African Literary NGOs

Power, Politics, and Participation

Doreen Strauhs

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137330901
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Proposing the novel concept of the "literary NGO, " this study combines interviews with contemporary East African writers with an analysis of their professional activities and the cultural funding sector to make an original contribution to African literary criticism and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

“The Landscape Had Not Its Like in All the World”1

(East) African Anglophone Writing from the 1940s to the Late 1990s

All writers are influenced by others. You can’t work in a vacuum.2

—Doreen Baingana (2008)

Introduction

Before embarking on definitions of the African literary NGO (LINGO), a few remarks on the literary history of Uganda and Kenya might be helpful—particularly for the reader as yet unfamiliar with these Anglophone writing scenes. In this chapter, I therefore aim at giving insights into the literary and sociopolitical contexts against which African LINGOs, such as FEMRITE and Kwani Trust, need to be read in order to grasp more fully their present role and impact as institutions of literary creativity as well as institutions of sociopolitical intervention.

Inevitably, such a nuanced historical overview is selective due to the limited scope and focus of this book on FEMRITE, Kwani Trust, and their associated writers. However, by highlighting the major ways in which Anglophone writers of earlier generations have experimented with forms, language, and style of creative writing from the 1940s to the late 1990s, the selective overview presented here will establish the starting point for the analysis of the model of the African LINGO in the upcoming chapters. At the end of this chapter, it will also become clear why Kenya and Uganda have seen a shift from university departments toward LINGOs in the late 1990s, in terms of Anglophone literary writers’ collectives and creative writing production.

A British Initiative

The beginnings of Anglophone writing in Kenya and Uganda were not homegrown per se. They were artificially initiated, deliberately fostered, and carefully nurtured by three major forces: the colonial government, British university lecturers, and the British-dominated publishing industry. In October 1945, Elspeth Huxley,3 a colonial government officer, was invited to advise the colonial government in Kenya on what literature should be produced in East Africa. Huxley “submitted a report which . . . recommended the setting up of an East African Literature Bureau to ‘produce books and other publications for the African population of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar . . .’”4 Two years later, in 1947, Charles Granston Richards implemented Huxley’s recommendations and introduced them at the East African Literature Bureau, on which he served as the first director between 1948 and 1963. In 1951, the bureau established bookshops, libraries, and postal library services. Between 1948 and June 1956, the bureau produced 550 new titles, totaling over three million volumes.5 Also, it “would edit and put effort into publishing textbooks in English and in the four languages of the East African Community (Swahili, Luganda, Gĩkũyũ, Dholuo-Gang). It would run a fortnightly magazine in the above languages, distribute books for popular readership through sales and libraries . . . [and] encourage literary creativity through offering prizes and other awards to notable talents.”6 In the 1950s, the bureau certainly was the leading institution for the distribution of Anglophone literature and educational material in both Kenya and Uganda.

The Rise and Fall of Makerere Campus

Yet, despite these efforts of the bureau, the Anglophone writing tradition by East Africans of non-British descent at that time was virtually nonexistent.7 Meanwhile, the literary market of Onitsha, Nigeria, was already flourishing, and Chinua Achebe had reached a transnational audience with his novel Things Fall Apart in 1958, writing back to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In the mid-1950s, Kenya and Uganda, however, witnessed a pattern that was quite common in universities across the continent: that is, further attempts at initiating Anglophone creative writing were undertaken at the English Literature Departments at the East African University,8 “birth[ing][, as Kingwa Kamencu remarks,] the emergence of many of the first generation of postcolonial Anglophone African writers.”9

In East Africa, the English Department of Makerere in Kampala, Uganda, became the center of guided creativity of the late 1950s and throughout most of the 1960s.10 Highlighting the developments at Makerere, Margaret Macpherson notes in her essay “Makerere: The Place of the Early Sunrise,” “If students were taking minor English they were encouraged to write, to try their voices in a parliamentary speech, to act as the editorial board of a newspaper. If they were taking major English, they were required to study a play by Shakespeare in their first year . . . learning to act it.”11 Later John Sibly, one of the British lecturers at Makerere, initiated the English Competition where students from different student dormitories, among them Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Peter Nazareth, “were invited to compete in writing and speaking.”12 The early beginnings of East African Anglophone creative writing thus were nurtured by academic structures and supported by university lecturers, who, like John Sibly, often were of British background since the establishment of the East African University and the implementation of English departments in the region were an integral part of the colonization process by the British. In the 1960s, these academic structures provided a boosting framework for upcoming literary talent in Anglophone creative writing.13

