Goretti Kyomuhendo is one of Uganda’s leading authors and literary activists, who has published fiction, essays, writing guides, and children’s literature. Her work includes four previous novels: The First Daughter (1996), which is a regular set book in Ugandan secondary schools; Secrets No More (1999), which won the Uganda National Literary Award for Best Novel; Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War (2007) , which has received significant critical attention and was translated into Spanish in 2022; and Whispers from Vera (2002), republished in August 2023, with an audiobook version on the E-kitabu platform. She was the first coordinator of FEMRITE: the Uganda Women Writers’ Association, and later established the African Writers Trust to create a supportive network for African writers on the continent and the diaspora.

Promises is Kyomuhendo’s fifth novel. It follows two young lovers, Ajuna and Kagaba, whose plans to get married are thwarted by Kagaba’s failure to find employment in Uganda. The novel follows the two on their separate trajectories, as Kagaba goes in search of work in the UK, and Ajuna stays behind as a lecturer at the National University.

Promises is a novel about the promise of a better life, and what happens in-between as Ajuna and Kagaba wait for the promise to be fulfilled. More than that, it is a novel about the ripple effects of these expectations on Ajuna and Kagaba’s families, friends, colleagues, and people they meet along their journey. As such, Promises provides a fresh perspective on many of the issues that characterized Kyomuhendo’s previous novels: women’s agency, professional fulfillment, romantic love, secrets, kinship and friendship, life’s hardships, and the bonds between village and city. Yet this is Kyomuhendo’s first sustained focus on the experience of Ugandan immigrants outside of Africa, and her first novel to include a male protagonist.

Through an almost-invisible narrator who alternately follows Ajuna and Kagaba, Promises gives a sweeping view of the way migration to the global north is affecting Ugandan society, while keeping its intimate focus on people’s experiences, and their deep humanity. In this, the novel is a rare achievement: while it thematizes urgent social and political problems, it never reads as a didactic endeavor. It is an utter readerly tale, that draws out pleasure and livingness in between difficulties and disasters. It allows us to enter others’ lives, whether we identify with them, or are struck by the impossible distance between our lives and theirs.

I talked to Goretti Kyomuhendo on the occasion of the book’s publication, asking her about her thirty years as a literary trailblazer in Uganda, and about her new book. Her story is a remarkable example of how patience and determination create change, and how a booming literary scene grew out of the passion of a handful of dedicated women.

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Ruth Wenske

If you could tell me a bit about your beginning as a writer. How did you come into writing?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

I grew up in a tiny village in Uganda called Hoima, being raised by my grandmother who had never been to school. My world started and ended in her homestead. It never occurred to me that I wanted to be a writer, because I had never met any writer. Only when I read Things Fall Apart, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, it gave me the license to dream. It changed everything for me. I read a story that I identified with, that created in me a kind of sublime feeling of what it means to be an African. I did not even realize it was fiction.

I actually started writing in the early nineties, when The New Vision invited people to submit short stories and columns for their weekend edition. After some time, the editors complained that my short stories were becoming too long, and suggested I should write a novel. But I did not believe I had the tools to write, as I had never been to university. I had never met a writer, there was no reference point. Still, I decided to just write a story that was close to my heart, which would become The First Daughter.

It took me years to get that novel published, as Fountain Publishers—which had also just started operating—would not accept a handwritten manuscript. Luckily, I had a former schoolmate who was teaching at a business school, and agreed to smuggle me into a typing course. I attended these classes every evening, and though I did not get a formal certificate, I learnt to type very fast. Afterwards, another friend had a typewriter in her office, and she agreed to let me use the typewriter after office hours. But even after I brought the typed manuscript back to Fountain Publishers, I had to go back and check on the manuscript every three months or so, several times, since there were no mobile phones at the time. At last, they found a reader—Professor Arthur Gakwandi from Makerere. He liked the manuscript and asked to meet me, only to inquire whether I had indeed written the book – as I had not put my name on it! As I said, I had no experience.

