In her doctoral novel The Kintu Saga __winner of the 2013 Kwani? Manuscript Project she tells the story of one Ganda family beginning with Kintu Kidda in 1750 and tracing his lineage into Modern Uganda, the year 2004. His descendants confronted with an intergenerational curse attempt to grasp the interconnectedness of their present to his actions __accidental killing of the son of his servant, and if possible how to alter the clan’s future in the face of this. The curse carries madness and death. With 6 main characters she explores family dynamics and the cost of the heritages from these, the stories we carry of ourselves and of our origins, mythology, folklore, faith/religion, and the conflict between the pre-colonial and post-colonial expressions of this, and mental illness among others. She speaks to the duality to the Ugandan life __the traditional and modern showcased. This was her debut novel inspired by her family’s experience with her father’s mental illness and a common Western mindset that posits Africa as a place of insanities. In it, she brilliantly alludes to common folklore in Uganda re-introducing our oral traditions to wider audiences. The Kintu Saga was first published in 2014 by Kwani Trust under the title Kintu.
This labor of love took more than a decade to complete its success a welcome respite. In that time Dr. Nansubuga Makumbi was faced with numerous rejections __getting a foot into the literary world especially in the West would prove more difficult than expected more so as an immigrant. She had to work difficult jobs in order to pay her tuition fees and that for a long time as she settled in Britain. Her Ugandan accent a deterrent at some job interviews despite her qualifications and prior experience as a teacher of English at an international school in Uganda. This started to slowly change in 2014 when she first got an agent. With an agent, she soon learned literary fiction sells just a few copies each year, and a career as a creative writer is not necessarily a paying one when you are just starting out. Her published works include Let’s Tell This Story Properly for which she won the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and Manchester Happened (2019) a collection of short stories that was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards 2019. She is also a contributor to the 2019 anthology, New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. Her recent work The First Woman/A Girl Is A Body Of Water (2020) is a coming of age story that follows Kirabo, a teenage protagonist as she sets off in search of her mother and down a path of self-discovery. It was published in August 2020 by Oneworld Publications. Dr. Jennifer N. Makumbi was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in the Fiction category in 2018. Kintu was on the 2014 Etisalat Prize Longlist too.
She writes for the African reader. It is to them she addresses herself. A view echoed in the April 3rd 2020 episode of The Verb, a BBC Sounds podcast hosted by Ian McMillan exploring African writing. In this Dr. Jennifer N. Makumbi together with other guests speaks not only about coping with how strange life is at the moment, adjusting to the ‘new normal’ post-COVID-19 but the role historical novels play in African Literature and informing our collective memory. Novels like Kintu bring to life characters that otherwise lay dead in our history books. She cites Shakespeare’s works like Macbeth as holding “truer” for some students as they study British History. We know these characters from our history lessons or oral traditions but to encounter them in the historical novel is to see them afresh, alive, multi-dimensional __in proximity facilitating our interrogation of their narratives. In this, the historical novel becomes more powerful than the history taught in school. Most Ugandans are acquainted with the creation myth Kintu ne Nambi from Buganda __a tribe in Central Uganda. In this Kintu the first man in Buganda sets off to find his missing cow. This search brings him face-to-face with Nambi, daughter of Gulu the god. Their newfound life is soon disrupted by her brother Walugembe, __god of death, who follows her to earth bringing with him death’s destruction. Nambi’s subservient state thereafter blamed on this. The social construct set. In contrast, the author places the origins of the destructive forces this lineage suffers on the titular character even as down the lineage we see how narratives to support cultures are maintained through the stories we tell ourselves of our origins.
She didn’t always know she wanted to be a writer. She says to Diane Ninsiima in a 2015 interview, her initial pursuit was a career in Law. She chose one in Education instead. In her younger days, she wrote poems by way of journaling. While in secondary school two of her plays were entered in school competitions both coming in third. Writing prose, she explains, only came to her later while she was teaching. She was a teacher of English and Literature in English in Uganda for several years and now teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. The award-winning author admits her writing does not always come easy. For this, she has two friends with whom she talks through her story at least once in three months and who challenge her ideas. These ideas first exist in a notebook, on yellow stickers, or scraps of paper as she thinks through them. Using these ideas she puts the skeleton of the story together before fleshing it out. Research is integral at all stages in the process. The wealth of historical and cultural detail in Kintu is a testament to the value of this for a creative writer. Her editing process takes the longest where not one or two edited copies are enough but on the contrary a number of edits that don’t take less than three years.
Her passion for words also stems from being an avid reader. Through the years it has always been important that she read widely and the first book to capture her imagination was Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood. It was the first book to “take her there”, into its world, in a way none of the other books she read growing up ever did. When we spoke she was reading two books, Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste and Black Leopard Read Wolf by Marlon James. The last book she enjoyed was An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.
In her words, she hopes to see a reawakening of the readership of Ugandan and then African books, robust distribution machinery, the eradication of pirating, and a good solid publisher for Ugandan authors. Her parting words were to encourage us to read, read, read. As a young writer leave your ego behind. Be persistent in the face of adversity. Forget making tons of money. Aim to rise beyond the best there is.
For those like myself who battle with self-doubt, and as a result lack confidence to write, it cannot be underplayed the significance of the existence of these powerful women in Literature like Dr. Jennifer N. Makumbi. If you are starting out or are somewhere along your path as a writer, just write that story, keep writing, you’re on the right path, do not give up. Value the process because you will learn that there are no secret magic tricks, it is only hard diligent work doing what you love, to write.