The man I was loving froze when his hand encountered a string of beads on my waist. We were getting naked for the first time, and I had, without meaning to, kept the beads a secret. 

His chest, which was just a while ago rising and falling with excited breathing, dropped to a flat steadiness – like a wave tired of the ocean’s journey. 

“What does this mean?” he asked.

I knew he was not really seeking an answer but an assurance; an assurance that my honey-brown, millet-sized beads were there for the most positive of reasons. He sat up, his forehead creased, eyes narrowed with anticipation.

I said nothing.

#

My people, the Acoli of northern Uganda, are among the many bead-wearing groups on the continent. Traditionally, new mothers strap their baby’s waist and wrist with beads to monitor their development, and for the girls, an additional role of body-shaping.

In adulthood, the Acoli wore beads as adornments but also to express and accept romantic interest.

But we were in 2014. The man in my bed and I were latecomers in this cultural practice to care about strict adherence to all its original symbolisms. Besides, he was from central Uganda, a region where waist beads carried a different meaning. 

A married Muganda woman adorned her waist to enhance lovemaking, and importantly, to signal to her husband that she was in the mood for sex. In fact, it was considered taboo for the woman to wear waist beads outside the bedroom.

My partner didn’t strike me as the traditional type. So, in what light was he really thinking about my adorned waist? Why had a single string of beads led to the collapse of desire?

#

Sometime in the early 2000s, a group of waist-bead-wearing women of my generation emerged. Some men responded with excitement. They assumed that  the women were sending public invitations for sexual conquests, and they were willing candidates. No hassle.  

But many men (and women) were repulsed by this wave. While time had passed and the cultural practice of bead-wearing had morphed to a stylistic one, this group wanted to keep waist beads in the bedroom. Even among the Acoli where women of my great-grandmother’s generation wore nothing but loin cloth and beads, condemnations arose.

The young women who flaunted waist beads with low-cut jeans and miniskirts were out of order. They were sexually unrestrained. They were loudly calling men for sex—something a woman must never do. It was the man who should pursue a woman. If it came too easily, it was cheap. It was impure.

Another theory claimed that the beads came with powers to trap men. Invisible charms from a powerful witch that ensured a man wouldn’t look elsewhere after touching a bead-waisted woman.

The man in my bed must have been haunted by one of these thoughts. He shifted, cleared his throat, and asked another question. “Why do you wear them?” He couldn’t bring himself to calling the beads beads, as if doing so would pull him into the depth of my impurity.

#

I have always loved jewelry. At just nine years old, I sat on the floor at the back of the class—shielded by students crammed into the few desks we had. I pulled out an acacia thorn from my bag as the history teacher went on and on about the fall of a fascist dictator in faraway Italy, or perhaps it was about the French queen who mocked her starving countrymen to eat cake if they couldn’t afford bread. 

I handed the thorn to my best friend and asked her to pierce my ears. I gritted my teeth and felt it rip through one earlobe, then the next. I made no sound. Shed no tears. Mama found out two weeks later, at which time, the wound had almost healed. As we sat on the verandah of our kitchen, perhaps listening to music on the radio, her eyes were drawn to the ear pin I had made from dry grass. It was my first set of jewelry. Mama was too stunned to be mad. 

From then on, my ears were always bejeweled. A friend of mine still teases me about the day I stopped  by the roadside and exclaimed, “I feel naked.” On looking closely at myself, I realized I had forgotten to wear my earrings. That’s how much jewelry meant to my sense of self.

But I never really wore waist beads. It was always necklaces and earrings–nothing flashy, no loud colors. However, once theories and condemnations started flying about waist beads and the young women who openly wore them, I was intrigued.

One day  I took a trip to downtown Kampala and knew I had to stop by Gazaland, the crowded shopping arcade where you got anything from hair to nails to lashes. I reached for the beads instead. At home, I fashioned its length to size 32 and tied it; it was neat and glittery. My single-string waist beads were the middle finger I gave to whoever wanted to define and determine where and how we wore beads.

It would take me another five years or so to upgrade to ankle beads. This attracted even more scorn. A woman who wore anklets was a woman of the world. She was utterly unwomanly. But I thought, if looseness meant beauty, femininity, and whatever women wanted beads to signify, I wanted in. 

#

I have known many men who don’t give up easily, especially when a vagina is at stake. When the man I was loving asked a second time why I wore beads on my waist, I gave him an answer simple enough to put the issue to rest.

“I wear them for the same reason I wear earrings. For the same reason you have that little chain around your neck.” 

He was not convinced. I imagined him conjuring images of a queue of men who came before him. The ones who sullied the water before he could quench his thirst. I was not going to reassure him, to tell him, Dear lover, there has only been one before you, a very unserious one at that! No. He was not a virgin, and neither was I. Nothing I said or did was going to restore us to that cherished stage of purity.

When he leaned against the wall and smiled the pained smile of a man who had gone hunting and returned without meat, I sat up and smiled the smile of a woman who had no lengthy explanations to give. I was a woman adorned, a woman content.

About the Author:

Ber Anena is a Ugandan writer, editor and performer. Her poetry and prose have been published in The Atlantic, adda, The Caine Prize anthology, Brittle Paper, Isele, The Plentitudes, New Daughters of Africa anthology, The Kalahari Review, among others. She’s a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Anena attended the MFA Writing program at Columbia University in New York, and holds degrees in journalism and human rights from Makerere University in Uganda. She’s the author of the award-winning poetry collection, A Nation in Labour. 

*Featured image by Antonio López from Pixabay