How Charlie Muhumuza’s Voice is Impacting East African Fiction

American author and journalist, Tom Wolfe, once spoke of the modern notion of art as an essentially religious or magical endeavour. According to Wolfe, the artist may be viewed as a ‘holy beast’ who receives flashes of inspiration from the godhead. In the Pearl of Africa, Uganda, one writer hints at joining the great pantheon of African literary chroniclers by displaying a knack for transcendental creativity. This is Charlie Muhumuza, a writer and lawyer living in Kampala, who is on the cusp of redefining his region’s iteration of literary fiction.

NURTURING THE WRITER WITHIN

Muhumuza’s story is a profound one. He was relatively new to the short story form until in 2019 when the Kampala-based literary organization, Lantern Meet Foundation, gave him the chance to attend a writing lab organized by its subsidiary, Ibua Publishers. Having already been a member of its poetic faction, The Lantern Meet of Poets, it was the annually held writing lab that led him to discover a world rendered in gorgeous short prose.

But the journey to Muhumuza becoming a writer started long before that. His love for storytelling through writing had been forged by the many books he had read at various stages of his life. As a child, he had marvelled at the storytelling in Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Woods; in his preteens, he had felt the magic in the dynamic characters in Barbara Kimenye’s The Moses Series, and books by English novelist, Charles Dickens. In his teens, he had enjoyed works by French and Kenyan writers, Jules Verne and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o respectively. He also credits how, in his adulthood, the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and peers like Ema Babikwa and Gladwell Pamba have shaped his writing.

Attending Ibua Lab was the nudge Muhumuza needed to finally start writing short prose. ‘This discovery led me to start digging up old Caine Prize stories, reading everything I could find, a lot of experimentation and applying for workshops,’ he tells me in an email exchange with him earlier this year. ‘I also started sending out stories to different publications tirelessly because I found myself believing in my work even when it was subpar at times.’

Muhumuza’s first major accomplishment as a writer came in 2020 when he placed third in the inaugural Kalahari Short Story Competition for his short story ‘The Machine’. Another milestone came a year later when he was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize for his story, ‘Brown Eyes’. In 2022, he attained his greatest achievement, one that propelled him to recognition within the East African literary community when his story, ‘How to Operate the New Eco-Protect Five-in-One Climate Control Apparatus’, a futuristic exploration of the effects of climate change, was shortlisted for the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2023, he was longlisted once more for the Afritondo Short Story Prize for his story, ‘Once Boys and Girls Of The Stream’.

AFROFUTURISM: A TOOL OF HOPE

In only three years, Muhumuza has grown into a noticeable presence within the African literary scene with his consistent appearance in literary prizes and journals. He cites his predecessors within the East African literary culture, who provided him with a model for what an East African writer should be, as the reason for his achievements. He says:

What I love about East African fiction is how diverse it is, how different the writers are. The writers that have come before us, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Scholastica Mukasonga and the likes are the institutions upon which we can further build. Almost all the lists I’ve appeared on, and the publications, have had East African writers before and so my work wasn’t so alien.

We the new generation of East African writers have the confidence to attempt all these feats because our forerunners did so. There is no denying there is still a long way to go, and thus the current wave of East African writers must lay its bricks.

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How Charlie Muhumuza’s Voice is Impacting East African Fiction

NURTURING THE WRITER WITHIN

AFROFUTURISM: A TOOL OF HOPE

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