His last book, "Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets" by Charles Onyango-Obbo is in its third print and still in the bookstores. The book is a collection of irreverent political and social essays, ranging from "Wife Beating - The African Way", "Sex and Politics", and a controversial commentary on dividing the Great Lakes region into Bantuphone and Luophone regions. Onyango-Obbo's first book, "Ear To The Ground", is no longer in publication.
"Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets" is published in Uganda by:
Fountain Publishers
Phone: 41-259163/251112
Fax: 251160
E-mail: fountain@starcom.co.ug
The book is available from the African Book Collective in London, and can also be bought online from Barnes and Noble. Inquiries and orders should, first, be made to Fountain at the above address.
Title: Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets (55pp)
Author: Charles Onyango-Obbo
Publisher: Fountain Publishers, 1997
Available: All book stores (Shs 3,500/US$3.5)
Review: Joseph Were
Book writers in Africa, and especially Uganda, face a peculiar task.
Subject apart, they write for a non-reading public which they must seduce with easy to read, pocket friendly literature.
The most recent product of this formula is Charles Onyango-Obbo's Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets, a series of puns on ordinary happenings with unusual significance.
Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets gives the reader Uganda's over past and contemporary reality in a book literary as big as one's palm. Which is a good thing except for those who think that only big is good.
In several essay-type anecdotes, he explores politics, religion, power, money and sex.
The essays are sometimes harsh introspections, but they are mostly incisive reflection.
Did you know which Ugandan ministers are more equal than others before the president? Or why most westerners send their children to study abroad, or why the Langi are more prosperous under Museveni than they were during son-of-the-soil deposed President Milton Obote's reign? Onyango- Obbo reveals it all.
Onyango-Obbo lets the reader laugh at the relatives in Tororo who abandoned a dead child in the house to go and mourn a rich man.
But this graveside humour cannot compare to the pain one feels as he talks about AIDS, famine and the Catholicism versus Protestantism question.
With rare insight into the religious reality of Uganda, he concludes that the majority Catholics may win the toss on numbers but the Protestants are masters at winning the wickets.
Most adults who lived through deposed President Milton Obote's regime saw the Langi and Acholi's living extravagantly like today's "westerners". Many hated or envied them. But Onyango-Obbo pitied them.
In the book he compares them to the Marabou storks that scavenge off Kampala's garbage dumps.
But it is on the subject of the sex of politics that Onyango-Obbo is most blunt.
He says Ugandan presidents set bad sex examples.
"Field Marshal Idi Amin had four official wives. Most of the leaders who have followed him have behaved much like Idi - only that they have been more careful not to flaunt it. The ministers are enjoying more freedom. These days most of them have `official residences' where the wife or husband and the children live, and the `minister's place' where they stay with their paramours."
Some of the images are grisly. Like the wananchi who raided an accident scene and stole human blood-soaked rice and sugar. They washed off the blood and ate the rice!
Onyango-Obbo's inspiration for style seems to be a report which The Monitor newspaper he edits made on August 12, 1997. "It alleged that Vice President Dr Specioza Kazibwe had `delivered a short and good speech which made her the centre of attraction at the workshop' in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia."
Of course, having been Editor of the , Onyango knows something about long and short speeches and he concludes that whoever wants Ugandans to listen to a long speech he must first become president or pay them to listen.
In Uganda' Poorly Kept Secrets he shows the extent to which he has mastered the art of brief effective communication.
Readers of Onyango-Obbo's Ear To The Ground in The Monitor and his column in the regional weekly, The East African are familiar with the Onyango style. As usual, even in Uganda's Poorly Kept Secrets he combines exquisite style with ingenious perception. Like a child who narrates things adults do in the bedroom, he creates fresh perceptions of otherwise ordinary incidents.
It is a book for everybody. Its short chapters are friendly even to untrained eyes. Yet the reader must pose and take it each paragraph as Onyango-Obbo piles image upon image, revelation upon revelation. My two-year-old son, Timothy loved the cartoon illustrations.
Yet this ease is deceptive. Onyango-Obbo writes like a man who is late for a scheduled flight. Short sentence piles upon short sentence in staccato sequence yet each paragraph is packed with a myriad of images.
The effect is not quick reading. Instead of the usual quick pace created by such writing, the reader must pose and take the loaded associations he creates.
The book must go through a second edition. Then, readers may enjoy a well edited work. The current edition reads like a cake baked in a hurry. It may be sweet but the icing could have been better. Nothing is as distracting as a missing word, a repeated expression. Words placed where they shouldn't be in the book strains the reader.
Onyango-Obbo's book may be a fountain of over thirty years of well researched exposition and the writer an accomplished wordsmith, but who cares if the reading is badly laid out? In a book "where poverty weds hunger" and ambassadors get posted to Uganda so that their wives become museums of the Ugandan heritage who needs a first chapter on why women eat eggs and chicken these days?
It may be a cheeky topic and the title, "Oh! Uganda" may be a good pun, but who wants funny when they can have hilarious.