African Balance

Uganda
March 2019

She plods forward along the dusty asphalt, her plastic flip-flops catching the intermittent shade of her skirt. One arm swings forward, her bony black wrist alternates, balancing and opposing the sway of her handbag on the other arm. It’s a Chinese knockoff of a high-priced designer from some European place. The seams failed months ago; a bright yellow plastic supermarket sack protrudes from one side, fluttering like a caught leaf in the steamy breeze. She rests the bag in the crook of her elbow as she swats away a fly. A Chinese cargo truck rumbles past indifferently, spewing dark smoke from its sphincter. Her steps are resolute, constant.  

A friend calls to her and she crows with laughter in response to her colleague trapped behind a sloping board topped with small onions and bananas for sale. Tomatoes, too, in balanced triangular towers. She’s slumped over her belly in a red plastic chair. The fabric of her skirt dangles through a crack in the seat, bowing under the weight of the boy resting on her thigh. He’s quiet, uncertain, his eyes shifting side to side mimicking the diagonal navy stripes on his sweatpants. Some university in the US couldn’t sell their designer children’s apparel; they dumped their sweatpants here. Four men balance atop their silent motorbikes as she passes near the tree trunk. One types on his phone. Another slurps a sugary orange drink from a plastic bag. 2 kilometers remain. Today.

Her bulbous silhouette darts away as she passes underneath broad leafy refuge. The foliage matches the fabric tied around her back. Her infant sleeps in peace, legs dangling, surrendering to the tight threads knotted across her mother’s chest, linking shoulder to hip. She sweats in the arc of her shoulder blades where the warmth of the child’s belly presses against her cotton t-shirt. Her exposed skin and the tops of her breasts shine with perspiration even as she passes under the shade of a second tree.

And into the sunshine again, her misshapen Dali shadow stretching long in front. Her hip splays with each left step, the tension in her muscles remaining so many years after folding her body in submission to the soil while pounding the cassava. The infant swath bulges, too from her upright back. But it’s the lumber that is the most distorting: a bundle of sticks wrapped in fabric atop her head, defying physics. They protrude unevenly, no two the same length, but not unlike her own swaying limbs. Her steps are expertly soft and her afternoon outline on the pavement is a spectacle.

But no. Only if she were alone. But she’s one of the many. So many. So many women in Africa pacing littered city streets and rural buckling roads with straining vertical stamina and inexplicable poise. Straining under all that they carry – the swath of fabric for the child she bore and the child she cares for, the load of lumber for the cooking fire, the handbag for the day’s finances from her small shop in town, the sack with medicine for her husband’s pain (and hers if enough pills remain), and the heaviest burden - exhaustion of bearing these since tender youth. It’s heavy for African women to carry so much. Like a bundle of sticks on the head, it seems precarious, impossible. Imminent collapse. Yet they plod forward, slowly, surely. Balancing it all.