East and Central Africa

Abstract

Introduction

Many of us had hoped that by this time, COVID-19 would be, if not recent history, then at least largely under control. This is not the case across Africa at this point in time. While some wealthy countries contemplate offering their citizens a third dose of the vaccine, the majority of the population on the continent remains unvaccinated and the virus continues its devastation across many communities. As the losses of lives and livelihoods mount, the levels of grief exceed our capacity to process it, even as we try to take it one day at a time. As many commentators have observed, COVID-19’s sharpest and longest lasting effects will be the ways in which it has deepened existing fault lines of inequality, at all levels and planes, as a result of its lethal intersection with the cartographies of capital, white supremacy, patriarchy and ableist systems.

There is a certain inevitability to the East and Central African annual publication list, where certain topics are concerned. Mau Mau. Happy Valley. Politicians’ memoirs. Child soldier narratives. Idi Amin. These topics seem to retain a tenacious grip on writers’ and scholars’ imagination of the region. But these recurrent themes sometimes yield fascinating perspectives that widen the range of debates and representations. Several entries on this year’s list point to these reconfigurations of staple regional themes. Christian A Williams’ essay “SWAPO’s Struggle Children and Exile Home-Making: The Refugee Biography of Mawazo Nakadhilu” [see General Studies: Tanzania] is one such example. The essay maps the life story and struggles of Mawazo Nakadhilu, born to a Namibian father and Tanzanian mother at Kongwa camp in Tanzania in 1972. Nakadhilu’s life trajectory, as one of SWAPO’s liberation struggle children, and therefore subject to the care and support of the SWAPO movement, would be complicated by Namibia’s independence. Upon her return to a Namibia that has failed to live up to the promises of the liberation movement to Namibians, both those in exile and those who remained in the country, Nakadhilu faced new sets of questions around citizenship, home and belonging that she continues to struggle with. Williams’ essay offers an important historical lens on narratives of exile within the continent, particularly in light of Tanzania and Zambia’s prominent role as the primary host locations for many Southern African liberation movements. Equally importantly, it maps a longer history of refugee experiences within the continent and the ways in which these complicate questions of belonging, citizenship and rights claims in fragile economies whose nationalist liberation promises remain permanently postponed decades later. For his part, Myles Osborne revisits representations and imaginings of the Mau Mau in Jamaica. In the essay, ‘“Mau Mau are Angels … Sent by Haile Selassie’: A Kenyan War in Jamaica” [see General Studies: Kenya], Osborne explores the multifaceted perceptions of Kenya’s Mau Mau liberation movement in Jamaica, which varied along class lines: while the middle and upper classes considered the movement a disastrous threat to their notions of Black liberation, marginalised Jamaicans, especially the Rastafari, considered it a deeply inspirational embodiment of a pan-African sensibility with deep strong resonances with Caribbean thought for Black freedom. This essay brings to view an exciting set of insights into the circuits of Black intellectual thought in the first half of the 20^th century and hither-to underexplored threads of intellectual exchange between Africa and the Black diaspora. A third and equally fascinating example, still in Kenya, relates to the patterns of imperial imagination at play in the conceptualisation of the so-called “White Highlands” in British colonial Kenya. M. Mahavir Kumar’s “Plaided or Dusky Forms: Highland Landscape in Scotland and Kenya” [see General Studies: Kenya] confronts the under-acknowledgement of Scottish, Irish and Welsh contributions to the English imperial misadventures across the colonies. Here, through a close reading of 18^th-century cartography and Scottish narratives of African exploration, Kumar argues that the colonization of the so-called “White Highlands” in Kenya was significantly shaped and influenced by aesthetic forms drawn from the Scottish Highlands. While the Scottish connection to English colonial imaginaries in South Africa has received significant scholarly and literary attention, this aspect remains largely underexamined in the Kenyan context beyond a few reflections on the church in colonial Kenya, making this essay an important intervention in Kenya studies. A last entry in this same vein relates to Italian soldiers’ experiences in British colonial Kenya. Elena Bellina’s “Space and Violence in WWII Italian Captivity in Africa: Becoming a POW between Mount Kenya and the Equator Line” [see General Studies: Kenya] examines unpublished memoirs which offer rare glimpses into the experiences of fascist Italian soldiers in early 1940s East Africa. The soldiers were captured by the British Army and held in Kenya as co-operators. Bellina describes how these prisoners of war used sports, performing arts and intellectual activities as survival strategies in the British camps in colonial Kenya. After the 1943 armistice, she writes, the camp and barracks were turned into courtrooms and torture chambers administering a distinct version of justice in the face of the split among the POWs between pro and anti-Mussolini groups.

