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would soon be scuppered by increasing autocracy and the eventual hollowing out of the intellectual community, as Dan Ojwang, Atieno Odhiambo, and Thandika Mkandawire variously show.

African‐Language Literatures and the Language Question

      Gikandi remarks that where Anglophone East African writing is considered young relative to other regional literatures – prompting Ugandan Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong to declare the region a literary desert – African‐language literatures in the region go back centuries. Examples are the aforementioned Geʿez literatures of Ethiopia, going back to the middle ages, while Swahili literature traces its roots back to the fifteenth century (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii).

In retrospect, it is clear that East Africa had not been a literary wilderness. While the region did not produce writers with international reputations until the 1960s, it had a substantial literary culture in African languages such as Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, Somali in Somalia, and Amharic in Ethiopia. Because these literatures dated as far back as the fifteenth century, they often had a local and regional authority and reputation that writing in English could not easily match.

      (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 9)

      An important paradox for Gikandi, though, is that despite being a late arrival on the continent’s literary scene, Anglophone East African writing “is fundamentally connected to older forms of literary expression in African languages” (viii). Elsewhere, Fiona Moolla (2014) remarks on the tendency to read Nuruddin Farah’s From a Broken Rib (1970) – which holds the distinction of being the first Anglophone male‐authored novel to feature a female protagonist – with emphasis on its oral features, which are in turn deemed to signal Farah’s novels’ emergence from orality, an idea that gains stronger resonance given that the author’s mother was a poet. Moolla’s reminder here, though, is that Somali orature deviates from popular perceptions of African orature in two important ways. First, it is individually composed and does not rely on formulae. Second, Somali society takes this format of individual composition so seriously that any subsequent renditions of the poem must acknowledge the composer and rely on memory to ensure accurate recitation of the original poem. In this context, then, Moolla’s reading unsettles assumptions about African orality as symbolizing “the collective outpouring of the communal spirit” which, in an evolutionary logic, “develops into individual expression articulated through writing, [and] in particular, the novel” (Moolla, 2014, 2). For her, on the contrary, Somali orature underscores the affirmation of the individual against what she terms the “social‐transcendental horizon” (2).

      Interestingly, this influence between African‐language and European‐language writing in the region goes both ways, as Alamin Mazrui’s Cultural Politics of Translation (2016) illustrates. Mazrui discusses Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s conviction that translation of Shakespeare and other classics into Kiswahili would modernize the language and Tanzania, while giving Kiswahili the nourishment it needed to develop into a literary language in its own right. Remarkable here is the success of the Nyerere project in socially engineering a powerful Kiswahili literary tradition which continues to outshine the Anglophone literary tradition in the country, decades after the demise of the Ujamaa project and Tanzania’s return to the neoliberal fold. Equally noteworthy is Kiswahili’s hospitable embrace of literatures from other regions of the continent and the world, and the ways in which these literatures were to leave a powerful imprint on regional sensibilities. Although translations of classics such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as Okonkwo Shujaa or Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy as Mchimba Madini will be familiar to Kiswahili scholars, they enjoyed less popularity with readerships compared to their originals, in part because readers had already been exposed to the English originals, largely through school curricula, which in turn spilled beyond the school gates as students influenced friends’ and colleagues’ reading lists. However, Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice would have completely different fates in translation as Masaibu ya Ndugu Jero and Mabepari wa Venisi respectively, because they became Kiswahili set works in schools, and therefore entered Kenyan and Tanzanian literary imaginaries in Kiswahili. For many Kenyan readers, present company included, Brother Jero was decidedly East African, and located in our Kiswahili cultural imaginaries, even after we encountered Soyinka’s other works in English.

Gikandi underlines the paradox that colonial literacy in African languages meant that many aspiring writers started by writing in African languages, but because many never attained university education, their views were absent in the literary debates of the 1950s and 1960s; “in the end, the identity of East African literature was determined in university departments and literary journals and thus reflected the interests and anxieties of a small elite” who subsequently shaped the region’s literary cultures and institutions of literary production (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 9).

      Elsewhere, Adrian Roscoe’s discussion of vernacular literatures in East Africa emphasizes the role of missionary societies, and later vernacular journals, as the early institutions for the promotion and publishing of African‐language literatures from the region (Roscoe 1977). Roscoe speculates that possibly because of connections to Muslim verse, poetry was a better developed form in Swahili writing than prose, which only emerged much later, partly thanks to vernacular newspapers and vernacular teaching in school curricula (Roscoe 1977, 8). Among the early Kiswahili fiction and life writing that Roscoe surveys are Martin Kayamba’s Tulivyoona na Tulivyofanya Uingereza (1932), James Mbotela’s Uhuru wa Watumwa (1934), and Mohammed Said Abdalla’s Mzimu wa Watu wa Kale (1960) and Kisima cha Giningi (1965). Another notable title in the region’s vernacular literature, which appears to be overlooked in Roscoe’s list, is Aniceti Kitereza’s Mwana Myombekere na Bibi Bugonoka, Ntulanalwo na Bulihwali, a historical novel which, though published in Kiswahili in 1981, was actually completed in 1945 in Kerewe, but lacked a publisher. Kitereza’s book has since been translated into German and Swedish, while fellow Tanzanian novelist Gabriel Ruhumbika translated it into English in 2002, directly from Kerewe.

      It is fascinating to revisit concerns about the forms of artistic and social alienation that confronted the first generations of African writers in East and Central Africa, who found themselves struggling to reconcile the new aesthetics culled from the literature curricula of schools and universities – inevitably steeped in “the great tradition” and the English canon – with their concerns about their communities’ lives and aesthetics on the one hand and, on the other, the promise and challenge of the artist as an individual. In Gikandi’s view, though, these tensions, which have often been read as irreconcilable and alienating, may actually have given these writers’ works a particular, distinctive edge: “early East African literature in English was defined by the obvious tension between European forms of literary expression and local materials or topics” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 10).

      Zambian literature appears to complicate this dynamic further, owing to local‐language fiction, primarily in Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi, and Tonga, published after World War II. Reed describes the Nyanja fiction as short novelettes, often with a moral at their core, whose structure and logics might be a blend of both indigenous morality tales and Victorian moral tales and the English magazine story (Reed 1984, 84).

      An interesting development in recent years has been the emergence of Sheng – a Kenyan urban patois – as a language of cultural production, primarily through music, short fiction, and popular poetry, with the latter two popularized by Kwani literary magazine and online literary platforms. Chege Githiora’s Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular (2018) is an important research resource that is bound to generate more scholarly engagement with Sheng cultural productions. Still on the language question, John Mugane, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Biodun Jeyifo rebooted this topic in a 2017 issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies, debating whether English was an African language.

The Makerere Conference

It has now become traditional to nod to the 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers of English Expression when thinking about the histories of Anglophone African writing. Reporting on the conference

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