| Ugandan author Moses Isegawa was so desperate to leave his native land, he would have given an arm and a leg to get away. He was driven by a passion to be a writer and one strong reason for wanting to leave Uganda so badly was the absence of bookshops in his country. The only English books he found in the local library were those of Jackie Collins and Danielle Steel and they did not inspire him.
In 1990, years of effort to leave Uganda paid off. He made his way to the Netherlands and it is here that Moses set about writing his internationally acclaimed first novel, Abyssinian Chronicles.
The Sunday Times caught up with the unassuming author on the sidelines of the Galle Literary Festival (GLF) last week where he spoke of his early life in Uganda, his life in his adopted home and his decision to return to his roots having established himself as a writer.
Born in 1963, young Moses enjoyed a life of privilege since his grandfather was a village chief. He also had the benefit of a private education where he mastered English, a language he calls the “most wonderful language in the world.” He worked hard in school always wanting to be among the top in the class and also immersed himself in old copies of Time Magazine that used to be in his grandfather’s house. “I would stare at the photographs in the magazine for hours and imagine what life must be outside my country,” he said.
Moses spent much of his young adult life trying to find ways to leave Uganda. Years of military dictatorship under Idi Amin had left the country in economic shambles and life was hard. In 1986, he approached a man who demanded US $1400 to smuggle him out of the country. “That kind of money is impossible to get unless you have someone to kill or someone to blackmail and unfortunately for me I was not good at that kind of thing,” he said.
His lucky break came when a Dutch publication for which he was doing a weekly column decided to send a journalist from The Netherlands to do a story about Uganda. As fate would have it, the first two Dutchmen assigned to come to Uganda could not make it and when finally someone arrived, he became Moses’s passport out of Uganda. “I did my best to impress the visiting journalist and convince him that he had to help me leave the country. I was willing to do anything. Wash the bathroom or even lick his boots if he would help me leave the country,” Moses says.
It took two years and in 1990 he was finally issued a visa to The Netherlands and it was here that he began writing the Abyssinian Chronicles, a story about life in Uganda during the rule of Idi Amin. The protagonist is a young man, Mugezi who experiences first hand the nightmarish experience of living under the rule of military dictatorship and overcomes this and many other personal hurdles. Moses attributes the success of his first novel, which was first printed in Dutch in 1998 and has since been translated into 17 languages to the fact that it told “a deep human story.” “It is the story of life, of human struggle and the spirit of endurance. The book’s characters go through good times and bad and the human element remains throughout my narrative,” Moses said.
It was a solo effort and having readied the manuscript himself and with little knowledge of book publishing, Moses got four copies and sent it off to four different publishers in Amsterdam.
“Three of them returned the manuscript saying they had little interest in a book written in English. The other one said he had begun reading it and two months later he agreed to publish it in Dutch.” When the book was published, it became very successful. “There had been no book out of Africa for a long time and so it was well received.” Moses published his second novel Snakepit in 2004, also set in Uganda in the time of Idi Amin, establishing himself as one of the leading authors from Africa.
But Moses remains modest despite his immense success as a writer. “The difference is the age. If you are 22 and successful, it can go to your head. But at 35 I had seen what poverty can do and am well aware that things can change overnight. I am cautious. I have a good life but I don’t know when it will stop. So there is little extravagance in my life,” he said.
With his success also came an awakening in Moses that made him return to his roots in Uganda, after having lived in Amsterdam for 15 years. “When I went to Europe I embraced my life there and now I am back in Uganda, I embrace my life here. One can truly belong only to one land. There are many stops on the way but the final destination is where one’s roots are,” said Moses in a contemplative mood.
And now once again well entrenched in his native land, Moses is working on his next novel, a story about Africa, this time straight out of Africa.
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