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A Companion to African Literatures. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн.Название A Companion to African Literatures
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781119058212
Автор произведения Группа авторов
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
Selected Writers
Long before it became fashionable for Africans to travel across the continent and write on their journeys – a trend popularized in recent years by South African writer Sihle Khumalo – Legson Kayira (1942–2012) had traveled from Malawi to Khartoum and on to the United States, accompanied by his Bible and a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Roscoe 1977, 215). Kayira wrote about his journeys in his 1965 memoir, I Will Try, which “remained on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks” (Ross 2012). In both his journey and its narration, Elliot Ross notes, Kayira understands himself to be following in the footsteps of missionaries such as David Livingstone, a perspective possibly imparted at the Livingstonia Mission School where he had studied (Ross 2012). Kayira’s first novel, The Looming Shadow (1967), inaugurated his comic spirit, which he would retain in much, though not all, of his subsequent fiction – Jingala (1969), Things Black and Beautiful (1970), The Civil Servant (1971), and Detainee (1974) – despite being at odds with the sober narratives of postcolonial disillusionment that were beginning to germinate at the time. Kayira shares the honor of being among the first Malawian novelists, along with poet and playwright academic David Rubadiri, whose sole novel, No Bride Price (1967), was followed by a range of poems, including the much anthologized “An African Thunderstorm,” and an equally well‐known poetry anthology, Poems from East Africa (1971), which he edited with David Cook. The third novelist in the trinity is Aubrey Kachingwe, whose highly political No Easy Task (1966) remains his only novel, as he turned to short fiction after its publication. Another major voice from Malawi is Jack Mapanje whose œuvre of poetry is widely recognized and studied. Mapanje’s Of Chameleon and Gods (1981) is easily the most widely read poetry collection from the country, and indeed, fairly well known across the continent.
Meantime, in Zambia, Dominic Mulaisho, a senior civil servant – whose early writing was done through dictation into an audiophone at lunchtime – is probably the second best known Zambian writer after Kenneth Kaunda and his 1962 autobiography, Zambia Shall be Free. That Mulaisho’s novels – The Tongue of the Dumb (1971) and The Smoke that Thunders (1979) – are both interested in power dynamics is unsurprising, as a good number of the region’s keenest analysts of power dynamics variously served in their countries’ governments. Here, Malawian David Rubadiri’s poem, “An African Thunderstorm,” and Ugandan Henry Barlow’s popular “Building the Nation” come to mind. Rubadiri served as Malawi’s ambassador before a fallout with the Kamuzu Banda regime which led to a long exile in Uganda and Kenya, while Henry Barlow’s cutting satire about the hypocrisies and wastefulness of civil servants was written during his term as a minister in the Ugandan government. But John Reed is skeptical about Mulaisho’s stylization of both the 1940s mission and the village in The Tongue of the Dumb, though he nonetheless believes it offers “a poetry of place, closely woven with the richness of growing things and the hardness of hunger” (Reed 1984, 92), which strengthens its link to the Old Testament that lends it its title. For Gordon McGregor, an academic at the newly launched University of Zambia, writing in 1969, Mulaisho’s novel was distinctive thanks to “a touch of satire and sardonic humour” that ran through it (cited in Currey 2008, 253).
The region has also produced its quarter of playwrights and dramatists, although this genre would seem to be under‐explored in recent decades. Among the major dramatists are Uganda’s John Ruganda whose plays Black Mamba (1973), Covenant with Death (1973), The Burdens (1972), and The Floods (1980) were variously staged in Kampala and Nairobi. The Burdens and The Floods are particularly well received and have been regularly featured on the Kenyan school and university curricula. Fellow Ugandan Robert Serumaga is equally recognized for his role as both actor and playwright. Among his better known plays are The Elephants (1971) and Majangwa (1974). Serumaga’s exploration of the absurd is evident both in his drama and his sole novel, Return to the Shadows (1969). Ruganda and Serumaga have a shared concern in their writing with social decay through abuses of power, corruption, and violence. Across in Kenya, Francis Imbuga holds the mantle of the foremost playwright in the country, up to his death, with Betrayal in the City (1976) as his most performed and studied play in the region. At the time of his death in 2012, he had published twelve plays, with Aminata (1988) and Shrine of Tears (1992) being particularly well received. Among the women playwrights, Micere Mugo’s The Long Illness of Ex‐Chief Kiti (1976) is lesser known than The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976), co‐authored with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, while Uganda’s Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu is an important part of the first generation of East African playwrights.
Diasporic Imaginaries
Peter Nazareth remarks on the diasporic impetus as a central element embedded in foundational East African writing, thanks to the porous intellectual and creative borders which writers and scholars criss‐crossed between the 1960s and 1980s. Illustrative here is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first play, The Black Hermit, which was first performed in Kampala as part of Uganda’s independence celebrations in 1962 (Nazareth 1984, 7), while his first two novels were also written during his stay in Uganda. In similar vein, Malawian David Rubadiri’s No Bride Price was written in Uganda, as was much of his poetry, while Kenyan playwright and scholar Ali Mazrui wrote The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1971) in Uganda (Nazareth 1984, 7). In many respects, then, the current wave of diasporic writing on East and Central Africa by figures such as Ethiopia’s Dinaw Mengestu and Maaza Mengiste, Somalia’s Nuruddin Farah, Ali Farah, Warsan Shire, and Nadifa Mohamed, Zambia’s Namwali Serpell and Rwanda’s Immaculée Ilibagiza is heir to an older legacy of diasporic voices in the region’s letters.
At the same time, the East African Asian community has been prolific in its contributions to the making of East African writing. Long before Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Asian community in Uganda, preceded by Tanzania’s Africanization program, which equally displaced the East African Asian community, novelists and poets such as Ugandans Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth, and Jagjit Singh were a major part of the literary scene, with Rajat Neorgy’s Transition magazine, edited from Uganda, as a vital platform of literary formation in the region. The magazine, which continues to provide cutting‐edge literary insights, has since relocated to the US. On the Asian expulsions, Jagjit Singh’s poem “Portrait of an Asian as an East African” remains one of the classics among literary meditations on this historical moment. These disruptions aside, the East African Asian community remains a prolific and key voice in the region’s literature, with contemporary figures such as Tanzanian Kenyan M. G. Vassanji and Kenyan poet Shailja Patel as widely recognized writers, and younger voices such as Canada‐based Iman Verjee, whose 2016 novel Who Will Catch Us As We Fall? is set in post‐millennial Kenya and variously nods back to the country’s entangled histories. An important addition to this library is Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (2016), an accomplished historical novel interweaving a triracial tapestry of black, Asian, and British encounters in the region, from the building of the ill‐fated Kenya–Uganda railway all the way to post‐independence interactions. If, as Godwin Siundu’s reading of M. G. Vassanji’s writing suggests, the genealogies of East African Asian intellectual trajectories are “subsumed both in political histories of the region and overcast by a dominant pan‐Africanist logic whose exclusivism intimidated and then killed what had initially promised to be vibrant Afro‐Asian dialogic creativity” (2018, 7), then Kimani’s novel offers fresh breath to the promise of this Afro‐Asian creativity, through his novel’s riveting reimagining of cross‐racial solidarities and forms of reciprocal hospitality.
While Idi Amin’s Asian expulsion and the resultant exiling of writers is better known, in fact many East and Central African countries have forced their writers either into detention without trial or exile, at one point or another. In addition to the Asian writers, Okot p’Bitek, Richard Ntiru, and John Ruganda were similarly forced into exile. Across in Kenya, the Jomo Kenyatta regime imprisoned Ngugi wa Thiong’o over his theater activities with