By Rosemary K
The advert stood out clearly in the papers. The National Tourist Council was looking for smart and attractive young women to represent the country's natural attractions and abundant resources to foreign countries and potential investors. The young women candidates were supposed to be between age sixteen to twenty four. They must never have produced or given birth to a child. Their height rage was required to be five feet five inches, to six feet three inches. This was a serious point in the requirements, and the big full-page advert also included the height range in figures, 5' 5" to 6' 3". All the interested applicants were asked to send their applications to the Managing Director of The National Tourist Council, and to accompany their documents with three full-size photographs taken at the angle of sixty degrees. One of the pictures was supposed to show the applicant in the nude, in order to enable the Selection Committee make an unbiased evaluation of the applicant's natural endowments. The successful candidates would be hosted to a colorful beauty pageant at Nile Hotel International, presided over by the world's most renowned beauty judges. This was a very competitive event, and the applicants must apply only if they were sure they suited the requirements. The Selection Committee's decision would be final, and no canvassing by candidates or their patrons was permitted.
As Hamurungi read the advert in The Light newspaper, her heart tingled with excitement. She possessed most, if not all the qualities the Tourist Council wanted. As she read on, her heart beat faster. There was a grand prize of a Hyundai Accent car, plus a return shopping trip to a country of the winner's choice! The additional part of the bargain was a mobile phone set, with a six-month air time bonus! The second prize included a return trip to the East African coast of Mombasa, where the runner-up would laze in the fine stretches of sand and the many other glorious spots of the coastal beaches. The third prize was a color television set, and a beauty box packed with multicolored make-up, imported direct from the world's leading cosmetics and beauty industries.
"Wow, what grand style!" Hamurungi exclaimed, folding the newspaper into two. She went to the right side of her bed. She looked through the mirror on the wall, supported by a rusty nail. The mirror was cracked at the sides with age. She turned her face to the right, to make use of the small sun rays that peered through the little wooden window. Not bad, she thought, as she smoothed her fingers along her chemically bleached yellow face.Hamurungi lived in a small rented room, in the slum area of Bwaise. Her rent was paid by Kimira, her sugar daddy. Kimira worked as an Executive at Bank of Uganda. Hamurungi always complained to her manfriend about the size and state of the room, but he never wanted to listen. Instead, he said that he still had big financial commitments to settle, before he could rent or build her a better house in Kololo. It was now two years since Kimira promised to build her a mansion in Kololo. When she reminded him again, he told her to forget it for a while. Hamurungi pressed, threatening to withdraw her sexual involvement with him. He responded with a defensive attack, and reminded her that his children had to have their school fees paid in Lincoln International School, his shamba boy's wages were unpaid for pruning the flower gardens, and he still had to book his business trip fares first class by British Airways. His wife also had to go to the sauna and massage parlor. What did she want him to do? Hamurungi's sugar daddy made his stand. The disappointed Hamurungi shed tears of frustration and regret. Why did she ever get sexually involved with such a crude and mean pig in the first place? She thought of how desperate she had been at the time Kimira proposed a sexual affair. She had just been expelled from school, having been found pregnant. Although she later managed to have an abortion, she could not face the prospect of returning to school.
Despite her bitter experience, Hamurungi had tasted the dangerous freedom of going out to sell herself on the streets of the city. She stole from home one night, after her mother revealed a plan of taking her to another school to repeat senior three. That night, she escaped from her home, and went to spend a night at her friend's place, who earned a living by selling herself on the streets. Hamurungi remembered clearly how she had to jump over stinking trenches of the Kisenyi slum, before she reached her friend Suzy's one-roomed house. Suzy was not working that night, so she welcomed her with high spirits.
"I am glad you have come to me at last," Suzy started, throwing her arms around Hamurungi. She went on to reassure her how her troubles of restrictive institutions like school would soon be over.
