Kintu

350 Pages·2017·1.34 MB·English

by  Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland,
California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
Copyright © 2017 Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Introduction Copyright © 2017 Aaron Bady First
published in 2014 by Kwani Trust, Nairobi ISBN: 978-1-945492-03-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961684
Design & Typesetting Justin Carder
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a book review.
In memory of my grandfather, Elieza Mayombwe Makumbi, who told folktales
and taught me how to tell them; my father, Tony Kizito Makumbi, who felt that
all I needed were stories in books and who introduced me to Shakespeare when I
was only eight years old. And to Aunt Catherine Makumbi-Kulubya, for holding
my father’s dream.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Aaron Bady
KINTU
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Prologue
Kintu Kidda
Suubi Nnakintu
Kanani Kintu
Isaac Newton Kintu
Misirayimu (Miisi) Kintu
The Homecoming
Introduction
Aaron Bady
Ugandans have waited a long time for the book you are holding to exist. Since it
was first published in 2014, after winning the Kwani? Manuscript Project, the
enthusiasm with which Kintu has been received in Uganda has been difficult to
describe but remarkable to witness. Last year, I had the pleasure of trailing
behind Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi at the Writivism literary festival in
Kampala, as readers and other writers caught at the hem of her garment. In such
circles, it is hard to overstate what a rock star she is, and how precious this book
has already become. The book sold out immediately, and even those who hadn’t
read it were talking about it and about where to get it. It’s not hyperbole to call
Kintu the great Ugandan novel. It is, simply and obviously, a plain fact.
Her reception in the UK, where she lives with her family, has been very
different. Even after winning the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize,
Makumbi was told that Kintu was unpublishable, that it was much too African
for British readers. Perhaps a sprawling multicharacter saga like this one might
work if the characters were white, if the proper nouns were places like Oxford or
Southampton, and if their names were solid English names (and for goodness
sake, only one name each!). In Great Britain, after all, who has even heard of
Kintu, the mythical first man on earth and founder of the Buganda Kingdom?
Who would know to pronounce his name with a soft ch sound, instead of a hard
k? Perhaps British readers might be interested in the exoticism of the historical
novel that Kintu starts off as being—the ninety pages or so that are set in the
18th century, before the rest of the novel reverts to 2004—but could the book-
buying public be expected to care about the struggles of an extended family in
present-day Kampala?
If you must write about Africa, then you write about dictators, ethnography,
and war; these are the sorts of stories that confirm what people already “know”
about Africa. And if you must write about Uganda, then you place a white
character in the middle of the action. You write about Africans who have left
Africa and migrated to the United States or Europe. You write about the legacies
of colonialism. If you can’t make Europe the hero of the story—and these days,
you can’t—then you can at least make Europe the villain. One editor rejected the
manuscript because Makumbi didn’t want to change it: to publish it, they would
have to change it, and the novel is too good to change.
When Transit Books first read Kintu, they signed it immediately. They
weren’t concerned that American readers would be overwhelmed by the
unfamiliar places and names, or that the novel was the wrong kind of “African.”
They put their faith in the story, trusting their readers to take that journey. It’s a
mistake to worry whether non-Ugandan readers will “get” this novel: as with any
great work of fiction, this one teaches you how to read it. But it’s a measure of
the preciousness of the book you hold in your hands that I cannot help but
burden you with a few words of advice, before you begin your journey.
The main thing to know, simply, is that this novel was written for Ugandans.
This might seem obvious, but it isn’t. What, after all, is a Ugandan? For one
thing, a Ugandan might be someone for whom complex and indefinite extended
families are more the norm than the exception, a world in which siblings might
be cousins, parents aren’t always parents, and everybody can have at least three
different names, depending on who they’re standing next to. A Ugandan might
be someone for whom family is a much older and more permanent institution
than the nation, and in which nothing is more political than sex and children. A
Ugandan might also be someone who knows the name Kintu, whether or not
they know what it means. At the highest level of abstraction, perhaps, a Ugandan
is someone with firm ideas about what it means to be Ugandan, and who it is
that isn’t. But if Uganda is real, its borders are anything but clear and obvious:
American readers might struggle to keep track of the names and relations that
proliferate across the pages of this novel, but it’s not like these things are easy
for Ugandans. They are not. If family is the texture of everyday life, then
everyday life is as confusing and indefinite (and borderline fictional) as family
history itself.
