It carries many resonances with Sam Selvon’s canonical The Lonely Londoners(1956), with whom the child of the protagonist in Makumbi’s ‘Our Allies the Colonies’ shares the same name.įirst published in Granta, June 2014, and available to read here. This story, which was the Overall Winner of the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, is included in Manchester Happened (2019), a collection that focuses on the experiences of Ugandans in Manchester and even draws on some of Jennifer Makumbi’s memories of when she worked at Airport Security. A group of middle-aged women arrive at the mourning ceremony and start retelling the story, from Nnam’s perspective. Nnam and her sons are treated as his illegitimate family. He was still married to his first wife in Uganda, and he passed on to her their rented house in Uganda, having secretly fathered two more daughters. At his funeral, she finds out that he had been living a double life the whole time.
She and Kayita had been together for over five years and had two sons together. The story opens with Nnam clearing her house in Manchester of her dead husband’s smell and memories.
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