Book Review of Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Since we haven’t been to Uganda, this photo is from Malta, taken from the walls of Mdina, but something in its essence evoked the setting of Kintu.

UPDATED: 2/5/2023

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443 pages, published in 2017 in the US (published in 2014 in Kenya)

YOU MAY ENJOY THIS BOOK IF YOU LIKE:

literary fiction * historical fiction * multi-generational novels * African fiction

TRAVEL INSPIRATION:

This novel is a tale of Uganda, written by an expat and with a primarily Ugandan audience in mind. This novel pushes the narrative of Uganda’s colonizers aside and focuses on the history, culture, and society of the Kingdom of Buganda as modern people seek to understand their own valuable story.

The novel has been well received in Uganda and has only more recently gained interest abroad, in what one could easily conclude is simply the modern extension of colonization: whose stories are worth saving and telling?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: jennifer nansubuga makumbi

In his introduction to the novel, US writer Aaron Bady shares the difficulty novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has faced in her effort to share her own Ugandan voice. While attending college in the UK (where she ultimately obtained a PhD and still lives), professors and others expressed a lack of interest in her stories, which focused on Ugandan characters within their own society. In spite of renown in her native Uganda for Kintu and being an award-winning author, she struggled to find a British publisher willing to publish her novel to her specifications, finally finding a publisher in the United States.

According to Aaron Bady in his introduction, publishers were concerned that the novel would not be well received by English speakers for a few reasons: the complexity of the family relationships (who is related to who, who thinks they’re related to someone when they’re not, etc.) and the less familiar names of the characters, who also go by multiple names. This is a bit unfathomable to me personally simply because among the Western world’s literary fiction stand - as one example - Russian novels, with lengthy names, multiple nicknames, and the like. But then again, perhaps readers have adjusted to Russian novels whereas a Uganda novel with unfamiliar names and places seems to be more of a publishing risk. Either way, I am glad this book found a publisher and crawled its way into my hands.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has won several awards - Kwani? Manuscript Project and Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has also been longlisted for the Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. She is actively writing, and I look forward to seeing what else emerges from her in the future!

REVIEW OF Kintu BY Jennifer nansubuga makumbi:

Kintu, with the K pronounced like Ch, is a mythological figure in Uganda and is part of their creation story (essentially the Biblical Adam to draw a parallel more known to Western readers), and it is not random chance that led the author to select the name of the original person to serve as the family name for her novel.

As mentioned above, due to the years of colonization and strife, much of the Ugandan history and culture have been usurped by a Western voice and story. In many ways, this novel is the Ugandan search for their true past, where as time passes, it can be difficult to suss out myth from truth; or, as the novel suggests, how much of modern myth is actually founded in true events passed along through oral tradition across generations.

At its core, this novel tells the interwoven stories of four generations of the Kintu family, starting in the year 1750, when this part of the country was the Bugandan Empire, and moving through to the modern era to the year 2004. When the novel starts, the country has undergone political and military strife with its neighbors but has yet to be colonized; when the novel ends, the country is again independent.

Much of the novel takes place in a relatively small geography around the o Lwera desert, allowing the generations to become enmeshed in the topography and place in a way that serves as a literary layering of generation upon generation like sediment. And the author does a fantastic job of writing about this important place with beautifully descriptive language that brings the trees, plants, and animals to life.

The characters themselves are somewhat doomed. The novel begins with the first generation of the family being cursed, a curse that will carry down the family tree, by a Rwandan outsider who has been wronged by him. Without giving too much away, I can say this complex family is dealt murder, is haunted, is possessed and confronts mental illness at times, and it has an affinity for twins. Evangelical Christianity makes an interesting side plot later on in the novel as well.

So, if one of the potential criticisms of the novel was that readers would struggle to follow the family relationships, how did that carry through my reading? I will simply say that while a reader can certainly work on plotting the characters in a linear path to connect them, anyone doing so is probably missing the entire point of the novel: people, history, and stories are not ultimately linear.

Let me end this review with a confession: The reason I sought out this novel in the first place was because in piecing together a listing of books I have read by country/location (which you can find here), I saw my own literary background in an illuminating light. I had endless lists of books set in or by authors from specific countries, while entire sections of the globe were blank or nearly blank.

Some of this is simply that a large chunk of my reading occurred during high school and college and were aligned to the so-called Western canon. But it also made me realize I need to continue to actively seek out global voices. I loved reading Kintu and feel fortunate that I happened upon it. I would highly recommend this novel to others, and I can’t wait for Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s next one, which she describes as being a feminist novel.

discuss Kintu

Have you read Kintu? We’d love to hear your own thoughts and reactions to this novel in the comments section below. Do you have other novels set in Africa that you’d recommend to us and our readers? Please share!

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