JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Over the years, there have been some postulations by critics that the evolution of what is tagged African writing in the turn of the century underwent a rather undesirable change. This is not to say that there have been no good developments; the evolution of mainstream literature from being all about socially conscious themes to spreading out into various themes of social life, religion, immigration and so on, has been, in general, good for African literature. One of the main problems alluded to here has often arisen from how what is written is written about. About how language is often compromised in order to pander to certain audiences. The result of this is that the originality of many stories is distorted. For this reason, writers whose works make it to the mainstream while maintaining their originality, whose works do not seem to be burdened by this need to pander to western audiences are highly celebrated in some quarters. One such writer is the Ugandan novelist and short story writer, Jennifer Makumbi.
Makumbi broke into limelight after her short story Let Us Tell This Story Properly won the Commonwealth Regional Short Story Prize and then went on to win the Global Prize in 2014. The story is now part of a bigger body of work, Manchester Happened, her short story collection, published in 2019. The prize-winning story, like the other stories in the collection, is an immigrant story of a woman living in Manchester, whose husband dies suddenly. She returns to Uganda, and in the process of putting things together for his burial, she discovers the startling reality of her husband being a full-fledged bigamist, while alive and married to her.
In the stories in the collection, Manchester Happened — ranging from Christmas Is Coming which tells the story of a depressed young boy who struggles to adapt to life in England and the condition of abuse in his family, to Our Allies The Colonies, which tells the story of Abbey, a young man who goes to England and impregnates a woman and loses the child, to Manchester Happened and down to Love Made in Manchester — Jennifer Makumbi shows what she is known for, an explorer of the past (colonial days, in this case), and establishes herself as a competent hand in handling the affairs of the present. The topics treated in the stories range from nostalgia typical of immigrant stories, the African culture, homosexuality, depression, religion. There is in the stories, an allegorical story of an immigrant dog and a native English dog, which portrays African immigrant life as opposed to the life of Africans born abroad.
The writing style is mostly fast-paced and spans over a long period in the life of its characters. The storyline is moulded by the observation power of the author, and the collection, therefore, serves, among many purposes, as earlier mentioned, as documentation of immigrant lives. In the collection, we are presented with the challenges which come with immigrant life without the high-browed, elitist, snobbish attitude in which most immigrant literature by middle-class writers are marinated. The stories are original in their conception and how they are written, and one does not find it difficult to empathize with the characters. The stories portray a group of people moving away from the troubles in a less-than-prosperous Africa to another world where they come across the full weight of another set of problems. Most of the immigrant characters are haunted by a stinging nostalgia that creeps out from the pages. The well-portrayed immigrant realities of the stories made an impression that this is perhaps the kind of books African immigrants in the UK might want to send down to family back home as a documentation of their stories.
Jennifer Makumbi’s earlier book, the novel, Kintu explores the generational curse which afflicted a dynasty for centuries. It first identifies the problem like a detective walking through the footprints of the story from the starting points of one of the afflictions, tracing it down to where the story began, before finally pointing out the problem to the consciousness of the descendants of the afflicted dynasty. A historical work, Kintu could be regarded as the reinvention of what should otherwise be a long-forgotten past, in an attempt to understand the present times.
The novel begins from 2007 when a man is mysteriously killed. The reader is left puzzled while the story goes back in centuries and begins to trace the origin. Mathematically, it could be said that the story begins from a single point and spreads out as the family tree of the Patriarch, Kintu expands, generation after the other, then it comes together again in the ending in a reunion. A graphical representation could even be drawn of the story. The story runs the course of so many descendants of the Kintu households and their different afflictions in a way that is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The story leans totally towards realism, but it embodies the myth and the legend of the people of which the story is told. And in a broader sense, it becomes an allegorical tale of how history shapes the life of a people.
Firstly, it embodies the relationship between the past and the present with a consistency like that of DNA, a set of genes that dictates the resemblance and why history replicates itself.
Secondly, it teaches the importance of awareness of history as a measure of understanding the problems of present times.
Thirdly, it shows the importance of addressing history as a pathway for genuine progress, into the future.
Fourthly, it is instructive of the dangers of trying to live in denial of history or to suppress with power, the grievance of the minorities. Divided between the present and the past, the story centres on an affliction and the cause.
The object of the novel, Kintu — a generational curse — appears mythical. Moreso, it is told from a localized point of view, from an African perspective. One is tempted to imagine how strange the story might appear to a western audience or one alien to the African culture. But then, the concept of a generational curse and its wisdom is a universal theme. We find stories of the father’s sin afflicting the children in the Holy Bible, the Holy Quran, the Upanishad, the Greek Mythology, and indeed in African mythologies. As the world becomes more engrossed with its entanglement with ‘reality,’ people have often come to scoff at stories like these because, in many circles, we seem to be losing touch with the power of allegories. Stories like Kintu, or myths like the story of the Israelites suffering in Egypt for centuries because of their fathers’ sins, are not meant to be taken just at face value. They are stories steeped in the psychology of what the implications of missteps in history can result. And how the problems resulting from an ignorance of history can only be solved by first curing oneself of that ignorance and acknowledging that history. In the Bible, the various myths of the Israelites being sold into slavery each time they disobeyed their god were used to warn the Israelites when they were about to go astray. In this same light, Kintu becomes the great Ugandan novel, embodying its history and a long timeline of its problems like many of its sister African countries. It also embodies a prophecy of liberation at the end. One of the enduring graces of history is that all afflictions come to an end at some point.