More concretely, this book is for Ugandans because it’s saturated with
Ugandan words and places and names. From the hills and valleys that the urban
jungle of Kampala now sprawls across—but that once looked out over the
Buganda Kingdom—to the long roads and rivers that crisscross the country,
Kintu is a novel about a singular and all-encompassing sense of place. And these
references tell stories. You may speed past them on your way to your
destination, but even a traveler who cannot understand the language—who can
only look, see, and move on—will still feel the depth of the novel’s engagement
with Ugandan history. This is part of Kintu’s magic: you will feel more than you
know. This also applies to Ugandans, especially those for whom “history” is the
story of Europe in Africa.
As Makumbi has been quick to explain, Kintu flowed out of a desire to give
Ugandans a taste of their own long and complicated history, to do for Ugandans
something like what Chinua Achebe novels did for Nigerians in the 1960s: to
make them look at a hill, for example, and know that the Ganda have been
climbing it for centuries. To remind them that Uganda’s history did not begin in
1962, when it gained independence from Great Britain, or even a few years
earlier, when Europeans first “discovered” them. To place today’s cultural
politics—of citizenship, sexuality, and spirituality—into the deep and long
endurance of centuries. Most of all, to tell a singular tale of Uganda as an
expansive family saga, in which blood ties only mean as much as the stories we
tell about them.
Makumbi began to write this story in 2003, in short bursts of frenetic, intense
work that were followed by long fallow periods of distraction and
contemplation. She was thinking about many things. One of them was a memory
from her childhood, when she read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in which
a father kills his foster son. “It cut much too close!” she told me. “I was so
young. I found myself looking at my father’s hands and wondering, ‘Would he
kill me? Would he kill me?’” When her father lost his faculties, years later, she
found herself dwelling on mental illness and the stereotype of Africa as a “mad
place.” And when she began a PhD in African literature, in England, she became
frustrated at the insistence of her supervisors that “African Literature” be the
story of Europe in Africa. As she began to write what she was then calling The
Kintu Saga, she vowed to tell the story of Uganda with colonialism placed in
perspective: not to say that the colonial encounter wasn’t important, but that it
wasn’t the only thing that was.
A decade later, it’s easy to find these biographical fragments in the final
product. But as haunted as she might have been by Achebe’s novels—about a
father who kills his son and a father who goes mad—and as destructive as that
legacy is, Kintu is a response to Things Fall Apart in which the story of a family
curse is also a story of survivals. African literature is littered with patriarchal
novels about how Africa’s manhood was taken by Europe: it’s one of Achebe’s
great themes. But while Kintu might be another story about men dying, it’s also
about families surviving (and often with women at the head). Makumbi insists
that Kintu is a “masculinist” novel, and it is: focusing on the fragile edifice of
paternity, she emphasizes the toll that patriarchy takes on the people who happen
to be men. For that same reason, it’s also one of the most feminist books one is
likely to read. But when I asked her why she didn’t call it “feminist,” she
laughed, and explained that I would have to wait and read what she was writing
next. When I had, she said, I wouldn’t have to ask; that would be feminist.
Makumbi is a scholar, and to write Kintu, she dug into the archives, asking
questions about names and places and expressions and history. But Ugandan
history is filled with stories that the archive won’t tell, places where the
historical record suddenly goes silent. To tell that history, she had to become a
fiction writer attuned to silences. After all, Uganda is a family, and Kintu is the
story of how all families are built out of silences and fictions: sometimes an
uncle is really a father, or a cousin is really a brother; even mothers are never
necessarily who you think they are. And sometimes the past separates us, and is
better forgotten. Kintu is about creating family ties where none existed before,
about making homes and families that can reach across the gaps of time and
space; it’s also about making up new truths when the old ones are lost or
inadequate. It’s about journeying far away to find out where you are from.
Take, for example, the long opening journey that begins the first book, as
Kintu Kidda and his men cross the o Lwera desert on their way to the capital of
the Buganda Kingdom. For him, the journey takes many days of hard travel
across a barren and forbidding landscape. The governor of a distant province,
and of suspiciously non-Ganda ancestry, Kintu is loyal to the Ganda kabaka,
however far he is from the centers of courtly power. And so he must cross o
Lwera to prove his allegiance; he must re-establish the links between the center
and the periphery of the great Buganda Kingdom, must reassure the Ganda that
he is part of it. As he travels—as he contemplates his situation, remembering his
past and planning his future—we are immersed in his world, the courtly
intrigues and domestic complications that consume him. But we also follow him
into the trials and tribulations of making family and nations out of strangers.
Neither one is just there—both must be made.
Kintu Kidda is fictional, but the o Lwera desert is as real as the Ganda. Even