Reading the Trauma of Internally Displaced Identities in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting

ABSTRACT

One of the effects of violent conflicts in East Africa is that millions of people have either been internally displaced or forced to leave their homes and set up other homes elsewhere. In this article I focus on Goretti Kyomuhendo’s novel, Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War, with reference to how the author locates the anguish and trauma of her local community’s search for belonging and for a sense of self-worth during the last months of the 1979 civil war in Uganda when the Uganda National Liberation Army and the Tanzanian People’s Defence Force combined to oust Uganda’s dictator-ruler, Idi Amin. I propose that Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War is a fictional narrative that imagines the author’s and her community’s lived reality, and that Kyomuhendo utilises waiting as a narrational trope in a clear attempt to come to grips with the lingering traumatic memories that engulf the local inhabitants of Hoima as they await the advancing allied forces to ‘liberate’ them from Idi Amin’s rampaging soldiers.

KEYWORDS:

• Goretti Kyomuhendo
• Waiting
• Uganda
• Idi Amin
• internal displacement
• trauma

Acknowledgements

Research for this publication was made possible by the Graduate School at Stellenbosch University. Prof. Grace A. Musila and Dr Emmanuel Ngwira supervised my doctoral thesis, a section of which served as the starting point for this paper. I thank them for the guidance they offered me during my doctoral studies. I also thank Dr Cindy Lee Steenekamp for her constant support and for encouraging me to explore the possibility of publishing this paper.

Disclosure statement

There is no potential conflict of interest.

ORCID

Nick Mdika Tembo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9572-9763

Notes

1. These are: Kabaka Edward Mutesa (9 October 1962 – March 1966), Apolo Milton Obote I (March 1966 – January 1971), Idi Amin Dada (25 January 1971 – April 1979), Yusuf Kironde Lule (13 April – 19 June 1979), Godfrey Lukongwa Binaisa (June 1979 – May 1980), The Military Council led by Paulo Mwanga (May − December 1980), Apolo Milton Obote II (December 1980–27 July 1985), Tito Okello-Lutwa (August 1985 – January 1986) and Yoweri Kaguta Museveni (26 January 1986 to date). For details, see Tindigarukayo (1988, 607–622, Nsibambi (2014, 28–122) and Kahyana (2014, 122).

2. Major General Idi Amin Dada was a military leader who overthrew the elected government of Milton Obote on 25 January 1971 and declared himself president. During the eight years he was in power, he became, according to Henry Kyemba, ‘Africa’s most ruthless killer’ as ‘a whole nation … spiralled down toward mere subsistence, its population cowed by thugs who were bribed with luxury goods and easy money to kill on Amin’s orders’ (1977, 12). Tanzania and anti-Amin Ugandan forces overthrew him on 11 April 1979.

3. The exact number of people who perished during Idi Amin’s violent reign is unclear, with Richard Ssewakiryanga and Joel Isabirye claiming that ‘an estimated 300,000 Ugandans lost their lives’ through ‘torture, summary executions and massacres’ (2006, 56).

4. I have argued elsewhere that Kyomuhendo novelises her own trauma in Waiting, for although the author casts the material in novel form, the village, Hoima, is avowedly her own. She was born in 1965 and grew up in Hoima, according to the novel’s blurb. A straightforward comparison between the author’s age at the time Idi Amin was being chased out of Uganda in 1979 (she must have been 13 or 14) and Alinda, the novel’s thirteen-year old homodiegetic narrator, is also very interesting. Finally, the scenes and events that Kyomuhendo fictionalises in her text also approximate that of Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin (see Tembo 2017, 165). Compelling as this seems, the speculation falls by the way side in the absence of further insights from the author herself or from related literature.

5. The editors of Africa Today offer a tell-tale explanation behind the anonymity of the article’s author: ‘The writer of this article, for reasons which become apparent in the text, cannot at present be identified, but has a long, intimate and continuing relationship with the Ugandan scene’ (1973, 11). It is possible that the writer was someone close to Idi Amin or politicians in the Uganda of the time depicted in Kyomuhendo’s novel.

6. It is difficult to raise a strong argument that this is the main reason for the presence of Tanzanian forces in Uganda. Indeed, Ssewakiryanga and Isabirye have suggested that the initial reason why Tanzanian forces were in Uganda had little to do with ‘liberating’ Ugandans. In their view, it had to do more with reclaiming what belonged to them. On 30 October 1978, Idi Amin had invaded the Kagera salient, a disputed region in north-western Tanzania which Idi Amin claimed belonged to Uganda. This ‘prompted a Tanzanian invasion in 1979 that defeated Idi Amin and put in power the Uganda National Liberation Front’ (2006, 56). This is what contributes to the villagers’ sustained anxiety in the novel.

7. Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (also known as Joseph-Desiré Mobutu) was the military dictator and President of Zaïre who waged war (from 1978 onwards) against several rebel groups that were opposed to his rule. He was finally deposed in 1997 by forces led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

8. I have borrowed this phrase from the title of Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara’s article ‘Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Space of Postcolonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting.’