Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's multi-award-winning Purple Hibiscus (2003) launched a sustained global interest in novels written by African women. Recent examples to draw reader and literary prize attention include Tsitsi Dangarembga's Booker Prize-shortlisted This Mournable Body (2018).
Like both of these works, the second novel by Ugandan author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, The First Woman, explores the plight of a precocious girl growing up in a divided family and dysfunctional country. At heart, it's a brave, powerful book about womanhood, traditional beliefs and modern demagoguery.
Set in 1975, the book centres upon the curious, gifted Kirabo, resident of the rural village Nattetta in Uganda. Raised by her grandparents, she sees her Kampala businessman father, Tom, infrequently and her mother never. It's the latter, mysterious and absent, who haunts Kirabo throughout the book. A prowess for the mystical; a clandestine friendship with supernatural Nsuuta; an irreconcilable rift with her grandmother; a relocation to her father's swanky abode; a complicated first crush on a young man called Sio; an immersion in an elite boarding-school: these milestones mark Kirabo's journey towards self-discovery.
It's a beautifully rendered book, less historical novel than an epitome of the Bildungsroman – that is, a novel featuring a young person who undergoes a spiritual, emotional and/or physical transformation. Kirabo undergoes all three. What makes the book's execution so striking is its interlacing of the ancient and the progressive, the primal and the neoteric. So, for instance, the heroine simultaneously embodies otherworldly capacities and childish naivety. While her grandparents' traditional ways offset their son's entrepreneurial, consumerist existence, these diametrical opposed lifestyles are straddled by Kirabo as she seeks answers to who she is. Even the lush landscapes of Uganda are contrasted by the gaudy, bustling built-up environs of Kampala and the constrained physicality of Kirabo's boarding school.
What unfolds cleverly then, in Nansubuga Makumbi's The First Woman, is a challenge to ideas, beliefs and practices: modern academia versus traditional folklore, capitalism versus communal village trading, what Kirabo refers to as "first-world Feminism" versus intergenerational customary powers held by women. Even Kirabo's struggles over her identity are counterpointed by her unquestionable intuition and indefatigable persistence. And this being 1975, of course, overarching this deeply layered story of personal and thematic tensions is that archetype of contradictions: Uganda's violent, despotic ruler, Idi Amin.
There's a danger of misrepresentation in likening Nansubuga Makumbi's The First Woman to Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Dangarembga's This Mournable Body. Yes, all focus on young women's personal awakenings during times of familial and political strife. Yes, all of them microscope significant moments in Africa's recent past. But equally each book is set in a different country. Nansubuga Makumbi's Uganda isn't Ngozi Adichie's Nigeria or Dangarembga's Zimbabwe. Africa isn't a single country, any less than Europe is.
The rich landscape and complex social, cultural and political affairs Nansubuga Makumbi examines in The First Woman are distinct and remarkable enough for this novel to be enjoyed on its own merits. A lavish and confronting read.
Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey
The First Woman
by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
(Oneworld, $37)