East and Central Africa

Introduction

2021 was an exciting year in the African literary landscape, with many of the major international literary awards going to African writers from different parts of the continent working in different languages: French-Senegalese writer David Diop was awarded the International Booker Prize for his novel At Night All Blood Is Black, while fellow Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr received the French Prix Goncourt for his novel La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes (“The Most Secret Memory of Men”). The other Booker prize went to South African writer Damon Galgut for his novel The Promise while the Prémio Camões Prize for Portuguese language writing went to Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane. Each of these prizes is prestigious and symbolises immense recognition for winners. But the highlight of the year in African letters has to be the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Zanzibari-British writer and scholar Abdulrazak Gurnah. In their citation, the Nobel Prize committee emphasised Gurnah’s “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. For many across the world, including East and Central Africa, the award was a surprise, as Gurnah hardly featured in predictions in previous years. But it is precisely for this reason that the award sparked excitement about the committee’s seeming return to a familiar tradition of honouring worthy but under-recognised writers while showcasing a truly global literary landscape. In this regard, Gurnah’s award was a welcome invitation to readers unfamiliar with his work to immerse themselves in his extensive body of writing that primarily tackles questions of migration, memory, history and loss, with a powerfully evocative grounding in historical specificities on East Africa and Britain. Inevitably, these preoccupations of his writing — particularly his deep interest in the complexities of migrants’ experiences — sparked speculation about the Nobel Prize committee’s choice as potentially inspired by the so-called migrant crisis that has been at the forefront of European public and political discourse in recent years.

Whatever the motivation for the award might be, the news was received with delight and pride across the continent. For scholars who had been working on Gurnah’s work for decades, the award was an even more special acknowledgement of what they had known all along about the deep insights and distinctive literary craft offered by Gurnah’s work. That the 2021 list includes three scholarly entries on Gurnah’s writing is a fitting reminder about the small but robust community of scholars who have been working on Gurnah’s fiction, largely within the Indian Ocean studies analytic frame, including Charne Lavery and Tina Steiner, both of whom have entries in this year’s list [see Studies on Individual Writers].

Coincidentally, 2021 also saw the publication of a new edition of Revolution in Zanzibar: Field Marshall John Okello, which was first published in 1967 [see Letters and Auto/biography: Tanzania]. Zanzibar’s geopolitical location and long histories of involvement in Indian Ocean trade networks marks it as a highly cosmopolitan landscape, but also one that once bore deep simmering racial and cultural tensions, going all the way back to the Indian Ocean slave trade and its traumas. John Okello, an itinerant Ugandan national with a colourful history of being on the wrong side of the law, had lived in different places across East Africa before making his way to Pemba Island in 1959, then on to neighbouring Zanzibar in 1961. In the islands, Okello joined the Afro-Shirazi Party which was strongly opposed to the political and economic dominance of Arabs in the region. When Britain granted Zanzibar independence in December 1963, making it a constitutional monarchy under the leadership of Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, Okello mobilized the Afro-Shirazi Party’s youth league against the Sultan a month after independence, triggering what came to be labelled the Zanzibar revolution of January 1964. The bloody revolution, framed as it was around an anti-Arab sentiment, saw thousands of Zanzibaris of Arab descent lose their lives and thousands more harmed and displaced. A teenager at the time, Gurnah was among those displaced by the revolution: he left for Britain, where he has lived much of his adult life. It is an interesting coincidence that this biographical portrait of the man behind the revolution, first published in 1967, was reissued in the same year when Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize, although the decision to re-publish does not appear to be connected to the Nobel Prize, as the book is published in February 2021 while the award was announced in October 2021.