Back then, Nairobi University was only a sister institution without any great impact, while Makerere University constituted “the headquarters of the Association for Commonwealth Language and Literature Studies and Robert Serumaga its first president.”14 Penpoint—a student journal founded in 1958 and issued by the English Department of Makerere University—provided a platform for the creative works of students and those later to become part of the first generation of Anglophone writers.15 The drama scene on campus was productive, and the Makerere Free Traveling Theater was inventive with its driving forces, the Ugandan student John Ruganda and the British lecturer David Cook, encouraging burgeoning playwrights and actors. In hindsight, this theater was considered the birthplace of some key dramatists in East Africa.16

Beyond this Anglophone theater scene, as the Ugandan writer Austin Bukenya emphasizes,

novelists and short-story writers, like Robert Serumaga, Eneriko Seruma, Laban Erapu, Davis Sebukima, Godfrey Kalimugogo, . . . [and himself with his play The Secrets] produced their vintage work during this period. Poetry appeared . . . in anthologies like . . . Rubadiri’s Poems from East Africa and Okola’s Drumbeat, which featured many Ugandan poets . . . like Henry Barlow, Richard Ntiru and Timothy Wangusa. In drama, authors like Tom Omara, John Ruganda, Elvania Zirimu and again, Robert Serumaga were crafting their theatrical works. Publication was easy, competitive, with the rise of outfits like the East African Publishing House, the East African Literature Bureau, as well as the opening of local branches by several international publishers, like Oxford, Longman and Heinemann.17

Besides Elvania Zirimu, other Ugandan women writers—although very few in number—such as the dramatist Rose Mbowa, who in the 1990s also was a founding member of FEMRITE, and the novelists Jane Kironde Bakaluba and Barbara Kimenye, made themselves heard among the male writers of this decade.18

But toward the end of the 1960s, the creative optimism in Uganda was fading with the center of creative writing in East Africa shifting from Kampala to Nairobi. The repressive political regimes of Milton Obote (1966–71; 1980–85) and Idi Amin (1971–79) stopped the flourishing development of creative writing and intellectual debates in Uganda, once radiating—like in the case of the Free Traveling Theater—from Makerere Hill to Nairobi and Daressalaam.19 Eckard Breitinger points out that once the center of “many intellectuals from the East African region and far beyond . . . [with] tremendous transnational input into the cultural scenery”20 and its literature and culture enjoying “high transnational visibility,”21 Uganda skidded into “near total invisibility of its cultural output outside of the country,”22 especially under the totalitarian regime of Amin. On this note, Breitinger adds, “The 1974 world conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature, convened by its chairman Robert Serumaga, nearly became a swan song for Ugandan literature [as] [m]any of the writers and critics stayed away worrying about their security in Amin’s Uganda.”23 By that time, a great number of Ugandan intellectuals had already been killed or gone into exile,24 and their audience was slowly withering away with them.25

In the wake of these developments, Okot p’Bitek, who by that time had already gained transnational recognition as one of the outstanding Ugandan writers with the publishing of his long poem Song of Lawino (1966), was dismissed as the director of the Uganda Cultural Center for having criticized the government. He left Uganda in 1967 for Nairobi University, where he started teaching at the Institute of African Studies. Likewise, Taban Lo Liyong, on completing his studies in the United States, moved to Nairobi in 1968. The hostile climate toward writers in Uganda had discouraged him from going back home to Kampala. At Nairobi University, Liyong joined the English Department after a short teaching period at the Institute of African Studies. Meanwhile, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who had left Makerere University in 1963 for an MA program at Leeds University, was already being celebrated as a writer from Kenya. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was to become “the first African member”26 of the English Department at Nairobi University College in 1967 and eventually the “first African to head a department at University”27 when he succeeded Andrew Gurr at the Nairobi Department of Literature in 1973. His early popularity that had virtually begun as a student at Makerere paved the way for his career. Clearly, the sociopolitical developments in Uganda brought together Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong, and Okot p’Bitek at Nairobi University around the same time, thus enabling them to combine their commitment in fostering homegrown literature.

Nairobi University: A Haven for Creative Minds

Not under harsh restraints of the government, Nairobi University initially provided a space where ideas on culture and politics could prosper and emanate into other spheres of civil society. As Kingwa Kamencu shows in her dissertation “Literary Gangsters? Kwani, Radical Poetics and the 2007 Kenyan Postelection Crisis,” these writers-cum-academics “were anxious to engage in nation-building as they saw it and eagerly revolutionised [the] . . . literature departments.”28 The three organized writers’ workshops that represented a forum for intellectual freedom. Alongside their colleague Henry Owuor-Anyumba, in October 1968, they demanded the abolition of the English Department and insisted on “its replacement by [the] Department of African Literature and Languages.”29 After long debates, the syllabus that Ngũgĩ and others had “perceived as too European in orientation”30 was replaced with a new syllabus...