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Moses Isegawa. Abyssinian Chronicles New York. Knopf. 2000. ix + 462 pages $26. ISBN 0-375-40613-1
MOSES ISEGAWA, WHO FLED his native Uganda in igo to become a Dutch citizen, appropriately titles his debut novel Abyssinian Chronicles. In this delightful bildungsroman, he weaves history and imagination in a masterful fashion, chronicling the rise and fall of the famous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and the accompanying political and social upheavals. Mugezi, the protagonist and narrator, is handcuffed to history a la Saleem of Salman Rushdie's 1981 classic Midnight's Children. He "pickles" history, to use Rushdie's term, in order to bring to the reader a postcolonial situation of dictatorship, guerrilla warfare, sectarian violence, corruption, and chaos.
Born John Chrysostom Noel to Serenity and Padlock, the young protagonist goes by the African name of Mugezi according to his grandfather's wishes. Soon her parents move to Kampala for a better future, leaving the...