Makumbi worked her way up to top of the literary world

You arrive at work one morning and find a peculiar email on your computer. It’s coming from a school in the UK. It’s an invitation to take up a Creative Writing course. You love writing. You have been writing all your life. But the strangest thing is, you didn’t apply for this course. So you don’t respond.

In a perfect world, you’d be a professional writer today, working from home and getting paid to do what you love. But this is not a perfect world. It is 1990s Uganda where the arts are dead and embalmed.

You would write for free if you had to but you are an adult woman now, with a son. So you’ve settled down comfortably as a school teacher. But now this email is a real temptation. You decide this is fruitless day-dreaming. You shake it off and move on. But the same invitation comes to your email address the following year. And the year after that.

You finally decide to give it a try and less than 20 years later, you are an acclaimed novelist. Today, you travel the world, on plane tickets mostly paid for by people you have never met. You are so acclaimed a writer that you can only be contacted through your agents in Europe and North America.

This might sound like a dream to you, but it is the real story of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.
She’s a Ugandan writer based in the UK. Her first novel, Kintu, which came out in 2014, is a gem in the literary world. In the writers’ world, Nansubuga’s plane has left the tarmac. She’s flying in a cloudless July sky.

Journey to the UK
“One of my best friends who was already in Britain, saw a Creative Writing course and asked the school to send me an application form. She had read some of my amateurish writing and thought I had potential. But at the time I was neither keen nor ready to go to Britain. I think I was invited three years in a row before I responded.”

Ironically, it is her lack of enthusiasm to go to the UK that endeared her to the visa people. That and the “damn good letter to the embassy” (sic) written by the headmaster of the school where she taught. He happened to be British.

“The visa person asked for both a sample of my prose and poetry – he thought my poetry was not impressive. He even asked me if I wanted to take my son along, but I said, I’ll wait until I have seen the schools and the society before I take my child,” she says.
Let that sink in. Nansubuga has a gift of confidence. No wonder she sailed through the visa processes.

“On September 30, 2001, I arrived in Manchester with £40 in my pockets to do a course that cost £7,500,” she says. “I arrived at around six in the morning. In the afternoon, my friend took me to Manchester Metropolitan University and showed me the building [that housed my school]. The following day I turned up to class like I had paid all the fees,” she says.
Looking back, Nansubuga says this kind of confidence was too crazy, even for her. But she was here now. She would have to look for the money for the course or lose everything.

The dark world of kyeeyo
“When I arrived I was like, where are the job classifications for teachers?” she laughs cheekily in one of her televised interviews. “My friend said, maybe, start by working in a supermarket. I’m like, excuse me, I have been teaching Cambridge exams in Uganda. Her brother told me, here no one knows your degrees. No one knows who you were in Uganda. You start at the bottom and make your way up.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was told she had no chance in the world to walk into a British classroom and teach English with ‘that’ accent. And it’s not like she had gone to rural schools. She had gone to Trinity College Nabbingo for O-Level and to King’s College Budo for A-Level. That alone should tell you that hers was a very smooth Kampala accent. Long story short, she didn’t even get the supermarket jobs.
“Only a nursing home would take me,” she says.

Nasubuga remembers her very first night at work. “It was Saturday night. I finished work at six in the morning only to find that it had snowed heavily. I sat down at a bus stop in a village called Didsbury and the bus did not come until 10 O’clock. I was, freezing, alone and far from home. I cried.”

Initially, she worked two jobs. Four days a week, she worked a 12-hour day-shift. And four days she worked a 12-hour night-shift. Nansubuga created the eighth day of the week all on her own. That meant that one day of the week, she worked both day and night.

“After two weeks of working like this, grey hairs appeared on my hairlines,” Nansubuga says.
She was making about £4 an hour. Her friend had paid all her bills during this time and given her free accommodation. After six months, she had stashed up some savings towards her course. The proverbial airport was in sight.

In 2002, she would apply for funding from the Commonwealth. She would get the much-needed funding and complete the payment for the course. And thus, after a stormy year of working eight days a week out of seven, and full head of grey hair at 30, Nansubuga was free at last. Free from worry and able to focus on the course. And on her job as a security guard at Manchester Airport of course.

“I am proud to say that I came top of my class and graduated with a distinction,” she smiles. “I think there was something about people presuming that because I was African I was, therefore, dumb that spurred me on. The other inspiration was the fear of coming home as a failure.”

Chasing the dream
After the MA in Creative Writing in 2003, Nansubuga would have to study in one way or another just so she could be able to renew her student visa. She says, “My plan was to live in Britain for, at most, 10 years. I figured that by then I would have made it and come home. It is just that, for some of us, it takes a long time to set yourself up back home. It is extremely hard to save out here. Hopefully, one day it will happen.”

In 2013, she finished her PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. A year later, she published her first novel, the highly acclaimed, Kintu. The irony is that she had to come back to the continent to find a publisher. Kintu was rejected by Western publishers and it was the Kenyans who first published it. It was edited largely by Africans and Africans reviewed it and made noise about it on the internet from 2014 until 2017 when a tiny American publisher took a risk on it.

While Nansubuga had gone to Britain to acquire success, she found it in Africa. Like the ancient children of Israel (and Jesus), she had to first find salvation in Africa before crossing the sea to find the promised land.

The awards
The awards have been flowing since 2014. When asked which of these mean most to her, she says, “They all mean the same to me – recognition and validation. The Kwani? Manuscript Prize picked me up when I had lost hope. The Global Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014 introduced me to the international scene. But it was after the Windham and Campbell Prize 2018 that the literary world started to take me seriously.”

Twenty years ago, all these incredible achievements were but a hibernating butterfly in Nansubuga’s dreams. Then one day, it fluttered its wings and moved a few particles of air. Slowly, that wave built up to the hurricane you see today.