Ruth Wenske

So I think this also brings me to my second question, about how the publishing landscape in Uganda has changed over these three decades. Could you tell us a little about your involvement with FEMRITE, and your establishment of the African Writers Trust? What motivated these endeavors, and how do you hope they will grow into in the future?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

I think for me the main change over these thirty years is that writers now have hope, they have possibilities. They have supportive structures that we lacked, literary events and festivals, organizations and workshops. When I started writing, there was no reference point. I had never met a writer. After the sixties, which was the heyday of literature in Uganda, there had been a civil war that destroyed all the infrastructures. We went from being the literary hub of Africa to nothing.

We created FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association, around 1995, in the spirit of getting together as women writers. We noticed that they were hardly any women writers in Uganda, even at the peak of Uganda’s literary days in the sixties. We knew only a few, like the playwright Rose Mbowa, authors Elvania Zirimu and Barbara Kimenye, and some others. So we realized that women’s voices were missing, and we wondered why. We women are the custodians of stories. Women are natural storytellers. Why were their written voices missing?

Yet we also knew that women were writing. We put out a public call announcing that we were starting an association, and were flooded! We had over 30 women in our first meeting, some with full manuscripts, others with a dream, a passion. It was a very exciting time. We were bouncing ideas off each other, writing together. FEMRITE Publishing flourished. There is a time we published five or six novels at a go. My second novel Secrets No More was in that group of novels. I was the first director for the first ten years of FEMRITE.

I left FEMRITE when I decided to move to the UK in 2007. I had worked at FEMRITE for ten years straight. FEMRITE wasn’t a job, it was my life. Yet I needed to take a break. As I was splitting my time between Uganda and the UK, I founded the African Writers Trust in 2009 to bridge the chasm between African writers on the continent and in the diaspora. Through my work with FEMRITE I had gotten to know many writers on the continent. Yet when I came to the UK, I met another group of African writers, who were not connected to the writers I knew because of the geographical barriers. The African Writers Trust brought these groups of writers together. We held workshops and conferences for skills development and collaborative learning. The last big conference we had just before Covid had over 100 writers, but we still hold workshops regularly. While the writers in the diaspora have a lot of professional experience, the learning and inspiration goes both ways. We share information, motivation, and stories. For me, one of the things that intrigue me whenever reading work by diasporic writers is that they are drawing from the same epistemological space as the African writers on the continent. They are coming back to Africa, to the source of their stories, for inspiration, for collaborative knowledge.

Ruth Wenske

So it seems that the move to the UK inspired the establishment of the African Writers Trust; but it also seems to have started you on the path to writing Promises. Could you tell us a little about what inspired this novel? How did these characters and story come to you?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

When moving to the UK, I met many Ugandans who had emigrated, and became interested in their stories of migration. I spent the first two years just talking to people and visiting immigration centers. At first, I thought of it as research for my new novel. But then I started feeling a sense of anger at all these wasted lives. I wanted to talk to politicians, I even tried to make an appointment to meet the Home Secretary. I wanted to write simplified information booklets for people back in Uganda who were planning to come to the UK as illegal immigrants, to explain the facts on the ground, how much they would earn and how far it would get them in the UK.

I felt that Ugandans who had moved to the UK covered up the difficulties they faced.  They would not talk about the hardships. At best, they would visit Uganda for Christmas, buy presents, and for two weeks everybody would be celebrating them. That is their measure of success. But then, they would go back to slave away in the UK. They still chose to return, to maintain the fiction they had created.

After years of collecting stories, I asked myself, how do I share all these stories? So I decided to return to the novel—Promises—and find characters who would carry all these stories for me. But it took me a very long time to write, almost ten years. It was the most challenging piece of work I have written, also because it alternates between protagonists and places.

Ruth Wenske

The novel follows a couple, Ajuna and Kagaba, as Kagaba decides to move to the UK to find employment. Could you tell us a bit about the novel’s structure, and why you chose to tell the story alternately from Kagaba and Ajuna’s perspectives?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

There were several reasons. One reason was the divergent geographical spaces that the novel straddles. I had never written a novel set in two places, which also reflected my own circumstances.

