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Waiting
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GORETTI KYOMUHENDO was born in 1965 and grew up in Hoima, Western Uganda.

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Waiting

A Novel
Goretti Kyomuhendo

Afterword by M.J. Daymond

Set in the seventies during the last year of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s brutal, often surreal rule, Waiting evokes the fear and courage of a small close-knit society uncertain of what the edicts of a madman or the marauding of his disintegrating army will bring with each day.

Safe for years in their remote country village far from Amin's political battlefield, teenager Alinda and her family experience terror firsthand when the troops of the self-proclaimed "Last King of Scotland" use the local highway to escape pursuing Ugandan and Tanzanian allied forces. With her pregnant mother on the verge of labor, her brother anxious to join the Liberators, and a house full of hungry siblings, neighbors, and displaced refugees, Alinda learns what it takes to survive, and eventually to plan for a new life.

"In a beautifully direct narration, [Kyomuhendo] is able to show her characters reacting to the horror that Amin's regime has put them through. While the story can be used pedagogically, the writing does not feel either syrupy or pedantic but instead profoundly realistic."

—Library Journal

“Goretti Kyomuhendo has crafted an intelligent, sensitive, beautiful metaphor of hope. She leads us to believe that the long waiting of Ugandan women and men will ultimately prove not to have been in vain: They will witness the arrival and live in the humaneness and peace of a new, post-Amin, post-all-evil day—a day for which they have suffered, struggled, and worked in equal measure.”

—Emilia Ilieva, Egerton University, Kenya