Jinja

Jinja, the second-largest city in Uganda, is Lillian Kagwa’s hometown and the starting point of her migration story. It is associated with both the political violence she lived through and the lack of employment that helped drive her to leave; later, it remains a measure of how different life in New York City is from the one she left behind.

Setting and Political Context

Lillian had lived in Jinja through Uganda’s emancipation from British rule and its subsequent homegrown government under Milton Obote. The country was ruled through the army and its secret police, the General Service Unit, whose presence brought violence into ordinary life. Jinja is identified through this national history rather than described in detail as a city.

Lillian’s Departure

In 1967, Lillian and three cousins were traveling toward Kampala when men claiming to be General Service Unit agents stopped their car. One of the agents shot her cousin Arthur when he hesitated to leave the vehicle. Though briefly blinded and deafened by the gunshot, Lillian drove away before the agents could take the car; she reached Kampala half an hour later, and Arthur had died before they arrived. The episode conveys the danger surrounding her life in Uganda, though the account places the checkpoint on the journey to the capital, not specifically in Jinja. A year later, Lillian secured a visa to the United States. She arrived in New York in 1968, aged twenty-five, without knowing anyone there. Her command of English, acquired in a country shaped by British rule, eased the transition, but she had been unable to find any work in Uganda. In New York, even a poorly paid job was a valued opportunity.

A Point of Comparison

Jinja remains present in the account as a contrast to Lillian’s later life. After losing her first job in New York, she found lower-paid work, moved into a smaller apartment, and rejected Brian West’s invitation to dinner and a movie; she was young and felt that New York City offered more amusement than life back in Jinja. The comparison does not erase the hardship of migration: it sets her new freedom and possibilities against the poverty and state violence she had left behind.

Narrative Significance

The city’s role is chiefly biographical and retrospective. Jinja establishes where Lillian’s life began, while the journey toward Kampala exposes the danger she faced before leaving Uganda. Recalled from the perspective of her later life in New York, it gives her migration both a practical cause—there had been no work for her—and a political one: remaining meant living amid state-sanctioned violence.