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2 Rereading East African Literature Through a Human Rights Lens: The Example of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child

       Katwiwa Mule

East African literature, like African literature in general, has often been read in terms of the institutions, ideologies, and individuals that gave rise to it and subsequently shaped its unique character.¹ In his authoritative essay, “African Literature and the Colonial Factor,” Simon Gikandi provocatively argues that “what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe had not taken place” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Gikandi’s argument is based on the premise that

      [M]odern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

      (Gikandi 2004, 379; emphasis added)

Gikandi does of course acknowledge here, as elsewhere, that literature in Africa predates the European colonial encounter,² but in accounting for what he and Evan Mwangi in another study call its “strong sense of regionality” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, vii), both argue that there’s a paucity of writing in this region compared to Western and Southern Africa because, besides the relatively speaking smaller size of Eastern Africa and the region’s relatively late encounter with European colonialism, “all other regions of Africa have been in contact with Europe since the late sixteenth century and have thus developed traditions of culture and writing in European languages that are as old as the colonial encounter” (vii). The point here need not be belabored: For Gikandi and others, what constitutes modern East African literature is largely literature in European languages, and is fundamentally imbricated in, and the subjectivity of its authors overdetermined by, to borrow the words of Biodun Jeyifo, the colonial “sublime” (Jeyifo 2004, xv), that is, the internalized experiences of trauma and inherent contradictions that define even literature that claims to transcend coloniality. In a controversial essay, “The Extroverted African Novel,” Eileen Julien emphatically states that “no African novels erase the history of colonialism and the repression of contemporary regimes” (Julien 2006, 668).

This sublime, according to Jeyifo, is what has fundamentally transformed and shaped “the collective identity of an entire generation … of writers” (2004, xv). To the extent that colonialism still permeates every aspect of life in the continent – state formation, cultural institutions, and identitarian frameworks – Jeyifo’s formulation raises a number of theoretical problems, most notably questions regarding temporality, linguistics, and even coloniality itself: When does the modern begin in the culture of letters in East Africa? Does the modern equal the period corresponding to European encounter with Africa?³ What are we to make of the colonization of the East African coast by Arabs long before the arrival of Europeans and the thriving culture of literary activities, most notably poetry, in Arabic script? Then there is the more intractable cartographical question: What are the geographical delimitations of what is now known as Eastern Africa?⁴ The geographical region designated as Eastern Africa is somewhat peculiar in this sense: It is the one area of the continent where a vibrant writing tradition predates European colonialism and a literature in African languages thrives alongside literature in the former colonial languages. Swahili literature, for example, owes its existence not just to western influence but also to the Islamic and African influences.

Although the foregoing discussion raises important questions regarding literary histories, what I propose to do in this chapter is to redirect readers’ attention to a much‐neglected critical dimension of East African literature: the correlative between genre and ideology. I do this by focusing on the relationship between the Bildungsroman (as autobiographized fiction/fictionalized autobiography)⁵ and ideology (anticolonial resistance) at their point of intersection with the mandates and imperatives for anticolonial texts: their insistence on the recognition of the cultural autonomy on the one hand, and the bodily integrity of the colonized on the other, as integral to their human rights. I take the cue from Joseph R. Slaughter’s assertion that literature is a discursive regime “that can constitute and regulate, imagine and test, kinds of subjects, subjectivities, and social formations” (2007, 8). Slaughter further argues that “[O]ne of the primary carriers of human rights culture, the Bildungsroman has been a conspicuous literary companion on those itineraries, traveling with missionaries, merchants, militaries, colonial administrators, and technical advisors” (123).

Rather than rehash the obvious connections between East African literature and colonialism or read it through its ideological manifestations as many critics have done,⁶ I want to suggest a somewhat different but burgeoning approach which builds upon, rather than displaces, the old vistas of literary and critical engagement by focusing on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child (henceforth WNC) as an exemplar of the way literature responds in the wake of political violence.⁷

My first point of departure is by looking at the ideologies and the normative narrative architecture which gives the Bildungsroman its form and subsequently its ambiguous position in a colonial context. There is, to my mind, a palpable tension between the evolutionary and positivist ethos of the classical Bildungsroman in its eighteenth‐century settings and subsequent developments and the revolutionary imperatives of decolonization in a colonial context.⁸ In other words, colonial ideology (with its dim view of the colonized) and the traditional Bildungsroman are mutually enabling to the extent that colonial ideology conceives history “in teleological and evolutionary terms,”⁹ terms whose rhetorical logic finds expression in the narrative of progressive individual development. Yet, as Tobias Boes reminds us, “the diachronic Bildungsroman plot is [not] too inflexible to accommodate avant‐garde experimentation” (Boes 2006, 239). Thus, if in its traditional form the Bildungsroman represents society as a normative construct,

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