A Look into My Life — Chapter Two

The only town I knew besides my own was Kamina. I had never visited it, but Mother had.

Whenever the children at school suspiciously asked why I never spoke about my father, I said he had gone to Kamina on a business trip. That was the only safe answer I could muster, the one that, in my eyes, justified the handicap of being fatherless.

As I said, Lubumbashi was quite small when I was little, and very conservative. Many men had several wives, named "offices", who lived either in separate households or together under one roof, in relative peace or otherwise. Divorce, however, was rare.

I knew only one other pupil who had come from a broken home, but her father was still very much present in her life. He showed up at parent's reunions and such. So I was almost alone in my plight, unable to relate to any other child.

When the other children spoke about their fathers, I kept quiet and wished the conversation would end quickly, dreading that one of them might turn and ask about mine. I made sure that I sat at the back of the class, so as to remain as invisible as possible.

My inability to share the Father Experience alienated me not only from my peers at school, but also from the children in my family. In my extended family, I was regarded as unconventional, even scandalous, the way one might stare at a madman or a crippled man, simply because I lacked what most people naturally had.

Some may not understand the unpleasant feeling that the brokenness of my family engraved in me. Nowadays, dysfunctional families are springing up everywhere, and it is no longer peculiar to see a child growing up without one parent.

But in my opinion, it remains abnormal, cruel and damaging. Unless a parent has died, he or she should be present in the child's life. Irresponsibility is a crime that should not be tolerated merely because it has become common.

Grade One came to an end, and I do not know how I passed. I understood little of what was being taught, and I did not care. I lived in a haze, curiously watching pupils learn from a stranger standing in front of them on a platform.

I had no friends. During breaks, I usually wandered around the courtyard and observed school life as one might watch a film, hardly participating in it or truly living it.

One day, my teacher, a lanky, light-skinned and energetic man, showed some interest in me because he had been told that my father was a famous local politician.

After school, as I walking out of the classroom, he stopped me and started asking me all sorts of questions about my father. How did he behave at home? What did he eat? Was he permissive or strict?

He was under the impression that because I was the child of someone prominent, we lived like royalty. 

Around that time, I began to realise that my father was well known in town. There were two parallel accounts of him.

One that was told at home through statements such as "you behave like your father". These lovely words were addressed to me whenever someone believed I had been bad.

The other account came from people in the streets talking about what he had done in his community. It was all very strange and disturbing, and I could not decide whether my situation was good or bad.

It was also around that time that, for some reason, I began blaming myself for his absence. I did not know where the guilt had come from or why I felt that way, but I was convinced that I was the problem, that he had left because of something I had done, or because of what I was.

I carried that guilt for years, until adolescence turned it into resentment.

Another source of great discomfort was the fact that Mother came from a tribe called Tshokwe, while my father was Luba. She had invited some of her siblings and nieces to live with us, and that crowd often used my father's tribe as an insult whenever they wanted to punish me.

They constantly reminded me that I was Luba, the only Luba of the family, as if that was something to be ashamed of.

There is a stereotype about Luba people which is, of course, usually inaccurate, although some famous members of the tribe comically perpetuate it. Through the unkind words of my cousin G and my aunt N, I quickly learnt that Lubas were supposedly short, dark-skinned, lacked generosity, were badly dressed, were cursed with a strange accent and were generally bad people.

Unfortunately, I came to associate the word Luba with something bad or shameful, and therefore believed that my very existence was shameful.

How could I have known better? I was not yet aware that many Luba men and women were comfortable in their own skin and simply happy to be who they were. In my little world, I was the only Luba in a crowd of Tshokwes.