City Kid Genesis 2

It’s time for another riddle.

Question: WHAT IS THE LINK BETWEEN a YOUTH FESTIVAL, an ARCHBISHOP and man named EDWIN LUWASO?

Answer: It’s THE CITY KID again.

Somehow, the director of Scripture Union of Uganda, who was based in Kampala – a long way from the place where I lived – heard about The City Kid and listened to a recording we had made. By ‘recording’ I mean something on a very basic reel-to-reel recorder (forget about modern digital technology), using its built-in microphone. Despite the poor quality of the said recording, he was impressed by what he heard and had the idea of using it as the centre piece of a Christian youth festival, celebrating the work of Scripture Union and reaching out with the Gospel to the young people of Kampala and beyond. The festival, to be spread out over a long weekend, was to be held in an indoor stadium, normally used for sporting events. The programme was to include school-based choirs, competitions and evangelistic talks given by the Rev Festo Kivengere, a celebrated evangelist from western Uganda.

But there was a problem: how to bring The City Kid to a public stage, with a large audience, without it appearing like a lecture with musical breaks. So it was decided to adapt it as a drama, with the main parts being acted out, but still with a musical group to render the various songs during the performance.

This is where the ARCHBISHOP enters the stage. Well, he wasn’t an archbishop at the time. He was a student of law at the University of Makerere in Kampala and an active member of the Christian Union there. He accepted the challenge of adapting the story for the stage and directing the performance. He was also the one chosen to take on the lead role of John Ouma, the city kid. His name? JOHN SENTAMU. In case you haven’t heard, he is the current Archbishop of York – a man of many talents but, for the purpose of this account, someone with a great stage presence.

John Sentamu in the title role of The City Kid'

I had planned to be on leave in Britain during the weeks leading up to the Festival, so I wasn’t around to help with preparation. Actually, I was happy to hand over all the arrangements to the committee, and entrusted the dramatisation to John Sentamu and his friends. I did manage to see a performance of the play just a couple of days after I got back from leave (this was in June, 1971, in case you were wondering about dates). It was very well done and, according to later feed-back, made a strong impression on many people who attended the Festival.

Now I have to retrace my footsteps. In the year before the youth festival, I had been trying to adapt the simple storyline of The City Kid into a novel. It had been suggested to me that it would work as fiction, without the musical accompaniment. The first version was completed by the end of 1970 and the manuscript dispatched to the Africa Christian Press, which was (and still is) based in Achimota, Ghana.

This is where a man named EDWIN LUWASO makes an appearance. Well, actually he can’t appear because he, like the novel, is a fiction. I invented the name, adapting my own to make it sound a bit African. Why did I do that? I wished the novel to be read by the potential publishers as if coming from an African writer: if it was obviously from the hand of a mzungu (white person), it would have failed and best be forgotten. However, I never intended to maintain a deceit, and, once ACP had expressed an intention to publish, I came clean about my identity. They replied

We are sorry you are not a Ugandan but are still interested in publishing your manuscript because of the merit of the story.

In the end the pen-name Edwin Luwaso was retained on the cover of the novel, with an explanation that it was a nom de plume. The novel was published in 1973 during my final year of teaching in Uganda. The book was subsequently reprinted twice but eventually the publishers felt it was time to call it a day.