"But I feel disgusted. I wish I could go back home, but I can't. My mother wants to take me to another nuns' school, where they check girls every month for signs of pregnancy. Oh, Suzy, what can I do?" Hamurungi cried. Suzy comforted her with prospects of being able to get herself a reliable customer. Her troubles would certainly end, if she was lucky enough to land on a generous buyer. Suzy and the other girls usually got their luck whenever they landed on a muzungu or a foreign worker. These groups of people were the best customers, because they always paid in dollars. Unlike local buyers, they paid in cash, whether for short or long. The ekisiraani or bad luck normally came from local buyers, who were always in short supply of cash. If you were lucky, they paid half the amount negotiated, or else they used you for a longer time, and then beat you up afterwards. Such men were really a cruel type.
Hamurungi spent the first days of her escape from home confined to Suzy's house. She had to first learn the secret ways of street life. The most important thing on the initiation list was to change her skin color.
"Good buyers like girls with very light skin. It looks as appealing as ripe oranges," Suzy intimated. The skin-lightening rituals included washing her body in a concentrated substance, made out of two or three bottles of JIK detergent, mixed with strong corrosive soaps. The other ritual was to smear the whole body with skin bleaching creams, mixed with strong whitening lotions. It was important for the person still undergoing this bleaching process to perform these rituals daily, or else the skin would fail to change color evenly. Most likely, the results would be like those of a half-cooked meal of matooke. It was also important to collect large packs of color make up, because the buyers preferred different shades of color on the faces of their products. If you met an Asian, he most likely preferred green shade around the eyes. If it was a European, he usually wanted light make up, but with deep-red lipstick. With all those finished, a girl had to buy very large amounts of Vaseline, to keep oiling her legs smooth.
"If you are unfortunate enough to have hairs on the legs, then you would have to keep your sharp razorblade nearby. You must keep shaving off the unpleasant growth," Suzy said. The secret behind shiny legs was that they were good at reflecting light from the head lamps of vehicles. If a possible buyer approached a girl in his car, the first thing to attract him would be shimmering legs and thighs, tantalizingly peeping out of her miniskirt. It was an absolute convenience to wear short skirts, because they revealed enough to arouse the buyer's interest. And for cases of short treats, these skirts helped a girl to supply her goods to the buyer without much delay. For a girl who had a slight dislike for miniskirts, she found a convenient skirt with a small zipper fixed at the front and at the back. When a buyer came, she would be able to unzip the side of the skirt the buyer wanted to approach her from. The other very important thing was the size of the girl. She had to make sure that her figure kept a maximum flesh of about fifty kilograms.
"My friend, you have to keep a very slim figure. Some buyers, especially the whites, have said that the nearer to the bone, the sweeter," Suzy further explained.
Hamurungi took about three weeks to fully master the art of a street girl's life. She woke up every morning, boiled water from a sigiri, and poured it in a large basin. She then added the JIK mixture into the hot water, and proceeded to the small ramshackle shed which served as a bathroom. The shed was constructed using crooked wood planks, whose lower edges threatened to get uprooted from the soggy surface of the earth in which they stood. When she reached the shed, Hamurungi removed her thin lesu tied to the upper part of her breasts, and reached for her strong corrosive soap. She rubbed the soap vigorously on the sponge, which had a rough scratching surface. She dipped the sponge in the hot water, and lifted it to her face. She scrubbed and rubbed her face vigorously, until frothy foam formed on it. She rested the soap in a make-shift soap dish, made from a tin perforated with small holes at the bottom. She bent forward, cupped her hands, and gathered water from the basin. She splashed it over her face. She did this several times, before she started scrubbing the rest of her body with the rough sponge soaked with strong soap. After bathing, Hamurungi's whole body tingled with hot sensations caused by the strong brew of the JIK substances, and the strong chemical soap used in her bath. She then proceeded to smear herself with the mixture of skin bleaching creams and lotions, carefully kept in a large bottle. The large bottle occupied a permanent space on a small bedside stool. She started with her face, down to her shoulders, until she reached her feet. Her friend Suzy helped her smear the part of her back which her hands could not reach. At the end of the third week, Hamurungi's skin was as yellow as a ripe orange. Nobody could guess that she was the same girl who came to Suzy's house a few weeks back, with an even dark skin. Her cheeks were a bit overdone, and they looked like raw meat hanging up on a butcher's stall.
