What if I told you a story that reflects reality?
What you need to know:
The story of this book takes us to the monastic purity of Father Santos Dila – the embodiment of Christian piety, having trained from the Gregorian University in Italy, and is now the vicar of the local area church in northern Uganda
Title: Fate of the Banished
Author: Julius Ocwinyo
Published: 2008
Pages: 149
Price: Shs50,000
Availability: Nalya Motel Library
Life is often a series of moments which amount to that ultimate moment when those moments are no longer of any moment.
True, this sentence seems like a play on words. However, what if I were to tell you a story that reaches beyond rhetoric to reflect a reality torn from the womb of rationality, would you reject it out of hand? Or would you parse it for the nuances which belong to a deeper meaning? The book Fate of the banished by Julius Ocwinyo is a singularly compelling story which will leave you with such questions, as its answers lie teasingly in plain sight.
The story of this book takes us to the monastic purity of Father Santos Dila – the embodiment of Christian piety, having trained from the Gregorian University in Italy, and is now the vicar of the local area church in northern Uganda.
His rectitude dots the i’s and crosses the t’s without alphabetizing his faith to any verbiage lent to the simplicity of good and evil.
Father Santos falls in love; rather he tumbles down the ravine of a lust that led to the fall of man in the Garden of Eden as he turns into a horn dog lusting after Flo, the wife of a rebel called Apire.
She is not a gaze-magnet, by any stretch of the imagination. “Her arms were thick and muscular and ended in large ungainly hands that seemed more familiar with the hoe than the lighter feminine chores. Her legs, like her arms, were also thick and muscular, with short, narrow feet finishing in stubby toes. Her skin was mahogany,” the author writes.
But she was attractive in the sort of small doses that amounted to a pill that cured Father Dila’s fevered longing to feel like a man. Not a man of the cloth, but a man dressed down by the animalism of sheer passion.
She told him she was spoken for by a violent man who spoke very little. So the seductive unavailability of his emotional and physical absence denuded her of any pretense that she could go on without missing that loving feeling from another man.
Then, there was Erabu.
He owned cows and the heart of a fetching beauty called Esina. All he wanted was to marry her using his cows as bride price. Her deep almond eyes atop a body that was sensuous, shapely and supple complemented a spiritedness ample enough to match the witchery of her alluring physicality.
They were one, until cattle rustlers left Erabu dispossessed of the wealth that had rusticated his love for her to the heads of cattle required to win her hand in marriage. Subsequently, he tried to earn his keep as a labourer or anything that would make him feel equal to her affections and, tragically, it was the anything in this equation that proved to be his undoing.
Erabu, like Apire, became a rebel. But the gentle angels of his nature would not turn him into a killer. Yet killing was all that was left to him, until his gentleness robbed him of everything when faced by the devilment demanded of him. Set in a war torn zone, the characters of this story are tragic beings whose personality traits are ingredients to their shared downfalls.
