Book Review - Manchester Happened
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s debut
novel, Kintu, a powerful, family saga
set in Uganda, has been likened to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Uganda is once again her focus in this
boisterous, short story collection. Makumbi lectures in Creative Writing but
evidently delights in breaking as many rules as possible. She includes double
negatives, is prone to ramble and her prose is littered with “and then”. However,
these written anomalies reflect a rich oral storytelling tradition and powerfully
evoke Ugandan culture and language.
Manchester
Happened is divided into two parts: ‘Departing’ and ‘Returning’. The first
half is mainly set in Manchester, the latter half in Uganda, and the stories span
the 1950s to the present day. In ‘Our
Allies the Colonies’, twenty-one-year-old Abbey Baker (optimistically named
after Westminster Abbey and Samuel Baker) arrives in Manchester aboard a Dutch
Merchant ship. It’s 1950 and Makumbi vividly recreates life for an African male
immigrant at that time – the bomb sites, double work shifts, dancing at the
Merchant Navy Club, poor accommodation and routine racism: “to be called ‘bongo
bongo’ was okay but to hear Do those
chaps still eat each other or Even
fellow blacks can’t stand them was crushing.”
In Makumbi’s titular story,
Nnambassa is sent to London at the tender age of sixteen. Her father had
studied at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s, when teenagers
arrived in their droves confident that “with British degrees, the world
belonged to them.” In 1988, Nnambassa finds it difficult to adapt: The reality was
“at once a sacrifice and a privilege.” Makumbi writes perceptively about the
pitfalls faced by upwardly mobile Africans in search of a job in Britain: “with
a name like Nnambassa the first interview was on the phone to weed out
nightmarish accents. If the interviewer started saying, I didn’t catch what you said…can you spell that word for me please,
you knew you’d failed. So you swallowed your pride and applied to a nursing
home.” Uganda’s brutal and tumultuous
past is a constant shadow: “There was distrust and intrigue within the
community. You had to be careful who you sought to network with on jobs,
housing and visa issues. You had to be careful how much of yourself you put out
there.” Nnambassa’s attitude might appear cautious but many Ugandans, like her,
recognised that past misdemeanours and unsavoury affiliations often accompanied
them across continents.
In ‘Let’s Tell This Story Properly’,
winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Nnam returns to her native
Uganda for her husband’s funeral and discovers that he has been keeping a wife
and family there as well as sustaining his marriage in Manchester. Nnam’s
experience must be every immigrant’s worst nightmare, many of whom leave
children behind when they move abroad for work. Nnam, struggling to succeed in
a foreign country, to make a modest fortune for her family, suffers the ultimate
betrayal and her bitterness is acute: “There’s nothing more revolting than a
corpse caught telling lies.”
Manchester
Happened glitters with similar examples of Makumbi’s terrific turn of
phrase, often heightened by her use of the second person, such as this one: “Ugandans in Britain will tell you The British didn’t give your culture a visa:
leave it at home.
There are two linked stories
featuring Poonah who “had mastered that perfect combination of sheer hard work
and stinting frugality that an immigrant with a deadline needed.” ‘Something
Inside So Strong’, opens in 2006. This is a prime example of one of Makumbi’s
more convoluted sentences: “Poonah was not one of those middle- or upper-class
Ugandans who, having grown up in the posh suburbs of Kampala and fed on middle-
or upper-class British images paraded on TV, in cinema and magazines, arrived
in London’s Peckham or Manchester’s Rusholme and – because they had imagined
that all of Britain was Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Savoy and
skyscraper – whined in dismay You mean
this is England?” Poonah works as an Aviation Security Officer at
Manchester airport. She plans to train, find a job in social work, save and
return home.
The final story, ‘Love Made in
Manchester’ is set in 2018. Poonah has achieved her goal, but remains in
England. It’s the fate of many of Mukambi’s characters who arrive in the UK, build
a new life and never return. Dedicated to “the fearless Ugandans in the
diaspora”, Manchester Happened provides
an entertaining insight into their lives. It’s a fascinating collection and
confirms Mukumbi as an exciting new voice.
Originally published by New Humanist