In November 2024, I wrote a review of Barbara Kimenye’s Kalasanda Revisited. In that review, I said Kalasanda Revisited is one of the best short story collections ever written. Anywhere. You have no idea what you are missing if you have never read Kalasanda Revisited.
Kimenye was unusually inspired when she penned these stories in the early 1960s. She was aware, as writers tend to be, without being able to fully articulate it, that she was living in a time of transition and a terrible rapture was coming in 1966 for the country and the way of life she pinned down. So she sat down and wrote furiously fast.
To capture it all before it was gone. Kalasanda Revisited is warm without being mawkish, sweet without being saccharine. In Kalasanda Revisited, Kimenye walked a Mozartian tight rope of lightness and depth and pulled it off.
Many an editor must have immediately appreciated her unique ability and tapped her on the shoulder to let her know that hers was a gift rarely found and most rewarded among children’s authors.
As a writer determined to live by the pen, I understand why she listened to that counsel to channel her energies into what would become the Moses books, a series following the adventures of a typical teenager in an East African school. Think of the Moses books like the Hardy novels but for an African audience. She churned them out and they remain a core reading experience in the memory of many a child born in the 1980s to 2000s.
As a reader, a lover of literature, I have continually mourned the emptiness of the shelf where all the other books she could have written for adults would have been.
So imagine my surprise and delight when an archivist and scholar friend informed me that they had tracked down the prequel to Kalasanda Revisited. The original Kalasanda! The first collection of Kimenye short stories that launched her career as a writer. The book where Bombo, Nantondo, Old Kibuka, Mrs. Lutaya made their debut and walked into our hearts.
Kalasanda is before me right now as I write this. I will read each page slowly. Lingeringly. I will take my time with it. There will be more Kalasanda after this because author Kimenye left this world in 2012 after 82 years of a very colourful life. Did you know that she might have dated Kabaka Mutesa II, the present Kabaka’s father? Or that she was the first female journalist in East Africa. Story for another day. Let me relish Kalasanda. I want it to live with me forever.
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This week I had to sit down with my son and help him make a choice for the school he wants to attend when he is done with his primary education. I was both amused and grateful.
Grateful that I have lived long enough to see him grow into a gangly teenager with his own mind. Grateful that he will argue back when he thinks he is right or I’m not being fair to him.
Grateful that is becoming more and more clear minded about what he wants to do with his life and is very aware that the choice of school he attends will play an important role in achieving that goal.
I was amused that I had reached a point where I have to consider what he wants and take it seriously. I was not given this opportunity before I sat for my Primary Leaving Examinations. I was told where I was going for secondary school. This young man would not tolerate that.
Since primary six, he has insisted that, whenever opportunity arises, I go with him when I’m visiting a secondary school he is considering. Google is his friend but like any good African, he believes when he sees with his own eyes. So we have been on a tour of different schools for at least a year until this week.
Millions of parents across Uganda with pupils in primary seven no doubt have been engaged in this rite of passage this term. I wonder how yours went? Did you get push back? Were you told that one school is preferred over another because it has a swimming pool?
Did you find yourself explaining that some choices are out of the question because their bare termly fees equal to two months of work for you? How did it go? Tell me.
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