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Mukenuzi: The Slave Trader
Paperback
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ISBN13: 9798343224740
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 14 2024
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Oct 14 2024
Pages: 220
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Nobody in Kasasa could say where Mukenuzi came from.
He arrived on an ordinary morning with nothing but a decorative walking stick, a voice built for believing in, and a story about gods who had chosen him to lead the village into prosperity. Within a season, an entire community was clapping for a stranger who couldn't point to a single mountain on the horizon he claimed to have heard them speak from.What Mukenuzi actually built was a machine for selling his own people. One festival at a time. One sacred journey at a time. One legless goat, one magic donkey, one tax on laughter itself at a time, he kept an entire village too busy being entertained to ask where its children kept disappearing to.
Eleven-year-old Ayella watches her cousin Tendo leave with the traders and refuses one last ride on his shoulders, embarrassed, not knowing it would be the last thing she ever gave him. She does the only thing available to a child with no power and an excellent memory: she starts counting. Years pass. The count grows. And Ayella grows into the kind of patient, dangerous person a village produces when it has spent a decade laughing at the same jokes to avoid asking the same question. She talks her way into the enemy's own court. She builds a case one stolen yam, one bought sign from the gods, one smuggled ledger page at a time. And when she finally says the number out loud in the middle of a festival, twenty-one names, spoken one by one, in front of the families who lost them, she does something Mukenuzi's charm was never built to survive. She makes an entire village stop laughing long enough to remember. Mukenuzi: The Slave Trader is a satirical fable about the con that convinces its victims to applaud their own undoing, and the stubborn, unglamorous work of the people who finally refuse to keep clapping. It is a village of legless goats, invisible robes, and a leader who once tried to tax his people for the crime of enjoying themselves, right up until the moment it very suddenly isn't funny at all, and then, somehow, it is funny again anyway, because that is how the truth gets told and survives the telling.
For readers of political satire and fable in the tradition of stories that use laughter as a scalpel, not a distraction, from the quiet horror underneath it. E.J. Magambo is the author of The Arabian Girl and Bridget. Mukenuzi: The Slave Trader is his third novel, and first work of satire.
Eleven-year-old Ayella watches her cousin Tendo leave with the traders and refuses one last ride on his shoulders, embarrassed, not knowing it would be the last thing she ever gave him. She does the only thing available to a child with no power and an excellent memory: she starts counting. Years pass. The count grows. And Ayella grows into the kind of patient, dangerous person a village produces when it has spent a decade laughing at the same jokes to avoid asking the same question. She talks her way into the enemy's own court. She builds a case one stolen yam, one bought sign from the gods, one smuggled ledger page at a time. And when she finally says the number out loud in the middle of a festival, twenty-one names, spoken one by one, in front of the families who lost them, she does something Mukenuzi's charm was never built to survive. She makes an entire village stop laughing long enough to remember. Mukenuzi: The Slave Trader is a satirical fable about the con that convinces its victims to applaud their own undoing, and the stubborn, unglamorous work of the people who finally refuse to keep clapping. It is a village of legless goats, invisible robes, and a leader who once tried to tax his people for the crime of enjoying themselves, right up until the moment it very suddenly isn't funny at all, and then, somehow, it is funny again anyway, because that is how the truth gets told and survives the telling.
For readers of political satire and fable in the tradition of stories that use laughter as a scalpel, not a distraction, from the quiet horror underneath it. E.J. Magambo is the author of The Arabian Girl and Bridget. Mukenuzi: The Slave Trader is his third novel, and first work of satire.
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