Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi‘s Kintu (2014) has received a lot of positive buzz, even being hailed as the first great Ugandan novel, whatever that means (I don’t mean to dismiss the praise, rather to problematize the terms first, great, and Ugandan).
It’s an ambitious novel: over 400 pages, and spanning several generations through Ugandan history. The plot revolves around a distant, not-quite-mythic ancestor who, through some unfortunate events, is the subject of a curse that is transferred across successive generations of twins.
The characters, for me, increase in their richness and individuality as the novel progresses, and the incorporation of the modern world into the social fabric is handled deftly. The major historical upheavals–the arrival and departure of the British, Idi Amin’s rule and removal from power, the HIV/AIDS epidemic–are all dealt with an understated realism that strikes me as highly accurate: that is, these things were part of everyday life, they were part of the circumstances through which lives had to be navigated, and people did so with widely varying degrees of sophistication, understanding, and success.
Because of the buzz around the novel, I couldn’t keep the question of what makes this Ugandan out of my head as I read: certainly, all of the details are deeply rooted–the settings, the historical events that are referenced, the cultures that are detailed and represented are all highly specific and very richly presented. And, it may be true that novels this deeply set in Uganda are few and far between. But in the end, I think Kintu belongs to a specific sub-genre of multi-generational studies of families with rich historical settings. In this, for example, it shares genre space with Some Sing, Some Cry.
If that sound interesting, and you are either curious about Uganda or know enough about it to want to immerse yourself in it, you will most likely enjoy Kintu immensely.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
The thick representation of a local culture is always an aspiration for me: I want my writing to be set somewhere specific, even if that place is generated from my imagination.