The Nairobi Journal of LITERATURE

The Contents

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The Nairobi Journal of Literature
The Journal of the Department of Literature
University of Nairobi
ISSN 1814-1706-10
Key Title: The Nairobi Journal of Literature
Abbreviated Key Title: Nairobi j. lit.
Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Henry Indangasi (Emeritus), Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Editors:
Prof. Alina Rinkanya, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Dr Masumi Odari, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Dr Miriam Musonye, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi

Peer Reviewers:
Dr Mikhail Gromov, Department of Languages and Literature, United States International
University, Nairobi
Prof. Henry Indangasi (Emeritus), Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Prof. Alina Rinkanya, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Dr Masumi Odari, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi
Dr Miriam Musonye, Department of Literature, University of Nairobi

The Nairobi Journal of Literature is a publication of the Department of Literature, University of Nairobi.
It publishes scholarly work in English and Kiswahili. The views expressed in the contributions are not
necessarily the views of The Nairobi Journal of Literature or the Department of Literature, University of
Nairobi.

Authors reserve rights to their contributions

Acknowledgement: The articles published here were first presented at the Third International Annual Conference on the Role of Literature in a Global World, organized by the University of Nairobi's Department of Literature in November 2020 at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. The special theme of the Conference was “Eastern African Literatures in the 21st Century: Achievements, Challenges, and Perspectives”.

Type setting and design: Anna Petkova-Mwangi
Email: literature@uonbi.ac.ke
Telephone: 254(020)318262
Manuscript address:
The Nairobi Journal of Literature
The Journal of the Department of Literature
University of Nairobi
P O Box 30197, GPO Nairobi 00100,
Kenya

Introduction

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The articles collected in this issue of the Journal are largely based on the presentations delivered at the Third International Annual Conference on the Role of Literature in a Global World, organized by the University of Nairobi's Department of Literature in November 2020. The special theme of the Conference was “Eastern African Literatures in the 21st Century:
Achievements, Challenges, and Perspectives”. In full accordance with the conference’s special theme, its program featured presentations by about thirty participants from Africa and Europe.
The fact that the Conference attracted participants from all over the world mirrored the importance of the issues raised by the gathering. The three days of the Conference were opened by keynote speakers, distinguished scholars and writers from Eastern Africa - Dominica Dipio from Makerere University, Mukoma wa Ngugi from Cornell University, Christopher Odhiambo from Moi University and Kithaka wa Mberia from the University of Nairobi.

A Bird’s Eye View Key Note Address - Kithaka Wa Mberia

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Colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
Allow me to begin this address by contextualizing Kiswahili within the African linguistic terrain.
Some linguists put the number of languages spoken in the world at about 7, 000. Roughly, a third of these languages is spoken in Africa (see, for example, Gordon (2005)). The approximately 2,000 languages are grouped into four language families, namely, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan,
Afro-Asiatic and Khoisan (Greenberg, 1963).

A COMPARATIVE READING OF NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O’S AND BINYAVANGA WAINAINA’S MEMOIRS - Susanne Gehrmann

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The publication of three volumes of memoirs by of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o between 2010 and 2016: Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter and Birth of a Dream Weaver, has been a major literary event for Kenyan and Eastern African literature. In his seventies, Ngũgĩ joins other postcolonial authors of the first and second generations who have preceded him, in publishing an autobiographical serial on childhood, identity formation and the issue of becoming a writer in colonial contexts and on the verge of formal decolonization. As representative of the Kwani generation of Kenyan writers, Binyavanga Wainaina, aged only 40, offers an early autobiographical text, One Day I will write about this Place in 2011, followed by its lost chapter “I am a homosexual, mum” in 2014. His was a major literary event, too. In my paper, I propose to examine the continuities and ruptures in life writing, and how the thematic, stylistic and ideological choices of Ngũgĩ’s and Wainaina, who are both widely read global authors of the present, differ. As I go along the lines of language, class and Bildung; collective trauma and individual depression, the relation to the nation, pan-Africanist and hybrid culture as well as the issue of becoming a writer, I question whether Wainaina’s narrative should still be termed postcolonial life writing in the same sense as Ngũgĩ’s. By observing that in many ways, Wainaina’s text moves away from Ngugi’s classical postcolonial stance, I argue that he inaugurates what we can – by lack of a better term for now – momentarily name a post- postcolonial autobiography.

