The Footsteps and Other Stories

Abstract

Set in part in a remote Ugandan countryside and in part in the squalid slums of Kampala, The Footsteps and Other Stories explores the pains and the struggles and the aspirations of wretched lowly folks when the state not only abdicates from its responsibility of protecting them but also turns its repressive instruments against them. In their flight from misery, in their unrelenting quest for the ever elusive security, personal or economic, they discover a voice for themselves--the one thing the state cannot take away from them. In spite of themselves, their attempts to make sense of their lives, of the events that they find themselves caught up in, are often times quite comical, sometimes bordering on the farcical. And the landscapes, depicted in a language that is quite lucid and lyrical, often times mirror the situations that the characters themselves are caught up in.