The eternal mother

Tomorrow it is my mother, Pauline Nyamikamo Matogo’s birthday. In honour of this milestone, I recall one of the best days I’ve spent with her.

It was my graduation day, April 5, 2002.
My mother was walking on air with pride.

Possibly, her memory flashed back to when my father was hall chairman of Northcote at Makerere University.
Back then, an honour guard was mounted by his fellow hall residents (complete with a pretend arch of sabres) whenever she arrived to see him. She would then amble through it while they serenaded her in song.

As she gloried in their attention, my father would proudly look on at the end of the honour guard.
They baptised her “Mama Ngina” after Kenya’s elegant First Lady (President Jomo Kenyatta’s wife).

On my graduation day, my mother and I walked up a climb that took us past Mitchell Hall. We soon found ourselves standing opposite a run-down house with a tiny manicured lawn.
It was a lecturer’s residence.

My mother informed me that that’s where I grew up, partly, before my parents rushed into exile.
In the trigger-happy days of Idi Amin’s rule, my father worked as a university librarian and part-time lecturer.
He was in-charge of the magazine and periodicals section of the library.

In this capacity, he betrayed a fondness for ordering, from abroad, literature deemed to have an agitatory effect on the students.

Amin, then university chancellor, believed my father was committing a cosmic crime. He thus accused my father of spreading what he colourfully called “political gonorrhoea.”

Marked for death, my father gathered us together and we decamped to exile quicker than Amin could say venereal disease.
Our hegira, if you will, led us to Zambia.

Looking at the house that day, I thought that it had aged into something of a deathly doss house.
The ghosts of a dark past seemed to inhabit it, shadowing its every structure with a gloomy reconstruction on what once was. Never letting it forget the tragedies of seasons past.

My mother seemed a little nostalgic that day. Maybe this building captured her undying affection for the bad old days, when everything was good.

Or maybe not.
Moments later, we settled on the picturesque green at the centre of the university. This is where the graduation ceremony was to be held.

Mother was giddy with pride. She was raised to cherish education as a person with a parched throat does a cold glass of water on a scorching hot afternoon.
I was happy too.
Indeed, nothing brought home the singleness of our shared joy as when a fellow graduand hollered my name.
“Matogo!”

Mother and I reflexively turned around to see who was calling our name. Then we realised.
“I think she’s talking to me,” I said.

Life, at times, may leave us weary of spirit but a mother’s care bandages our wounds. Inbuilt with hospitality, a mother’s love is our hospice. It is that place we can always call home, even when lost within ourselves.

My mother’s simplicity has taken on a life of its own in her old age. Now it symbolises a primal need to be at peace with the elements in realisation that love itself is simple.

It is there, and that’s all. But we complicate everything in its name by painting it in secondary colours of this and that.

Yet love is simply there in ways a mother is always there for her loved ones. And as she looks into the seeds of time at the years gone by, she’ll enjoy this love at full flower.

Mr Matogo is a digital marketingmanager with City Surprises Ltd
[email protected]