Moses Isegawa quotes
1963 – · Uganda / Netherlands, 20th–21st century · novelist, writer
About Moses Isegawa
Born in Kampala on 10 August 1963 into a Catholic family, he attended seminary, studied at Makerere University and worked as a history teacher. He emigrated to the Netherlands in 1990, learned Dutch and published his first novel in 1998. His fiction examines violence, religion, exile and Uganda’s modern history.
Works: Abyssinian Chronicles (1998); Slangenkuil / Snakepit
Quotes
“Life was a journey of discovery, and character was a variable that kept veering left and right in search of the perfect way for a particular day.”
Source: Abyssinian Chronicles, English trans. Knopf, 2000 · Check the source
Verified attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- The line appears in Abyssinian Chronicles as part of the narrator Mugezi’s reflection.
- What remains uncertain
- Attribution to Isegawa is verified at the work level; the sentence functions as a narrated observation within the novel.
Isegawa frames identity as an ongoing, unstable process: character isn’t fixed but shifts in response to daily pressures. In Abyssinian Chronicles the line, voiced by the narrator, captures how history, family and migration push a person off-course and force constant reorientation.