LITMIR.BIZ

      1 1 See Irele (1990). Irele argues that a critical examination of African literature necessarily raises the question of its distinguishing characteristics that set it apart from other literatures. See also Irele (2001).

      2 2 Arabic colonization long predates European colonization in Eastern Africa, resulting in a vibrant literary culture, especially poetry, initially in Arabic but later in Swahili language, that survives to date. The Swahili‐language novel, for example, is among the most highly developed African‐language novelistic traditions in the continent.

      3 3 See Desai (2001).

      4 4 What constitutes East or, better still, Eastern Africa is still subject to debate but there is a general agreement that Ethiopia is part of this geopolitical configuration. Ethiopia has a very long history of writing. The debate as to whether Swahili is an indigenous language is now definitively settled.

      5 5 See Boldrini and Davies (2004).

      6 6 See especially Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s three most influential works: Writers in Politics, Moving the Center, and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. No other writer or critic has mounted a more sustained case for reading African literature ideologically than Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

      7 7 See Andrews and McGuire (2016).

      8 8 For fuller discussion of the characteristics, norms, and contexts of the European Bildungsroman, see Moretti (1987).

      9 9 Boes (2006, 235). On colonial ideology in Africa, see Mamdani (1996, 3–6).

      10 10 The classical normative Bildungsroman by its nature is evolutionary and providentiary, with narrative progression mirroring the psychological and social growth of the individual gesturing toward eventual mutual accommodation between the society and individual. But there are what Jameson in “The Experiment of Time” (2006, 101) calls intermediate steps which collapse the destiny of the individual with that of the social collective.

      11 11 It’s ironic to think of the colonial world as objective. For a thorough critique of the discourse of human rights, human personality development, and the Bildungsroman, see Slaughter.

      12 12 Amoko here echoes and modifies two famous essays, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” In his provocative argument, he terms Arnold and Levis’ nationalist attempts to institutionalize literature intentional fallacy, that is the idea that literature must always be in tandem with nationalist sentiments.

      13 13 The atrocities committed by the British army in Kenya were not peculiar. In Southern Africa, they were preceded by the near extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples of present‐day Namibia, then known as South West Africa, by the Germans.