The precursors
Born in 1931 in Gulu, Okot p'Bitek wrote a thesis on Acholi culture. Inspired by traditional songs and the situation in his country, which gained independence in 1962, he wrote Wer per Lawino, which he published in English translation(Song of Lawino) in 1966. This long melody of a woman from a rural background was published in French by Présence africaine, unlike the response of the husband, Ocol, which followed. But his outspokenness did not please the government: he had to go into exile. His impact on Ugandan literature is nevertheless considerable, and it is thus usual to hear that some belong to the Okot school poetry. Orality also serves the political purpose of his quasi-contemporary, Robert Serugama, born in Buganda in 1939. After his discovery of the theater of the absurd in Ireland, he created a company in 1967 and wrote A play. Two years later, he tried his hand at writing novels with Return to the Shadows, an acerbic critique of power. After the coup d'état of Idi Amin Dada, he will bias by using mime in his plays Renga Moi (1972) and Amayrikitti (1974). He nevertheless left Uganda from 1977 to 1979, and died mysteriously the year after his return. In the same tone, the playwright Mukotani Rugyendo, born in 1949 in Kigezi and raised in Tanzania, evoked the political climate of his native country in And the Storm Gathers.
The voice of women
In 1995, some of the authors decided to set up their own publishing house: Femrite. The works of Goretti Kyomuhendo, who had already made a name for herself in 1966 with The First Daughter, were published. In the same vein, another heroine is at the heart of A Novel of Unganda's Hidden War (2007), set during the dictatorship. Violet Barungi is also sensitive to the condition of women, and her novels(Cassandra, Over My Dead Body) deal with education and forced marriages. In 2013, she and Hilda Twongyeirwe will be working on the issue of female circumcision in Taboo?
The end of the millennium is abundant: Susan Kiguli was awarded the National Book Trust for her collection of poems The African Saga, Marie Busingye Karooro Okurut published The Invisible Weevil, Ayta Anne Wangusa achieved international recognition with Memoirs of a Mother, and in 1998, Moses Isegawa, born in 1963 in Kampala but now living in the Netherlands, published his first novel, written in Dutch. It was an immediate success, and Abyssinian chronicles was translated into fifteen languages.
The same recognition went to Monica Arac de Nyeko, whose Strange Fruit (2004) recounts the lives of child soldiers in the north of the country, and to Jennifer Makumbi with Kintu (2013). Contemporary literature is returning to orality, sometimes with a very modern digital bias, thanks to the performances of poet Kabubi Herman (Slim Emcee) or the development of the Open Mic Uganda project, which aims to promote poetry and oral creation.
