ROSE NAKATO SSEMAKULA

Nakasero Market trader who kept a hundred vendors counting, saving and standing tall

Rose Nakato never wrote down a price, because every price lived in her head, and in fifty years nobody ever caught her out. She opened her stall at Nakasero Market in 1966, at the age of twenty, with a basket of tomatoes and a borrowed scale, and by the time she retired she sold the best matooke, pineapples and passion fruit in the market, and half the diplomats' cooks in Kololo called her by name.

She was born in 1946 at Mityana, one of eight children, and left school after Primary Seven to help her mother on the family plot. In 1970 she married Emmanuel Kato Ssemakula, a young economist who had once bought a pineapple from her and stayed an hour arguing about the price. When he left for his doctorate in London she kept the household and the stall running and sent him parcels of groundnuts, and when he returned she told him that a woman with her own income was a woman with her own opinion. He never contradicted her, at least not twice.

In 1984 she founded a savings group among sixty vendors, many of whom could not read, and taught them to count, to keep records and to sign their own names. It grew into the Nakasero Market Vendors' SACCO, which paid school fees, medical bills and, one memorable year, a roof for the entire fish section. She wore a gomesi to church every Sunday at All Saints' Cathedral, sang alto, cooked groundnut sauce for the choir and made sure every child in the market ate before school.

Rose died peacefully in her sleep in April 2024, three years after Emmanuel, aged seventy-seven. She leaves three children, eight grandchildren and a market that is still, they say, counting her way.

“A woman who counts her own money does not need to ask for permission.”