Stalking her for more than a month, Mayende realised Kabasita was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Finding the right opportunity to whisper his sweet nothings into her ears seemed hard.
“Kabasita was friends with my aunt and cousins, it is them that played the role of match-makers between us,” he recalls.
However, when he approached Kabasita, she played hard to get, yet Mayende was not about to give up.
“At first, I was hesitant, but months down the road I accepted his proposal and it was not long before I became pregnant. This scared me, I was 17 years and he was 10 years older than me,” she narrates.
When her aunt started getting suspicious of her condition, she talked to Mayende and decided to leave Bulemezi for Mengo where she started living with her sister.
Taking the wrong turn
While in Mengo, the two lovebirds kept in touch and everything seemed to be taking the right direction with Kabasita looking forward to the day she would move in with her lover.
But in 1982 when she was about six months pregnant, her expectations were cut short when she learnt that the man that took her innocence had two other wives with five children.
To Kabasita, this was disheartening.
“I had never wanted to be someone’s second wife, and when one of his relatives told me about Mayende’s multiple relations, I confronted him about the issue. Instead, he seemed unbothered and suggested I join his two wives and start living in the same homestead where he would easily look after me and my child, an idea I rejected,” she smiles.
Mayende shies away, saying that despite him having two wives, he had found true love with Kabasita and had hopes of someday making her his wife.
This is an excuse Kabasita did not want to listen to, saying she could not bear competing with women older than her, yet she was the one at fault.
To clear her conscience, she ended the relationship with Mayende, and promised to hand over his child after she had given birth.
“I was forced to cut ties with him and went back to my aunt’s house in Bulemezi. To my surprise my aunt did not support the idea of me ending the relationship, but I had made up my mind,” she reveals.
However, unbothered by Kabasita’s decision, Mayende carried on with his other wives and children.
Moving on
Kabasita says when their son turned a year old in 1983, she went to Kikuubo where Mayende was running a retail shop and handed over the child to him. This was an indication that there was no turning back. They both moved on and as months passed by, each got involved in other relationships.
Unfortunately for Kabasita, her new relationships somehow seemed to hit a dead end.
“I met and fell in love with two other men, but for each of the relationships there was something wrong about it. At some point I thought I was unlucky,” she remarks
Noting that in 1996 she gave up on relationships and decided to live a single life.
It is then that, she became a born again Christian.
Meanwhile, Mayende got two other wives, making a total of four and for one reason or another, he broke up with each one of them remaining with one, who he later on broke up with in 2000.
When his relationships came to an end and with no one to hang onto, Mayende found himself thinking about his Kabasita. Click to read more…
