In Diary of an African Fanatic, author Ismail Dramundru Ali shares the routine challenges of a passionate African. He also analyses the challenges facing Africa and concludes that Africans have been slow to solving their problems because of over reliance on religion and witchcraft.

The book tackles colonialism, political leadership, bad policies, tribalism, environmental degradation, rural-urban migration, terrorism and gay rights among other issues.

Dramundru walks the reader through his life from childhood in rural Uganda to the time when he gets sucked into the madness of the capital city Kampala and all the way to the bustling metropolises of the Western world.

Like the title suggests, Diary of an African Fanatic highlights seminal events in Dramundru’s life. As a child, his father wants him to get good education which will secure him a bright future.

From a Muslim background, Dramundru tells about life growing up in Abirachu village where the day began with the muezzin’s call to prayer, almost simultaneously with the cock’s crowing in the morning.

“The Muslims would perform their ablutions and don their long robes for the morning prayer. The non-Muslims would have a head start with their day’s chores. People were apportioned different roles by virtue of their sex, size and age,” he writes.

“The African regime knew religion was the opium of the masses so they encouraged it, unlike the ban that was put in place in the former Soviet Union. Africa’s rogue rulers let a lopsided version of religion prevail, to make the people more subservient,” he argues in the book, published by RoseDog Books.
“In Africa when religion failed, there was always the recourse to the witchdoctor and magic. It was not that God had abandoned Africans but Africans hasd abandoned God because they lost belief in a God that wanted total obedience. The African chose to take a short cut to the spiritual realm by way of the witchdoctor.”

He soon joins school and has the experiences that majority of Africans go through where the culture of coercion and force is rife even among fellow students in the form of bullying. But he was not one to stomach bullies and physically fought for respect and freedom.

Traditions

Dramundru went to a school where students were expected to adhere to whatever laws the school administration came up with. “The school officials and teachers had underestimated the rage that was burning inside the students,” he notes, and tells of a bust up turned into a student strike that left the school in ruins.

On family and traditions, he says traditional society distinguished gender roles in a setting that didn’t appreciate the woman, though she was not any less human than a man.

Dramundru argues that the African woman deserves no less than the man.

Perhaps these ideas came to him in hindsight in the West (the USA to be precise) where he eventually moved in search of better education and life in general.

But life in the West is not a bed of roses as he found out on arriving in the US. He notes that every African immigrant to the West must first find that key that will open the doors to the kingdom of opportunity.

On arrival, he looked forward to meeting with fellow African students but was disappointed when he finally mingled with them. They were not the brothers as he had dreamt of and he soon found himself on the streets doing drugs to cope with the pressures of an alien life.

“My situation was even more complex because of my immigration status. I was entitled to only work for the company that hired me and therefore my work visa was only valid as long as I remained an employee with this firm. If I lost my job, it meant losing the privileges of living in America in the manner I had grown accustomed to,” he writes. Like many immigrants, he confesses that fear of returning home was overbearing, especially because he had nothing to show for his stay abroad.

Hope was on its way even as he looked at it with scepticism. “The first miracle that I saw from the pavement that had become my temporary home was the poster of a biracial man one Barrack Obama,” he goes on.

The poster said he was running for president of the United States. He tore the first poster and used it to wipe his hands clean, after he had eaten some oily leftover food liftedfrom the dumpster. Did he stand a chance? Did black people run for president nowadays?

“The day Barrack Obama won the presidency I pulled out a ring I had bought for Anita. At the height of the celebration I pulled out the ring and proposed to her… she agreed to marry me on the most important historic day of our adult lives. My life seemed whole again. Never again, I swore, would I swim in the waters of despair and anguish,” he concludes.

Personal life

This is Dramundru’s first book and is based on personal experiences and fiction. “The events in the story either happened to me or somebody I know,” he told The EastAfrican.

But Dramundru did not go to the US because he wanted to.

After graduating from Makerere University in the early 1990s he co-founded the African Self-Help Initiative to work towards community self-improvement. The non-profit organisation became successful with time, attracting the attention of the ruling National Resistance Movement. It eventually paid the price for refusing to align its social work with the political message of the day.

“They arrested our members on dubious charges of treason and terrorism. Our offices were shut down and soldiers placed to guard them. We were accused of corruption and defrauding the public,” he explains.

It was then that he fled to the US.