Another, more pleasant coincidence on this year’s list is that two of the scholarly monographs published on the list — Tina Steiner’s Convivial Worlds: Writing Relation from Africa and Charne Lavery’s Writing Ocean Worlds: New Comparisons in World Literature [see General studies] — are concerned with the Indian Ocean World. Steiner and Lavery both explore literary engagements with the Indian Ocean world, reinserting Africa into this world that has tended to be read in ways that emphasise India. For Lavery, the Indian Ocean world is what Isabel Hofmeyr (2012) has described as “a complicating sea” with “overlapping transnational vectors: old trading diasporas, Muslim networks, slavery, waning British imperialism, Zanzibari independence and the African-Arab violence that followed it, Cold War politics, and international regulation of refugees”. Lavery’s exploration pivots on Anglophone literary meditations on the Indian Ocean basin in the work of Joseph Conrad, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen and Abdulrazak Gurnah. On Gurnah, Lavery suggests that his work “highlights not only the freedoms but also the costs of long-distance Indian Ocean travel, the connections as well as the failures of its Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism” (Lavery 91). In many ways, Lavery’s book pairs well with Tina Steiner’s, which lingers on the question of conviviality and the conditions of possibility for practices of relation that privilege mutuality. Focusing on the work of Jamal Mahjoub, DDT Jabavu, Sophia Mustafa and Abdulrazak Gurnah, Steiner sees the Indian Ocean imaginary as a transoceanic network of connectivity that by necessity models a distinctive Southern transnationalism mapping south-south circulations of goods, people and ideas that have been fuelled not only by the complexities and ambivalences that Gurnah’s writing nods to but also by distinctive practices of relation, hospitality, openness and curiosity that keep alive the promise of human solidarity and disalienation, to use Steiner’s term.

Staying with scholarly monographs, but shifting gears slightly, Jane Plastow’s A History of East African Theatre, Volume 2: Central East Africa [see General studies] is a valuable intervention on an understudied genre not only in East and Central Africa, but in Africa, more broadly. The hegemony of the novel in African literary studies continues to cast long shadows over African drama and poetry, both at the level of publishing and scholarly attention. This is a curious contradiction, when we consider the role of drama and theatre in shaping the region’s and indeed the continent’s vibrant television drama and video-film landscape as well as spoken word poetry’s centrality to many African audiences’ literary diets. In this context of general scholarly neglect of drama, Plastow’s historical study is a valuable gift that carefully maps a rich, context-specific history of theatre in East and Central Africa. Crucially, its focus on theatre in Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda allows it to trace the different linguistic-cultural histories of theatre across the region, which in turn were very much shaped by the respective French, Belgian and British colonial cultural policies and shifting investments in different timelines. The book also revisits theatre for development which, in the 1980s and 1990s, was favoured by donor programmes and foundations that channelled resources towards theatre as a vehicle of different forms of conscientisation and behavioural change. One hopes that Plastow’s remarkable volume will spark renewed scholarly engagement with theatre in the region.

On a different trajectory of performative genres, Frederic Unseld’s essay “Rhythms of the Unemployed: Making Art and Making do through Spoken Word in Kisumu, Kenya” [see General Studies: Kenya] turns to spoken word poetry in the lakeside city of Kisumu in Kenya. I flag this essay because the spoken word poetry scene has for decades now, been a lively scene of literary activity in the region, primarily featuring young writers and performers. Remarkably, Unseld offers an unusual reading of this form, by drawing out its socio-cultural implications and its place in young people’s life worlds at a time when youth continues to be synonymous with what has been termed waithood and uncertainty, amidst high unemployment rates. Here, Unseld sees the ways in which one spoken word artist mobilises spoken word poetry to navigate time and the uncertainties of insecure work and economic insecurity in Kenya.

