“Tales from Here and There”: On Uganda’s Literary Culture
In March, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi became a 2018 recipient of the $165,000 Windham Campbell Prize, one of the world’s most generous writing awards. Five years ago, when the Ugandan-born author completed her doctoral thesis, the novel Kintu, at the University of Lancaster in the U.K., she was unable to find a publisher in in the UK willing to publish it.
Makumbi’s novel makes a fine ambassador for her bookish compatriots in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Kintu follows one Ugandan family across centuries of Ugandan history. It doesn’t stray into other lands or continents. It skips right over Uganda’s British colonial experience. It doesn’t dwell on the most internationally famous aspects of Ugandan contemporary history.
The first book of Kintu opens with the lines:
It was odd the relief that Kintu felt as he stepped out of his house. A long and perilous journey lay ahead.
A half-century ago, Uganda was an African literary powerhouse. In 1961, a 22-year-old established , arguably sub-Saharan Africa’s all-time most influential says in his 2016 memoir, , that the time he spent from 1959 to 1964 as a student at Makerere University, Uganda’s premiere seat of higher education, made him the writer he is today.
