The Smell of the Poor is a story set in the late sixties and early seventies in Uganda that portrays human suffering resulting from poverty and ignorance in their wiser perspectives. It also highlights the difference in the classes and in the races and tribes. This period was after Uganda got its independence and the Africans were finding their way slowly as the Europeans were leaving the country.
Orach Lutulamoi is a young man from Northern Uganda, forced out of the safety of his village in Acholiland by the usual glitters of the capital city after his mother separates from his drunken father Forasikino Nono Lutulamoi.
With the departure of his father, Orach finds that he is now the head of the household so he needed to find a way to make ends meet. There was talk of there being numerous jobs in the city so Orach wanted to get one of these. He strongly believed that there was a way that he would be able to make more money in the city than he would ever make with a job in his village. The only thing he would be able to do in his village was be a hut builder. This was really all he was qualified to do. Oh, he could also fetch water for people. The well was quite a distance and some people would give food in exchange for someone fetching water for them. Orach found this whole fetching water thing so taxing, he would rather mould bricks at a hut building site.
In the city, the youthful Orach, who has only primary seven education and no work experience whatsoever, eventually settles for a laborer's job which he previously despised. He was now twenty years old so he had to take care of himself let alone his mother and sister back home. Still, he acknowledged that in his village a laborer's job would pay him so much less than in the city. He takes the job in the city because at least here no one knows him and he still will be able to earn something that he can send back home. He soon realizes that he cannot save the money he makes at his job partly because of his meagre wage. The other part is because, as a human being amongst people of a certain class, Orach cannot remain unanswerable to the demands of expensive modern living in the city. This was the city of Kampala.
There was a certain class that people were required to live here. There were places of entertainment that existed in this city that were just a dream for someone from his village. Even at his tender teenage he wanted to experience these nice things that he had only heard of. It was quite a shock for Orach when he first got to the city. He was seeing things for the first time and he did not know how to act or how to react. It was like a child being exposed to numerous toys after living his life without a single toy. A child who had never known that there was even such a thing as a toy. A child who was not allowed to play. Now that he had all these toys at his disposal, he did not know which one to play with first. He did not even know if he was allowed to play or not.
A little over a year, Orach was thrown out of his job because of a three day absence whilst attending to his second hand wife picked up from the city. He called her 'second hand' because he had taken her from someone else. At the time he felt that he had won a prize. She went willingly with him and the other man did not seem to want her any more. Orach was just happy that he had gotten a woman, he did not look too deep into it. Now that she had caused his dismissal he started to think about all these things.
He was yet to recover from the shock of his dismissal when he got hauled during a panda gari operation in the city slums by state security men. It is from the prison cell that Orach recounted some scenes of his past experiences.
The smell of the Poor is a total recollection of Orach's account of his life up to the point that led him to prison.