Another refreshing entry is Juan Miguel Zarandona’s “The Translation of Diasporic African Indian Autobiographical Voices into the Languages of Spain: Achmat Dangor (1948–2020) and Moyez G Vassanji (1950–)” [see Studies on Individual Writers]. This chapter in the volume titled African Perspectives on Literary Translation has important insights to offer with regard to the reception of postcolonial African writing in Spain, as well as questions of circulation of African writing. In setting debates on World Literature as conceptualized by David Damrosch in conversation with Translation Studies, the chapter opens up a rich, yet under-explored scholarly trajectory on the circulation of African writing in translation and the politics of reception emerging from that, particularly with regard to circulation of such writing outside of the four major languages of African writing: English, French, Portuguese and Arabic. On a related note, around staying off the beaten track, the biographical essay volume My China Story: Experiences of China in 40 Essays by Ugandans [see Auto/biographies: Uganda] points to the beginnings of African reflections on encounters in the East broadly, and China specifically, which one expects, will soon see many more titles, as China’s interactions with, and influences on, Africa continues to grow.

Like any other region, East Africa has its own share of traumatic histories. Two of these are represented in this year’s list: the Asian expulsions and the Uganda martyrs. The former is central to two titles in the list, both debut novels: Neema Shah’s Kololo Hill and Hafsa Zayyan’s We Are All Birds of Uganda [see Fiction: Uganda]. The continued resonance of this traumatic history and its cross-generational implications for East African Asians and their descendants is signalled by the growing body of literary and biographical returns of this moment and its afterlives. The Uganda martyrs were forty-five catholic and Anglican converts who were executed on the orders of Kabaka Mwanga between 1885 and 1887. Two biographical entries on this year’s list return to this historical period: Robert Kibuuka’s Please Don’t Cut off My Hands: The Story of Rugarama Retold out of ‘Two Kings of Uganda’ by Robert Ashe and Henry Lubega’s Uganda Martyrs: A Story of Faith, Inspiration and Celebration [see Letters and Auto/biography: Uganda]

Back to criticism, we could say the list points to a strong turn to questions of literary production and circulation, as approached from different perspectives. As its title indicates, Maria Suriano’s essay “Dreams and Constraints of an African Publisher: Walter Bgoya, Tanzania Publishing House and Mkuki na Nyota, 1972–2020” [see General studies, Tanzania] is a critical biographical reflection on Walter Bgoya, one of the most prolific publishers in the region, with a lengthy career representing a rich snapshot of the shifting patterns and competing interests in the publishing landscape in the region. Such studies are valuable resources for all readers interested in African literature, but even more so for those concerned with questions of literary history as seen from the publishing landscape. A second set of entries turns to how the digital age has shaped the production, consumption and circulation of African literature. Here, Shola Adenekan’s monograph African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya reads well alongside a cluster of essays on this year’s list, including Stephanie Bosch Santana’s “Navigating Digital Worlds: African Literary Forms in the Digital Age” and Aurelie Journo’s “Literary Networks and Digital Media in Contemporary African Literature” [see: General Studies: Kenya and General Studies: Regional]. Collectively, these works confront the methodological questions posed by digital literatures and the demands they make on their readers. They reflect on the continuities and discontinuities between print-centric literary production and the digital canvas, noting what Adenekan terms the persistence of both a print imaginary and epistemes of oral literary practice in these digital literary forms. This is an exciting and lively terrain whose possibilities continue to unfold as writers and institutions experiment with the promises of the digital.

The third strand explores the related question of literary networks and literary activism. Here the special issue of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies themed “Literary Activism in 21^st Century Africa” and the special section of Social Dynamics themed “Small Magazines in Africa: Ecologies and Genealogies” [see Special Issues ] convene fascinating discussions on the formation and maintenance of literary networks across the region’s histories and the ways in which these networks shape the production and circulation of literature. They also explore the question of literary activism, which has seen a pointed resurgence in the region’s letters, as we witness renewed recognition of the power of literature to intervene in articulating urgent questions. Lastly, the cluster on small magazines tracks the role of these literary magazines across African literary history, shaping the intellectual, artistic and activist investments of writers and audiences at different historical moments.

Despite the ongoing aftershocks of the pandemic across the region, 2021 appeared to be a vibrant year in the region’s literary and scholarly scene.