Introduction
2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 Asian expulsions in Uganda on President Idi Amin’s orders. There is an extensive library of poetry, fiction, biographical writing as well as scholarly work on the Asian expulsions and its ongoing charge in the individual and collective imaginaries of East African Asians, both in the region and in the diaspora. On this year’s list, a range of entries revisit the Asian expulsions, including Tina Steiner’s “The Language of Food: Ingestion, Expulsion and Registers of Repair in Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook” [see Studies on Individual authors] and Anneeth Kaur Hundle’s “Fifty Years On: The 1972 Asian Expulsion as Global Critical Event, or the Insecurities of Expulsion” [see General Studies: Uganda]. Hundle’s essay confronts what it terms “expulsion exceptionalism”, in reference to the singular status the expulsion has come to occupy in Afro-Asian public discourse; and seeks to reframe the expulsion as what can be termed a “global critical event” that remains influential in shaping Afro-Asian debates on belonging. Staying with the East African Asian community, Mahruba T Mowtushi’s monograph, Africa in the Bengali Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928–1973 [see General Studies: Uganda] is interested in textual portraits of Africa in Bengali imaginaries, both nationalist and diasporic. The volume offers a provocative reflection on south-south politics of representation, which tend to be overshadowed by the more prevalent north-south axis. The chapter on poet and founding editor of Transition Magazine, Rajat Neogy, will be of particular interest to scholars of East African literature and literary histories.
Elsewhere on the list, Thandeka Cochrane’s essay “The Politics of Literature in Malawi: Filemon Chirwa, Nthanu za Chitonga and the Battle for the Atonga Tribal Council” [see General Studies: Malawi], offers another interesting retrospective perspective in the context of Malawi. It turns to a 1932 anthology, Nthanu za Chitonga (Stories in Chitonga), published by local intellectual, teacher and intermediary in colonial politics in Nyasaland, Filemon Chirwa. Cochrane’s essay tracks the history of this anthology’s production and circulation in colonial and postcolonial Malawi, and the different forms of literary, cultural and political labour it has been mobilised towards, some of which may not have been anticipated at the time of publication. This essay models an important method of literary studies, particularly with regard to early ethnographic African writing, and its intersections with the colonial state on one hand, and literary production on the other. For readers interested in these questions, this essay makes an generative read alongside Derek Peterson’s work on early Gikuyu intellectuals in Kenya, and Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s work on Fante intelligentsia in the late 19th Century Gold Coast.
This year’s fiction list sees a new entry by Stanley Gazemba, titled Footprints in the Sand. Though preoccupied with familiar themes — state dysfunction, crime, corruption and systemic decay — Gazemba’s novel is genre-bending, as it blends the realist mode with elements of the fantastic. Another notable entry in the fiction list, which is similarly genre-bending, is Okwiri Oduor’s Things They Lost, a much-anticipated debut novel from the 2014 winner of the Caine Prize for African writing. This richly experimental novel weaves together key strands of Kenyan history with intertextual nods to cosmologies of magic drawn from Swahili culture unfolding across three generations of women descended from an eccentric English woman. As Lizzy Attree succinctly describes it in a review for The Guardian, the novel “carries echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, while Oduor shares Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s gift for illustrating the complexity of rural inland and coastal Kenyan reality, with its intricacy of connections to Uganda, Tanzania and the Swahili coast.”
