The Village That Made Me: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 1

June 16, 2026

I Was Born Under a Banana Tree — And That Was the Least of It

A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust by Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi
It is with a kind of fear that I begin to tell this story.

Not the ordinary fear of embarrassment, though that lives here too. Not the fear of being judged, though I have spent more hours than I care to admit imagining the way a stranger's eyes might move across these sentences, measuring me, filing me away. No, the fear I am talking about is something older and quieter. It is the fear you feel when you stand at the edge of a childhood you have spent years trying to both escape and preserve — and you reach down to lift the veil, and you are not sure what version of yourself you will find underneath.

I was born on the fourth of January, 1993. I was born in a banana plantation, in a village called Kisaka, in what was then Rakai District of Uganda. My mother did not go to a hospital. She never went to a hospital for any of her ten children. She gave birth beneath trees, on the earth, the way the generations before her had, and when each child came into the world she was already thinking about the next hour, the next meal, the next child. That is the kind of woman Rosemary was.

She called me her polite baby.I did not know, for many years, how much weight those two words were carrying.

The Village That Made Me

Kisaka, in English, means bush. Or shrub. No one is entirely certain how the village got its name — history in small rural places is like that, half-remembered, half-invented, told differently depending on who is sitting across from you and what time of day it is. But the name fits. Kisaka is a place where things grow quietly, stubbornly, without asking permission.

It sits about eighty kilometres south of Masaka, the largest city in the sub-region, but those kilometres feel longer than they measure. The road that connects my village to the world is called the Masaka-Mutukula Road, and it runs all the way to the Tanzanian border. When I was a boy, that road was a dirt track that turned to mud in the rainy season and cracked like old pottery in the dry. It was upgraded in 2003, when I was ten years old, and I can still feel the wild joy of running to the construction site after school — climbing graders and caterpillars and bulldozers, collecting lime bags, shouting at the machines like they were magnificent beasts that had wandered into our world from somewhere unimaginable.

The hills around Kisaka are green in a way that should embarrass postcards. In the early morning, before the heat arrives, they sit there blue and enormous against the sky, and you can stand at the edge of the compound and feel, for a moment, like the world is mostly beautiful. The river Bukoola runs nearby, crystal clear, fed from the hills and flowing eventually into Lake Victoria. We drank from it. We fished in it. In the dry season the cattle came to it and stood in the shallows like they owned everything.

But the beauty of Kisaka never told the whole story. No beautiful place does.
When you searched Kyotera District online — even now, years later — eight out of ten results will mention HIV/AIDS. The epidemic carved through this region across four decades, and it carved through families the way floods carve through riverbanks: quietly at first, then all at once. The nearby landing site of Kasensero is known internationally as one of the places where the epidemic first appeared in Uganda. History marked my home long before I was old enough to understand what history was.

This is the land I came from. This is the soil my story is rooted in.

The story does not end in the banana plantation, or in that mud house, or in the silence after my father's rage. It is only just beginning. What happened next — the years that pushed me toward a dream I could not yet name — is where the story turns. Find out what shaped the rest of this journey in The Dream From Dust. — Lukonge M Achilees-Author of The Dream From Dust