Title: East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Traditions
Co-editors: Egara Kabaji, Dominica Dipio and J.K.S Makokha
Publisher: Logos (Berlin, 2011)
Volume: 510 pages
Fostering the literary integration of East Africa
As renewing of the economic, political and social integration of East Africa progresses steadily, the region’s distinguished literati are also rising to the occasion, so to speak.
With this collaborative book, East African Literature: Essays on Written and Oral Traditions, the various contributors seek to “participate in the on-going process of cultural reawakening in East Africa”, among other things.
Unlike previously when the East African Community (EAC) comprised of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, the literati are obviously aware that East Africa is wider and broader than that.
Seasoned and younger literary critics and works from Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Southern Sudan, many of whom are either based in their home Universities and others abroad temporarily and permanently, took part or are featured.
“This collaborative book brings to the intellectual world of literary studies fresh reflections, perspectives and criticism on contemporary East African literature and orature.” It’s well known that East Africans have more similarities, like Swahili being the growing regional lingua franca, than differences.
This extends to societal issues such as the traditional subjugation and subordination of women, which is discussed a great deal in this volume, as captured by the various representative writers and artists’ works.
“The structure of this book moves from the general to the particular while capturing generic aspects of contemporary East African literature by way of a number of genres and examples.”
From the view of body as text (“the unsaid”), to the form, style, content (theme and context), the esteemed literary scholars and critics unravel the information communicated by the suitable/selected literary works.
The book commendably encompasses all genres with “focus on current stylistic trends, narratological issues and thematic concerns.” For their profoundly informative essays, the academics insightfully draw from established and emergent writers, poets, dramatists, and musicians in the region.
In her essay, for instance, Dr Dominica Dipio, head of the Literature department at Makerere University, uses Julius Ocwinyo’s Footprints of the Outside and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting to examine the fictional rendition of Uganda’s troubled history.
However, the image of women in art seems to attract more thematic concern, with most works and essays across the region analyzing the same issue. For example, Jairus Omuteche and Lenox Odiemo-Munara argue in their essays that unlike many other works in the region, Margret Ogola’s Place of Destiny and Elieshi Lema’s Parched Earth: A Love Story, from Kenya and Tanzania respectively, attempt to portray women and their struggle in a positive light.
Language is taken as taken as a tool for advancing male dominance in society. Beth Mutugu, in her feminist perspective on several Swahili novels by the late popular Tanzanian novelist Ben Rashid Mtombwa, sees English and Swahili (the dominant African literary language, beside Amharic in Ethiopia) as inherently sexist; “the two languages are systems that embody sexual inequality.”
Sexual inequality and discourse is also apparent in the form and style of a variety of oral poetry such as among the Borana in northern Kenya, and vernacular literary traditions across the region, like in the Nyatiti musical performance of the Luo community.
But in Clara Momanyi’s essay on a popular Kiswahili play, Mama Ee, by Kenyan Feminist writer Katini Mwachofi, she raises concern about the “need to critique African literary works composed in Africa by African writers through the use of African feminism.”
Other crucial issues tackled in this broad literary critique include the “alive and kicking” style of the Kenyan novels with Swahili code-switching, criticism of the political establishments, the HIV-AIDS scourge, style in children literature, and the transitional art of Somali drama “representing the experience of a society in a testing period of change.”
This illuminatingly brilliant literary collaboration on East African Literature comes on the heels of other remarkable initiatives and works such as James Ogude and Joyce Nyairo’s Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa, Performing Community: Essays on Ugandan Oral Culture also edited by Dominica Dipio, Lene Johannessen and Stuart Sillars, Kwani?, among others. The book can meanwhile currently be purchased from Amazon.com, and will soon be available in accessible bookstores in East Africa.
Last but not least among all, the book’s editors are esteemed academicians worth applauding. J. K. S. Makokha teaches courses on African, Caribbean and South Asian literature in the Institute for English Philology, Free University of Berlin; Professor Egara Kabaji is the Director of Public Communication and Publishing, and a Professor of Literature, at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology; and Professor Dominica Dipio is current head of Literature Department in Makerere University.
Higenyi is a Freelance Writer/Reviewer
Email: higenyihassan@yahoo.com or
hassanhigenyi@gmail.com