Jennifer Makumbi at the Festival of Words

 

Jennifer Makumbi was born and raised in Kampala, Uganda. After her parents split up when she was two she lived with her grandfather. This was during the regime of Idi Amin Dada whose presidential regime (1971 to 1979) was characterized by atrocious human rights abuses, ethnic persecution, and the kind of corruption that is synonymous with a dictatorship. She spoke of neighbours and friends who would suddenly go missing in the night which created additional fears that through simple association, they may be next. This paranoia is something that I’ve read about frequently in Nazi fiction, such as Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin, but not in African literature. This had particular resonance for Jennifer as her father was a banker who was arrested and brutalised and who experienced such emotional and physical torture that his mental health rapidly deteriorated.

 

Jennifer recently won the Kwani Manuscript Project, a new literary prize for unpublished fiction by African writers, for her novel The Kintu Saga. She is also the winner of this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize which was held in Uganda. This was something she was particularly pleased by as ‘it’s usually won by Canadian’s’. The novel itself takes her father’s circumstances as inspiration, drawing a parallel to his madness and that of ‘mad’ Africa, given the upheavals experienced over the centuries.  

 

Kintu is a mythological figure specific to the Baganda of Uganda and was the first person on earth, the father of all people. There are three versions of the myth so any modern interpretation is inevitably going to cause controversy as well as break a few taboos along the way. Therefore it is understandable that it’s been written in exile, after Jennifer emigrated to Britain in the early 2000s. She revealed that one aunt has been given a copy of the book and she has not heard from her since (hopefully she is just a slow reader…) whereas other friends were disappointed to discover a prominent male protagonist was homosexual.

 

Homosexuality in Uganda was punishable by death until 20 December 2013 when the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Act instead made the crime punishable by life in prison. This should be seen as a form of progress, albeit very slow progress. Association with LGBT or promotion of a LGBT lifestyle comes with severe punishments too, which is why the casting of a homosexual character will have caused some native readers anxiety. But this is the power of fiction. It enables readers the necessary detachment to view their lives and culture from a safe distance.  

Kintu is targeted towards a ‘broader audience’ which was necessary given that Uganda has 46 different languages and 36 ethnic groups, and so it wasn’t possible to write for one particular group. If she had written it in, say, one particular dialect of Ugandan, then her readership could easily have been reduced to one million people. Therefore she wrote it in an ‘elastic English’ that gives it a uniquely Ugandan feel with the necessary colloquialisms. 

 

The result is a complex, provocative historical story that enables competing world views and ideologies to emerge. It has already gone some way to uniting Ugandans, although it perhaps favours Baganda nationalists who may interpret the themes as recognition of their suffering and a demand for greater recognition – be that in taking back land or cultural status. Most important of all, the book is the beginning of a much needed dialogue about what can be extracted from Africa’s past to shape the future in post-independence. The answer may very well be a more meaningful role for women, particularly given that in the story all of the male heirs of patriarch Miisi die, and so his daughter Kusi (herself an army general and the only family survivor) is the only person left to inherit the family name. No doubt this will infuriate traditional male Ugandan readers, particularly due to their violent representations and the senseless killing that opens the book, who may perceive a deliberate feminist reading of the myth in order to readdress gender equalities. But such accusations are of course a strategy used by men to dismiss a female voice.  

 

Due to the sheer breath and scope of the narrative – it begins in 2004 and shifts back and forth to 1750 – certain aspects will have more resonance with readers than others. But given that Jennifer started writing it in 2003 and it has just been published, it is a book that has taken a lot of thought. And this, quite simply, is all she demands from readers when considering Uganda’s past, present and future.

 

Tolerance has been a recurring theme at the Festival of Words and this was just the latest talk in a series of dialogues that has given voice to the marginalised from a far afield as China, Syria, Afghanistan, Belfast and Hungary. Nottingham has felt like a truly cosmopolitan city: the bar has been raised instead of being drunk dry.    

Kintu is available from the Five Leaves Bookshop.