East African Literature and the Gandasation of Metropolitan Language – Reading from Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu

Abstract

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is, without doubt, one of the finest literary writers to have come out of East Africa. The Ugandan has succeeded in writing herself into global reckoning by telling a completely absorbing and canon-worthy epic. Her creative impulse is compelling, considering her narration of a riveting multi-layered historiography of (B)-Uganda nation in her debut novel, Kintu. With her unique style of story-telling and intelligent use of analepsis and prolepsis to (re)construct spatial and temporal settings of a people’s history, Makumbi succeeds in giving readers an evocative historical text. In narrating the aetiological myth of her people, Makumbi bridges metonymic gaps between two languages – core and marginal. She deliberately attenuates the expressive strength of the English language in Kintu by deploying her traditional Luganda language in the text so as to achieve certain primal goals. The present study seeks to disinter these goals by examining the use of Metonymic Gaps as a postcolonial model to construct indigenous knowledges within a Europhone East African text. The study also mines overall implications of this practice for East African Literature. I argue that, just like her contemporaries from other parts of Africa, Makumbi projects Luganda epistemology to checkmate European linguistic heteronomy on East African literary expression. Her intentionality also revolves around the need to bend the English language and force it to carry the weight of Luganda socio-cultural peculiarities. Consequently, her text becomes a locus of postcolonial disputations where the marginal jostles for supremacy with the core in East African literary landscape.