Insightful African readers are bound to relate to the story told in Kintu in an allegorical sense. The affliction of an unsolved puzzle of history is currently hitting Nigeria hard, for example. Still, it isn’t something the world is very aware of or even Nigerians. Like the Kintu clan, the history of the genocide which occurred in the Nigeria-Biafra war, in which over two million children were starved to death, has been swept under the carpet. The people live in an induced state of denial, and on the national level, the stories can only be discussed in hushed tones. The result of this is that today many of the ethnic factions which fought by the side of Nigeria are suffering from their own resources being exploited in the south and in the north (Southern Kaduna, for example), a mini genocide is going on, which is underreported in the Nigerian media. The country Nigeria is mired in a mess of unresolved history and the burden of holding on to power even when it made no sense like Kintu does when he should have been accountable for the child he took to a journey with him.
The novel Kintu has been described as a descendant of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In 2016, at Hubert Ogubande Hall, during the Ake Arts and Books Festival in Kuto, Abeokuta, Makumbi remarked that one of her foremost literary inspirations was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. According to her, Okonkwo’s character stuck with her so much, especially the part which says, “When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground, and he seemed to walk on springs as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often.” Jennifer Makumbi recounted to the audience of her, remembering looking up to her father to see if he was an Okonkwo. Another part of the novel which Makumbi also recounted was the killing of Ikemefuna. Critics have written tirelessly about this aspect of Things Fall Apart. Still, this much is clear: Okonkwo could have avoided killing a boy who called him father, save for his rigid masculinity. It is this same masculinity that drives him to his end. Here, a parallel could be drawn between Okonkwo and Kintu. They both share a story of killing someone who called them father and, afterwards, fell to their ruins. Kintu has the chance to be accountable to Kalema’s father on the death of the son they both shared. But he could not bring himself to bend the rigidity of his power to explain what had happened to his subject. On the other hand, Okonkwo was warned by Uchendu when it seemed he was becoming depressed in exile. Kintu and Okonkwo kept on with life in a headstrong manner, even when it seemed that things had come to the stage where one surrenders, perhaps for a brief moment, and accepts the futility of mortal strength. It is this rigid relationship that leads both men to their ruins.
By virtue of these arguments, Kintu becomes, at once, the story of a man and the story of a people and indeed an allegory of history. Jennifer Makumbi’s genius lies in her capacity to express the spectacle of what is; her ability to write stories of Africans across different epochs and geographies in which Africans can truly recognize themselves. Every good literature serves as a mirror to the human condition. But in the case of indigenous stories like those which Jennifer Makumbi tells about Africa, it goes a step further beyond the line of empathy which the universality of the human condition draws on. A good indigenous story should feel like a comfortable pair of trousers which one can comfortably put on. Jennifer Makumbi achieves this feat through the finesse of artistic writing and the employment of familiar language.
Makumbi has a new novel coming out in October titled A Girl Is A Body of Water. Originally her earliest book, she began writing it in 1998 and it was rejected in 2003, 2005 and 2008, after which she dropped the manuscript and did not come to it again until eight years later, after the publication of Kintu. According to a recent article in The Publishers Weekly, the novel is about Kirabo Nnamiiro, a 12-year-old Ugandan girl living with her loving grandparents in a village. She is determined to find her mother, whose identity is unknown to her. For some reason, Kirabo’s family refuses to speak about her mother’s identity. And Kirabo, a belligerent teenager, sets out on an adventure to find her mother. The novel is, from all available evidence, about a great childhood that aims to demystify the misconstrued concept of African childhood and a coming of age of an adventure embodied by Ugandan mythology. The language is thoroughly African, and the dialogue is a mix of English and Ugandan patois. In one of the pre-order links I have seen, there is a cover of the book on which a quote by Jennifer Makumbi is written. It reads: “I do not write for the West. If I can understand Shakespeare, then you can understand me.”
There is a lot to admire in Jennifer Makumbi’s petulance in sticking to the African language. She doesn’t pander to the world to hear her out. She does not, out of insecurity, step out of the originality of the story. For many years without success, she stuck with what she set out to do until she has emerged victorious before us. She reminds us of Toni Morrison, who showed us another dimension of the beauty of literature in a language totally belonging to her people. Toni Morrison mentioned, a number of times, of gaining the insightful courage to tell her stories in those terms because she was empowered by African writers like Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, who set out to tell the African stories in a language which did not struggle to patronize the colonial masters, but in one which embodied their own heritage.
The thing with genius is that it often moves one to the other far end of the world — to a realm of insight which isn’t obviously clear to everyone. As Toni Morrison said, “I did not go to the mainstream. Rather, I moved over to the other side and waited for the world to meet me there.” Jennifer Makumbi, by virtue of her literature and her grip on the African language, gives us literature in a world of its own, so original, the idea of patronage is alien to it. She stands and bravely, she writes. And then, she challenges the canon to do for literature that comes for Africa, that, which Africans have done for literature from the West. From where she stands, she waits for the world to meet her where she is. Jennifer Nansubunbga Makumbi embodies the possibility of a future where the tides are once again moved over to the Cartesian from which Africa inspired people of colour from all over the world. In an interview with Gloria Mwinage Mwaniga, Makumbi recalls that when she first started to write, it was in her native Gikuyu that she began. Now she serves us prose, which, from all evidence, embodies this same language. She is proof of the truism, as Achebe says, “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” Makumbi embodies these canonical words, and in her language and story, we are shown the Uganda we know, in a new light, in stories that embody her history, her people, her folklore, and her hopes and aspirations — all these through the finesse of great art and inspiring bravery.
