One of the most meaningful conversations I had with my parents when I saw them recently concerned retirement and how each one experiences it differently. Listening to them was overwhelming. As I am nearly sixty now, to have a conversation about retirement with my long-retired parents was nothing if not a blessing. And so I listened.
For my father, a high-ranking civil servant in his time, it was all about planning and preparing himself to be weaned off the perks of his office. He needed a private home of his own and he wanted to continue to be able to provide for his family. My mother, who was a writer and editor of some standing in her time, described her psychological and emotional struggles as she contemplated redundancy in an empty nest.
It was not, for them, the case of just two elderly persons watching the passage of time. Both are cerebral. Just as reading kept my father busy, writing kept my mother going, and as I listened to her in their retirement home in Bugolobi one afternoon I felt a strange but real connection. She spoke of how her time at Femrite, the Uganda Women Writers Association, had planted the unperishable seed that enabled her to continue writing fiction during her later years. She has since published several books, including children’s stories, making me wonder if she ever retired at all.
I find myself at a crossroads after retiring early from my job as an international economist. I quickly set up a boutique management consulting firm to keep me engaged intellectually, and now I hold a few boardroom positions even as I keep my philanthropic pursuits alive. I could honestly say that I am happy, often happy, and yet once the initial excitement of my new-found freedom had ebbed I started having needling questions in my head.
How does one continue to live after formal retirement? How does one balance life and work as a retired woman? And, especially, how does one remain sane? The voices in my head became louder during the COVID-19 pandemic as I sat at my dining table, which also is my office at home. I grappled for answers, finding them not in the people and objects near me but in those so far away and yet somehow so near – people I had known many years ago as a primary schooler. At home in Abuja my saving grace, if that is what it is, was being able to reach out to those friends and share experiences and connect as if, somehow, we were back in the classroom. Only this time we — the 1977 class of Kitante Primary School were chatting on WhatsApp. Many of us live outside Uganda. Most of us are parents if not, like me, grandparents.
Later, after the pandemic was over and we could all go and do whatever we wanted to do, I thought about what it all meant. If these friends meant a lot to me now, perhaps even more than the strong friends I had made as a grown woman, what tricks of nature were at play? Why were we recalling stories and events from nearly five decades ago? Perhaps, I thought many times, we had come full circle, like the winding road that takes you home one day, finally, no matter where you have been.
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Just before the pandemic struck in 2020, the Kitante class of 1977 had already started looking each other up, catching up, and meeting up. We celebrated birthdays. We attended weddings. On WhatsApp we shared jokes, comforting each other in times of sorrow and supporting those who needed help. But it was during the two pandemic years, when the world literally came to a standstill, that we really bonded and kept each other going in the face of a depressing global experience. Many of us were fast approaching the sixth floor, as some like to say, and inevitably there was encouraging talk about how to look after ourselves. We challenged each other to take walks, when that was possible. Regardless of where we live, many of us began our days by taking walks, determined walks for sure. Our first target was one hundred kilometers in thirty days. From New York to California, London to Kampala, we did our best to take up this challenge. Beyond the constitutional benefits, most of all it was great fun. In Kampala small groups met up and walked up and down Kololo
Hill or Tank Hill in Muyenga. And as they walked they asked after ailing parents, inquired into the education of their children, and no doubt remembered the children they once were. Character traits from many years ago came up, for children do not forget anything.
Barbara still frowns a lot.
Nakato was always a busybody.
So-and-so was hyperactive.
Our banter renewed the vigor within, affirmed a sense of belonging, and helped many of us deal with not just the fear of loneliness but also the sense of hopelessness that comes with slowing down after reaching a certain age.
Even now, what strikes me most about our engagement is how, after my global journey of living and working on four continents and interacting with so many people from different cultures, the group in which I really feel at home is that of the kids I went to school with. It is to them that I return and leave with life, and it is among them that I am most comfortable.
They are my childhood friends, warts and smiles and everything. When we get together for drinks or food in Kampala we just fall in step. They accept me just as I am and speak freely because they know me best. During my last visit to Kampala, in July 2023, we attended the wedding of the son of our mate – a lovely ceremony that showed how we have stuck together all these years later.
An uncomfortable truth about living away from one’s country for so long is that, at times, one feels lost and unable to easily reconnect with others. They may see you with strange eyes, or rather you may see them with strange eyes. Not so with the Kitante class of 1977, men and women who have been a great source of support in an unnerving world. They have made it easier for me to navigate the evolving urbanised culture of Ugandans. There is always the question of what’s going on here, and some of our conversations have focused on the usual stuff: health and education, for example. We have supported projects at Kitante Primary School through donations and charity events, and there is always the possibility of doing more. Life’s challenges may have taken a toll on us in different ways, and at different levels, but we have held each other’s hands in the onward march, helped in no small way by technology. A WhatsApp message at 5 a.m., wherever one is, will get some people talking.
