Item 2: Get Into Makerere

2. Get into Makerere. (Not Kyambogo. Not "any university." MAKERERE.)

I underlined MAKERERE twice and boxed it, which is the stationery version of shouting. The parenthesis tells you I had already heard the adults' fallback speech, the one that begins "Even if it's not Makerere, there are other good universities," and had decided at twelve that I would not be needing it. I have since met women who went to Kyambogo and are running ministries, NGOs and at least one very terrifying school. At twelve I did not know these women. I knew one hill in Kampala with an ivory tower on it, and I knew it was mine.

What I did not know was that for about three years in the middle, I would behave as if I had never heard of it.

You already know I was not always the girl in the exercise book. Somewhere between Senior Two and Senior Five I put that book in the bottom of a suitcase under a pair of sandals I had outgrown, and I became a different project. The project involved a skirt I rolled at the waist the moment I passed the school gate, a borrowed phone hidden inside a hollowed-out Oxford dictionary (an act of literary vandalism I still apologise for), and a group of girls who believed, as I did, that the rules were a rough draft.

I want to be fair to that girl, because nobody else was. She was not wild in the way the aunties described. She did not smoke. She did not drink, much. She mostly wanted to be in rooms where something was happening, and school was a room where nothing happened except Physics. Her grades slid quietly, the way a car rolls backwards on a hill when someone forgets the handbrake: slow, then less slow, then a teacher shouting.

The shouting came in the second term of Senior Five, on a Saturday night, at a place called something like Club Oasis that was neither a club nor an oasis but a hall behind a petrol station in Mukono with a speaker the size of a wardrobe. Four of us had walked out through the gap in the fence behind the girls' dormitory, the gap every student knew about and every teacher pretended not to, and we had danced to the same three Bebe Cool songs for two hours. We came back at one in the morning to find the gap occupied by the deputy headmistress, a torch, and the school matron in her nightdress, holding a stick she did not need because the deputy's face was doing the job.

We were sent home for two weeks. "Sent home" is the official phrase. What it means is that your parent receives a phone call from a school that charges fees she can barely pay, telling her to come and collect the child who has been wasting them.

Mama came on the Monday.

I had prepared a defence. Of course I had. I had rehearsed it in the sick bay where they kept us so we would not contaminate the obedient. The defence had three parts: everyone does it; it was only dancing; the deputy headmistress has always hated me because I corrected her pronunciation of "epitome" in Senior Three (all true, and none of it the point).

Mama signed the book at the deputy's office. She said, "Thank you, madam," in her church voice. She carried my suitcase herself, though I reached for it, and she walked ahead of me to the stage where the Mukono taxis loaded.

She said nothing in the taxi. Nothing at the Old Taxi Park, where she bought me a rolex because it was past lunch and she does not let people go hungry even when she cannot look at them. Nothing on the boda from the stage to our gate. I held the rolex in its polythene bag the whole way and did not eat it.

At home she put the suitcase in my room, went into her bedroom, and closed the door.

I stood in the sitting room for a while. Then I did what children do when the punishment refuses to arrive: I went looking for it. I knocked. No answer. I opened the door a little.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed with a school-fees exercise book open on her knees. I knew the book. Every family I knew had one: a counter book or a Picfare where somebody wrote down what was paid, to whom, and what was still owed. Hers was the red one from the kitchen drawer. She was not crying. She had a pen in her hand and she was adding something up, and as I watched she crossed a number out, wrote a smaller one under it, and then sat looking at the smaller number with the pen resting on the page.

She looked up and saw me. She closed the book. She said, "Your food is in the bag. Eat it before it gets cold."

That was all. I went back to the sitting room and ate the rolex, which was already cold.

That night I unpacked the suitcase, which nobody had told me to do. Under the sandals, under a jumper that no longer fitted, was the blue Picfare. I had not opened it in maybe three years. The cover still said MY LIFE PLAN in capitals, underlined three times, in a pen that had not faded at all, which felt like an accusation.

I opened it at the kitchen table, under the bulb that buzzes, and read item two.

Then I did something I had not done since Senior One. I took out my Senior Five timetable and a ruler and a Bic, and I drew a grid on a clean page at the back: days down the side, hours across the top, five in the morning to eleven at night. I filled every box. I gave myself forty minutes for meals and twenty for bathing, which tells you I was seventeen and had never met a realistic estimate. In the box for Saturday night I wrote, in capitals, NO.

I wrote it in pen. Obviously. Pencil was for people who weren't sure.

I didn't tell Mama what I was doing. I didn't decide anything, exactly. I just woke up at five the next morning because the grid said five, and sat at the kitchen table with my Biology notes, and when Mama came out at six to boil water, she stopped in the doorway and looked at me for a long moment, and then filled the kettle and made two cups of tea instead of one.

