Bob Kisiki
15 November 2006
Kampala — Moments make the person! Tough moments. Sweet moments. Achievements. Pain. Struggle.
Altogether, they contribute to the name society gets to know. This is the idea one gets, listening to the endless chain of experiences that have contributed to Evangeline L. Barongo, award-winning author and head of the Uganda Children Writers' Association.
Moments. Like when, as a child growing up, a member of the royal family, whom she refuses to disclose, would pick her up from school. They would ride in huge cars, roaming from place to place. Then her mother would one day come for her, to take her to their less royal circumstances. She, of course, did not like this.
"She would tell me, 'you have to dig this piece, from here to there, if you want to go back to the palace.' So I would dig morning and evening," Barongo narrates with satiety. "Now I am glad she made me work, because, as I learnt later, the chief was not my father. I needed to learn to work."
Moments. Like when, as a primary school classroom teacher, her husband told her he was going abroad to do his master's degree, and later his Ph.D. She said hey, we should go together. They went, and it was her stay in Manchester, UK, that launched her from a simple teacher to a library specialist, with special qualifications in children's literature.
Moments. At another moment, Prof. Khan asked the class Barongo was in to write an essay on what a book is. Being the wife of a professor, she went home and attacked his encyclopedia, wrapping everything it said on the word 'book' together into what she knew was going to be the essay to end all essays.
When the scripts were returned, she had scored 3/10. Her friend Mohammed, who had simply said, "A book is anything written with a message for the reader, regardless of length", had scored 7/10. Prof. Barongo laid the blame at her door for not consulting with the right people. She learnt her lesson.
Moments. Moments produce the person, else Barongo would not have minded when one day she attended a conference of children's writers and, looking around, she discovered she was the only one without a published title to her name.
Yes, she had been writing, but she had always thought her stories were not 'quite it'. But when she left that conference and started sending out her stories, the shock was astounding.
And now, Barongo is the proud author of several published works, including Our Escape, The Orphan, My Name is Street Child, Beggar Rose, We're All Animals and several others.
Recently, her latest title, Greedy Monkey Loses A Best Friend won her an award from the International Board on Books for Young people (IBBY).
Out of 164 titles that were entered for the contest, Barongo's was one of four titles that won awards under Author, Illustrator, Translator and Storyteller categories. Her colleague in Uganda Children's Writers' Association, Jude Kasagga, won the Illustrator category for Nowhere Safe to Live.
Greedy Monkey Loses A Best Friend is the story of Monkey and Crocodile, two friends who parted company because of Monkey's greed.
Crocodile has Monkey's interests at heart, but Monkey is selfish. The message is clear to the children.
Barongo believes that writers of children's stories need to have the interest of children at heart.
This, she says, should be the basis of the topic. "Many children are forced into things they don't want to do. It happens to them from infancy. They are removed from school against their will.
They are married off to men they don't love," she says with pain. Her belief is that when we write about these ills and the children read them, they begin on their liberation process.
And who can blame her? I read somewhere recently that if you want to hide a treasure from an African, hide it in a book. Meaning: reading is wealth untold.
It might be hard to be a wife, mother and author running an organisation, but for Barongo, that is not the problem. The real pain comes when she has written a new story and a critical reader rubbishes it. "That is when stress sets in.
Or when the manuscript is ready but there's no money to print it. Sometimes you publish the book and then it does not sell," she laments. She cited a case where she looked for market in Kenya for books by herself and colleagues.
The publisher called her saying they had vetted the books and accepted some but none of them was hers. She was happy for the association, but sad that her titles had flopped. "The following day I was in a nasty mood," she said.
Barongo's books can be bought from the Uganda Children's Writers' Association offices on Jinja Road.
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