The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945

Simon Gikandi, Evan Mwangi

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780231500647
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 challenges the conventional belief that the English-language literary traditions of East Africa are restricted to the former British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Instead, these traditions stretch far into such neighboring countries as Somalia and Ethiopia.

Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi assemble a truly inclusive list of major writers and trends. They begin with a chronology of key historical events and an overview of the emergence and transformation of literary culture in the region. Then they provide an alphabetical list of major writers and brief descriptions of their concerns and achievements.

Some of the writers discussed include the Kenyan novelists Grace Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ugandan poet and essayist Taban Lo Liyong, Ethiopian playwright and poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Tanzanian novelist and diplomat Peter Palangyo, Ethiopian novelist Berhane Mariam Sahle-Sellassie, and the novelist M. G. Vassanji, who portrays the Indian diaspora in Africa, Europe, and North America.

Separate entries within this list describe thematic concerns, such as colonialism, decolonization, the black aesthetic, and the language question; the growth of genres like autobiography and popular literature; important movements like cultural nationalism and feminism; and the impact of major forces such as AIDS/HIV, Christian missions, and urbanization.

Comprehensive and richly detailed, this guide offers a fresh perspective on the role of East Africa in the development of African and world literature in English and a new understanding of the historical, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries of the region.

Authors and Topics A—Z

A

AIDS/HIV Sub-Saharan Africa is the area of the world worst hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. By 2001, 15 percent of Kenya’s population was HIV-positive, Tanzania had a 7.8 percent infection rate, and the prevalence in Uganda was 5 percent. Eastern African literature has changed in response to the AIDS scourge, even if it at times uses the disease merely as a metaphor for what is wrong with postcolonial society. The toll of the pandemic on the general population and the mystery surrounding the disease have been the subjects of plays, novels, poetry, and oral literature from the region. AIDS has also been used as a metaphor for the various social and economic problems facing East Africa. In addition, the AIDS/ HIV motif has been employed, especially in the early 1990s, to inject sensation into literary texts: the infection has been ascribed to negative characters as a form of punishment in the texts’ moral scheme. Yusuf Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge (1991) is one of the earliest novels to allude to the emergence of AIDS. In Dawood’s novel, Hugh, the main character, becomes a lecher because he is “very old-fashioned and thought that the only danger from sex was pregnancy,” but he ends up infected by the virus, which he uses to try to kill his rival. Wamugunda Geteria’s Nice People (1992) portrays AIDS as a punishment for the nurses that the promiscuous Dr. Joseph Munguti has been having a “nice time” with but who remain too faithful to him. Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source (1994) presents the physically beautiful but morally empty Becky finally dying of AIDS, but its sequel I Swear by Apollo (2002) is more sympathetic to the victims of the infection. Sympathetic, too, is Ugandan Namige Kayondo’s Vanishing Shadows, a love story that uses AIDS to force the denouement of a romance that cannot be fulfilled. Several stories in the collection Reversed Dreams, edited by Nana Wilson Tagoe and Wanjira Muthoni, have AIDS as a specific theme.

The AIDS condition has also inspired full-length novels by new writers. Joseph Situma’s The Mysterious Killer (2001) depicts a traditional society fighting to defend itself against death by AIDS. Set in the village of Randi (Thunder), where people are dying of a strange epidemic, the novel revolves around Cecilia’s encounter with a strange disease that traditional treatments, including sacrifices, fail to cure. The novel presents the conflict between modern science and traditional beliefs and the tragedy the tension poses in the era of AIDS.

As it has become more prevalent as a literary theme, AIDS/HIV has attracted the works of popular writers. David Maillu’s Broken Drum (1991) depicts a European visitor who believes Africans are infected with AIDS simply because they are African. In the second edition of his controversial My Dear Bottle (1973), Maillu represents AIDS as the new scourge of the African urban class. The text provides racialized and ideological theories about the origin of AIDS—“I hear it was manufactured / in America / to wipe away Niggers / and the Soviets / during Cold War times”—and cynically thanks the scourge for killing certain politicians: “My country is invaded / by parasite politicians / thanks Aids / for killing some of them.” A little more textured is Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague (2001), which documents the near annihilation of a village tellingly named Crossroads. Despite the high rates of death in the village, the people do not want to use the free condoms handed out by Janet Juma, and the village government is not keen to assist her. At one point, the village chief wants to sleep with her and dismisses vehemently the idea of using a condom: “I can’t use kodom … I’m the Chief…. Why do you want to waste your life telling people shameful things…. To live all your life begging people to use kodom?” In a society where AIDS victims are stigmatized because of the association of the disease with sexual promiscuity, Mwangi’s novel uses plot and character relationship to demystify the infection. In the novel, Janet’s HIV-positive husband, Broker, changes his sexual behavior and joins the war against the disease, giving confidence to other people with the infection: “You see what most people don’t understand about Aids is that it is possible to live a normal and reasonably active sex life with Aids. But one has to take the necessary precautions not to infect others with the Aids virus.”

