![]() ![]() Kintu Kidda presides over a clan in a provincial outpost of Buganda and, upon the emergence of a new king in 1750, leads a delegation on a long and difficult journey to join other governors in demonstrating their fealty to the new ruler. ![]() The novel’s main action takes place in two distinct settings, the 18th-century environs of the Buganda kingdom, and that of its colonial and postcolonial successor, late-20th-to-early-21st century Uganda. Kintu explores some three centuries of fraught, often tragic human experience, focused on a Ugandan nobleman and his descendants, and the actions, memories, traditions and spirits that both motivate and haunt them. That said, the overwhelming scale and sweep of Makumbi’s effort stands in dramatic contrast with these novels. Like Things Fall Apart, Kintu reveals the profound fracturing of a local African community that results from uneven experiences of modernity impacting its traditional ways of life. ![]() Like The Slap, Kintu concerns the unexpected and dramatic consequences, for a widening group of people, of a rash act of violence that an adult commits against a child. ![]() Two books that immediately come to mind, in trying to make sense of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s ambitious new novel Kintu, are Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. ![]()
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