{UAH} How Margaret Kamya, 80, became a Muganda
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Margaret Kamya comes out to meet us walking briskly across the compound. She does not look a day over 60.
She has heard it before and valiantly defends her age. “I got married in 1953 and I was 20 then,” she shares.
Today, it may not be unusual to see people marry across tribes and even national borders. In the 1950s, however, it was a different story.
In some places, the cross-cultural cross-border marriage was virtually unheard off.
However, this did not deter Margaret Wairimu Kamya from following her prince from her home in Kenya to Uganda, where she set up a home and eventually became a Muganda.
She recently celebrated her 80th birthday.
A NEW CULTURE
Until the age of 20, Margaret was a Kikuyu but today, she is a Muganda who proudly associates herself with the Nsenene clan of Uganda.
She recalls how learning a different culture was not a walk in the park.
“We were at my in-law’s place. I did not know women according to traditional Ganda culture, which was still very strong in the 60s, did not eat chicken.
“My husband, who, so far, had been telling me the social faux pas I was likely to fall in did not mention it either.
In retrospect I now know it was intentional. He was given chicken to share out, and after giving each of the men around the table he passed me a large piece, which I graciously accepted.
“The uproar it caused! No one could believe I was sitting there comfortably eating the chicken with the men. Children who were outside crowded at the door to watch me eat,” she says.
Her story began in Bondeni area of Nakuru, Kenya where she was baptised and lived with her parents and siblings. “I am the eldest of 16 siblings,” she says.
STUDY MIDWIFERY
Many girls did not make it to school but Kamya did because her father was a teacher and a Christian.
“My father asked me to leave school in Primary Five because he had many children to look after, so I dropped out and started working at the nearby clinic,” she says.
That was short-lived as she got an opportunity to go study midwifery in Mombasa. She did not finish the three-year course and was back in Nakuru after one and a half years. “I think I was not passing my classes,” she says.
Luckily, that was a different time, when even those who did not complete training could still practise as local midwives. At 19, Margaret was a nurse living at home with her parents and helping raise her siblings.
RUMOURS ABOUT THE BAGANDA
It was around this time that she met George Kamya who had come to Nakuru to work as an accountant. “He used to come to church and we would exchange casual greetings,” she says.
He, on the other hand, was smitten by the tall beautiful girl and went through a mutual friend, another Ugandan woman called Harriet Kawalya Kaggwa, to get to know her.
Margaret grew fond of him and when he made his intention to marry her clear, she was only too pleased to tell her parents. But there was the little matter of his “non-Kikuyu”.
It did not go unnoticed by her wider family and other people who heard of the budding relationship.
“It was a big thing for my people, most of who wouldn’t hear of it. Someone ‘discovered’ that my husband-to-be was a Muganda and claimed that they eat people and mice. There were so many stories about the Baganda,” she said in a speech read on her birthday on December 21, last year.
For the full story go to www.dailymonitor.co.ug
Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed Lamb contesting the results.
Benjamin Franklin
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