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

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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.

The PROBLEMS OF KENYAN FEMALE YOUTH IN THE NOVELS OF MORAA GITAA-Alina Rinkanya

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Moraa Gitaa is one of the most prolific and well-known Kenyan women authors of the new generation. Born and raised in Mombasa, she has worked for more than 15 years with various organizations, among them the British Council, Aga Khan Foundation and PEN Kenya Centre.
Gitaa won First Prize in the National Book Development Council of Kenya Adult Fiction literary award in 2008, was nominated for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing, and was one of the Kenya Chapter winners of the 2014 Burt Award for African Literature.
In her fictional works, which include four novels, a number of stories and a secondary school reader, she manages to treat a wide range of issues topical for modern Kenyan society, and especially for the younger generation, focusing on the challenges that haunt young females.
Among the problems treated in her works are drug addiction, human trafficking, sexual abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, gender discrimination, inter-generational and ethnic tensions, economic marginalization, HIV and AIDS, corruption and transnational crime. All these concerns are tackled by the author in the setting of her native Coastal province, – but the setting is also symbolically used as a microcosm for the whole country. The paper analyses the four novels of Gitaa - Crucible for Silver and Furnace for Gold (2008), Shifting Sands (2012),
Hila (2014) and Shark Attack (2017). The paper concludes that Gitaa’s works are notable not only as an example of social criticism in literature, but also as inspirational texts for young readers.

DEPICTION OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION IN KENYAN SWAHILI WOMEN’S PROSE IN THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY -Mikhail Gromov

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The article analyzes how the problems of Kenyan younger generation are depicted in the recently emerged women’s literature in Swahili, giving an overview of both larger prosaic
genres, such as novel, and shorter prose, which is currently favored by the majority of Kenyan women authors of Swahili expression. Using the works of both well-established and aspiring
writers, the article shows how they outline the host of problems facing the young Kenyans – such as the abuse of the girl child’s rights, drug addiction, adolescent crime, etc. – thus sensitizing
their readers, especially younger ones, to these social ills, and proposing certain ways to mitigate them.

THE EASTERN AFRICA AND THE CARIBBEAN SPACE AND IDENTITIES: RETHINKING THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN THE CARIBBEAN-Julias Kanyari

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Studies on African presence in Caribbean amplify the centrality of West African literature and history on the formation of the political, social, cultural and religious identities in the Caribbean. However, literary studies tracing the Caribbean-Africa connection have been conducted in West Africa. Although West Africa plays a major role in the formation of the Caribbean consciousness, this approach has led to a misrepresentation of facts about the contribution of other African regions towards the formation of the contemporary Caribbean space and identities. Tentatively, such literary studies are based on the assumption that the African presence in the Caribbean has everything to do with slavery; hence the connection between Africa and Caribbean is premised on slavery. This paper posits that the creation of the Caribbean social, cultural and religious realities is a continuous process that outlived the abolition of slave trade and slavery both in the Caribbean and Africa. Consequently, the study amplifies the role of Ethiopia in the formation of the Rastafarian Movement in Caribbean literature, the influence of the Mau Mau Uprising on Caribbean literature, and the significance of Edward Brathwaite adopting an African name. Ultimately, the paper argues that the Eastern Africa is a major influence in the formation of the contemporary Caribbean consciousness.

