Chapter Three: The Mabama Hiatus

After spending two years in Turiani, our lives shifted once again. In early January of 1977, my mother, my younger brother, and I were sent back to Mabama. We left Turiani quietly, before Chama Cha Mapinduzi was formally born, before politics settled into a single name but long after its effects were already shaping our lives.

For me, the return felt like a breath held too long and finally released.

Mabama was familiar ground. The paths knew my feet. Faces remembered my name. I met old friends whose laughter slipped easily back into place, and I made new ones without effort. The schoolyard sounds returned. The rhythm of the village felt steady, predictable. What was meant to be a short stay became something longer—three full years suspended between what had been and what was still coming.

Those years felt like a pause, a holding pattern in the middle of constant movement.

Our time in Turiani itself had been brief, but it lingered in my memory with a bittersweet clarity. What I remember most was not hardship, but proximity to something joyful. We lived opposite a famous soccer player at the time—Hussein Ngurungu.
He was a young man then, kind and unassuming despite his fame. When he returned from Dar es Salaam, where he played for the national team, he never came back empty-handed. He brought soccer balls. Real ones. New ones. To a child, that mattered.
Those balls carried more than leather and air. They carried stories from faraway stadiums, from crowds and cheers we could only imagine.

Word traveled fast whenever Hussein Ngurungu returned home. Children appeared from every direction—barefoot, dusty, shouting names before they even reached the road. We gathered in loose clusters, pretending not to stare too hard, though our eyes followed the bulge of a new ball tucked under his arm.

He never made a ceremony of it. He would greet the elders first, respectfully, then turn to us with an easy smile. When the ball finally dropped to the ground, time seemed to pause. The leather was clean. Unscarred. It smelled different—new, unfamiliar.

The first kick always mattered.
Someone would step forward cautiously, toeing the ball as if it might disappear. Then another kick, stronger this time. Soon dust rose, feet moved faster, laughter broke loose. Teams formed without argument. Shirts came off to mark sides. The field did not need lines. The rules did not need explaining.

For those moments, Turiani felt whole. The worries of adults faded to the edges. Politics, money, uncertainty—all of it retreated before the simple joy of a ball rolling freely across open ground. Childhood claimed its space.

In those scenes, brief as they were, Turiani felt connected to a larger world again. And for me, those moments softened the memory of a place that would soon let us go. We lived without fully unpacking our futures, always aware that this was temporary, though no one said so aloud. My mother carried that knowledge quietly. She never explained much, but her silences were careful, deliberate.

While we were in Mabama, my stepfather made the decision that would finally uproot all of us. Life in Turiani had become increasingly difficult. Every business he ventured into failed to take hold. Effort no longer translated into reward. Stability slipped further out of reach.

Back then, decisions belonged to men. Women followed.

When things became completely unsustainable, my stepfather sold the very house we had lived in at Turiani. The sale marked more than financial loss—it was a closing. An admission that the experiment had failed. He took the money and carried it forward, not toward repair, but toward reinvention.

That money became the seed for a new gamble.

He chose to leave Turiani behind and move deeper into his ancestral land—to Kibogoji. There, he believed, land was still honest. Rain still answered effort. A man could start again with his hands, his memory, and his will.

We did not yet know when we would join him. Only that another move was forming, slowly but inevitably.
Mabama, once the place I came from, became a place I was waiting in.

The pause would not last forever.

The return to Mabama was joyous, but it carried uncertainty beneath its warmth. What we believed would be a brief stay stretched into a long wait—a waiting without dates, without promises, without answers. We waited for fare that never came.

When we first left Mabama years earlier, we left with a man who was exuberant, confident, still carrying himself like someone whose future was intact. Even after politics and economics stripped much from him, my stepfather still had a little money left—enough hope to imagine recovery. But when we returned, that version of life was gone.

We came back to my grandmother’s humble home. The bigger houses we once lived in had all been sold and were now occupied by other families. The familiarity remained, but ownership did not. We were no longer the family people remembered as comfortable or secure. Wealth had thinned into memory.

My mother and my grandmother struggled quietly to keep us afloat. Food had to stretch. Favors had to be asked. Pride was swallowed carefully, one day at a time. My mother waited for money to return her to her husband, believing the separation was temporary. Each week, each month, she expected word.

The fare never arrived.

Slowly, she began to understand that waiting itself had become the condition of our lives. And so she adjusted. She learned how to live inside uncertainty, how to raise children without guarantees. We moved from place to place—staying with uncles in Tabora, in Urambo, in Ulyankulu—never fully settling, never fully unpacking.

Then, in October of 1978, the Uganda–Tanzania war broke out. The country shifted again. Fear thickened. Movement became harder. Hope narrowed. My mother lost much of what little certainty she had left, but she did not stop fighting. Somehow, she kept us fed. Somehow, she kept us housed.

In early 1979, when endurance had almost worn thin, the fare finally came.
It was enough.

Enough to end the waiting. Enough to gather what little we had. Enough to take us to where my stepfather had already gone ahead of us.
Kibogoji was no longer a distant idea.
It was calling us home.