The Land Was Everything
I've only recently began to understand what it means to own land.
Perhaps a month ago I found an article written about a man who tracked down his father's investment: some cheap land that had been sold to him by a door to door salesman in the baby boom era. They had lived somewhere in the eastern US (I want to say New Jersey) and the land the father purchased was in New Mexico. The author found the plot of land he'd been paying a meager property tax for and realized not only what his father's dream meant, but also that the land was still not worth much.
But land is worth a lot in many places and those that have it seem to flourish while those that do not either languish or become uprooted. The story of my family is that of being uprooted but I didn't understand how much this was connected until a few months ago when my uncle told me about how we'd lost our land.
In the late 1970s, after becoming fed up with the madman-dictator Idi Amin, the Tanzanian government invaded Uganda to overthrow him. The home that my family had was near the Uganda-Tanzania border. My uncle describes it as a lush place where they grew bananas and coffee. When it became apparent that the home would be in the direct line of combat most of the family left to settle in a new place, but my grandfather wouldn't leave. I wonder if he had a sense that his spirit was somehow connected to that place and that if he was forced to leave, it would be crushed by hopelessness.
He did lose his land and although there is more to the story the only man I saw as my grandfather had given up on life. The language barrier meant that I never was able to ask him, and as a thoughtless teenager I probably wouldn't have been able to piece much together but now I wish I would have asked him if the day he died was when they took his land away.
My parents, a short time after being married, scraped together what they had and bought a small plot of land in Uganda. During the more than 20 years of life as expatriates both in the US and Kenya they would speak again and again about the land they had – an anchor to a home, a fragile grasp on stasis and having something concrete for the time they would finally return.
Now I can see myself - my landless self - in a better light. I can see my wanderings and how they can't last forever without my becoming even more uprooted and scattered. I can see how special it is for those who have that notion of land, stasis, permanence, and anchoring.
8:00:29 PM 
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