Rose Kalule carrying a brick she has molded. PHOTO BY DENIS KABUGO
When we arrive at Nnalongo Rose Kalule’s home in A Zone, Kagoma village, in Nabweru sub-county, Wakiso district, she is locking up, preparing to head to a nearby stone quarry.
Dressed in a green gomesi, a scarf tightly wrapped around her head, and rubber boots encasing her feet, the 65-year-old looks like a woman on a mission - even though time and toil have curved her back and thinned her limbs.
Her body bears the signs of years of labour and her steps mirror the quiet burden of time. Without waiting for an invitation, we follow her. Less than seven minutes later, we stand at the quarry where she works — a space littered by bricks, silent witnesses to the decades she has spent here.
Kalule removes a tarpaulin from the bricks she made yesterday and cleans the soil she is going to use. Due to the many years of working the soil under her belt, her feet hurt. The gumboots come in handy as she starts to knead and temper the soil.
Pausing, she walks to a nearby shallow well to fetch water to moisten the soil before she molds the bricks with a wooden mold. Her experience was immediately clear in the speed and precision with which she shaped the first brick.
“In the earlier days, I was energetic and could fetch two 20-litre jerrycans at the same time. But now, I am weak. I can only carry a five-liter jerrycan per trip to the well. Sometimes, the soil is dry and I need more water. That means I can spend an entire day fetching water to knead a small batch of soil,” she says.
Kalule usually spends one day fetching water, another day kneading soil, and a third day moulding the bricks. Ideally, in three days, an energetic youth would have made over 3,000 bricks, a feat she can no longer achieve.
“I used to do all the three tasks in one day. But now, when the rain comes before I finish kneading, I have to start again. Rain destroys the molded bricks. There is a batch of bricks I have to redo yet I do not have the strength for it,” she laments.
To survive and to cater for her family, Kalule has taken to borrowing money to buy food. However, by the time she gets her bricks to the kiln, she cannot make a profit. All the money she will make from selling this batch of bricks will be swallowed up in debt repayment.
For instance, if she makes a profit of Shs300,000 from the sale of her bricks, Shs100,000 goes to purchasing food, Shs50,000 to pay for the firewood used in the kiln, Shs50,000 to pay a bricklayer. The remaining Shs100,000 is used to repay debts.
“I have been making bricks for over 30 years, but by the grace of God, I am not yet bent. I have to make the bricks on the ground, though, because my arms ache,” she says.
Nowadays, Kalule has to deal with the challenge of being cheated out of her money. After burning her bricks, she travels to Kawempe to inform truck drivers that she has bricks for sale. Each brick is sold at Shs250.
The drivers collect the bricks but instead of paying for them, they ask if she can pick up the payment from the construction site.
“Usually, I am unable to pick the money or to send someone, so I request the driver to deliver the money to me. That driver took 3,000 bricks but he only paid me half of the money. I tried to report him to the authorities but I never got help,” she says.
So far, Kalule has been cheated three times but she ploughs on. Before leaving the quarry, the old woman carefully inspects her work, ensuring the bricks are covered with tarpaulin to protect them from the rain.
From typist to brickmaker
Before she touched a brick, Kalule held a different kind of tool - a typewriter. She once worked as a copy typist in the Ministry of Defence during the Obote II regime in the early 1980s. Her life was different then. There was stability and hope for a future built on white-collar toil.
“I was a copy typist for five years before I was demoted to the tearoom. I was told that a good Muganda was a dead one and I did not deserve to be a typist. I worked in the tearoom for one year before I was fired. My education certificates remained at Bulange (former Malire Barracks),” she says.
At the time, Kalule was married with three children including twins. When the Liberation war advanced towards Kampala, the family went into hiding. Unfortunately, her husband, Abdul Nsereko, died during the war.
“When the new government took over, I was scared of returning to work. I remained in my late husband’s village in Kagoma. I thought the soldiers were looking for everyone who had worked with the old regime,” she recalls.
In a cruel twist of fate, one day, when she had taken one of the twins to a hospital in Makindye Division for treatment of malaria, a bus skidded off the road and crashed into the building, hitting the wing she was in. The child and doctor died. Kalule was pulled out of the rubble, barely alive.
In 1990, she remarried and went on to give birth to seven more children. However, Kalule says her new husband brought more strain in her life than relief. As his responsibilities grew, his willingness to support the family shrank.