1
Memoirs and biographies continue to be a popular genre in the East African region, and one expects, right across the continent. Three entries on this year’s list from Kenya and Tanzania stand out for different reasons. The two Kenyan titles give pointers to the ways in which the life stories of the two authors intersected with a monumental stretch of post-independent Kenya’s public life under the second president Daniel Toroitich arap Moi. The two titles are Zipporah Kittony’s Sheer Grit: A Memoir and Lee Njiru’s President’s Pressman: A Memoir [see Letters and Auto/Biography]. Apart from serving in various political roles during the 24-year Moi regime, Kittony enjoyed personal proximity to the former president, as her family were close family friends with the Moi family. On his part, as the title suggests, Njiru was Moi’s press secretary for decades. For readers interested in Kenyan history, politics, and the inner workings of power and state institutions during the Moi regime, these two memoirs offer important behind-the-scenes glimpses of the textures of statecraft during the last two decades of the twentieth century in Kenyan political life. The third title is Shoonie Hartwig’s Aniceti Kitereza: A Tanzanian Epic [see Letters and Auto/biography: Tanzania], a biographical portrait of one of the major foundational writers in Tanzania, Aniceti Kitereza, and the story of the forty-year journey towards publication of his novel. Kitereza is best known for his ethnographic novel, Mr Myombekere and his Wife Bugonoka, their Son Ntulanalwo and Daughter Bulihwali: The Story of an Ancient African Community (2000), which he originally wrote in kiKerewe, but only secured a publisher for it forty years after completion. The novel was subsequently translated into Kiswahili and English. It is fitting that the Tanzanian publisher, Mkuki na Nyota, who recently reissued the English edition of Kitereza’s novel, are also the publishers of this memoir. Hartwig reflects on two years of living in Ukerewe and striking up a friendship with Kitereza, followed by eleven-years of letters exchanged between them, all relating to the process of publishing Kitereza’s novel in its kiKerewe original.
Another set of auto/biographical debates that has been unique to the region is Namibian life writing that reflects on the experiences of Namibian liberation movements in Tanzania. This is an exciting body of work that opens up remarkable possibilities for interregional studies in African literary studies. On this year’s list, Nelson Mlambo and Martha Nahole’s essay “Children as Participants in the Liberation Struggle: Lydia Shaketange’s Walking the Boeing 707 (2008) and Ellen Namhila’s The Price of Freedom (1997)” [see General Studies: Tanzania] examines two memoirs of childhood spent in Namibian liberation movement camps in Tanzania, with an eye to the place of children in the everyday lives of these movements, beyond conventional framings of children as vulnerable figures at the height of anticolonial struggles in East and Southern Africa. This essay, and similar work in recent years, offers provocative lines of inquiry for scholars interested in intra-African mobilities, narratives of exile within the continent, and broadly, the intersection between biography studies and migrant/diasporic studies in Africa.
Stefan Helgeson’s Decolonisations of Literature: Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil after 1945 and particularly the chapter “‘Our Cultural Take-Off into the World’: The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Making of East African Literature” [see General Studies: Regional] is another remarkable entry that models what such inter-regional analytic frameworks might look like, and the insights they can yield. This ambitious volume is remarkable for the ways it threads together both a fine-textured reflection on historically dynamic debates in literary critical practice in Africa and Brazil at different junctures in the respective regions’ geopolitical timelines, and a keen eye on what the stakes were, at each moment. The chapter on East Africa richly contextualises major forces and players that shaped the trajectories of literary-critical practices in the region, and the pointers these offer, in making sense of the current return to debates on decolonisation of literature and curricula alike.
The literary world lost two major African women writers this year — Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo and Kenyan Micere Mugo — who shared a decades long close friendship. On this year’s list the volume Mīcere Gīthae Mūgo: Making Life Sing in Pursuit of Utu [see Studies on Individual Writers], edited by Wachanga Ndirangu, convenes a timeous meditation on Mugo’s work as a pan-African feminist Marxist thinker, dramatist and poet, whose work has been foundational to African literary reckonings with the complexities of post-independence Africa.
Lastly, two scholarly chapters, both appearing in the volume Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture, tackle critical questions on literary production and analytic categories attached to African literature: Ranka Primorac’s essay “Against ‘African Popular Literature’, or: The Weeping Woman” [see General Studies: Kenya], makes a strong case against the category ‘popular’ as potentially counter-productive when deployed in framing certain forms of African literary texts. Through a reading of the trope of the weeping woman in Zambian and Kenyan fiction which is ordinarily read as belonging in different brackets of the canonical–popular dichotomy, Primorac emphasises that this framing robs us of important insights into literary textual practices that become visible when we read literary texts alongside each other, disregarding the value-laden classifications that come with the tag ‘popular’. The second essay, “Gendering the Popular: Making a Case for FEMRITE in Uganda and Beyond” by Lynda Gichanda Spencer and Erik Falk [see General Studies: Uganda] revisits the FEMRITE initiative in Uganda, with a view to reconsider the suggestive pointers the texts published by FEMRITE offer, in making sense of contemporary debates on World Literature, and the methodological possibilities unlocked by some of these approaches to literary studies, when applied to FEMRITE publications.
