Explosion reported near Catholic shrine in Uganda's capital Kampala
An explosion was heard near a Roman Catholic shrine in Uganda's capital Kampala on Tuesday morning, Ugandan media reported. The army said two armed people were "neutralised" in the Munyonyo suburb ahead of celebrations for the Martyrs Day public holiday.
The blast killed at least two people, the Daily Monitor newspaper reported. NBS Television said the explosion was caused by a suspected bomb near the Munyonyo Martyrs' Shrine in the south of the city.
A Ugandan army spokesperson wrote on X that a "counterterrorism unit this morning intercepted and neutralised two armed terrorists in Munyonyo, an upscale city suburb."
NTV Uganda said authorities had restricted public access to the area around the shrine after the explosion.
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Though this position garnered much attention, and sparked lively debate in the post-colonial world, it was hardly the main preoccupation of post-colonial writers, and also did not convince African writers of the time to recourse to their mother languages. Most post-colonial critics were obsessed with discourse and its effect on oppressed cultures. Because the discourse was not embedded in the language of natives, or simply languages, it was oriented by the language of power, and alienation was not all that bad — alienation might even open a new way of seeing your own culture differently. In time, Ngũgĩ's autochthonous approach almost faded into obscurity. Though the language debate dominated Ngũgĩ's intellectual and literary oeuvre, his tackling issues was no different from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Cheikh Hamidou Kane and others. One can read Achebe and Ngũgĩ in a deep conversation in terms of returning to their roots. 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His rendering of his past basically relies on three revolutionaries: Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Rodney, to whom he owes his critical approach. Ngũgĩ scholar James Ogude reads his works as 'writing from below', a Marxist approach initially employed by the Marxist English historian EP Thompson. The most precious gift he passed on to his nation is his latest book, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi , which ranks alongside the famous Malian epic Sundiata . I believe the epic will survive time and continue to honour the continent; it embodies all human suffering and dignity throughout the centuries, and the happiness of the time being and the time ever present and the time passed over present. Time never passed for Ngũgĩ, which always is invoked through memories that never age, as Harry Garuba reminds us. It is crystallised in moments that contain overlapping terrains and lived through everlasting mourning, chants and praises. 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It is a masterpiece that hails from his nation, which he carefully treats as a pearl glistening in his eyes with relentless tears toward a world. Ahmet Sait Akçay is a literary critic and African Studies scholar, he is teaching at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.
