Upon This Mountain

The first half of this novella from Makerere University professor Timothy Wangusa is a bit flat--childhood life-is-but-a-dream stuff, exoticize Bagisu, too much inside the protagonist Mwambu's head. But then you get what's going on when Mwambu impregnates Mabuya, his childhood friend, in the last moment that feels dreamlike--from then on it's all real, adult, sociopolitical action, characters negotiating their status in the larger world and their position relative to each other. Right-on debate and flirting scenes at school, Ugandans with their lovely love of the comically turned and overturned phrase. The cousin coming back from the war, the bringer of the understanding that Hitler is more than an ogre to be killed with the spears of show more the people, a story alongside Kintu, just as the Empire is more than a fairytale Queen. The point is, an irrevocable move from the internal to the public, but Mwambu is precious and clings to his uncircumcision and thus to manchildness, as he sees his place as faher usurped by the tough cousin and his other friend, who's not ready to become a man not because he wants to stay a child but because he'd rather become a woman, get his wish, genitals cruelly mangled in one of the most wince-inducing scenes I know, sashaying around as a rebuke to Mwambu--the fruits of hiding from manhood--but also as a cautionary tale, a reason to keep hiding--which is essentially our protagonist's issue. He doesn't want to choose adulthood, he wants it to just happen, but how can it when postcoloniality is exploding in slow motion and nobody knows whether a man should be giving his foreskin to Mt. Elgon or trying to do as the Europeans say and not as they do. To their credit, the Europeans--their designated spokesman in the novel, as so often a schoolmaster, Rev. Graves--do tell the Bagisu that everybody's just trying to fuck you, and that Jesus is big shit because he's the best solution they've got (is this attitude a necessary condition of devout religion? Devaluation of human friendship because it threatens the special relationship with Jesus? Overvaluation of Jesus because humans are untrustworthy pricks? Chicken/egg? David/Saul?) Realizing that makes me feel a bit better about Graves and the big reveal, where it turns out he's literally trying to fuck somebody (hope that's not too spoilery), a scene which I still feel is soapopera-y in a kind of clumsy way bt which does set things up for the legitimately inspiring ending, where Mwambu does it his way--even if "it" is cutting off a bit of his body. An honest-to-God-and-Elgon real-life-believable flawed victory. show less