East and Central Africa

Introduction

Two of the scholarly entries in this year’s list examine what appear to be very remarkably different authors and texts: William Shakespeare’s drama and Addison Gayle Jr’s The Black Aesthetic. The two texts, however, by Edward Wilson-Lee and Simon Gikandi, respectively, have a shared interest in the journey of texts and ideas across Eastern Africa and in their imprints on local thought. Simon Gikandi’s “Looking Back on the Black Aesthetic” [see General Studies] examines the impact of African American intellectuals on East African discourses on decolonization, with keen interest in the location of debates on black aesthetics at the intersection between local and global cultural networks. Gikandi draws connections between Gayle Jr’s volume of essays and the debates at the University of Nairobi on Black aesthetics on the one hand, and the abolition of the English Department, on the other. Gikandi reminds us of the centrality of “communities built along aesthetic lines as an alternative to a compromised citizenship” (p17) across postcolonial societies in East Africa which were in conversation with, and tapped into the same discursive archive as, the Black Arts movement in the US. For Gikandi, the global resonances of the Black Arts movement and debates on Black aesthetics run counter to popular portrayals of the movement as parochial and inward-looking. On his part, Kenya-raised Edward Wilson-Lee traces the vectors of travel of Shakespeare’s work and ideas across Eastern Africa through an unlikely range of agents, including early explorers Stanley Morton and David Livingstone, all the way to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere’s translations of Shakespeare into Kiswahili and South Sudanese soldiers’ reading of Shakespeare.

Wilson-Lee’s study Shakespeare in Swahililand (see General Studies: Regional) is a compelling retracing of the different ways in which Shakespeare’s writing has been mobilized to speak to different constituencies’ life journeys and political projects in the Eastern African region. Shakespeare inevitably features in Susan Nalugwa Kiguli’s “Personal Reflections on Teaching Literature” [see General Studies: Uganda] where the Ugandan poet and scholar reflects on her own intellectual biography as a student of literature in Uganda in the 1980s, confronted with a firm reminder that mastery of Shakespeare’s works was a mark of distinction for students of literature. Kiguli’s essay offers an important biography of the fortunes and trends in the teaching and learning of literature at Makerere University, an institution that enjoys pride of place as the launch-pad of many debates in East/African literary debates and the careers of many of the region’s literary greats. Among these greats is Ngugi wa Thiong’o whose memoir in this year’s list, Birth of a Dream Weaver [see Auto/biographies: Kenya] ruminates on his formative years as a writer at the Literature Department of Makerere University. In some ways, it is these years and the debates he was exposed to there, coupled with developments across the border in Kenya, that would plant the seed for the eventual debate on the abolition of the English department across the region, which Gikandi cites in the afore-mentioned entry, as being shaped by the Black Arts movement.

Still on the region’s literary traditions, Godwin Siundu’s “The Nairobi Tradition of Literature”, which appears in the same issue of the PMLA journal as Susan Nalugwa Kiguli’s essay, offers a compelling critique of the unintended legacies of the 1972 revolution of literary studies in the region. Where Kiguli laments contemporary students’ resistance to engaging with “Canonical English” fiction by deeming it racist or irrelevant to their realities; Siundu notes a fossilizing trend at the University of Nairobi’s Literature Department, where the emphasis on stylistics and oral literature comes with resistance to both cultural studies and multi-disciplinarity in literary studies. Siundu is intrigued by the irony that a department associated with globally-recognized figures such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Micere Mugo, Andrew Gurr and Simon Gikandi was simultaneously exclusivist in its pedagogical agenda. Siundu suggests that one way to understand this trend is by revisiting the Moi regime’s demonization of literary studies as a subversive discipline with little to contribute to the national development agenda. Punitive responses to academics keen on conscientisation and relating knowledge to contemporary realities may have encouraged investedness in what Siundu terms “politically correct forms of literature — stylistics and oral literatures — [and] a pedagogy of conformity” (1550–1551). Ultimately, these four entries — Gikandi, Wilson-Lee, Kiguli and Siundu — convene an important conversation on the region’s literary and pedagogical legacies while complicating both the popular dismissal of the Black aesthetics debate and an equally popular valorization of the abolition of English Department in East African universities.

Two publishing platforms make a noteworthy presence in this year’s list: the Malawi Writers’ Union and the African Poetry Book Fund. The APBF annually publishes a cluster of chapbooks featuring contemporary African poets, and this year’s volume features nine chapbooks, with four East African poets’ work: Ugandan-American Hope Wabuke’s The Leaving; Kenyan Ngwatilo Mawiyoo’s Dagoretti Corner and Tanzanian Lyn Kasese Nyachiro’s Paper Dolls [see Poetry]. Now on its fourth volume of poetry chapbooks, the New Generation African Poets series of the African Poetry Book Fund is edited by celebrated writers and poets Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani and has been instrumental in revitalising the publication of African poetry. On its part, the Malawi Writers’ Union was formed in 1995 and has brought out a growing list of publications in recent years, including three novels in this year’s list: Shadreck Chikoti’s Azotus the Kingdom; Jonathan Mbuna’s Pilgrims Together and Ananiya Ponje’s Assignment [see Fiction: Malawi]. On the digital platform, which has been an important circuit of literary production and circulation in the region as both Meg Arenberg and Doseline Kiguru [see General Studies: Regional] note, two initiatives, Writivism and Jalada, have joined Kwani Trust in this space, widening the scope of digital literary debate and production.