As we all move steadily towards sixty, that sixth floor, plans are steaming up for a reunion at a beautiful spot that we visited during a school trip in 1977: Paraa Lodge in Murchison Falls National Park. Even if many of us have been there a few times, going there in this nostalgic spirit will strike differently. For we have fond memories of that trip and some have kept mementos of black-and-white photos taken during the expedition. The trip, even before it happens, stirs within us a longing for our lost youth and resurrects a carefree spirit. It makes me reflect on how we literally go back to being our youthful selves every time we are together, and perhaps even when we are not together – young at heart and, I dare say, most of us ageing gracefully. We are renewed by our lifelong friendship.
This is important, for I have found that retirement can be lonely as one becomes more introspective and deliberate about life. As for me, I am no longer driven by a high-flying international career during which I globe-trotted and enjoyed an active social life. The finer things in life have seemed to matter more as I gravitate towards peace and quiet. I seek tranquillity. I read for pleasure. Playing golf in beautiful and serene landscapes and visiting art galleries are attractive propositions. As is sitting with elderly family members and learning more about the values passed down generations, about our culture and traditions
that we take for granted, and even about the history of our nation and where we are going.
A major preoccupation for me has been how one gives back to the community and ensure, even in a small way, a better future for the younger generation – my children and grandchildren and my nephews and nieces. I now spend a considerable amount of time working with talented youth and mentoring young adults. This has opened up a whole spectrum of other fields about which I may know nothing: the creative chaps, the techies, the foodies, wildlife conservationists, name it. And I realize, interacting with these young people, that no matter how old you are you never stop learning. After two years attending workshops on technology and innovation I found myself teaching a brief course at the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University. One session I designed focused on technology and innovation in Africa, and later we travelled as a group to study emerging businesses in Kenya. There was an education start-up, Akili Kids, and one on e-mobility, Ecobodaa, offering a window into exciting new experiences. Listening to young, talented and very driven youth sharing their worldview was refreshing because it was like pondering the world with a new set of eyes, and so, naturally, I often felt younger than my years.
The daily grind of work draws ineluctably towards the end, and always it gets there. It helps to find one or two activities about which you have passionate feelings. Visiting art galleries — and collecting art — has become an addiction. With another group of friends, including some I have known since childhood, we have set up the Contemporary Art Society of Uganda, a collective in which we encourage or provoke each other into investing in Ugandan art. As a group we support emerging artists, many of whom are producing artworks at a very high level. I have adopted a policy of having one art day per month during which I do
nothing but read about art or visit galleries and hang with creatives. This is good for the soul every now and then.
It is not all joyful. After a certain age ailments kick in, and when they do we draw strength, again and again, from childhood friends. The Kitante class of 1977 has set up a group chat that we call Walking for Life. We still push each other to exercise daily, and the health tips that friends provide ease the burden of ageing. I find that our generation is much more open about sharing our health challenges whereas for the older generation, that of my father and mother, this was probably a taboo subject. I do not know why. Perhaps this is only true for me and my Kitante pals, or maybe it is not.
A friend recently said to me that the reason he keeps driving himself all the way from Kampala to Kisoro is because, as we get older, it is important to keep pushing ourselves. And I keep thinking about what he said particularly on those mornings when I get up and the sharp pain in my hip is still there. Rather than feel sorry for myself, I intentionally put on my clothes and head out for my exercise routine. At times the pain is just in my mind. Once, on my fifty-fifth birthday, with pain in the knee, I was still able to hike all the seven peaks of the Ngong Hills in Kenya over two and a half hours. For my sixtieth birthday, when that day comes, I hope to challenge myself again, perhaps by climbing much of the Muhavura range if I cannot summit it. Who knows? The body may be weakening, but the spirit is as willing and determined and adventurous as the young woman within me.
More importantly, if you learn something from me, family and friends are very important. Perhaps friends more so. As we come full circle, dear reader, we realize that the camaraderie of lifelong friends is to be treasured and, in some cases, may be stronger than that of natural family bonds. In recent years I have learned with surprise and gradually conceded — in the poignant sense of That’s life Mwattu— that most interactions are transactional and, consequently, empty of the deep and lasting connections many of us
crave. This makes our haven of childhood friends special. After all is said and done we go back to Square One, to a sort of primary consciousness.
And so I say, after Max Ehrmann in Desiderata, a poem that has been instructive since I was a sixteen-year-old girl:
Be yourself.
Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Wise words still, but even gracefully do not surrender too much.