A GIKUYU OGRES, ORAL NARRATIVE AND POSTHUMAN THINKING-Inge Brinkman

Abstract

n this contribution I would like to offer an interpretation on ogres and humans in Gikuyu oral narratives, focusing on the earliest records of such stories in the colonial era. Gikuyu oral
narratives have been recorded since the early twentieth century, albeit often rendered only in summarised form, in English translation, and evaluated from a racist and paternalistic stance.
Despite these serious drawbacks, the collections can serve to reconstruct a preliminary Gikuyu ogre history of the early colonial period, thereby contributing to the sociocultural history of the
imaginary in a more general sense. The focus here will be on the social relations between monsters and humans, in connection to ecological concerns in the narratives, based on textual
analysis.
In my view a historical perspective on oral literature can offer theoretical insights into the recent debates on (East) African popular culture and the post-human turn in literary studies. Many studies in popular culture are strongly connected to urbanity and new ICT, and the posthuman, ecocritical turn is a relatively new approach in academia and gaining momentum only recently
in (East-)African literary studies.
This ‘newness’ should not stand in the way of appreciating older philosophical traditions:
Gikuyu people have, through their oral narratives, long reflected on the relations between humans and other creatures, between culture, nature and preternature. Studying such historical
reflections may indeed help to qualify our concepts in literary criticism.