Remembering Kampala

For much of the sixties, Kampala was at the centre of literature in Africa, its status propelled by Makerere University and Rajat Neogy’s Transition Magazine. However, in the seventies, the violence of Idi Amin forced intellectuals and artists to flee the Ugandan capital and led to the end of Kampala’s cultural dominance in Africa.

‘There’s something ineffable about great cities,’ Marcus says. ‘Not that Kampala is one,’ he adds. ‘But yes, great cities have a personality they take on—a personality that’s disconnected from the collective personality of its inhabitants.’

—Derek Lubangakene, The Unfinished Manifesto

John Nagenda died in March 2023, and I got on a bus and went to Kampala. In Kampala, in the evening, I walked through the Makerere University campus where Nagenda and other members of his cohort had first emerged as writers. It was five in the evening, and the sun, getting lower in the sky with each moment, was blazing. There were very few students out on the campus that day, the university empty because of Easter. I walked past the McKinnell Knowledge Centre, and further on, the School of Dentistry. Makerere was very green, the trees old and leafy—the perfect colonial garden city. 

Just before I’d left Nairobi for Kampala, a book I’d ordered had been delivered to me. Nagenda’s The Seasons of Thomas Tebo, a novel which he had written as an allegory of the Uganda of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, was out of print, but I’d gotten a second-hand copy shipped to me in a roundabout way—from France across the channel into Britain, then to the United States, whereupon a friend acting as final courier brought it to me.  

Nagenda intrigued me. When I’d spoken to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o a few months prior for a profile I was writing about him, he’d talked about Nagenda, and mentioned how integral Nagenda’s writing had been to his own career. Ngũgĩ told me, ‘John Nagenda, oh my God. I don’t know if it’s as good as I thought it was, but you should read “And This, at Last”. Oh my God, that story.’ 

In the story, a two-pager which was published in the second issue of Rajat Neogy’s Transition, a young reporter goes to interview an old man who has gained a reputation as a bit of a recluse. The reporter is ‘bright and eager-looking, but dead scared inside.’ The old man lives in a ‘house full of old memories of voices now forever silent and faces gone, still and empty’...

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