ABSTRACT

One of the socially accepted gender roles for the male folk is to exhibit physical strength and suppress weakness. In history and in many literary works, it has become conventional to portray male characters as the frontline fighters in war situations. The female counterparts are not utterly unappreciated but are often presented as the one who is raped, killed, died or one who sleeps around with men due to the hardships of war and after war situation. Contemporary African writers are beginning to get fascinated by tales on women-warriors. Interestingly there exist a good number of them in Africa who have been shelved into the archives. Literary works have exhumed these tales and are now replicating them in their works. Talk about the Dahomey Amazons, Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana and Amina Sukhera of Nigeria, to mention but a few. Goretti Kyomuhendo has join the many Ugandan authors to tell her war tale, neither from the war-front stand point nor from the poverty-ridden camp's stand point but using a young girl as the omniscient narrator, she presents what a family is like in a war situation. Ahurried reading of this work would make it look like a balanced split of gender roles in a war zone, but a closer study would reveal that a group were the real fighters of this war. The aim of this work is to analyze this novel in order to find out who actually were the fighters of this war and in what way was it so. With the gender schema as the theoretical framework, the reader-response theory is used to bring in the researcher's personal interpretation of the work. The paper concludes that there may be no physical enemy in the novel. Uncertainty/Waiting are the real enemies, while she who carried her pregnancy and put to bed with little or no aid, who nursed the wounds with only natural herbs, who fed the family and cared for the rest of the family, who filled the gap of anxiety created by Uncertainty/Waiting is the real combatant and the hero in the novel.