Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

‘What I am saying is that when you get a boyfriend, don’t sneak around like a thief. Bring him to me, let me meet him and he will treat you with respect. Stolen love is dangerous. It takes you to bushes and what-what.’

Child, never let a man rush you. Tell him I am not ready,

An inept husband is a life sentence.’

‘No man is worth your tears; you hear me? Keep them for your children.’

Especially because throwing girls out of education ensured one thing: their babies would be born into poverty. When the girls were led out of the San to get on the school bus, Kirabo pondered. The boys who had made them pregnant would carry on as before, their lives uninterrupted.

The Ganda did not celebrate birthdays – ‘What nonsense. Children do absolutely nothing on their arrival that warrants presents every year. If anything, they should give presents to their mothers, who come close to death.’

‘Can you imagine being an Indian nurse and making grown-ups lift their clothes, so you prick their buttocks? I wonder how many buttocks you would see in a day?’

But then again,’ she sighed, ‘with well-off people, you never know where their privilege first came from. Often someone bled, someone sweated, someone cried or died to make them rich. That is what my father says.’

For a long time, the girls synchronised their play of mothers and nurses so well that they did not notice the difference in their aspirations.

When a person wished for the impossible, people would encourage them: Don’t lose hope. With these Europeans coming to our world now, the sun could rise at midnight. Ganda months, which had been transient, coming and going depending on the moods of the seasons, were being replaced by the static European calendar.