Book Event - Ambitions and Keeping Up Appearances in the Making of a Doctor

About the Book

Musa is a young man in Uganda who struggles to pay school fees and stay in school until he graduates as a doctor. The country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1962. The colonial masters had used the larger tribe, the Baganda to concur the smaller tribes of Eastern Uganda. We see Musa’s father, who belonged to the smaller tribes, struggling to keep up appearances in an elite club that tried to approximate itself to the Baganda tribe who ruled with the support of the British. Musa’s mother’s ambition to become a nurse is caught up in the colonial masters’ rule of not allowing nurses to become married or to have children. Because of the colonial game of playing tribe against tribe, Uganda faces civil wars and military coups soon after independence that result in a poor economy that depends on smuggling Uganda’s coffee to neighboring…