Still on a historical trajectory, Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L Newman’s edited volume Finding Dr Livingstone: A History in Documents from the Henry Morton Stanley Archives [see Auto/biography: Tanzania] revisits the much-studied 1871 journey by Henry M. Stanley in search of the missing explorer Dr David Livingstone. Finding Dr Livingstone offers a detailed transcription and annotation of the documents relating to Stanley’s trip, including worker contracts, plan names, maps, poetry and field notebooks. Beyond being a richly detailed reconstruction of Stanley’s journey, the book is an excellent research resource with promising glimpses into the teams of African soldiers, carriers and workers who facilitated Stanley’s journey as well as Tanzania’s (then Tanganyika) precolonial history, more broadly. Staying in Tanzania, this year’s list also includes a translation of a biography of rock music icon Freddy Mercury, Alfonso Casas’ Freddie Mercury: An Illustrated Life [see Translations: Tanzania]. Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar to Parsi-Indian parents, his family was among those displaced by the Zanzibar revolution who would settle down in England. He would go on to build a remarkable career in music and ascend to legendary status in the industry. This title joins an extensive list of biographical portraits of one of the most celebrated rock music icons.

Paul J. Magnarella’s Black Panther in Exile: The Pete O’Neal Story [see Auto/Biography: Tanzania] explores the reverse of Freddie Mercury’s movement: in this case, the relocation of an influential African-American member of the Black Panther party from the United States to Tanzania. Magnarella served as Pete O’Neal’s lawyer between 1997 and 2001 and draws extensively on this position in this well-documented portrait of O’Neal’s life story. For scholars of Black Studies, African Studies, and Tanzania specifically, this biography is rich in pointers to the long histories of Black internationalist thought and the afterlives of radical Black freedom movements, some of whose principles continue to shape contemporary life despite the ostensible demise of the movements in their home soils. Based in Tanzania since 1972, the O’Neals brought with them the Black Panther spirit of community development and Black solidarity which they translated into educational and health programmes and other initiatives to promote solidarity between Tanzanians and African Americans.

Meantime, Peter H Reid’s Every Hill a Burial Place: The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa [see Auto/biographies: Tanzania] turns to yet another historical segment in Tanzania: the investigations into the suspicious death of Peace Corps volunteer Peppy Kinsey in 1966. Reid, himself a Peace Corps volunteer at the time of the murder trial which acquitted Kinsey’s husband, Bill, revisits the case, shedding light on a range of inconsistencies and biases surrounding the case, which took place at a geopolitically critical time for the newly independent country and against the backdrop of the competing interests at the core of the Cold War. Reid meditates on the possibility that these broader political circumstances surrounding the case compromised the pursuit of justice.

At a time when the spotlight is on patterns of migration from Africa and the middle East into Europe, it is easy to forget that there was a time the traffic flowed southwards, from Europe to Africa. Jochen Lingelbach’s On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War [Auto/biographies: Regional] joins a growing list of recent titles that remind us of this trajectory in migrant movement where close to 20,000 Poles escaped war-torn Europe and sought refuge in East and Southern African territories under British rule, primarily Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. These refugees found themselves navigating competing interests and ongoing tensions between British administrators, African natives and within the refugee communities themselves. The historical and socio-cultural insights emerging from this biographical portrait of these communities sits curiously alongside another set of life-writings by more recent communities of refugees in the region, including Rwandese refugees in Uganda, Sudanese refugees in northern Kenya and Somali refugees in eastern Kenya. Examples of titles on these communities’ experiences on this year’s list include, respectively, Patrick Karangwa’s Finding Purpose in Times of Challenge: My Journey from Refugee to Humanitarian Leader [see Auto/biography: Uganda]; Yuot Alaak’s A Father of the Lost Boys: A Memoir and Ilhan Omar’s This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman [see Auto/biography: Kenya].

Meantime, the year saw the publication of three intellectual biographies on the Nobel Prize laureate, Wangari Muta Maathai, all by Kenyan scholars, approaching the ecofeminist icon from different disciplinary angles, including history, gender studies and literary studies. The three titles are Tabitha Kanogo’s Wangari Maathai; Besi Brillian Muhonja’s Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai and Grace A Musila’s Wangari Maathai’s Registers of Freedom [see Auto/biographies: Kenya].

