For a quarter of a century now, Uganda’s First Lady Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi Museveni has been a permanent fixture on the country’s political landscape. Yet surprisingly little is known about her for the simple reason that she has lived all this time in the shadow of her husband, President Yoweri Museveni.

This 62-year-old mother of four grown-up children who have given her 12 grandchildren has cultivated the public image of a graceful but meek woman for whom a husband is, as in Old Testament times, also his wife’s lord.

It’s an image consistent with her Christian convictions, which she wears on her sleeve, and her For a quarter of a century now, Uganda’s First Lady Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi Museveni has been a permanent fixture on the country’s political landscape. Yet surprisingly little is known about her for the simple reason that she has lived all this time in the shadow of her husband, President Yoweri Museveni.

This 62-year-old mother of four grown-up children who have given her 12 grandchildren has cultivated the public image of a graceful but meek woman for whom a husband is, as in Old Testament times, also his wife’s lord.

It’s an image consistent with her Christian convictions, which she wears on her sleeve, and her the misfortunes of her early life that produced a strong yearning for a father figure. By her own admission, in Museveni she found a man who would forever change the course and direction of her life.

Observer of the first couple will have noticed that whenever they appear together in public, Museveni walks a stride or two ahead of his wife, back erect, chest out and head high. In contrast, his wife, with her handbag clutched in her hands, walks hesitantly, her head always slightly bent, unless she’s waving to the public.

As he portrays himself in his own memoir, Sowing the Mustard Seed, published 14 years ago, Museveni has throughout his life built a persona as a valiant freedom fighter who singlehandedly turned around Uganda’s fortunes. He does not hesitate to frame Uganda’s progressive history as beginning from 1986 when he captured power after waging a five-year guerrilla war.

Not even the five years that Janet has now spent as Member of Parliament, half of them as a state minister, have helped her step out of her husband’s shadow. Curiously, Museveni recently elevated her to a full Cabinet position.

Her memoirs, My Life’s Journey, published this month by Fountain Publishers, may represent her first steps to establishing her separate identity and her legacy as first lady. For the first time, she brings her own story, no matter how manicured, to a public that she has encountered in all sorts of ways and still remained largely an enigma to.

But for one chapter in which she explains her foray into politics with a depth of detail to be found only in a few other parts of the book, these memoirs are decidedly apolitical. Instead, they are an account of one woman’s lonely life as the only survivor of her immediate family; her relationship with an eccentric man who lived and had his being entirely consumed with fighting dictatorships at the time; the turbulence she had to endure because of that; and her steadfast belief in God through it all.

After 25 years in power, however, time has cast doubt on Museveni’s commitment to fighting dictatorship. Not only is there no place with a functioning democratic system where an elected president has lasted this long, consensus is growing that Museveni is in fact turning into the kind of leader he dedicated his life to fighting.

No published commentary has laid bare the chasm between Museveni’s convictions and promises as a young revolutionary and his actions in power over the years than Dr Olive Kobusingye’s The Correct Line. Kobusingye is the sister of Museveni’s sworn nemesis Dr Kizza Besigye.

The book, which was initially impounded in October 2010, notes that to look at Museveni’s life and how he has governed Uganda is to gain firsthand experience of what George Orwell might have had in mind as he penned his classic Animal Farm 66 years ago.

Interestingly, Janet makes no assessment whatsoever of how her husband has run the country save to underscore his candour in tackling HIV/Aids and to say, generally, how her family has made huge sacrifices for Uganda.

From the way she never misses an opportunity to insert God into all the episodes she has chosen for her memoirs, one would be forgiven for believing Janet had a “Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus” moment. Early on in the book, recounting the death of her only brother, Janet tells her mother she didn’t want anything to do with a God who had the audacity to take away her only son and the replacement of the father-figure in the home. To the young Janet, her mother had not faithfully loved, served and followed this God only to merit such a loss.

Now, the classic scenario when people turn their back on God like the biblical Prodigal Son, is that a period of dissolute living follows until disaster strikes, bringing them back to their senses and forcing them to seek out the God they parted ways with.

Janet, however, does not reveal how her life turned out in the intervening years before she saw the light, as it were, even though, as she admits she lived by her own rules, did whatever she pleased without caring about the purpose of her life. She only returns, almost in the middle of the book, to the undramatic way in which she finally found Jesus.

Creative licence

So, did she or did she not kick over the traces?

Such unanswered questions underline the licence autobiographies allow their authors. This, however, comes at the risk of hollowing out the story especially when the choice episodes are not told with enough details. This remains true even if, as a rule of thumb, autobiographies are exercises in self-praise.

The keener reader, who is not blinded by the exaggerated contributions Janet and her husband have made to Uganda, and is only interested in a properly and fully told story, will encounter many more sections like this where he or she will wish there were a little more detail here and a little more reflection there.

This kind of reader will also wish Janet had tempered her eagerness to tell of God’s goodness in such matters as the state of Africa. In her efforts to reflect on the continent and its myriad challenges, Janet rehashes a much-discredited proposition common among ultra-evangelical circles that Africa is in the mess it is in because it turned away from God.

According to her, “It is only in being rooted and grounded in God that we will find our true purpose and fulfil our destiny as Africans.”

Besides offering an account of Janet’s life, My Life’s Journey triumphs, as the author duly noted during its launch, in offering another account of the Musevenis that is conspicuously absent in Sowing the Mustard Seed.

Where in the latter you only encounter a steely Museveni who covers how he met and married Janet and when they had their first child in just three paragraphs, in the latter Janet devotes a whole chapter in which she literally gushes about the man who intrigued and charmed her in equal measure — by, among other things, the way he lacked a dress sense but was obsessive about cleanliness.

She is also detailed in accounts of how each of their children was born; how she sustained the family in exile; and her loneliness and longing for her man, details Museveni would have wished remained out of the memoirs.

In a fleeting moment of boldness, Janet also tackles the three main rumours that have circulated around her life: 1) That Lt-Col Kainerugaba Muhoozi, their first born and head of his father’s Special Forces Group, is not her real son; 2) That she suffered from some form of epilepsy, which she says God healed; and 3) she was gifted her education degree by Makerere University.

Yet, whether the book itself is a thriller, as her husband, who wrote its foreword, claimed when he officially launched it, is a judgement that will ultimately be delivered by readers.