She put mine beside my notes without a word. I drank it without a word. We did this for thirteen mornings.

When I went back to school I became someone my former friends found genuinely alarming.

I am going to describe the next eighteen months briefly, because the details are boring, and that was rather the point. I moved my bed in the dormitory to the corner furthest from the gap in the fence. I sat in the front row, a place I had previously considered reserved for prefects and people who would one day become pastors. I gave the hollowed-out dictionary back to its owner with the phone inside and an apology. I learned the Krebs cycle so thoroughly that I can still recite it, which has come up exactly never.

I made rules. I was good at rules, it turned out, as long as I was the one writing them. No outings unless they were on the school calendar. No borrowed phones. No new friends who smelled of trouble, a smell I believed I could detect at forty metres. No conversations after lights out that were not about Chemistry. I treated temptation like a pothole on Entebbe Road: you do not need to understand it, you just steer around it and keep going.

My grades came back up the hill, faster than they had rolled down.

The girls from Club Oasis stopped asking me to things. One of them called me Pastor for a whole term, and I let her, because I had calculated that Pastor was a small price for a place at the top of the class list. I would do the same calculation many times later in my life, in different currencies. At the time it seemed like simple arithmetic. You subtract the distractions; what remains is the result.

You know this girl, I think. Maybe you were her. The girl who discovers that discipline works and decides, quite reasonably, that it is the answer to everything. She is not wrong yet. That is what makes her dangerous. I have looked back at those eighteen months many times, hunting for the mistake, and I keep not finding one. I worked. The work worked. The equation balanced on every page.

Mama noticed. She did not make speeches about it; she is not a speech woman. But when I came home for holidays there was always meat on Sunday whether or not it was a meat week, and once I heard her on the phone to my aunt in Masaka saying, in a voice she thought I couldn't hear, "This one has woken up." I went into the bathroom and smiled at the mirror for longer than was normal.

I sat my A-Levels in the hall where we had once been made to kneel for talking, and I walked out of my last paper, General Paper, and sat on the steps and laughed. Not about anything. Just the big, loud laugh I used to have, the one that made people at the next table turn around. I had not done it in a while. It came out of me like something released from a box.

Then there was the waiting.

If you did not grow up in Uganda you may not know about the admission lists, so let me tell you. The government sponsorship list for Makerere came out each year, and it was not delivered to you personally, like a wedding invitation. It was released into the national atmosphere. It appeared in the New Vision and the Monitor in pages of tiny print. It went up on noticeboards at the university. And, in my year, it went up on the Makerere website, which responded to the attention of an entire country of anxious teenagers and their mothers by doing what Makerere's website has always done under pressure: it collapsed.

The rumour reached me on a Thursday afternoon. A cousin texted: LIST IS OUT. Four words, all capitals, no punctuation. My heart did something unmedical.

I had a small Tecno phone with a cracked corner and a data bundle I had bought with money I was supposed to spend on airtime for the whole month. I typed in the web address. The page loaded the Makerere logo, the blue and the gold, and then a white void with a little circle going round and round.

I refreshed.

The circle went round.

I refreshed. I sat on the back step. I stood up and walked to the gate, because I had read somewhere that network was stronger near gates, which is not a fact. I held the phone above my head like it was a newborn I was showing to the village. I went back to the step. I refreshed.

At one point the page loaded half a list, alphabetical, and cut off at a surname beginning with B. My surname does not begin with B. I read the Bs anyway, all of them, as if I might be hiding among them under an alias.

I refreshed.

The battery said 40 per cent. Then 23. I turned the brightness down so far I had to cup the screen with my hand to see it. The circle went round in the dark. Mama came out once to tell me the beans were ready, looked at my face, and went back inside and covered the saucepan.

At 4 per cent I got a page. Not a list; a page that said the list was available as a PDF, with a link. I pressed the link. The phone thought about it. A little bar began to crawl across the top of the screen, the way the old download bars used to, a millimetre at a time, the most suspenseful object in East Africa.

At 2 per cent I said, aloud, to the phone, "Please."

At 1 per cent the bar was nearly at the end.

Then the screen went black, and stayed black, and I sat there holding a small warm rectangle of nothing.

I want to tell you I laughed. I did not laugh. I sat on the step and something closed up in my chest like a fist, and for maybe five minutes I could not think of a single other future. Not Kyambogo, not a private university, not a year of retakes, not anything. There was one door, and I could not see whether it had opened.

I plugged the phone in and stood over it while it charged. You cannot check a website while your phone is at 1 per cent and plugged into a socket in a corridor that also has the fridge on it, because the extension cable is short and the socket is loose and if you so much as lift the phone the charging icon disappears. So I knelt. On the cement, beside the fridge, holding the phone very still with both hands, refreshing.

