Introduction
The question of translation of broadly African literature, and specifically East African literature, comes up in two entries in this year’s list. First, we have Moradewun Adejunmobi’s chapter, “History Lessons: Translating the African Classics” [Criticism: General Studies: Regional], which attends to the tensions between African literature that circulates globally in Europhone languages, and African literature originally composed in indigenous African languages. For Adejunmobi, this tension speaks to the politics of literary production, circulation and canonisation. At the same time, she notes, African literary history offers ample evidence to suggest that the translation of African literature originally composed in Europhone languages into and out of indigenous languages has had greater impact in the promotion and circulation of these bodies of work than other forms of translation. This finding has interesting implications for debates on African language literatures and the tensions between translation and origination in vernacular languages. The second entry is an example of such translations: Ken Walibora Waliaula’s The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Voice of Agony [Translations], which is a translation of Abdilatif Abdalla’s Kiswahili classic, Sauti ya Dhiki into English. This title enjoyed wide circulation in East Africa on first publication in 1973, in part owing to its place in the region’s Kiswahili curricula, and it will be interesting to see the patterns of circulation of the English translation. This translation is accompanied by valuable contextualising material that locates the poetry within the context of its original composition in prison, where Abdalla served a prison sentence for ostensible sedition against the autocratic Jomo Kenyatta presidency. In some respects, Abdalla’s poetry prefigures a subsequent body of prison writing from the region and offers a crucial entry point into making sense of the socio-political climate of the last quarter of the twentieth century in the region.
East African Asian literature remains a vibrant area of scholarly interest, with Mahruba T. Mowtushi’s Africa in the Bengali Imagination: From Calcutta to Kampala, 1928–1973 [General Studies: Uganda; see also Bangladesh article in this issue]. Two chapters in the volume are of particular interest: in chapter five, titled “Ganesh Bagchi and Narratives of Longing and Belonging in Uganda, 1948–1964” [General Studies: Uganda], Mowtushi examines Ganesh Bagchi’s autobiography, My Days and Ways (2014) for its insights on Bagchi’s travels from Calcutta to the Kenyan coast, then onwards on the Kenya-Uganda Railway to Uganda. Here, we get an Indian perspective on arrival in East Africa in 1948 and travel on the railway line built by an earlier generation of Indian labourers, as well as another layer of perspectives on Indian perceptions of Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. For its part, chapter six, titled “Nations and Identities in Transition: The Poems of Rajat Neogy for Transition Magazine, 1962–1973” [General Studies] shifts our attention from the classic East African literary magazine, Transition, to its editor’s poetry. While Neogy is rightly celebrated for founding and editing the magazine which is indispensable to the story of the emergence of East African writing, Mowtushi’s chapter invites us to meditate on the man behind the magazine and his own poetic oeuvre that captures the spirit of the decade when East African literature enjoyed a dynamic energy that made the region a serious literary player on the continent’s canvas.
Speculative literature and magical realist writing are the concern of a number of entries on the list, including Mikhail Gromov’s “Magical Realism in Modern Swahili Literature” [General Studies: Regional] and Alina Rinkanya’s “Female Plight and Magical Realism: A Study of Rebeka Njau’s The Sacred Seed and Okwiri Oduor’s Things they Lost” [General Studies: Kenya]. The seeming continuum between folklore and speculative imaginaries in African writing makes an interesting case for literary histories while challenging perceptions of African speculative writing as a recent development or an adaptation of science fiction genres from elsewhere. Here, Gromov and Rinkanya track the imaginaries back to the 1950s and 1960s in the work of Tanzanian writer Shaaban Robert and Kenyan novelist Rebeka Njau, demonstrating the deep roots of speculative imaginaries in the region’s literatures and their continued reconfigurings in contemporary writing, including Okwiri Oduor’s 2022 novel, Things they Lost.
Although the novel remains the genre of choice, both in curricula and scholarly attention within African literary studies in Africa and beyond, a study by Bhakti Shringapure and Lily Saint titled “African Literature is a Country” (2020) shows that poetry and theatre are arguably the two genres with deeper, more expansive roots, in modern African literature. Together, African poetry and theatre have been able to circulate beyond the perimeters of formal educational curricula, to reach different constituencies, in ways that the canonical novel has not. Several entries on this year’s list are worth mentioning for their attention to poetry and theatre. Susanna L. Sacks’ Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry [General Studies: Malawi] tracks the influence of digital media publication in the inception, circulation and canonisation of contemporary poetry from, among other countries, Malawi. For Sacks, digital publication is more than just a different medium of publication. Rather, the digital leaves its imprint on the poetry’s aesthetic, including digital investment in urgency, immediacy and populism, which not only shape this poetry, but also compel literary institutions of consecration to reconsider their frameworks of valuation, when confronted with this poetry. Nathan Suhr-Sytsma and Ryan Topper’s “Poetics from the Global South” [General Studies: Regional] not only addresses the paucity of scholarly attention to poetry, but goes beyond that to showcase the distinctive possibilities embedded in poetry from the global South, including Ugandan poetry, for our purposes. This essay and the accompanying contributions to the special issue in which it is published is driven by a set of crucial questions: “How might criticism and theory from the Global South recast the study of poetry? How might close attention to poetry from the Global South afford insight into the workings of literature and the world at large? How does poetry as a genre — or set of genres — extend or challenge the forms of thinking hitherto constituting postcolonial studies and its variants?” (382). Alexander Fyfe’s study of Ugandan poet Susan Kiguli’s work — “Beyond the Liberal Subject: Susan N. Kiguli and the Lyric Poem in 1990s Uganda” [Studies on Individual Writers]—offers some answers to these questions. Here, Fyfe makes a compelling case for Kiguli’s poetry as reconfiguring and reimagining neoliberal approaches to women’s empowerment in Uganda in the wake of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government’s attempts to integrate women into economic and national politics. For Fyfe, Kiguli mobilises lyrical poetry to do “a certain kind of subjective-political work that is out of reach of the novels written in Uganda during this period” (Fyfe 553). From a different angle, Okot p’Bitek is easily the best known and most widely taught Ugandan poet. Readers and scholars of p’Bitek would be interested in historian Patrick William Otim’s Acholi Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and the Making of Colonial Northern Uganda, 1850–1960 [General Studies: Uganda], which provides a richly textured portrait of the intellectual histories and contexts that inform the much-read Ugandan classics, Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol.
