modes of presentation in kenyan literature

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International Journal of English and Literature Representations of Kenyan history in oral literature: 1948-2002

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Amitayu Chakraborty

Timothy Hattoh-Ahiaduvor

Aformeziem Brendal

This study explores the forms of the prose without reference to biographical or sociological factors. This study educates its readers how to effectively use the formalist criticism in analysis of any literary work of art.

African Studies. To cite this article: Lotte Hughes (2011): ‘Truth be Told’: Some Problems with Historical Revisionism in Kenya, African Studies, 70:2, 182-201 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2011.594626

Lotte Hughes

Historical revisionism is equally appealing to state and non-state actors during periods of intense socio-political change, especially following civil conflict, when the need for unification is paramount. This applies to Kenya as it struggles to come to terms with the post-electoral crisis of 2007/08. The need to redress state-orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau and the struggle for independence is also important; encouraged by first president Jomo Kenyatta, ostensibly in the interests of national unity, the trend was continued by his successor. Since Mau Mau was unbanned in 2003, and a lawsuit was brought by veterans with the support of a human rights group against the British government in 2009, there has been an upsurge in public memorialisation and debate about the liberation movement in Kenya. This has been accompanied by increasing calls for ‘true’ history to be written.1 Veterans have persuaded the state to support a project on rewriting Kenya history, which links to efforts to commemorate heroes and broaden official definitions of heroism to include a wide range of ethnic communities and rebel leaders from different periods of anti-colonial resistance. These themes are reflected in two new history exhibitions developed by National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and in the local media, which has done more to popularise these histories and commemorative initiatives than any scholarly texts. This article draws on research interviews and the literature on resistance, social memory and patriotic nationalism to problematise and analyse these developments, within the context of constitutional change.

African Studies

(This replaces what was previously uploaded next to the article Truth be Told (2011)) Historical revisionism is equally appealing to state and non-state actors during periods of socio-political change, especially following civil conflict, when the need for unification is paramount. This applies to Kenya as it struggles to come to terms with the post-electoral crisis of 2007/8. The need to redress state-orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau and the struggle for independence is also important; encouraged by first president Jomo Kenyatta, ostensibly in the interests of national unity, the trend was continued by his successor. Since Mau Mau was unbanned in 2003, and a lawsuit was brought by veterans with the support of a human rights group against the British government in 2009, there has been an upsurge in public memorialisation and debate about the liberation movement in Kenya. This has been accompanied by increasing calls for 'true' history to be written. Veterans have persuaded the state to support a project on rewriting Kenyan history, which links to efforts to commemorate heroes and broaden official definitions of heroism to include a wide range of ethnic communities and rebel leaders from different periods of anti-colonial resistance. These themes are reflected in two new history exhibitions developed by National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and in the local media, which has done more to popularise these histories and commemorative initiatives than any scholarly texts. This article draws on research interviews and the literature on resistance, social memory and patriotic nationalism to problematise and analyse these developments, within the context of constitutional change.

Wanja Kimani

Several initiatives from artists’ collectives seek to empower and engage the new generation of young Kenyans as a way of overcoming ethnic divisions and tribalism (a legacy of British colonial rule). Art forms include but are not limited to exhibits of art and photography, theater, and poetry.

Duncan Omanga

The Anvil was a student newspaper at the University of Nairobi launched in the mid-1970s after its predecessor The Platform was shut down and its editors suspended from the university. Initially designed to be less militant, The Anvil forged a quasi-Marxist identity at a time of both widespread post-colonial disillusionment in Kenya and a largely conformist ‘patriotic’ press. In this context, the paper shows how ‘Marx’ became a symbol through which The Anvil, arguably the most fearless publication of its time, summoned a politicized ‘student’ public by offering alternative imaginaries of the nation. Drawing from literature on nationalism, publics and ideas from media theory, the paper shows how this socialist lens was routinely used to interpret both local and off-shore events as a tool for proximate political agency by drawing on black cosmopolitanisms, anti-colonial sentiment and Cold War politics.

Aaron L. Rosenberg

One of the most remarkable phenomena within Kenyan verbal art is its tendency to cross generic boundaries and to affect the syncretic combination of elements from various forms of expression This type of artistic creativity, maintaining as it does early roots in Kenyan verbal expression, raises a variety of salient questions. What devices or methods do these artists use to blend genres? How should scholars accustomed to working within the confines of the story, the poem, or the novel analyze these verbal blends? Where does one situate these new hybrid forms in the larger context of Kenyan and African literature today? Answers to these questions may be found in an examination of two texts one of which is, in fact, derived from the other. They are Parselelo Kantai’s short story “Comrade Lema and the Black Jerusalem Boys’ Band” (2005) and the song “Joka” (2006) by the popular singer/musician Eric Wainaina. Kantai’s narrative of the life of an imaginary Kenyan musician contains a written version of the lyrics of a song which Wainaina has transformed into song These texts do not represent a new phenomenon. For example, taarab as an East African musical form has a long-standing tradition of poets composing for bands or particular singers. Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Okoiti Omtatah have also used oral narratives as sources of inspiration and elucidation in their texts. But the particular brand of syncretism demonstrated by Kantai and Wainaina’s works underscores the importance of reframing the notion of intertextuality as a process which is profoundly transformative rather than simply accretive. They also challenge us to accept popular song as an expressive tool closely linked to literary forms of verbal expression.

