Goretti Kyomuhendo

"Time of the Writer" Festival, sponsored by the Centre for Creative Arts of the University of Natal and the French Institute of South Africa, Durban, South Africa, March 2000

SG: You presented yourself the other night on stage as a representative of the Uganda Women Writers' Association.

GK: Yes, Femrite, which is short for our gender identity as women, and for our professional identity as writers. We started in 1996 with the overall aim of assisting Ugandan women to have their books published. Because we realized that previously there was only one woman who had appeared among all the big male writers, like Okot p'Bitek, John Ruganda, Taban lo Liyong, Robert Serumaga . . . we needed to address that imbalance. And we women consider ourselves the traditional storytellers, so obviously women were just not getting published. So the challenge was to make the know-how available to them.

SG: Yet you got your first novel, The First Daughter, published by Fountain in Kampala in 1996.

GK: Well, it was the difficulties I had gone through that led on to Femrite. There was only one publishing house in Kampala at the time anyway, and they were doing what they could, but only one or two books a year. Because to them I was a young writer, I had little help.

SG: But it has done well since?

GK: Very well, I think because of the issues it dealt with: teenage pregnancy, polygamy, and more. Those were the challenges to a young girl growing up in Africa, and now it has been taken up as a reading supplement in many Ugandan schools. And I've also done a low-priced children's book, also pertinent, comparing the lives of children in rural and urban areas. I went to school in a rural area myself, and can compare that experience with that of my city-bred sons. To give an example, they're amazed I never used to put on shoes . . . but I didn't have any, you know. I wish to show them the kind of injustices that can occur when people come from different worlds.

SG: And the recent novel?

GK: Of last year, and it is called Secrets No More. That is the one which deals with the Rwandan genocide of the mid-'90s. I chose this because, as you know, we share a border with Rwanda, and I knew people who died during that period, or who were suffering, so I had to write it out of my system. It's the life of a girl whose story spills over into Uganda, most of it being set actually in Uganda, which inevitably becomes her political homeland. But there, although I'm writing about a terrible war situation, still my special interest is in that neglected half--the experience of such a person as a woman. Because I feel that, as a writer, I write best if I write about something that I know. Being a woman is the first thing I know, and I know it very well--so that is why I principally write about women. I don't think men can write about, for example, the experiences of first menstrual periods. When I was writing about the war, I brought in details which would escape a male writer. Visiting a refugee camp, my first instinct is to ask, what does this woman use when she has her period? I don't think a male writer would have feelings about that. It's the small things they don't understand, which are so important.

SG: Is your movement seeing that women play a greater part in Ugandan life?

GK: I am an activist, a feminist, and yes, the literature is in step with a general movement. Since the last election three years ago, girls have been leading in all spheres--high school and so on, and into the political arena. I think that if you empower a woman, naturally we grow confident to write about...