Introduction
Among the interesting entries in this year’s list is John McCracken’s Voices from the Chilembwe Rising: Witness Testimonies Made to the Nyasaland Rising Commission of Inquiry [Auto/biography: Malawi]. McCracken’s book is an important addition to Malawian studies, which revisits an important moment in the country’s history — the Chilembwe uprising, led by Baptist minister and celebrated nationalist icon John Chilembwe. While other resistance movements in the region have received extensive literary and scholarly attention, the Chilembwe uprising is largely under-explored in scholarly and literary circles, despite its centrality to Malawian historiography and nationalist discourses. Still in Malawi, Mairi Wilson’s Ursula’s Secret and Mark Fine’s The Zebra Affaire [Fiction: Malawi] both revisit Malawian history but as a canvas against which to trace fictional lives of characters caught in transnational waves of political and personal intrigue.
Meanwhile, two other titles on the list revisit yet another under-explored fragment of history, this time in Uganda: the 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. The plane was redirected to Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where the hijackers released most of the non-Israeli passengers and held the Israeli passengers and crew hostage. The hijackers’ main demand was the release of “freedom fighters” held in Israeli and European prisons. Saul David’s Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport and William Stevenson and Uri Dan’s 90 Minutes at Entebbe: The Full Inside Story of the Spectacular Israeli Counter-Terrorism Strike and the Daring Rescue of 103 Hostages [Auto/biography: Uganda] are two riveting accounts of this historical moment and the rescue of the hostages in Entebbe at the height of the Idi Amin presidency and its implicit support for the hijackers. These two titles are instructive not only on the Idi Amin presidency, but also on Uganda’s complicated relationship to Israel across its history. Other titles spanning the Idi Amin era in Uganda include Geoffrey Baker’s Tenterhooks: Survival in Idi Amin’s Uganda 1966–1976 and Olara Otunnu’s Archbishop Janani Luwum: The Life and Witness of a 20th Century Martyr [Auto/biography: Uganda]. An outspoken critic of the brutal Idi Amin presidency, Archbishop Luwum was initially arrested and charged with treason, before being killed in what the government insisted was a road accident. Subsequent reports confirmed that his body bore several bullet shots and that he had clearly been assassinated under Idi Amin’s orders. As the title suggests, Archbishop Luwum is remembered as a martyr in the Anglican Church. A less traumatic title in the same cluster is Elly Rwakoma’s autobiography, reflecting on, among other things, his life as a presidential photographer for Milton Obote, Idi Amin, and Godfrey Binaisa. Still on matters military and Uganda’s other complicated relationship to the volatile Great Lakes region, Adrien Fontanellaz and Tom Cooper’s The Rwandan Patriotic Front: 1990–1994 [Auto/biography: Uganda] examines the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which in turn had an interesting relationship to Uganda and the subsequent genocide in Rwanda. On its part, Norman Tumuhimbise’s Unsowing the Mustard Seed [Auto/biography: Uganda] is a response to President Yoweri Museveni’s 1997 memoir Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom. Tumuhimbise revisits President Museveni’s military conduct and interrogates elements of both his conduct as a military leader and his presidency. A vocal activist who works closely with Ugandan youths, Tumuhimbise’s outspoken confrontations with the Museveni presidency have resulted in several brutal encounters, including abduction and torture, partly in response to his claims in the book.
In recent years, Uganda has been on the news for all the wrong reasons, most prominently with regard to legislation against same-sex practices. The question of queer sexualities in Uganda is gradually registering in international fiction as a narrative trope, as suggested by Richard Stevenson’s Why Stop at Vengeance? A Donald Strachey Mystery and Elizabeth Day’s Paradise City [Fiction: Uganda]. Both novels feature migrant protagonists on the run from homophobic violence in Uganda. Why Stop at Vengeance is a thriller centred around a gay Ugandan man in the USA, desperate to avenge the murder of his lover and friends at the instigation of a conservative American missionary church in Uganda. Stevenson here explores not only the question of political migrancy of sexual minorities, but also the involvement of conservative churches in nurturing and bankrolling homophobic perspectives in Uganda. On her part, Elizabeth Day’s Paradise City tells the story of Beatrice Kiiza, a Ugandan lawyer and lesbian who flees to London and finds herself joining the largely migrant underclass labour in the city’s hospitality industry as a cleaner in a hotel. At the centre of the story is a sexual assault by a prominent millionaire and hotel guest, Sir Howard Pink; in a narrative that brings to mind the 2011 case of sexual assault charges against the then director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
2015 was a productive year for the region’s fiction, with an interesting array of anthologies featuring stories from Eastern Africa. These include Ellah W. Allfrey and Jack Wang’s Let’s Tell This Story Properly: An Anthology of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which features short stories by award-winning Ugandan novelist Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Kenyan writer Alexander Ikawah. The Caine Prize’s annual anthology, titled Lusaka Punk and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2015 features stories by Malawian Jonathan Mbuna and Kenyans Kiprop Kimutai and Dale Abraham. The Kampala-based FEMRITE published a collection of stories titled Nothing to See Here: Stories of the 5th Residency for African Women Writers, while the region also welcomed a new entrant in the literary production landscape, Writivism. The organization hosted its first literary festival in Kampala in 2015, and has since spread its footprint across the continent, while also confronting the barrier between the anglophone and francophone literary landscapes. Their first publication, Roses for Betty and Other Stories: The Writivism Anthology 2015, is part of this year’s anthologies list and promises to be an annual regular feature on the region’s publications list.