Women writers have often used the AIDS issue to expose gender problems in East Africa, where women have little control over their sexuality. Violet Barungi’s “The Last One to Know” (in Barungi and Okurut’s Woman’s Voice) laments the disempowerment of women who end up as the victims of the virus. Carolyne Adalla’s Confessions of an AIDS Victim offers an in-depth analysis of the vulnerability of women to AIDS. When she finds that she is HIV-positive, Catherine Njeri is seized by fear and panic and confesses about her past as a strategy for regaining her agency. Written as a long letter to her confidante Maryanne, this epistolary novel analyzes the gendered conditions that led Catherine to her present condition. Mary Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil (1998) uses AIDS as a metaphor for the political and social problems of postindependence Uganda, such as military dictatorship, widespread corruption, gender discrimination, and other forms of inequality. While symbolizing the problems eating into the vitals of the nation, the weevil in the story is figured as the AIDS-causing virus. The novel ends on an optimistic note, with the main character hearing a didactic song about AIDS being played on the radio: “But now in openness we live / The guns demystified / And AIDS no longer a mystery / It too shall be conquered.”

In the same vein but in a more complicated way, in that it interweaves the AIDS condition with the state of postindependence East Africa, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s Chira documents the shortcomings of postcolonial Kenyan society in a way that parallels the issues it presents about AIDS/ HIV. The novel examines the Luo concept of chira (“wasting disease”), a term applied to AIDS although it predates the AIDS phenomenon. The novel depicts a society that still mystifies AIDS as a curse instead of seeing it as a condition produced by sexual interactions. AIDS/HIV is certainly not the central theme in Chira and the narrative rarely depicts HIV-infected characters, but the brute fact of AIDS pervades the text as part of the cultural landscape in which the story is set. The characters find themselves thinking about AIDS even when their minds are on other issues, such as the possibility of a marriage in a morally rotten city. The main character, Gabriel Otieno, has many friends who have chira. However, his society is in denial. Haunting all aspects of his society, AIDS is presented as a metaphor of the problems of the whole nation:

So when an Assistant Minister is declared bankrupt—the declaration itself being more potent than the amount of money in play—his immune system becomes deficient, he is unable to retain the wealth that he still eats: it dribbles away obscenely, his intimate touch becomes infectious and his substance dwindles…. Repentance can change things for the individual but not avert the creeping corruption.

Finally, as it has become central to political discourse, AIDS has appeared as a major theme in many popular songs from East Africa and is also the most prevalent subject in oral literature, popular theater, and drama in the region. In fact, plays such as David Mulwa’s Clean Hands were some of the earliest texts to depict the issue at a time when it was considered taboo in East Africa.

PRIMARY TEXTS

Adalla, Carolyne. Confessions of an Aids Victim. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1993.

Barungi, Violet, and Mary Karooro Okurut, eds. A Woman’s Voice: An Anthology of Short Stories by Uganda Women. Kampala: Femrite, 1999.

Dawood, Yusuf. Water Under the Bridge. Nairobi: Longman, 1991.

Geteria, Wamagunda. Nice People. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1992.

Kayondo, Namige. Vanishing Shadows. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Macgoye, Marjorie Oludhe. Chira. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1997.

Maillu, David. My Dear Bottle. Nairobi: Comb Books, 1973.

——. Broken Drum. Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation and Maillu Publishing House, 1991.

Mulwa, David. Clean Hands. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Mwangi, Meja. The Last Plague. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2000.

Ogola, Margaret. The River and the Source. Nairobi: Focus, 1994.

——. I Swear by Apollo. Nairobi: Focus, 2002.

Okurut, Mary. The Invisible Weevil. Kampala: Femrite Publications, 1998.

——. The Official Wife. Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2003.

Situma, Joseph. The Mysterious Killer. Nairobi: Africawide Network, 2001.

Wilson-Tagoe, Tagoe, and Wanjira Muthoni, eds. Reversed Dreams and Other Stories. Nairobi: Writers’ Association of Kenya, 1996.

REFERENCES

Kruger, Marie. “Narrative in the Time of AIDS: Postcolonial Kenyan Women’s Literature.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 1 (2004): 108–129.

