for a local newspaper in the future depicted by the story. What recent stories have you covered? Write a couple of headlines.
- Describe the new terms, ideas and situations that you have picked from the story.
- What are the real world inspirations and scenarios that the writer used to tell the story?
- Describe the steps by which such a future could come about, starting from now.
Kampala Yénkya 