Iowa, Iowa City, ; professor, U. Iowa, Iowa City, since ; program chairman, U. Iowa, Iowa City, spring ; chairman African studies program, U. Iowa, Iowa City, since Married Mary Raquela Fernandes, January 4, Children: Kathleen, Monique.
Looking for a job? Back to Profile. Photos Works. Main Photo Add photo. School period Add photo. Nazareth taught that university's course "Elvis as Anthology," which explores the deep mythological roots of Elvis Presley's roles in popular culture. His literary criticisms have often involved observations of the fate of diverse global economic and academic migrants, spanning the Asian, African and black American cultural histories.
This includes the Goan diaspora settled in Western countries, the post-Idi Amin Asian emigration from Eastern Africa, and the cultural superstitions of the pre-Obama presidency of American politics.
Biography Lists News Also Viewed. Then came the barbeque. My wife [Mary Nazareth] asked a friend to give her a ride home with our two daughters, Kathy and Monique. The young officer who brought the wives and mother and I talked. I discovered he believed in fighting every week or he would go soft. I told him I had tried to get the army band for the dance but could not get them so I had to settle for the police band. I was to discover he was the biggest killer in Uganda.
You will see in the movie The Last King of Scotland that, much later, Kay was killed and dismembered but her body was sewn together and Amin gave a lesson about what happened to people like her. This is quite a moment that you recall! A dance sounds like the appropriate metaphor to conjure up in explaining how one might manoeuvre between happier events and tense political episodes.
When you watch something like The Last King of Scotland , how much do such fictionalisations recall the past for you and at what point do such productions feel like they do not do the past justice at all? Regardless, it must also feel traumatic at times to see or read about that era.
What you mentioned is very real to me so it is not really from the past. I may or may not have mentioned that there is a Ugandan, John Otim, who has been communicating with me about a novel he has been writing and it is nearly ready for publication called Strongman.
It draws a lot from my novels but at the same time is different from my novels in style, rhythms, angles towards the Amin figure, music it draws from the Beatles, Cliff Richard, and other singers , space it flies over Africa. He says that two Ugandans who have read it are not happy that he has not presented Amin as a complete monster, but what he has done works, and I pointed out to him that some people who met Amin said he was very charming.
All I can say is that it works. I have not met Otim but he studied in Makerere, and later in the United States, and then taught at a University in Nigeria, and now is jobless in his hometown Lira in Uganda because of coronavirus. I know Lira for two reasons. When I was young, my father decided to drive us around towns in Uganda in his Ford Consul and one of the towns we went through was Lira.
The project was the construction of a sugar mill financed by the Soviet Union. By the time it was functioning, I was not in the country. The feeling of the present-ness of the past, as you experienced it, makes sense in how it continues to be an integral part of who you are and were.
I would love to learn more about this. When I came back from [graduate studies at] Leeds with my wife and daughter, I applied for a position at Makerere [University]. I was turned down. I tried to fight my case, but I did not succeed. It was late in the year and the only job I could get was in the government as my hometown of Entebbe was essentially a government town.
As it turns out, the secretary to the treasury was a powerful man who got to like me and kept me in the ministry. I liked the ministry too because I did all kinds of important things and kept on improvising. I had to do a short study in law and take an exam, which I passed. And I was promoted to senior finance officer in the ministry. The ministry had its hand in many other organisations.
I had time to read books when I was not busy. Towards the end of my Leeds experience, I thought I had been miseducated all my life due to colonialism and would have to re-educate myself. The finance ministry was just the place. It took me three years to do a basic re-education. I heard a bang in my head that told me I was ready. At the same time, I got very involved with the Entebbe Goan Institute and became President three times.
This part of the story is told in The General is Up. You might say I had a different kind of life in the ministry. In addition to my novel, I also wrote a book of literary criticism. Clerks and secretaries typed my manuscripts.
I gave them credit in both books by name since they worked gratis. We had to take an oath not to give away secrets. I decided to write a novel set in a country called Damibia so I could not be accused of writing about Uganda and making it possible I would end up in prison. By the time you were at Yale, In a Brown Mantle had already been published and not long thereafter, the expulsion of Asians from Uganda was underway. Did you decide not to return to Uganda because of the recurring nightmare you used to have of Amin discovering your novel?
Also, while your immediate family was with you, did you still have other members of the family in Uganda and were you concerned for their safety? Outsiders do not understand the complexities of Uganda.
Although my citizenship was taken away [by one person], another person gave me a newly printed certificate that permitted me to stay in Uganda and continue working in the finance ministry.
My wife and two children were also given that certificate so I could stay on. The head of my department in the finance ministry at that time was Anthony Ocaya. He was an Acoli, a different tribe from Amin. He told me to stay on. But things changed after a few weeks and he talked to me and told me to leave the country because he was going to leave three weeks after I left to work in the United States because he was tired of dodging assassins.
He said we would meet in Washington. I stayed at his place on my way from Yale to a conference in Kansas City. I had wanted to stay on in Uganda but my friend Joje Waddimba sat me in his car and talked me into leaving for the sake of my wife and children.
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