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Introduction: Kenyan and Ugandan (Women’s) Literature

The Trouble with Modernity

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• Marie Kruger  

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F or nearly a decade, writers’ collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and FEMRITE, the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. This dramatic shift is evident in the success with which Ugandan women’s groups have collaborated with local publishing houses to steadily increase the literary presence of female authors, or in the efforts of Kwani ? magazine to promote the work of Kenyan scholars and writers, journalists and visual artists in an innovative print format. Though some of the women writers have been honored with prestigious literary awards, their works have not received sustained critical attention. 1 This book provides the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers and their nuanced narrative representations so urgently deserve. I demonstrate throughout my work that Anglophone Kenyan and Ugandan women’s writing constitutes a vital, yet often overlooked, part of the cultural and creative exchanges in Eastern Africa, and that it continually extends its focus to include the larger historical and political events in the African Great Lakes region (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and Eastern Congo). 2 As new literary networks operate across national spaces and freely exploit the digitized modes of global communication, the works of their writers revisit and significantly expand the recurrent concern with modern institutions, subjectivities, and sexualities in East African writing.

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In addition to In Their Own Words , edited by Violet Barungi, see also the interviews with Monica Arac de Nyeko (31 Jul. 2007).

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See Kahora, “Editorial,” Kwani? 5.1 (2008): 10.

Kahora, “Editorial,” Kwani ? 5.1 (2008): 12.

Kahora, “Editorial,” Kwani ? 5.2 (2008): 9–10.

Kahora, “Editorial,” Kwani? 5.1 (2008): 12.

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© 2011 Marie Kruger

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Kruger, M. (2011). Introduction: Kenyan and Ugandan (Women’s) Literature. In: Women’s Literature in Kenya and Uganda. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116412_1

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Moi University conference reviews Kenyan literature since Independence

Last month, I travelled to Eldoret, Kenya to attend a conference hosted by the Department of Literature, Theatre and Film Studies at Moi University. The theme of the conference was Literature and the Production of Knowledge in Kenya, 1963 - 2013 .

The purpose of the conference was to explore cultural activity and knowledge production in Kenya over the first 50 years of independence (1963-2013), a period that has been characterised by state failure and false starts towards democratisation. The conference was part of a series of events taking place in Kenyan universities, research institutions and diverse spheres of public life throughout 2013 to commemorate 50 years of independence and to take stock of research, publishing, politics, cultural production and other areas of Kenya's public life over this period.

About 70 people attended the conference, which took place at the Sirikwa Hotel, some having travelled from other countries in Africa, mainly South Africa. About 40 papers were presented to an audience of faculty and students of Moi University and other universities around Eldoret.

The conference offered an opportunity to reflect on the value, status and future of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Kenya in the context of an intense administrative purge that was particularly strongly felt at the height of political repression in Kenya up to the late 1990s. Based on the perception of the Humanities as a haven for dissent, this clampdown has arguably succeeded in undermining the merits of the Humanities in Kenyan public opinion.

A good part of the discussions also took stock of the current global debates on the value of the Humanities and the crisis caused by austerity programmes and reduced funding due to the current global financial crisis. This also offered insight into the marginalization and severe underfunding of the Humanities in Kenya.

Many of the papers focused on research and consumption of literature, theatre, popular culture, new media art, and multi-disciplinary research in the Humanities in Kenya, and knowledge production in these areas since independence. A few focused on areas such as digital technologies, social life and education, as well as digital literacy skills and research. Many of the presentations and discussions focused on the volatile political atmosphere in Kenya over the last 50 years culminating in the 2008 post-election ethnic violence and its economic consequences, which coincided with the wider 2008 global financial crisis. The austerity programmes put in place to manage the crisis only placed the Humanities under more profound siege.

Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor of Moi University, Prof Anne Nangulu, who opened the conference, also made her own presentation in which she reviewed the post-independence history of research and the impediments to research and publishing in Kenya.

This issue was also the focus of one of the keynote presentations by Tom Odhiambo of the University of Nairobi who dwelt on the contemporary lack of enthusiasm in publishing in the Humanities, especially in Literature, as the lingering consequence of the political repression of the 1970s - 1990s, which successfully intimidated publishers into giving a wide berth to publishing in Literature and Humanities, and the tertiary sector generally.

The hostility of the era coupled with the shift of focus in the Kenyan publishing industry to school textbooks severely undermined knowledge production and consumption in Kenya. One of the consequences is that most visible research and publication in the Humanities in Kenya is still done outside of the country. One of the matters agreed upon was redeployment of new energies into publication starting with the publication of papers from the conference.

There was a particularly enthusiastic response to presentations by postgraduate students at advanced stages of their research.