It was going to be Hamurungi's first night on the street. She felt little streaks of fear creep through her stomach, and she abruptly fell onto the bed. She had been leaning against the wall, exaggeratedly applying make-up to her face. Suzy was checking through her miniskirt collection for the most suitable color and design for the evening. When Hamurungi fell onto the bed unexpectedly, Suzy looked up with questioning eyes.
"I don't think I am going tonight," Hamurungi said. She then told Suzy about her fears. It was as if small butterflies were running up and down the insides of her stomach. Suzy laughed a small devilish laughter. What was she really afraid of?
"In this business, you go to make money against all fears. It is true the first night on the dark unfriendly streets is really frightening, but a girl has to toughen. If you allow feelings of any type to visit you, then you are soon out of business," Suzy replied. She told her that the business of night life needed someone with the toughest mind and the stoniest heart. She also told her of the terrible ordeal that one of their friends once suffered, when she landed on a crude Nigerian.
"But the man could have been any other tribe or nationality," Hamurungi said.
"No way, those people of West Africa have their own way of speaking English. For instance, if they want to say the word 'hurry', they always call it horry instead," Suzy explained. So when the Nigerian approached the girl, they negotiated and agreed on the amount. The man wanted her for a long treat at his house, and he showed her the tempting dollars peeping out of the pocket of his agbada. The girl immediately knew she had landed on a big harvest that night. She entered the man's Mercedes Benz car, and they drove away. When she reached the man's house, she found there a group of other men, including an elderly man of about sixty. The group spoke in very high pitched tone, and they were just completing a meal of yams served on a big silver platter. The man who had brought the girl told her to sit in the big sofa, placed in the left corner of the house. He sat in another corner, and lit a long cigar. He told one of the men to bring the girl some wine. The girl wondered whether the man had brought her for business, or for a tourist visit. Before she could have time to sort her thoughts out, the man who had been told to give her some wine planted himself in front of her. He stamped his left foot against her right foot, and squeezed her breasts. It happened too quickly for the girl to realize what it was all about. The group surrounded the girl, and started shouting obscenities at her.
"We are now in real business, baby," the man who had brought her said. The rest of the group now descended on her, and ripped her clothes off. They raped her in turns, until she passed out. They then threw her out of the house for dead. She could have died in the cold windy night, had it not been for the local defense guards who found her lying groaning on the veranda, in the early hours of the morning. They picked her up and took her to the Police clinic. The Police said there was no doctor in their clinic, and threw her limp body on their 999 vehicle for Mulago Hospital. They put her on the doorstep of emergency ward, and drove off. She was admitted to intensive care ward, and she stayed there for three days. She did not have the money to pay for the bill, and she escaped from Mulago Hospital in the middle of the night. When she told her friends about her story, some girls feared and spent two days off the streets. However, the bite of poverty became too much for them to bear, and they returned to the streets the third day. So as Suzy was saying, the business required the toughest mind, and the stoniest heart. When Suzy finished her story, Hamurungi was too distraught to speak. What had she brought herself into? Supposing she met a similar fate, like that met by the girl who went for a long treat from the Nigerian? She turned her face sideways on the pillow, and started to cry. Tears freely flowed from eyes, and traced lines on her heavily made up face as they slid down to her chin. Suzy put her arms around her, and tried to comfort her. Such incidences were a nasty part of the business, and they happened to the girls during the days of misfortune.
(story continues...)
**Rosemary won the NABOTU First Prize in Short Stories for Songs of the Third Life shory story book.
