Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu

Abstract

Introduction In the opening of Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014), a young man named Kamu Kintu dies during a mob lynching in Kampala’s slum quarter Bwaise. The inaugural episode, set in 2004, appears to be cut loose from the rest of the plot, but during the course of the novel, more and more connections emerge. The narrative thus appears as a causal enigma whose linkages only gradually become clear. The delayed unlocking of the mystery of Kamu Kintu’s lynching thereby makes space for another set of causalities indexed by the victim’s name: ‘Kintu’ evokes and indeed provokes the reiterated effects of a curse uttered upon his clan more than two-and-a-half centuries earlier. In 1750, the expatriated Tutsi Ntwire utters a curse upon the Ganda noble Kintu Kiddu who is responsible for the death of Ntwire’s son Kalema (50), a curse that will afflict Kintu’s descendants over successive generations. Kamu Kintu is the most recent direct descendant and bearer of the accursed name. In this way, Kintu elevates forms of historical causality that would normally be dismissed as ‘superstition’ (Chakrabarty 104) to the same level as conventional historicism. Makumbi’s novel has been hailed as an epic work of contemporary Ugandan, and indeed Eastern African literary creation (Evers; Lipenga; Mwesigire; Nabutanyi), in accolades that seem well-earned given the 400page span of the novel, and its ambitious attempt to encompass preand postcolonial Ugandan history. No less significant are the implicit claims it makes for understandings of historical causality that lie outside the customary purview of putatively ‘universal’ Western historiography. The novel deploys historical fiction to suggest ways in which alternative historiographies may coexist in an ‘entanglement’ (Mbembe, On the Postcolony 14, 16; Nuttall 2–4; Werner and Zimmerman) with European versions of history and its writing. In this article I investigate Kintu’s interventions into the imbrications of various types of historiography within the framework of historiographical fiction, a capacious genre that proves to be more accommodating of such experimentation than most historical writing. This article mobilises the notion of ‘proximity’ as a conceptual instrument forged in current work on contemporary African literatures and cultures (Fontein; Iheka 21–56; West-Pavlov) to conceptualise the articulation of multiple versions of history in Makumbi’s novel. The article makes three connected claims, proceeding in a dialectical manner. First, Kintu suggests that the ‘evenemential’ causality of ‘historicist’ history is also inhabited by an alternative causality, that of the curse itself, Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014) places alongside forms of historical fiction familiar to European readers, a form of historical causality that obeys a different logic, namely, one governed by the long-term efficacity of a curse uttered in pre-colonial Buganda. The novel can be read as a historiographical experiment. It sets in a relationship of ‘proximity’ linear historical narration as understood within the framework of European historicism and the genre of the historical novel theorised by Lukács, and notions of magical ‘verbal-incantatory’ and ‘somatic’ history that elude the logic of hegemonic European historicism but nonetheless cohabit the same fictional space. Makumbi’s novel thus sketches an ‘entanglement’ of various historical temporalities that are articulated upon one another within the capacious realm of fiction, thereby reinforcing a cosmic ontology and axiology of reciprocity and fluid duality whose infringement in fact triggers the curse at the origin of the narrative.