She Buried Her Children and Still Raised Us

This Mother’s Day, I honor my grandmother, Hajjati Mariam Nassozi, the woman we all called Musebeeyi.

My earliest memory of her is simple. I am on her back.

She ties me there the way many African women do, with a cloth pulled tight across her chest, my small body pressed against her spine.

I am crying, and she does not stop her work. She walks, she cooks, she moves through life, and somehow I quiet down. Her back is my first home.

It is the 1980s. War is moving through Uganda as Yoweri Museveni fights his way to power. Nights are not safe. People do not trust the dark. When word spreads that soldiers are near, families leave their homes and hide in the bushes.

I remember those nights.

Musebeeyi lifts me onto her back and walks into the darkness. The air is cold, the ground rough under her feet. When we reach the bushes, she spreads a cloth on the ground and lays me down. We sleep there, under the open sky, waiting for morning.

I remember going. I never remember coming back.

Maybe she always carries me home while I am deep asleep, when the danger has passed and the houses are safe again.

One night, we do not go.

Maybe there is no warning. Maybe the adults think it will be fine. We stay home. Musebeeyi is serving dinner when two armed men burst into the house. Their voices are sharp, fast, in Swahili. As children, we do not understand much. But one word cuts through everything.

Pesa. Money.

Musebeeyi does not panic. She unties the cloth belt around her waist, the one she uses as a wallet, and drops all the money onto the floor. The men pick it up, but they are not satisfied. They demand more.

She pleads with them in broken Swahili mixed with Luganda. “Pesa silina.” I have no more money.

She keeps saying it, her voice steady but desperate.

For a moment, everything hangs there. Then the men take what they have and leave. No one is hurt.

We survive.

By the 1990s, the war fades, but something else takes its place, HIV/AIDS. It moves quietly, but it destroys loudly. Almost every family loses someone.

Mine does.

My aunt Mama Jalia dies in April 1993. Mama Jamida follows in February 1997. Mama Safina dies in February 1998. Then my uncle Kojja Abdul in March 2001.

One by one, they go.

By the end of it, Musebeeyi has buried half of her children. My mother is the only daughter left. She still has four sons, but the loss is heavy, like a weight that never lifts.

And still, she keeps going.

She takes in the children her daughters left behind. She feeds them, clothes them, sends them to school.

She does this with almost nothing, just coffee from her garden and the hard life of peasant farming.

She does not stop there.

Even those of us who are not orphans depend on her. Whenever my mother struggles with school fees, Musebeeyi is the one she turns to.

I remember one moment clearly.

My mother goes to the village, worried about our fees. Musebeeyi sells her only cow to help us. Her only cow. The one thing that stands between survival and real hardship.

My uncles are not happy. They think it is too much. She already has too many orphan children to care for. Why should she sacrifice for us with parents too?

But that is who she is.

When life is hard, you go to your mother. And she never turns you away.

When I reach Senior Six, everything depends on my exams. If I pass well, I can get a government scholarship and go to university. If I fail, there is no backup plan.

I go to the village during the holidays. This time, Musebeeyi gives me special treatment.

While everyone else goes to the garden to farm, she tells me to study. Every morning, I carry my books and a 20-liter jerrycan and walk to the abandoned classrooms of Bukogolwa Secondary School. The rooms are empty, quiet, perfect for reading. I study for hours. After that, I fetch water from a nearby spring. That is my only chore.

My cousins are not pleased.

One evening, as we sit down to eat, one of them says, with sharp sarcasm, “Maybe those who do not work because they are reading should also wait to eat until they finish their exams.”

The message is clear.

But Musebeeyi stands by her decision.

When the holidays end, she prays for me, the same way she always does. Then she looks at me and says, “Read hard. Pass your exams. A free university education is important. Your mother cannot afford it.”

I listen.

I pass.

Years later, when my mother falls sick, Musebeeyi is there again. Always present. Always steady.

Doctors suspect cancer and recommend a biopsy. But both my mother and Musebeeyi refuse. They believe that once doctors cut into you, death follows. It is a belief shaped by what they have seen too many times.

As children, we want to trust medicine. We want to fight. But their decision is final. When my mother dies in July 2012, Musebeeyi breaks. She cries and says, “All along, I thought you would bury me. It is painful that I have to bury you too.”

No parent should have to say that.

The last time I see her is just before I leave for the United States.

She is weak. She has been in and out of the hospital. I tell her I am traveling. She asks me when I will come back.

I do not answer.

We both know the truth.

There is a silence between us, heavy and honest. Then she fills it the only way she knows how, with prayer.

“May Allah protect you wherever you go.”

I ask my wife to take a photo of us together. I know this is goodbye.

She dies in May 2017, three months after I arrive in the United States.

And even now, when I think of her, I do not see her lying in a hospital bed.

I see her walking.

I see her with a child tied to her back, moving forward through war, through loss, through hunger, through everything life throws at her.

She never stops.

This Mother’s Day, I remember her not just as my grandmother, but as the woman who carried all of us, on her back, in her hands, and in her heart.

— Yasin Kakande  

Author of The Missing Corpse