Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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I N C A R C E R AT I O N N AT I O N S
growling guard flicks my words away with his wrist, shooing me off
as if Im a stubborn mosquito.
Five minutes later I am back, prostrated before him with my
fellow volunteer. Having worked here for four months now, she,
unlike me, actually saw her paperwork properly processed by the
prison powers-that-be and was thus legal to enter Luzira. Id been
mostly slipping in on the sly, having been given unofficial permission to be herein the form of a you may enter and you may teach
from the head officer on duty last weekbut granted no papers to
prove it.
Two grovelers work better than one. With enough kowtowing
and please, sirs, and sorry, sirs, we bow our way beyond the
Uzis and into the prison complex, through the shantytown-like
living quarters of the prison officers, past the military barracks and
the central gate where the guards wave us inside, into the throngs
of men milling about in sunshine-yellow uniforms, and through
the concrete door ofa little library.
Good afternoon, Professor Baz!
Its the best greeting Ive gotten all dayno, all week. Uganda
has proven to be many things but welcoming isnt one of them;
most days I am pleased to get a polite nod from even the hotel concierge, a professional at the art of service with a scowl. This greeting comes from a prisoner, Bafaki Wilson, aka Headmaster Wilson,
aka Pastor Boma, all of which means that Wilson is a kind of peerelected prison official. Hes pastor of the Boma block of Luzira
and lord of this library, erected by the London- and Kampala-based
NGO African Prisons Project.
How are you today? Wilson asks, grinning as he always does,
and looking long and hard at me with those eyes, surely the kindest eyes in all of Uganda. At thirty years old, Wilson is an uncanny
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INTRODUCTION
combination of frail old man and lively little boy. His small, slim
stature, unfettered smile, and spirited stare, not to mention floppy
sun cap, fashioned from the yellow prison-uniform cloth and much
too wide for his narrow face, all of these scream boy. But the wizened old man shines through in Wilsons slow, wounded gait and,
most of all, in his style of speech. Every sentence emerges slow and
studied, finely crafted with pronouncements, as if lifted from the
transcript of a Martin Luther King sermon.
Wilson, I am well, I answer. Conjuring up my second smile
of the day, this one genuine, I shake his hand. Then I make the
rounds, greeting a dozen students with handshakes and broad hellos. Theyre assembled around a wooden table in the center of the
blocklike library, scribbling on loose-leaf paper or flipping through
random books they arent really reading: Speaking Norwegian,
Hamlet, A Travellers Guide to the English Countryside.
Creative writing class is under way. Wilson sits to my left and
reads, with studied enunciation, from the Maya Angelou poems Id
handed out yesterday:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
During my first class in Luzira Id assigned the men personal
essays, and Wilson told his tale. From rural Uganda, he was born
into a polygamous marriage that produced over sixty children. His
mother died when he was a baby and he was abused by his stepmothers, so he ran away. He committed crimes; he was too poor
to pay either the fine or the bribe that could get him off the hook
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I N C A R C E R AT I O N N AT I O N S
[4]
INTRODUCTION
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