[Mwangi]

Akare, Thomas (b. 1950) Kenyan writer of popular fiction. Akare’s work chronicles the problems of the seedier parts of the Kenyan capital city, focusing on the lives of prostitutes and the homeless. His first novel, The Slums (1981), is a documentary first-person narrative in which Eddie Chura Onyango recounts his life in Nairobi. “Chura,” his middle name, is a derogatory term for a lowly cleaner, especially of toilets. He and his friend Hussein make a living washing cars in the slums of Nairobi, mostly in the sprawling Majengo slum where sex is cheap and the police are corrupt and violent. The shell of a derelict car that he calls “home” is eventually towed away, along with his school certificate. He decides to rob a bank, and eventually decides that turning himself in to the police might be safer than being murdered by the mob. In the end, Eddy resorts to alcohol, drugs, and cheap sex as way of escaping from the harsh realities of life in the city. Through its colloquialisms, the novel underlines the mundane spread of crime, prostitution, unemployment, violence, and corruption in postindependence East Africa.

Similarly, Twilight Woman (1988) depicts life in the underbelly of Nairobi, where poverty is widespread and prostitution is one of the few ways to earn a living. It is the story of Resila, who goes to Nairobi expecting a good life with her husband. She becomes disillusioned and decides to run away with a rich man, Arthur. When Arthur abandons her, she becomes a “twilight girl,” the euphemism for a hardcore prostitute. Akare’s novels are episodic in structure, a style enabling him to capture the fragmentation and unsettled life of the postcolonial urban landscape.

PRIMARY TEXTS

Akare, Thomas. The Slums. London: Heinemann, 1981.

——. Twilight Woman. Nairobi: Spear Books, 1988.

[Mwangi]

Angira, Jared (b. 1947) Kenya’s leading poet and one of East Africa’s most talented writers. In addition to his poetry, Angira has written in English and Swahili about issues ranging from the promise and betrayal of independence to the effects of poverty. Angira studied commerce at the University of Nairobi and did graduate work at the London School of Economics, and this background explains his sharp sense of the politics of underdevelopment in Kenya. He sees his poetry, especially in its use of irony and expressive imagery, as a site for bringing economics and poetics together. In the 1970s, he declared himself a follower of Karl Marx and Pablo Neruda, who had to “confront the world without end and see how to endure all the spirit of forgetting all the present and bad things.” Drawing on techniques of traditional African poetic expression and modern European traditions to fashion a hybrid genre that is experimental and deeply philosophical and realistic, his poems reflect postindependence disillusionment and the abuse of natural and human resources by an irresponsible elite.

Angira’s first collection of poems, Juices, are built around a confrontation between, on the one hand, the process of modernity and individualism and, on the other hand, the nationalist desire to turn different ethnic communities into one nation while respecting the traditions of each group. It examines the alienation of the modern postcolonial East African, who is caught at the crossroads of cultures and not sure on which side he or she belongs. For example, his poem “Masked” uses the image of a mask to evoke estrangement and to express the uprootedness of the postcolonial Kenyan subject exposed to Western modernity. The speaking persona in the poem narrates the conflicts he encounters when he returns home from a place where he has mixed his own culture with other traditions:

We opened our virgin palms

and received the potent juice from each other

and synthesized with

the beauty we had carried.

The virginal image tries to recreate an uncontaminated purity, but in the poem is also the excitement that accompanies hybrid possibilities: “and all of us went wild / with weighty rucksacks on our backs / and leather sandals / and flew like balloons in frenzy.” This excitement does not last long, because the subject cannot reintegrate in his village when he returns. The metaphor of the balloon expresses the ephemeral nature of the exhilaration, an animation that is buoyant but can easily be deflated. The speaker’s encounter with other cultures is at a superficial level, but he prefers this condition to that of his colleagues who were fully immersed in alien traditions, those who “went tipsy with nectar / And lost their way homewards.”

Silent Voices is a collection of eighty-five poems in which Angira deploys diverse, often anguished voices to express the expectations and fears of postindependence East Africa. The poet taps into African cultural traditions without losing sight of the conditions defining contemporary society. This is underlined in the poem “Meeting,” which discusses the poetic persona’s influence by other writers. Angira underscores his indebtedness to Western forms but at the same time claims and registers a voice unique to his culture. The first five lines invoke canonical Western poets as imagined by the speaker:

Milton stood on the rock

And looked down

To see excremental whiteness of life

Owen emerged from Flanders

To inspect the camp of existence.

The coinage “excremental” connotes “mental” and “extreme,” signifying to the reader that the condition thematized here is more philosophical and aest...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Major Political Events
• Introduction: East African Literature in English from 1945 to the Present
• Authors and Topics A–Z
• Selected Bibliography
• Index