“There is Another Woman in the Story”: counterfactuality and re-mythification in Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu

Abstract

This paper discusses how Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) undercuts the androcentric Buganda myth of creation by offering an alternative version of the narrative and unpacking the silent treatment of female figures. The discussion pays attention to how Makumbi recasts the myth as a historical event, destabilises its images and objects, and then again mythologises this event to present women in a different light where they are assigned new roles. I employ a counterfactual feminist approach to tease out how the narrative contests the linearity of both the myth and the Buganda nationalist histories that have always sought to return to the myth for purposes of a unified identity. The article argues that by counterfactually reworking a popular Buganda myth of origin, the narrative desacralises it and reveals that women in Buganda’s past have more complicated histories than what the masculinist narratives have always presented.