Also, I had never written a male protagonist. When I started, I thought it would be Ajuna, the female protagonist, who would go to the UK. She was the strong one. But for some reason I felt the male character was going to carry this story for me in the UK. I also wanted to challenge myself and write a male protagonist. Let me give you an example. I don’t want to give away too much, but there is an incident of unfaithfulness. And I wondered, how does a man react to unfaithfulness? I knew exactly how a woman would react, I could create that scene very easily. But what about men? Do they cry? Do they fight? Do they walk out on the relationship? So I spent a lot of time on that research, asking men how they would respond to unfaithfulness, and getting many interesting answers.

I also wanted to use these two perspectives to show both sides of the story. I wanted them to have an equal partnership in telling the story. Kagaba keeps asking, what is a man with no money and no job? Who can love such a man, how can you sustain that love? Is love enough? He doesn’t think so. But Ajuna disagrees. She tells Kagaba, “you are everything a woman could ever wish for, you are everything I want in a man.” But he insists on leaving to the UK, he follows the promise of having it all. Yet he also believes their love will survive.

Ruth Wenske

I am curious about one character in particular, Musana, Kagaba’s almost-brother-in-law. He is not immediately likeable. He has tricked Kagaba into coming to the UK by lying about his job, and falsely promising Kagaba a posh job. Yet there is a complexity about him that is really touching. What were you trying to do with Musana’s character?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

I wanted to show that Musana has been dehumanized by the sheer effort of trying to survive. Actually, one of my early readers wrote that Musana was their favorite character. Musana continues to pay Kagaba’s rent, he sends money to his brother in Uganda, he cares deeply for his children whom he left behind. We see that he is also struggling. And if he had mentioned the whole truth to Kagaba, then by extension, he would also be admitting to his family in Uganda that he is not doing well. But he lies, and he sends money home, so the impression is that he is doing well. The expatriates, particularly those without papers, never talk about the reality of what they are living through, as telling the truth would be a reflection of not having achieved that promise of a better life. That is what I was angry about – that misinformation. But I also wanted to understand it.

Ruth Wenske

In a sense, it is the characters in the novel who create fiction: they have fictional lives which they project to their people across the sea. All this goes back to the promises, or the expectations, that are a theme in the novel. I was wondering, do you see any intersections between love and migration in this regard? Is there an overlap in the kind of expectations, and fictions, that we create around love and migration?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

Essentially, Promises is an immigration story. But it is also about the domestics, it’s a love story, and a story about the community. It is a story of what happens in-between the big events. In this regard, immigration and love have the same motivation. Promises is about the human need to find a better life. The novel suggests that a better life is relative; it asks, what is a better life? It looks at the motivations behind our actions. Whether we go for further studies, or go for another job, or leave one place for another, or fall in love, the motivation is the same. We are looking for something better for ourselves, and for the people around us. But the definition of that better life is what is debatable, what is relative; that is the in-between.

My aim was to tell the story of all these people who make up a community. People leave behind spouses, children, whole families. I wanted to show the ripple effect of that choice. How does one person’s migration impact their community? Through this, I also wanted the novel to bring out the complex nature of African families. Sometimes the relationships that come out, that are made, baffle me. People have very intricate relationships. The expatriates have their people, who form very useful and complex networks.

I think the emphasis on community comes from the way I write. In terms of my writing process, I plot my stories. I chart out everything about the main characters, including each one’s backstories. Who are their other friends, their siblings, their parents, whom we don’t see in the novel? What are their second and third names, when are their birthdays? I know a lot more about the characters than what ends up in the novel. I created them. I give them their mannerisms; I understand their reactions because I know their life stories. Often only two lines end up in the novel. I think that is why it took me ten years to write the novel.

Ruth Wenske

Here is my last question. The epitaph to the novel is a quote from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: “For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.” It is one of my all-time favorite quotes, and I was wondering, why did you choose this quote?

Goretti Kyomuhendo

I took my time to find something that would be a representation of the promises that the book talks about. We imagine somebody else’s life is better than ours. From the surface, from the distance, from the outside looking in, other people’s lives always seem better than ours. We always want a piece of that. To me, that is why Achebe says: for whom is it well? So I felt it was an apt quote, to help us manage our expectations.

Ruth Wenske

Thank you for taking the time to talk about this fascinating novel, and the history behind it!

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Order Promises by Goretti Kyomuhendo here!