Staying in Uganda, but turning to theatre, Christopher Balme’s “National Theatres in Africa: Between Modular Modernity and Cultural Heritage” [General Studies: Uganda] invites us to consider the place of African theatre at the intersection of literary production, competing British, American and Chinese imperial interests, and the unfolding post/colonial futures in the second half of the twentieth century in Africa. Zoning in on Uganda, Balme reads the interplay of these histories as an allegory of postcolonial history framed within what can be described as the contradictions between modular modernity’s promise of the new and cultural heritage’s preoccupation with preservation. For Balme, the seeming opposition between the two actually belies the reality of a continuum between modernity and cultural heritage, particularly when we attend to the dynamics at play in the cultural Cold War, for which the National Theatre in Uganda provides an exemplary case of these dynamics and their imprint in the country’s theatre imaginaries during and after the Cold War. Theatre scholars may be interested to read Balme’s essay alongside Charlie Ely’s “Contemporary East African Dance Theatre: Emerging Decoloniality and Choreographic Self-writing” [General Studies: Uganda], which is a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of African Theatre and Performance. Two additional entries on the list—Bobby Smith’s Theatre and Global Development Performing Partnerships [General Studies: Regional] and Matthew Elliott and C. J. Odhiambo’s “Global North and Global South Collaboration in Training to Achieve ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’: A Case Study of Theatre for Development in Kisumu County, Kenya” [General Studies: Kenya] — tackle theatre for development in the Global South and relationships with development partners from the Global North. Given the centrality of theatre for development in the generation and circulation of theatre narratives in Africa, and the reality of heavy dependence on development funding in supporting these productions, this subgenre of theatre is of interest to literary scholars. This is particularly the case at a time when the gap between canonical African literature, primarily published in the Global North, and more ephemeral narrative forms that do not enjoy critical attention nor legitimation by the formal institutions of artistic consecration such as reviews, endorsements and literary prizes, has widened, even when though these narrative forms enjoy wide circulation beyond the academy and the middle classes.
Equally exciting are two intellectual biographies of major Ugandan playwrights and theatre-makers: Rose Mbowa and Robert Serumaga. Kathy A. Perkins’s chapter titled “Rose Mbowa 1943-1999: Mother Uganda” [Studies on Individual Writers] and George Bwanika Seremba’s “The Emblematic Legacy of Robert Serumaga’s Abafumi (Storytellers) Theatre Company” [General Studies: Uganda] are remarkable resources for literary historians interested in drama in East Africa, and specifically Uganda. Mbowa and Serumaga’s work remains influential in debates on the region’s theatre, and these detailed portraits of the contexts of their interventions, as well as their communities of theatre practices, are indispensable.
If we linger longer on literary forms that have historically been overshadowed by the novel, then the literary magazine is enjoying something of a renaissance that has seen the emergence of several new magazines, often fully digital, in the last two decades. Parallel to this is the resurgence of scholarly interest in these magazines. On this year’s list, this cluster of scholarship is exemplified by Sara Kazmi’s “The Periodical as Political Educator: Anticolonial Print and Digital Humanities in the Classroom and Beyond” and Alexandra Reza’s Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire [General Studies: Regional]. Both entries attend to the aesthetic and political labour performed by literary magazines as powerful platforms of literary engagement with topical political questions. Beyond political critique, which is the core interest of these two entries, literary magazines are widely recognised for their status as debut test beds for writers’ ideas and experiments with form, particularly in the case of writers in the making. In effect, they provide an important archival resource which we can turn to not only for a glimpse of the questions that preoccupied writers in a given time-slice, but also for the artistic and political footprints of writers whose later work tends to circulate better, and is sometimes received as a ready-made artistic and political sensibility, as opposed to a sensibility arrived at over time. Another book length exploration of ephemeral literary forms and the networks of their production is Stephanie Bosch Santana’s Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language and Media in African Literary Cultures [General Studies: Regional]. Through a reading of minor forms across print and digital media, in English and a range of African languages, including Malawian languages, this book reflects on the movement of literary narratives across genres, languages, platforms, space and time and the implications of these forms of mobility for our understanding of literary production and circulation that unfolds off-screen, outside the circuits of canonical literary production and circulation.
In sum, 2024 presented an abundance of interesting literary works and scholarly engagements with the region’s writing.
