We had wandered off from our traveling pack of students near the Owen Falls Dam. Karanja, Wacuka and I felt that our guides were not giving us the full splendor of the sites and we could not let our bumpy bus ride from Kampala, Uganda be in vain. We wanted to venture off the beaten path into the villages to meet the people and discover new sights. We were at the Northern end of Lake Victoria, and most importantly, the source of the Omugga Kiyara, universally known as River Nile, the life blood of Egypt.
credit: Daniel Naudé
Many years before, while in Primary school, I shared a class with a boy by the name of Ekime, a local of the Owen Falls area in Uganda. Ekime was the reason I had bribed my way into being part of the school trip to these parts, despite not being a member of the Civil Engineering class at our University. The engineering class had chosen this destination because they wanted to learn about the unique load-bearing capacity of the Owen Falls Dam. Ekime believed that these parts concealed many secrets that the government had managed to keep under wraps. He had narrated numerous tales about the mystery of the Ripon falls, now submerged under the Owen Falls Dam. His tales ranged from flickering lights under the water cascades at night to mysterious sounds that frightened domestic animals. One of the Ugandan boy’s tales had stayed with me for fifteen years.
Ekime’s family owned a herd of the Ankole Longhorn cows. Every evening, the boys in the homestead would take turns to milk the ten cows that produced milk. Ekime was the last in line and had been assigned to milk Kyolaba, a large prolific heifer named after one of Idi Amin’s wives. Ekime’s father believed that the cow and the late dictator’s wife shared a lot of traits, one of which was beauty. Kyolaba also produced the most milk and was the youngest one in the herd. By the time Ekime got his turn to take the cow into the solitary milking shed, her udder was so heavy with milk that she had a labored walk. Soon, Ekime was crouched under the cow, the Chrrr! Chrrr! sound of the heavy milk drops hitting the bottom of the aluminum milk bucket cutting across the otherwise still night. Then it began- shrill sounds in the distance that had Kyolaba trembling on her hoofs and letting out loud puffs from her muzzle. The sounds became louder and louder like an orchestra of a million crickets. Kyolaba tightened her udder and let out the last spurts of milk before kicking the large bucket of milk all over Ekime’s lap. She cracked open the horizontal wooden bar that was restraining her and ran to rejoin the rest of the herd, leaving Ekime drenched in warm Ankole milk. The next morning everyone in the village was talking about the bizarre incident. Some of the village know-it-alls attributed the sounds to an underground machine under the dam that Egyptians used to travel to and from Cairo to inspect the dam. The Kampala and Cairo governments had signed an agreement to ensure that Ugandans would not tamper with Egypt’s main source of water. There was a rumor that the locals would spot two Arab men with blue turbans near the dam whenever such sounds would be heard. That story from one and a half decades ago stayed with me as we approached the banks of the dam.
I could not help but think about Ekime. Shortly after completing primary school in Kenya, he had returned to his native Uganda and I never heard from him again. I had looked for him on Facebook to no avail. Every time we held class reunions with former schoolmates, his name would always come up and everyone wondered what had become of him. All I remembered about his family was that they owned huge tracts of land near the dam. I hoped that I would come across a villager in these parts who knew about Ekime or his family. After stopping several people, they told me that the government had bought off most of the land around the dam from its previous owners with plans of expansion. Karanja and Wacuka were growing impatient with me and so we decided to ask one last person about Ekime.
As luck would have it, this old woman knew all about Ekime’s father.
To be continued