There’s Suubi Nnakintu, who takes a taxi bound for the village of her youth, hoping to find the biological father who abandoned her the Christian convert Kanani Kintu who, with his wife, stakes his place in heaven on Ugandan Independence precocious Isaac Newton Kintu, whose future depends on the results of an HIV test and the slain Kamu’s father, Miisi Kintu, a western-educated doctor struggling against both negative stereotypes of Africans abroad and prejudice among his countrymen at home. Instead, he inadvertently causes the death of his own son and awakens a curse that will plague his offspring for generations. While his body lies unclaimed in the mortuary, we follow Kintu’s lineage back to 1750, when the ambitious Kintu Kidda journeys with his tribe to pay tribute to the new regent of the Kingdom of Buganda, with whom he hopes to gain favor. In 2004, a man named Kamu Kintu is branded a thief and killed by a vicious crowd. Phone orders min p&p of £1.Makumbi’s debut novel is a sprawling family chronicle that explores Uganda’s national identity through a brilliant interlacing of history, politics, and myth. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. To order a copy for £11.24 go to or call 03.
Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is published by Oneworld (£14.99). While the scene of his original sin is immediately engaging - his portrait as a sort of bumbling everyman intriguingly out of step with his renown - the energy of what follows dips and soars, as gruelling vignettes of gender injustice jostle with hallucinatory dream sequences and occasional bouts of explainer-type description (“In the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union was a major sponsor of postgraduate study for Ugandans”).
Kintu’s failure to confess provokes a curse that his latter-day descendants spend the rest of the novel trying to escape.
Then we wind back to the mid-18th century to watch his distant ancestor, a tribal leader named Kintu, accidentally kill his adoptive son while on an expedition to pledge fealty to a new king. T his epic about Uganda’s history from a debut author who grew up in the country and now lives in Manchester starts with a man beaten to death outside Kampala in 2004.
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