IMMIGRANT POETRY BY MARJORIE MACGOYE AND STEPHEN PARTINGTON - Natalia Frolova

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The poetry of Kenyan writers Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye and Stephen Derwent Partington
cannot be called typical for East African literature. Both Macgoye and Partington are ethnic
British, who, each at own time, moved to Kenya and devoted themselves to literature. Their
verses depict a sincere love for the land, which has become their home, pain for the hardships of Africans, an interpretation of African reality through the eyes of a European. The paper
compares two views of British-born Kenyan poets, to the life and people of Kenya, and two kinds of attitudes to the portrait of Europeans through the prism of their own experience.
Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (1928-2015), English-born writer, author of famous “Song of Nyarloka” (1977) has earned the nickname "mother of Kenyan literature." Macgoye's poetic
work is imbued with pain and compassion for the Kenyan people, who became her family – she proudly calls herself a Kenyan writer. Macgoye mourns any tormented, absurdly killed or
unfairly treated human being, whether it is little girl Atieno who has to work instead of going to school, or children stampeded during the visit of President Jomo Kenyatta, or slum dwellers
whose homes were knocked down by the order of the Nairobi authorities. Despite the frequent sad mood of Macgoy's poetry, it is worth noting the main positive component of her poems – a
sincere love for Kenya, admiration for Africa, black people, original African nature, diverse cultures. Finally her immigrant view at Africa looks paternalistic and missionary in a whole.
The representative of English-language Kenyan poetry of the 2000s, British-born Stephen Partington in his verses demonstrates an ironic attitude to the reality; suffering and pain are not
in the focus of his attention, especially in poems on racial relationships. His irony often touches his non-African origin, a misunderstanding of things that are obvious to the indigenous people of
Kenya.
The poetry of both authors is a brilliant example of how the interaction of cultures among the European intelligentsia, who immigrated to Africa, forms a request for literary expression in the
context of integration into a foreign cultural society. On the other hand, we see how the attitude towards the topic of Africa and African people transforms historically. The very landscape of
problems changes from decolonization of consciousness in the McGoy’s poetry and its obvious paternalistic notes to Partington’s another modernistic «agenda».

TRANSPARENT NARRATIVES: A CRITIQUE OF STYLE OF THEATRE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN KENYA Wambua Kawive

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Literary genres and intra-genre typologies have particular stylistic features that define them.
Theatre for social justice bespeaks of a theatre programmed to achieve certain goals. We hypothesise that its special purpose has a bearing on the style it employs to accentuate its intent and affects its artistic merit. We will analyse Wakanyote Njuguna’s Before the Storm, Kithaka Wa Mberia’s Maua Kwenye Jua la Asubuhi and Kivutha Kibwana’s Kanzala and interrogate their unique stylistic endowments and performative peculiarities. We investigate whether these texts of theatre for social justice have infractions, what their nature is and what linguistic and extralinguistic forms have been infused in the theatre to advance its purpose and appraise the impact these have on the theatre.

INTERPRETING EAST AFRICAN SOCIAL VISION THROUGH DRAMATIC TRIPARTITE PSYCHE - Joseph Muleka

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Uzoma Esonwanne, in the article “The ‘Crisis of the Soul’: Psychoanalysis and African Literature,” argues that psychoanalysis and African literature have long maintained a studious,
if not wary, distance from each other (140). The interpretation of this is that psychoanalysis as a theoretical approach does not, or cannot apply to African literature; a claim which – in the view
of this paper – can only be the consequence of a misreading of African literary works, whether deliberate or not. Of course, many literary works by African writers can be subjected to a
psychoanalytic determination. The aim of this paper is to disabuse Esonwanne’s claim by demonstrating that, and how, in fact psychoanalytic approach is core and inescapable in the full
understanding of the motivation of some of the actions by a majority of the characters in African literary works. We are bound to turn to psychoanalysis as we attempt to unearth the social vision
that the characters represent and, in particular, what drives them. The paper carries out this task using selected works by some of the leading East African playwrights; namely Imbuga and
Ruganda, as a case study. The paper endeavours to apply the psychoanalytic “tripartite psyche” to interrogate four of some of the most prevalent concerns of East African drama, namely: abuse
of power, amassing wealth, social injustice and sycophancy cum betrayal. Through the application of the tripartite psyche, the paper discusses the four identified vices, arguing that
indeed these are part of the motivators for the rampant destructive instincts witnessed in the works, including murder, corruption, incarceration of perceived dissidents, clinging to power
and ethnic cleansing, among others. The paper relies on textual analysis, employing qualitative descriptive and comparative research designs.