In Kenya, historical fiction and life writing continues to preoccupy writers, with 2015 seeing the reprinting of aviatrix Beryl Markham’s 1942 memoir West with the Night [Auto/biography: Kenya]. Markham was a well-known figure in Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s colonial circles thanks to her beauty and her unconventional life marked by scandal, but also her passion for flying. She is best remembered for her solo transatlantic flight non-stop, which, despite crash-landing in Nova Scotia, earned her international celebrity. Her remarkable life continues to intrigue contemporary readers and writers, with figures like Pauma McClain offering a fictionalized interpretation of her life in her novel Circling the Sun [Fiction: Kenya], which revisits Markham’s adventures in Kenya. Another growing body of historical fiction on Kenya revolves around the Mau Mau Land and Freedom Army’s struggle against British colonial administration in Kenya, and its continued hauntings of both post-independence Kenyan and British imaginaries. Four novels on this year’s list speak to this imaginative revisiting of the Mau Mau era. Guy Hallowes’ No Happy Valley: Shattered Dreams [Fiction: Kenya] is a cross-racial romance narrative set at the height of the Mau Mau resistance struggles, while William Shaw’s A Book of Scars [Fiction: Kenya] is a detective novel set in 1960s London about a murder mystery whose roots are traced back to 1950s Kenya at the height of the brutal encounters between the Mau Mau and British colonial forces. Similarly, Graham Hurley’s Sins of the Father [Fiction: Kenya] is a crime thriller at the centre of which lie gruesome murders and abductions that reveal an unspeakable history of involvement in torture camps in colonial Kenya, where various atrocities were committed in attempts to stamp out the Mau Mau movement. Dawood A. McCallum’s The Final Charge revolves around a fictional British colonial policeman charged with war crimes in post-independence Kenya’s courts. It is intriguing to see the question of British colonial atrocities in their battle against the Mau Mau — which has been a subject of extensive scholarly attention by historians — making its way into British fiction about Kenya. In a sense, this body of fiction represents a late reversal of the “Kenya novel” genre of colonial fiction which tended to present the British administration as an orderly, morally upright regime, forced to confront a bloodthirsty Kenyan resistance movement.
In some respects, the crime fiction genre remains a popular one in the fiction category, with a particular set of tropes and narrative strands coalescing into a recognizable set of clusters, often featuring the Maasai community, wildlife tourism, and, increasingly, hostage situations at the hands of Somali militants. These tropes and narrative strands that are becoming stock templates are evident in Richard Crompton’s Hell’s Gate and Liza Marklund and Neil Smith’s Borderline: An Annika Bengtzon Thriller [Fiction: Kenya]. Another narrative strand that is growing in popularity is marathon runners. Here, Ed Caesar’s Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon [Auto/biography: Kenya] offers an engaging portrait of various marathon runners, locating them in a rich historical context of marathon running in Kenya, as well as the science, physiology, and psychology involved in these elite runners’ lives. Tony Bianchi’s Harry Selwyn’s Last Race approaches these histories of running through a fictional lens, locating the fictional protagonist in a long and complicated relationship to Kenya’s elite running landscape and the broader political histories of British imperial rule.
Two titles continue an ongoing engagement with Eastern Africa’s Asian community on this year’s list: Sana Aiyar’s Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora [Auto/biography: Kenya] traces the various trajectories of the interactions between the South Asian diaspora in Kenya and the British colonial government, on the one hand, and the nationalist anticolonial movement on the other. Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala’s Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1890–1940: The Forgotten History, too, is an important addition to the histories of colonial Kenya and British imperial rule in both Kenya and India.
Two other interesting entries on the list are James Wesley Rawles’ Land of Promise and the NEST collective’s Stories of Our Lives: Queer Narratives from Kenya [Fiction: Kenya]. Stories of Our Lives is a valuable addition to the small but growing Kenyan queer literary archive, which previously largely featured short fiction and blogs. Rawles’ Land of Promise is a speculative novel, set in the fictional Ilemi Republic, a Christian nation located somewhere between Kenya and South Sudan, founded in response to the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate. Ilemi Republic completely overhauls many conventions of state bureaucracy, ranging from taxes and levies to permits and licences and even currency, referencing work with a tri-metallic currency of gold, silver, and platinum. The republic also has no police or army, nor parliament. This novel makes for an intriguing meditation not only on contemporary current affairs but also the conventions of state-craft and its institutions, which we have largely come to accept as bordering on the inevitable.
Finally, Lutz Diegner and Frank Schulze-Engler’s essay collection Habari Ya English? What about Kiswahili?: East Africa as a Literary and Linguistic Contact Zone [General Studies: Regional] is a much welcome meditation on the region’s writing, not only as a cross-regional study, but most importantly, as a cross-genre, cross-linguistic dialogue between the region’s major literary languages: English and Kiswahili.
