Each generation adds a little bit more or takes a little bit away from the original facts. Traditional African culture relied on an oral accounting of history, and as such truth can often become distorted and easily turned into myth. I found this very intriguing, hearing about the curse from different perspectives and seeing how it affected people differently across history. The novel is divided into six separate (yet intricately interconnected) books. Words are, indeed, powerful tools and they have been used here to full effect.

Such a narrative technique makes the story distinctively her own, and it's completely unafraid to shout out its voice to the rest of the world like Achebe's writing. Here Makumbi plays around with language and storytelling she writes in English, as Achebe once did, but she also inserts Ugandan words into her prose.

African language is formal, developed and intelligent. In his novel Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe demonstrated that Africa does not possess a silent culture. Breaking Kintu's curse will finally bring them all together in the conclusion of this hugely dramatic story. His actions have ramifications for all his descendants, for those that been scattered across the globe over the years. Once a respectable man, Kintu Kidda is ruined. He is cursed and leaves his village in solitude. It set off a chain of events that would shape his life thereafter and ultimately see him torn from the remainder of his family. Two hundred and fifty years prior to the incident with the concrete slab, a freak accident lead to a fa`ther murdering his own son it was an accident he never forgave himself for.

I found this such an effective piece of storytelling, the idea that the history of our ancestors never full leaves us and has the potential to one day assert itself in our present age. Blood flows easily, and quickly, when your family's steps are haunted by a curse that spans generations. He is then brained with a concrete slab his woman is left in widowhood and has the hard task of dealing with her man's debt. In just a few pages a man has been hunted down by an angry mob in Uganda. Kintu opens with unbridled authority and mercilessness. Summary: History in the form of an unrelenting curse pervades the present in this epic novel that questions if we can ever fully recover from the wounds of the past.

Kintu book review