On the scholarly front, 2020 was a generative year, with an exciting range of works engaging with the region’s writing. Peter Leman’s Singing the Law: Oral Jurisprudence and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity in East African Literature (see General Studies: Regional] is a refreshing addition to the region’s literary studies corpus that adopts a transdisciplinary lens, bringing Law Studies to readings of literary texts. The book revisits various literary texts, including settler colonial creative nonfiction, the poetry of Uganda’s Okot p’Bitek, Somali Orature and the drama and poetry of Micere Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others. The interdisciplinary conversations between law and literature have deep roots in the region; continued interdisciplinary engagements of this kind draw fresh insights while surfacing insights that prove generative for both disciplines. On its part, Ashleigh Harris and Nicklas Hallen’s essay “African Street Literature: A Method for an Emergent Form beyond World Literature” [see General Studies: Regional] explores ephemeral literary forms such as flash fiction, graphic novels and spoken-word poetry as what the two scholars refer to as African street literature which, in their view, “registers its situatedness, and as such its location as co-constitutive of the literary text” (2020, p.1). In their critique of the World Literature framework of literary studies as complicit in, and sustaining the unequal infrastructures of literary production and circulation, the two authors build on Raymond Williams’ thought on residual, dominant and emergent forms to foreground emergent forms as triggered by the inadequacy of dominant forms to the realities of everyday life that literary texts meditate on but which are simultaneously excluded from the circuits of legitimation that underwrite the World Literature category. Among the examples they explore is Kenyan spoken-word poet, Mamboleo, whose street performances of poetry speak to the immediate circumstances of its composition and delivery. The two scholars seek to disrupt global literary studies’ reliance on the dominant legitimizing institutions of literary production — mainstream publishers, awards, academies and their attendant distribution networks — to the exclusion of emergent forms such as flash fiction, microfiction, graphic narratives and spoken-word poetry. Here, they contemplate the methodological demands posed by these texts and propose what they call a calibration of interpretation with an attentiveness to the sociality of the form and its context of production.

Harris and Hallen’s work reads excellently alongside the special issue of Postcolonial Text edited by Shola Adenekan, themed Digital Africas [see Special Issues]. Featuring a fascinating selection of articles on different dimensions of digital literary and popular cultural engagements in East Africa and other parts of the continent, the discussions in these essays offer cutting edge insights into the state of the budding field of African digital literary studies. This is also the subject of Adenekan’s recently published monograph, African Literature in the Digital Age (2021), which will be explored in more detail in our next issue.

Staying with scholarly works, Rahul Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality [see General Studies: Uganda] is an important addition to the region’s shelf of scholarly work in queer studies. Setting Uganda, India and Britain in conversation, Rao is interested in public discourse on homosexuality as filtered through multiple frames of politics, identities and discourses produced at different temporal junctures in Britain’s relationship to Uganda and India; in LGBTI activists and communities’ interactions with allies and queer communities beyond India and Uganda and in the two sets of now-clichéd claims that homosexuality is Western and homophobia is African. Rao explores these planes of thought and their intersecting implications for making sense of queer livability in Uganda, India and Britain.

On our list of anthologies, one entry that stands out is In Bibi’s Kitchen: The Recipes and Stories of Grandmothers from the Eight African Countries That Touch the Indian Ocean [see Anthologies: Regional]. While the intermeshing of food and storytelling is a recognisable trend, elsewhere broadly studied under gastropolitics and gastropoetics, it remains something of a novelty in East and Central African letters, making this a notable entry with promising possibilities for scholars of the Indian Ocean world, who have been the most creative, methodologically, in developing generative ways of reading culinary textualities as important historical and literary archives. It will be interesting to see the kinds of interpretative frameworks this title inspires.

In 2020, Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi published her second novel, The First Woman in the UK, which was brought out in the US under the title A Girl Is a Body of Water [see Fiction: Uganda]. The novel was actually written before her first novel, Kintu, for her MA in Creative Writing in the early 2000s, and she attempted to publish it between 2003–2008, unsuccessfully. On the back of her remarkably successful Kintu, she revisited this manuscript, which would be brought out under two different titles in 2020. Consistent with her style, The First Woman/A Girl Is a Body of Water takes a popular Ugandan myth revolving around Nnambi, the Eve-like equivalent in Luganda folklore, and reconfigures the story into a coming-of-age novel about a young girl. The intentionality with which Makumbi reworks Ugandan folklore enables her to breathe new life into these narratives and to explore the other, often suppressed possibilities they offer to make sense of the Ugandan epistemic archives. More decidedly, Makumbi uses the folkloric figure of Nnambi, whom she turns into her protagonist, Kirabo’s stepmother, to excavate and flesh out indigenous feminist sensibilities which remain largely underacknowledged in the region’s as well as in continental, literary and feminist scholarship, more broadly.

In the midst of the devastation of the current pandemic, literature remains a source of consolation, perspective, reflection and above all, beauty.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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