A young woman leaves the village for the city and finds work as a domestic worker in a wealthy household. Sounds familiar? Yes, it is.
The Girl Child Has Seen Days is a story Ugandan readers may feel they have encountered many times before in novels, on television and in countless other forms of storytelling. Ernest Bazanye, though, has a different reason for his version. It is funny.
For Bazanye, the story is almost beside the point.
“The plot is just like a clothesline,” he says.
“It’s a line on which you hang your gags and jokes.”
That may be the best way to understand the book. Rather than treating the plot as something precious that must carry the entire weight of the story, Bazanye uses it as a framework for what he really enjoys: putting funny people in ridiculous situations and seeing what happens next.
The result is a novel driven by entertaining episodes, memorable characters, and the kind of humor readers familiar with Bazanye’s work will recognize immediately. It gives everything a direction while the jokes do much of the heavy lifting.
That approach makes perfect sense for a writer who has spent much of his career making Ugandans laugh. Bazanye has been writing stories, columns and satire for decades. There was no grand revelation or single life-changing moment behind The Girl Child Has Seen Days.
It was, in his telling, simply one of the stories he was working on and one that eventually found its way into book form.
Getting it published, however, was another story. Bazanye chose to self-publish, and that decision was more about convenience. He believes Uganda’s publishing industry still operates largely according to a model designed for very different markets and circumstances.
In his view, that model does not always work particularly well for Ugandan writers or readers, yet self-publishing continues to carry an unnecessary stigma.
Bazanye wants to challenge that. For him, putting out his own book is also a statement. Ugandan writers should be able to develop publishing models that make sense for their own environment instead of automatically accepting old assumptions about what “proper” publishing looks like.
“If a person with my reputation can self-publish, then maybe this will help remove the stigma that says it’s only amateurs who publish themselves,” he says.
It is a practical argument, but there is also something delightfully Bazanye about it. He has spent years questioning conventions through satire and comedy. Why should publishing be any different?
Long before The Girl Child Has Seen Days, Bazanye had already established himself as one of Uganda’s familiar voices in humor and satire. For more than twenty years, he wrote Ernest Bazanye’s Bad Idea in The New Vision.
He contributed to the political satire show What’s Up Africa and Business Unusual, and has written and hosted Muwawa Club on Urban TV. He is also a writer for Dumb Questions For Cool People, a comedy quiz show he co-created with Timothy J. Nyanzi.
Therefore, while the novel may have a familiar starting point, its author hardly approaches it as a conventional storyteller. Bazanye approaches it as a comedian. Which changes the question.
Perhaps the point is not whether you have heard a story about a girl coming to the city before, but what this particular writer does with that story once he gets his hands on it. The answer, if Bazanye is to be believed, is simple: he puts many jokes in there.
The Girl Child Has Seen Days is available now for readers looking for sharp humor, memorable characters and a story that does not take itself or its plot too seriously.
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