The local Afropolitan: Mobility, migration and oral storytelling in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s <i>Kintu</i> (2014) and <i>The First Woman</i> (2020)

This article explores how the determinedly local novels of Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2020), imagine a more egalitarian mode of Afropolitanism, which is characterised by a sensitivity to underlying systems of mobility, fluidity and fluctuation, and is not therefore restricted to those who have personally experienced intercontinental travel or mobility. In these works, mythology and oral storytelling function as mediators between the local and the global by making the reverberations of historical migration palpable and, more broadly, by initiating an attentiveness to global interconnectedness and what Achille Mbembe calls “the presence of the elsewhere in the here” (“Afropolitanism” 28). Considering how Afropolitanism has come to denote not just a novel’s literary content, but also a particular context of literary production, this article also examines what it means to centre and celebrate localness in a global medium like the African novel through an analysis of Makumbi’s paratextual self-fashioning.