A disillusioned village belle

Title: Inidi Kenyanje Author: Ijuka Kabumba Available at: All Kampala bookshops Price: sh6,000 Reviewed by: A.G. Musamali Publisher: Nyonyi Publishing Co. Ltd Ijuka Kabumba’s masterpiece, Inidi Kenyange, was selected this year’s best novel by the National Book Trust of Uganda on September 1. I am tempted to say that Kabumba deserved it. What would you think of a village beauty who poisoned her deformed baby boy just because it resembles her brother-in-law, Ayesigye, whom she admires but has never, gone in bed with? Kenyanje, is the village beauty. She has dropped out of school because of sexual molestation by Binyasi, her school headteacher who has perfected the evil art of child abuse. But even at home she has to contend with Gente, her step-mother, who ensures Kenyanje stays home to provide the services provided for donkeys and camels, while Gente’s own children get through school. And now when Kenyanje collides into her former teacher, Nguma, in Ngwe town and fate brings the two together she ends up with a son who is of little pride to anybody. Rather than cement their marriage, the son splits the two souls. In Inidi Kenyange, Kabumba has moulded the epitome of suffering for a simple girl who at first had ambitions of becoming a doctor and later thinking that what she had not achieved, her son would. Kabumba portrays the Kiga society in south western Uganda, with superb proficiency. He uses simple English which shows that he is used to panel-beating his creative talent well before it appears in public. He uses coloured diction to portray Kenyanje’s emotions. For instance when Kenyanje thinks about the late Mugyenyi, Kabumba writes: “Where was he now? The body might be near where she stood. But how about the soul? She reflected upon this as little as she stood beside his grave. Surely there must be a soul. She, or any other being, could not be sheer matter. But, she reasoned with herself that the ability to have a soul must also be possessed by animals. For they, too, breathed the air which, to her, symbolised the soul. She was incapable of imagining anything better.” This is the type of trait that philosophers possess. All through there are passages that pulsate like this. Now let us also face a few bitter facts in the literary world. The title of a book can do or undo an author. In Kabumba’s case that is his undoing. Hundreds of potential readers are bound to be repelled from the masterpiece by its title. The book would pass for one written in some vernacular dialect. However, when I opened the book, I was surprised to discover it was written in Queen’s English. This unattractive title has the fault of being the name of the main character. Using a name of a character as a title is long outmoded. Kabumba drafted his book in the early 1960s but only published it in December 2000. And the design of the cover - in boring blue ink with a white window into which a simple hand-drawn picture of Kenyange with her half-blind and crippled child is somewhat uninviting. This is made worse when Kabumba chooses to publish with a house that does not ring any bell in Kampala’s book world. The readers are at fault, of course, but when a writer puts effort in writing for the public, the work should be well packaged to sell, not to be tacked away in dusty shelves of back-street bookshops. However, these few faults cannot deny one to go for this unique literary work to broaden one’s literary experience. Readers should therefore go for the book, get to the text itself and grasp the message.