“He refused to take care of the children I came with into the marriage. He also failed to take care of his children and educate them. In 1993, I came to this stone quarry and found 20 people working. I decided to fry snacks and sell them to the brickmakers,” she explains.
Kalule made donats, chapatis, samosas and half cakes. Such was her profit that she opened a shop and employed her eldest daughter as the shopkeeper. After selling off her stock, in the afternoons, Kalule worked as a casual laborer in other people’s gardens.
“There was so much work to do that eventually, the shop collapsed. My daughter had to spend her days at school anyway. Also, people began buying plots of land and constructing houses in Kagoma. With time, there were no more gardens to work in. My financial obligations were increasing,” she says.
Besides caring for and educating her children, Kalule was also sending money to her aging parents. That is when the bright ideas of venturing into brickmaking hit her.
“There was a woman called Naku, who was making bricks. I asked her why she was doing a man’s work and she told me her husband had abandoned her. I told her to teach me how to make bricks and she obliged,” Kalule says.
As she developed her skill and sold more of the bricks she had made, Kalule’s first achievement was the house she built. She bought the land using the proceeds from selling bricks, used bricks she had made to build the house, and roofed it with her profits.
“I educated my children, some of them completed Senior Six and went up to the university. My eldest daughter studied nursing,” she says.
The downward curve
Just when it seemed like Kalule would finally rest and enjoy the fruits of her labor, fate struck again. Five of her children died mysteriously, including one who fell into a pond and drowned. She sheds tears as she narrates how some of them died.
“The one who drowned had just turned 19. He was studying at the YMCA. My most recent loss came in 2020 when I lost another one of my sons. He left me with four grandchildren, one of whom is mentally unstable,” she laments.
The child always loses his mental faculties in the morning and regains them in the evenings. Kalule’s eldest daughter, Irene Birungi, who was a nurse, is now bedridden, battling lung disease. Birungi’s three-year-old granddaughter has a hole in her heart. The old woman cares for all of them.
“We are not happy that at her age, our mother is still kneading bricks, but we are helpless. I can no longer work, otherwise, I would have been taking care of her. But we have no one else to turn to. We all look up to her,” Birungi says.
Kalule’s only surviving son, on whom all her hopes are pinned, is unreachable. After he graduated in 2023, she mortgaged her land title to raise Shs3 million to facilitate his travel to Saudi Arabia to work as a casual laborer. However, since he left, she has not heard from him.
“I am worried. None of us have a smartphone, otherwise we would have tried to reach him through WhatsApp. I have heard stories about people losing their body organs in the Arab world. Some of them die. I am scared,” she narrates with grief.
With new technologies frequently flooding the construction market, bricks made from soil are no longer fashionable. This means Kalule’s business is also on a downward trend. Nowadays, several people are constructing houses with concrete blocks.
“Three months ago, I took a batch of bricks to the kiln and burnt them. However, I have failed to sell them because there are no clients. My grandchildren are not going to school and I have a lot of debts, yet I have not sold a single brick in a month,” Kalule laments.
Her grandchildren are in Primary Seven, Primary Three, Top Class, and Baby Class.
Making ends meet
Due to her health, Kalule tried to abandon brickmaking for poultry and cattle farming. She acquired 70 traditional layers, hoping to cash in on the egg trade. However, the chicken succumbed to diseases.
“Thieves stole my cows and goats. I became known in this village for the nightly alarms I would make whenever the thieves attacked my home. One night, while chasing a thief, I fell into a deep ditch. I had to be pulled out by the villagers. Surprisingly, the thief and the cow easily jumped over the ditch,” she says.
With that experience, she abandoned farming and returned to bricklaying. Now, she is calling on well-wishers to help her shoulder the burden of treating her three-year-old great granddaughter who has a hole in her heart.
“Sometimes, her eyes turn blue and we fail to eat, out of fear. I cry whenever I think about my grandchildren’s future. I used to sleep on a bed but would fall off whenever I thought about them. Now, I sleep on a sack on the floor. I am 65. What will happen to them in the next five years?” Kalule asks.
The old woman suffers from conditions that come with age, such as ulcers, stomach upsets, dry throat, and painful legs.
“I am old and grey but I do not have land. I sold off my two plots of land and I rent the space where I make bricks. I ask anyone who can, to offer me a job, because I cannot beg today and then, beg again tomorrow,” she laments.
Nnalongo Kalule, a woman who has spent decades working under the sun, now stands on the edge, on the brink of losing everything. Yet all she needs is a chance to give her grandchildren and great-grandchild a future.
