When the City Weeps: The Dust Beneath the Towers

 

By Emmanuel Mihiingo Kaija

Kampala woke like a lion coughing up history.

 

From the soft arrogance of Kololo’s hills to the jostling boda veins of Wandegeya, from the rust-bitten corrugated iron of Katwe to Muyenga’s glassy heights, the city inhaled its morning smog—thick with petrol, charcoal smoke, perfume, sweat, and something older: the scent of memory, the ache of a country still learning to smile through cracked lips.

 

On that Wednesday in July, the sun rose reluctantly, its light a dull smear on the horizon, as if even it hesitated to look directly at the day ahead.

 

And beneath that hesitant dawn stood Akena Isaiah—reporter, believer, exile in his own country. He leaned against a graffiti-scarred pillar in the New Taxi Park, a cracked Samsung in one pocket, a frayed press badge in the other, and a red notebook open in his callused hands. He listened—not for honks or vendor cries or preachers shouting redemption, but for the tremble beneath it all. The city always whispered secrets before it screamed them.

 

Isaiah had written for The City Eye for four years—an underfunded, defiant newspaper run on fumes and fury. It had no office now, just a borrowed desk in a shared flat and a WhatsApp group named Ink & Fire. They hadn’t paid him in months, but the work fed him better than food ever had. Truth, when dangerous, was a kind of nourishment.

 

He jotted a phrase in a mix of Luganda and English: “Power eats in silence.” A proverb, maybe. Or a warning. Or a headline.

 

Kampala was full of stories—some loud and vulgar, others buried in unmarked graves. What kept his pen trembling, what had haunted him for fourteen sleepless nights, were the children.

 

Three girls. All under thirteen. Vanished from different parishes. No ransom. No bodies. No official outrage.

 

The police offered murmurs—human trafficking, maybe cults, maybe foreign rings. But their answers were as empty as their promises. The mothers, however, had screamed at dusk. Screamed until their voices cracked and their neighbors turned their radios up to drown them out.

 

Akena had met one of them—Mama Shakira, in the rust-red corridors of Kisugu. Her face was a mask of salt and grief, dry now from exhaustion. She had offered him porridge in a cracked mug. She had touched his hand gently, as if asking permission to hope.

 

“Write her back,” she whispered. “If you don’t, she’ll disappear for good.”

 

That night, Isaiah didn’t sleep. He lit candles around his desk, like vigil lights for the forgotten. He prayed—not to a god whose silence had grown unbearable, but to the story itself. He prayed that it would speak.

 

And it did.

 

The City Eye was housed now in a decaying top-floor room of a printing press downtown. The windows didn’t close. The ceiling leaked when it rained. But it pulsed with a kind of sacred defiance.

 

Joan Mugume, the editor—widow, ex-poet, former war correspondent—sat at a secondhand desk, sipping sugarless tea from a chipped mug that read: Speak Truth or Die.

 

“You’ll get yourself arrested again,” she muttered, not looking up as Isaiah dropped a sheaf of notes on her desk.

 

“If I do, make sure the mugshot’s flattering,” he replied.

 

Joan skimmed the notes. Her brow furrowed. “Minister’s cousin owns the garbage contracts. Police rerouting patrols. Disappearances. This is a war path, Akena.”

 

“Three girls are gone,” he said. “And no one with a uniform or a microphone is asking why.”

 

She set down the cup with care. “Then ask. But bring me proof, not poetry. Facts, not fury.”

 

Proof lived in shadows.

 

Isaiah began walking Kampala like a ghost. He wore a boda helmet even when on foot. He took nothing at face value, and nobody knew where he slept.

 

He met street preachers in Kisenyi who spoke of darkness moving through the night. In Luzira, he found a school janitor who said the CCTV at his compound “had lost power” the night the second girl vanished. In Kasubi, a gravedigger whispered that “small coffins” had been buried by torchlight, with no records filed.

 

He spoke to no one twice. He trusted no one fully.

 

Then he found Nabirye Fiona, a housemaid with quiet eyes and cigarette burns on her wrists. She had worked in the estate of Eng. Sebugwawo, a shadowy contractor whose name always echoed when whispers of corruption passed through the walls.

 

“They come at night,” she said, barely louder than wind. “Black cars. No plates. Sometimes they leave with sacks. Sometimes… with children.”

 

He blinked. “And the guards?”

 

“They wear police uniforms. But they don’t protect.”

 

He recorded none of it. He only listened. Wrote in code. Hid the notebook in the back of a broken speaker in his flat.

 

That night, he sent Joan one message: I’ve seen the devil’s number plate.

 

At dawn, their office had been gutted.

 

Not robbed—searched. Precisely, violently.

 

Laptops smashed. Memory cards gone. Joan’s teacup shattered. Their whiteboard wiped clean except for three words, written in thick black marker:

 

“DROP THE STORY.”

 

No name. No signature. Just the scent of power flexing its teeth.

 

Joan lit a cigarette—her first in a decade—and stared at the broken window.

 

“Print it,” she said.

 

Isaiah nodded. His fingers ached. But he didn’t tremble.

 

They worked all day. At dusk, the headline was bold and red:

 

THE CHILDREN BENEATH US: WHAT KAMPALA REFUSES TO SEE

 

They printed 5000 copies on borrowed credit. They passed them by hand on bodas, at taxi stops, to radio stations, pastors, and campus journalists.

 

Kampala buzzed. Streets murmured. Twitter boiled. WhatsApp chains carried the words faster than newspapers ever could.

 

And then came the knock.

 

Midnight. Heavy. Unmistakable.

 

Isaiah didn’t panic. He slid the red notebook into the crack behind his late mother’s photo, kissed it like a relic, and waited.

 

The men came masked. They blindfolded him. Didn’t speak.

 

They drove for hours. Or maybe minutes. He couldn’t tell. They threw him in a concrete room that smelled like bleach and forgotten screams.

 

“You think you’re a hero?” a voice asked from the dark.

 

He said nothing.

 

“You’re a spark. We stamp sparks.”

 

Still nothing.

 

“You write again, we erase you.”

 

Then came the fists. Measured. Brutal. Enough to silence but not to end.

 

Before dawn, they dumped him at the edge of a sugarcane plantation outside Mukono. Naked. Bleeding. Breathing.

 

Isaiah limped back to Kampala. Each step a vow.

 

He returned to the flat. The notebook was there.

 

Joan was waiting. Two new interns from Makerere sat quietly behind her, eyes wide, notebooks in hand.

 

She handed him tea. No words.

 

He sipped. Winced. His ribs cracked under the effort.

 

She asked, “Do we stop now?”

 

He looked at the sunrise. The sky was burning again, like it always did.

 

“No,” he said. “Now we begin.”

 

Emkaijawrites@gmail.com