This is a true detail and I am not proud of it: I knelt there for over an hour. I knelt longer for that list than I had ever knelt in church.

I found my name at 8:14 that evening.

I remember the time because I took a screenshot, and then a second screenshot in case the first one was lying, and the second one says 8:14. My name was there, spelled correctly, which was itself a miracle, beside a registration number and a course code and the words GOVERNMENT SPONSORSHIP.

I read it eleven times. I counted.

Then I stood up too fast, and the cable came out, and the phone died again with my name still on it, and I didn't care, I didn't care at all, I ran into the sitting room where Mama was pretending to watch the news and I said, "Mama," and nothing else, because my voice had gone somewhere.

She stood up. She looked at me. She knew.

She did not shout or dance; that came later, from the neighbours. She put both hands on my face, which she had not done since I was small, and she held it, and she said my name, quietly, twice. Then she said, "You see?" And I did. I believed I saw everything.

The celebration lasted about a week and spread like water from a burst pipe.

By Friday morning everyone on our road knew. By Friday afternoon the pastor knew, and on Sunday he made me stand up in church and announced that the Lord had opened the gates of Makerere, which I felt slightly undersold my Chemistry revision. My aunt came from Masaka with a live chicken in a basket and a speech. An uncle I had seen perhaps four times in my life phoned to say he had always known, which was news to everyone. Mama cooked matooke, groundnut sauce, pilau, the chicken (I could not look at it), and a cake from a woman in the trading centre who iced my name on it with one letter missing. Neighbours brought sodas in crates. Somebody's child was sick on the mat. It was perfect.

At some point in the evening someone asked me to say a few words, and I stood in the middle of our small sitting room full of people and said, with total conviction, that if you work hard and make the right decisions, you will get what you want. People clapped. My aunt said, "Amen." Mama, at the back near the kitchen door, nodded slowly, the way she nodded at good sermons, and mouthed the words of her saying along with me, because of course I had stolen her saying and dressed it up as my own.

I said it the way you say the times tables. I said it like something proven.

I want to stand in that room now, beside that girl, in her best dress, with icing on her finger. I would not interrupt her. She deserved that evening. She had earned every soda.

But I can see what she was learning, standing there, the way you can see weather coming over a hill that the people on the other side cannot. She was learning that she had been bad and then good, and that goodness had paid. She was learning that the method was simple: identify the danger, avoid it, work. She had subtracted the distractions and what remained was her name on a list. And she was learning, most of all, that the exercise book had been right. Every word. A twelve-year-old had written an instruction and a seventeen-year-old had obeyed it and the universe had signed off on the transaction.

She concluded, with impeccable logic, that the rest of the book would work the same way.

The next morning I found the Picfare and opened it to item two.

I ticked it. In pen. I pressed so hard the tick came through to item three on the next page and left a little ridge you can still feel with your thumb. Beside it I wrote the date, and then, because I was seventeen and full of cake, I wrote DONE!!! with three exclamation marks, and drew a star.

Here is the Ledger entry I would write today, if I were honest.

PLANNED: Get into Makerere. Not Kyambogo. Not "any university."

HAPPENED: Got into Makerere. Government sponsorship. Name spelled correctly.

PAID: Two weeks at home I wouldn't trade. A friend who called me Pastor and meant it. Thirteen mornings of tea with Mama in silence, which turned out to be some of the best conversations we have ever had. One data bundle. Most of a battery, twice. The skin on both knees.

The first two columns match exactly. Word for word, almost. I have audited a lot of items from that exercise book since, and I can tell you this is the rarest entry in the whole Ledger, and the one I trust least. When Planned and Happened line up perfectly, you do not check your working. You do not ask what else you might have learned. You just believe the formula, and you carry it with you to the next item, and the next, like a key you are sure fits every door in the building.

So the fourth column is short, and I have rewritten it more than once, which is what pencil is for.

REVISED: Got into Makerere. Be proud of this. Also: write down what it taught you, and check it again later. Some lessons are right once and wrong afterwards.

That is the one aphorism I will permit myself in this chapter, and you can tell I wrote it in pencil because it hedges.

I still have the screenshot. It moved with me from that Tecno to three phones after it, like a family photo you can't throw away. 8:14 p.m. My name, the course code, the capitals. A while ago, on a bad night I will tell you about when we get there, I went looking for it, scrolled through years of pictures to find it, and sat looking at it for a long time.

But that was much later. In the version of me that matters for now, it is the August before Makerere, and I am sitting at the kitchen table with the blue Picfare open, my thumb on the ridge where the tick came through. I have turned the page. I am reading item three, the one about boyfriends, and I am smiling, because after this week it seems the easiest item in the book. I have just proved I can steer around anything.

I pick up the pen.