“I was instead drawn to an oil painting by [George William] Kyeyune that I thought was the bedrock piece of the Holderbaum Collection. Kyeyune made the painting, titled Circumcision, in 2007, as, I later came to learn, part of a wider series on the practice. In the piece acquired by Holderbaum a woman with impossibly long coiffured hair (wrapped in a multi-colored cloth à la Matisse) restrains another woman who faces a man armed with a knife. We can’t see what’s in the face of the woman whose genitals are about to be tampered with, even though we must assume she’s anguished or terrified, which is partly why she must be held back by the woman squatting behind her. Yet for me the painting’s point of equilibrium is not the hand that holds the knife but the man’s eyes peering into the woman’s groin. He seems to be hesitating, as if he is slowly coming back to his senses and giving himself up to nature. It’s as if Kyeyune, as he made the painting, had been shouting, You fool, what do you think you are doing? “

“Cooking this, eating this, you are declaring that your foods and way of life are worthy even in the face of others that the world chooses to validate as being superior. You decide that one day you will write about this, burn, fry, light up their ideas of you through your food. This too is an act of resistance. You will tell them that in your country are a people who know their worth, who have always known their worth, even if some of them have forgotten. You will scream to them that you, the collective you, are incandescent.”