Mulira exuded selfâ€"sacrifice and a spirit of volunteerism

JUST a spontaneous appreciation of the self–sacrificing love and leadership of Rebecca Mulira, who tragically gave up her life in a motor accident along the Masaka Road on November 12. A fuller account of her life and times will fill volumes elsewhere. Suffice it here to illustrate for The New Vision readers her lifetime of sacrifice. Since I started on this article, I have seen in your columns of November 14, 2001 Patrick Luganda’s listing of Rebecca’s public achievements which contained a very accurate description of her by the current Headmistress of Gayaza High School. “She had tremendous volunteer spirit,” is a quote that completely agrees with the title I had already chosen for this contribution, and what follows is intended to demonstrate that this volunteering was the driving force and explanation of her “activism.” The way she left this side of eternity could not better show her “tremendous” volunteering spirit. Returning from a burial of a wife of her late husband’s nephew and travelling in an executive trooper driven by her son which contained a daughter and three other relatives on her husband’s side, she was the only one who yielded the spirit when their vehicle rammed into an omnibus. The vechicle had suddenly stopped before to pick up a passenger after it had just overtaken them. By fact or affinity, she was mother to all in their vehicle. It was as though she said, “I volunteer to go, for I am the elder and I have played my role, past the 80 years of the Psalmist. For goodness sake, let the others stay to pass on the baton to others.” Self–sacrifice indeed. Christ-like. My mind goes back to when I first knew her, as a child. Although I occupied a central position in her wedding photograph when she married my uncle, Eridadi, in the very late 1930s, when I met her for the first time, I was only nine or 10. She struck me as outgoing and beyond self for others. She was breast-feeding in the bedroom. It must have been baby Peter, the precursor of present day lawyer Peter Mulira. Lunch, which she was for ever dutifully to prepare for her homestead, I recall, would have been over, for the next event was a midday siesta. Being on holiday and feeling lonely, I had walked to their home, a short distance from ours. Somehow, I linked up with them in the bedroom. She did not treat me as a problem at all, for after she had put the child to sleep and she herself was dosing, she asked me whether I also wished to sleep. When I consented, she mothered me to sleep on the same bed with both of them, thereby allowing me to share in their family privacy. From then on, I looked up to her as a mother. Her marriage to my uncle, a much older person who had had an extended academic career that took him beyond Makerere to Achimota in Ghana, can be cited as another example of her self-sacrifice, because her near contemporaries like Margaret Mulyanti, who later married Rebecca’s brother James Mukasa, and Sarah Nyendwoha (Ntiro) continued with their education up to Makerere, and Oxford in the case of Sarah. Rebecca’s betrothal to a man much older than herself recalls that of her mother who married Omwami Hamu Mukasa after his first wife had passed away. But both mother and daughter were amply rewarded by their marriages. Even when Rebecca went on that fruitful trip to the USA with her husband’s niece, Kate Kibuka, the crusading zeal was because so little was known about Uganda in that distant country at the time. Rebecca and Kate certainly played a lead role in projecting a good image of Uganda and its women leaders, but they had to sacrifice time and care for their families which were only compensated by the results of the journey told elsewhere. If politics is defined as “power” then Rebecca was not a politician, for she did not seek power over anyone. Rather, she sought to serve, a trait for which she was very suited because of: her parantage in upper Buganda hierachy: disposition of self-sacrificial love right across class, ethnicity and race and above all, her superb femininity, which asserted itself without finding it necessary to play masculine roles. May this, which she so eloquently displayed, be the future of feminism. Rebecca’s parting thought was also very indicative of her lifelong outreach to other people. After ministering to the miraculous survivors in the hospital, cousin Eva called me to her bedside and said, “Two or three days before the accident, mum said we should come over to your place because it had been long since she last saw you.” In the flesh she did not make it but I believe her spirit continues astride and it has nurtured these tributes. For well beyond midnight, as her remains lay in the coffin in the sitting room of her house at Namirembe, while splendid singers sang songs of solace, I noticed from my position of vantage outside the pitched large tent a single bright star-looking object in the pitch dark sky. I lost no time and opportunity to point it out to mourners that it represented Rebecca who had already joined her CREATOR. Thanks to the eternal hope in Christ Jesus.