Given the centrality of Kiswahili as a literary language in the region coupled with an Anglophone critical practice, there is a growing body of scholarship in English that engages with Swahiliphone literary material, with important implications for the Anglophone literary library. Two examples in this year’s list are Meg Arenberg’s “The Digital Ukumbi: New Terrains in Swahili Identity and Poetic Dialogue” [see General Studies: Regional] and Kai Kresse’s “Kenya Twendapi? Re-reading Abdilatif Abdalla’s Pamphlet Fifty Years after Independence” [see Studies of Individual Authors]. Arenberg’s essay contributes to ongoing debates on digital platforms of literary production in the region by examining the case of Swahili dialogic poetry. According to Arenberg, this genre, which traces its roots back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the East African coast has, in recent years, found a home on digital platforms, including blogs, personal websites and Facebook pages. Remarkable, for Arenberg, is the transfer of the heated debate on free verse vs. traditional Swahili poetry and the attendant anxieties about Arabic and Anglophone influence onto the contemporary digital platforms of poetic production and performance. She notes that

the remediation of Swahili poetry on online social networks constitutes more than a mere transfer of Swahili poetic dialogue from its traditional media. Increased access to digital media across East Africa and the transnational circulation of Swahili cultural forms of various kinds are clearly both raising anxieties about cultural contamination and increasing the stakes of defining and defending linguistic and literary identities. (p1347)

On the other hand, Kai Kresse’s engagement with the Kenyan poet, scholar and political activist Abdilatif Abdalla’s largely under-circulated pamphlet “Kenya Twendapi?” (“Kenya, Which Way Are We Going?”) underlines the challenges of the region’s linguistic silos, in which some debates and issues have remained in rigid silos, despite their cross-over interest to readers and scholars across the linguistic divide. Kresse’s essay offers a reproduction, translation and critique of the pamphlet whose concerns mirror those raised by Abdalla’s compatriot, friend and fellow political prisoner, Ngugi wa Thiong’o later in the 1970s. Like Ngugi, Abdalla would go on to produce award-winning writing while in prison under the Kenyatta regime, ironically winning the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1974, two years after his release from prison. Ultimately, Arenberg and Kresse’s essays underscore the value of cross-linguistic engagements and conversations in contexts with multiple languages of literary production. This, in turn, is the subject of Alamin M Mazrui’s Cultural Politics of Translation: East Africa in a Global Context [see General Studies: Regional]. Mazrui explores Swahili translations of various texts and genres, with emphasis on the cultural politics that frames their production and reception. This is an important research tool for scholars interested in the circuits and institutions of literary production and distribution in the region. Among the issues explored is translation, specifically, sacred translations of the Bible and the Qur’an, translations of European classics, and power struggles of America, China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War as articulated through their support for translations of particular titles. Among the texts featured are Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; The Taming of the Shrew; Nikolay Gogol’s The Government Inspector; Wei Jhinzi’s Ancient Tales of China; the Finnish epic Kalevala by Elias Lonnrot’s and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, among other titles. Mazrui’s study locates these translations and their circulation in their respective socio-political climates in the region, paying close attention to the various elements of foreign relations and global dynamics that catalysed the decisions to translate one set of texts as opposed to another at different junctures in the region’s histories.

The auto/biographical narratives list this year features a number of remarkable titles, including South African Amin Cajee’s Fordsburg Fighter: The Journey of an MK Volunteer which contributes to a growing archive of work on the South African liberation struggle’s militant arm, uMkhonto we Sizwe, and its experiences in exile in Tanzania. Tim Crother’s The Queen of Katwe: One Girl’s Triumphant Path to Becoming a Chess Champion follows at the heels of a well-received Hollywood film of the same title telling the story of a young Ugandan girl’s attempts at excellence at chess as a way of coping with her family’s difficult circumstances. Still in Uganda, Charles Tumwesigye’s One Man Dancing is based on a Ugandan actor and dancer’s work with renowned Ugandan playwright Robert Serumaga at the height of the brutal Idi Amin regime and the journeys his artistic talent made possible. Lastly, Mwenda Ntarangwi’s The Street Is My Pulpit is a portrait of popular gospel hip-hop artist Julius Owino aka Juliani, whose use of hip hop as a genre for evangelisation stages fasciation conversations between youth culture and spirituality while challenging conventional perceptions about the two.

In sum, the region continues to stage productive conversations through different literary genres and platforms.