![]() ![]() Queen Elizabeth national park, Uganda … Kintu is a complex profile of a family and a country. Makumbi mostly avoids describing both the colonial period, which so often seems the obligation of the historical African novel, and Idi Amin’s reign, which seems the obligation of the Ugandan novel. There are some surprising historical omissions. (All but one of the six sections are told from a man’s point of view.) The result is a book that – like Makumbi’s subversion of the Kintu myth – examines the burdens of patriarchy on African men without blaming women. And she looks at patriarchy not through the consequences it may have for women, but from the male perspective. ![]() While Makumbi documents the Ugandan story, she also subverts Ugandans’ understanding of who they are as a people, questioning the popular conceptions of gender, religion and mental illness. Kintu has been hailed as the “great Ugandan novel”, and deservedly so. The beauty of the book is that it gives a snapshot of different periods of Uganda’s history through characters who are dynamic and engaging, with interesting personal stories of their own. In Kintu’s time, the curse manifests itself as a mental breakdown experienced as a consequence of his son’s death the concept of inherited chemical imbalances may have been unknown to the 18th century, but is familiar when it comes up again in relation to Miisi, one of Kintu’s descendants, living in the early 21st century. ![]()
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