SYMBOLISING ORATURE, HEROISM AND GENDER RELATIONS IN OKOITI OMTATAH’S LWANDA MAGERE Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong

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Folklore in most African contexts conveys age-old traditions, societal values, and the history of communities. It also communicates the state of social interactions, particularly those associated with formations of gender. Besides its historical content, legends for instance hold community together. Orature in drama, therefore, employs symbolic codes and sign systems, through which processes of signification and communication contribute to the dramatic logic. This paper will first of all explore a Luo legend that captures the heroic achievements of Lwanda Magere in Okoiti Omatatah’s eponymous play. Focusing on the character of Lwanda Magere, perceived as ambiguous, the paper investigates the notion of duality in order to portray how traditional systems contest heroism and disparages womanhood. Equally projecting masculinity as nuanced, the paper interrogates how Lwanda Magere mediates cultural norms and societal expectation. Embedded in the said codes and systems, my analysis will help clarify how the materiality of folklore, character, and linguistic units could possibly affect the functioning of, supposedly, grounded traditional institutions. Finally, discussing how relevant Omatatah’s drama is to postcolonial African drama as a whole, the semiotisation processes will offer new meanings to what Isaiah U. Ilo calls a “post indiginist” (2013) understanding of modern African drama in a postcolonial context.

SPOKEN WORD POETRY IN KENYA: AN EMERGING GENRE OF ORAL LITERATURE IN SOCIAL MEDIA SPACES - Beatrice Ekesa

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Spoken word poetry is an emerging genre of oral poetry in Kenya. This genre is a demonstration of the transition that has taken place in the field of performance poetry. Spoken word poetry began from the theatrical spaces, moved to print media, and now we are experiencing it in the virtual spaces due to its adaptation to the technological advancement in society today. Social media networks like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, have been instrumental in
popularizing spoken word poetry. This genre started with real theatrical performances in various platforms in Kenya but has since occupied the social media as an alternative space for their performances. These new spaces have seen the rise of many poets in this genre due to the availability of a ready audience, as well as the ease in which poets have when sharing their poems with the virtual audience. The social media saves these poets the financial burden that
comes with publishing a book, or the complexity of getting a media house to air their performances. This paper seeks to draw connections between theatrical performances of the traditional oral poetry and the virtual performances of the contemporary oral poetry, particularly spoken word poetry. The study evaluates ways in which the social media is
transforming the performance of oral poetry by offering an alternative space for the performance of spoken word poetry in Kenya.

Power Performance in the Digital Space - An Analysis of Kenyan Online Comedy - Miriam Musonye

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The widespread global usage of various social media platforms has had a significant impact on life in general. This form of social interaction has also impacted significantly on the field of
artistic creativity in terms of production, performance, circulation and engagement with artistic material. One key way in which digitization has impacted on life is that it has availed platforms
for young users of digital technology to express their creativity in a manner that was largely not possible in the past. In Kenya, and in other countries as well, one observes that young people are
now creating careers out of short performances on social media platforms such as Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram. In this context, my paper focuses on two separate comedy texts, namely
Flaqo Raz aka flaqo411 and The Mama Njeri Show that debut the moniker Plesident Kingston.
These two are performed by two Kenyan young people and circulated on Instagram and Youtube. The two comedies are set in family contexts and they mainly parody parent-youth
relationships. My main focus of analysis is the portrayal of the parent figure in these texts against the portrayal of the same in traditional oral narratives and in newer but non-digital
forms such as Mchongoano. This will be geared towards attempting to see how current popular Kenyan literature looks in relation to its variants of earlier times. Further to this, the paper
hopes to investigate the question of power contest in artistic and digital spaces.