Kampala’s Gendered (Im)possibilities in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2021)

In major African literary texts, the city is often represented as either a site of corruption and disease or as a symbol of postcolonial modernity and progress. Within these depictions, women exist on its fringes, in service of others, often as sex workers, or mothers or domestic workers. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novels, set in the Ugandan capital city of Kampala, challenge these conventional portraits of postcolonial African cities. In this article, I propose that Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2021) offer a unique portrait of Kampala focalized by female protagonists whose narrative trajectories showcase how feminine precarity and agency intersect with history to produce complex portraits of urbanity that are often excluded from the conventional shorthand of degeneration or progress that frames African cities in African letters. I conclude that her novels offer readers new insights into neglected manifestations of women’s encounters with African urbanity.