With issues of ethnicity taking up a large share of public life discourses in Kenya, many of the papers focused on the issue of ethnicity. Some focused on the 2008 post-election ethnic violence, particularly the specific modes of mutilation of bodies of victims on the basis of their ethnicity to suggest ways of reading the bodies as texts of Kenyan history. One paper used the work of performance theorists to understand the paradox of a number of Kenyans choosing to regularise the ethnic stereotypes against their communities through public service taxi stickers.

The central focus of the conference was around the archive. A number of papers scrutinised attempts by the post-independence administration to regulate national histories and diverse modes of public resistance. Others brought out archival issues, which are central to cutting edge research in countries like South Africa, but which have not yet captured scholarly imagination in Kenya.

My paper focused on knowledge production at the local level and new ways of mediating local histories. I present ways in which a local historian earns for himself the social position of an intellectual in a peasant society by influencing the process of production and consumption of community histories by reconstructing those histories to silence discourses that sideline him and his clan.

One keynote presentation by Dan Ojwang from the University of the Witwatersrand highlighted the issue of the unacknowledged role of missionaries in research and the writing of local community histories initially for use in local mission schools. In the wake of urban migration for the purpose of selling labour notions of fixed community territories became impossible because the migrants found themselves having to live outside ancestral spaces. Such radical transformations during the colonial era defined new and unintended roles for texts of missionary anthropology because these texts became a reference points for the new African urban dwellers who were anxious to instill in their offspring specific notions of peoplehood.

The paper pointed out the paradox of missionary ethnography forming the basis of postcolonial modes of ethnic belonging. Whereas such missionary anthropology is largely sidelined it is often the only record of numerous histories, which are no longer a part of everyday memory and have no place in school syllabuses. The focus of the paper reminded me of current research into the work of such missionaries such as Carl Hoffmann who worked among the Sotho and similarly produced a vast body of documents.

The paper pointed at the bigger issue surrounding the archives of Kenyan pasts, which are yet to be explored and which demand attention as the country enters the next 50 post-independence years. In this respect, there is a lot to emulate from on-going research in South Africa. 

Analysis of three novels as representative models of Kenyan Literature’s suitability for filmic adaptation

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In the multi-media creative space, a close relationship exists between literature and film. Writers and film creators employ their unique skills to make their audience visualize: the former mentally, the latter through audio-visual senses. The distinction between the two media types lies in the perception of the visual image and concept of the mental image, which informs the adaptation of prose fiction, particularly novels. Global and regional level film producers adapt literary works into film, yet in the Kenyan context, a creative disconnect exists between literary works and their film adaptations. Generationally popular Kenyan literary texts are deficiently adapted into Kenyan film. The study evaluated three novels, namely The River and The Source, Striving for the Wind and Dust as representative models of Kenyan Literature’s suitability for adaptation. It was guided by the Reader Response Theory, Intertextuality and Adaptation Theory. In view of the qualitative and quantitative nature of the study, a mixed methods research design was employed. The study drew its primary data from Jicho Four Productions’ adaptations of Ogola’s The River and the Source, close reading of Ogola’s The River and the Source, Mwangi’s Striving for the Wind, and Owour’s Dust, alongside semi-structured interviews of fourteen persons purposively sampled from across literature and film industries, utilizing mixed questionnaires. The study finds that Kenyan Literature and Kenyan Film as solid creative pillars exist individually, without a bridge to substantitively link them and their audiences. This research is significant as it gives insights to the barriers to adaptations of Kenyan Literature into film, untapped potential of adaptations, internal and external standard-based yardsticks influencing adaptations, and provides a structured outline of stumbling blocks and potential remedies to enable film adaptations of Kenyan Literature to be at par with regional and global counterparts.

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How to Cite

• Endnote/Zotero/Mendeley (RIS)

Axe, J. Q. (2016). Issues and Challenges of Adapting a Creative Work. Retrieved March 29, 2023 from Sycamore Scholars: http://hdl.handle.net/10484/12133

Ebert, R. (2011, August 17). Mistah Kurtz, he out of gas. Retrieved from Roger Ebert: www.rogerebert.com/reviews/viva-riva-2011

Hauge, M. (2014, September 22). The Five Key Elements to a Successful Adaptation. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from Story Mastery: https://storymastery.com/articles-by-industry/articles-for-screenwriters/books-movies/

Literary Devices (2023, January 1). Characterization. Retrieved from Literarydevices.net: https://literarydevices.net/characterization/#

McGowan, D. (Producer) (1979). The Littlest Hobo. CTV.

Mwangi, M. (1990). Striving for the Wind. East African Educational Publishers.

Nairobian Reporter (2017, Sept. 21). Margaret Ogola: The writer who became a doctor. The Standard. Retrieved from https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/entertainment/news/article/2001255178/margaret-ogola-the-writer-who-became-a-doctor

Nashville Film Institute. (2023, January 1). How Long Does It Take to Make A Movie? Everything You Need To Know. Retrieved July 1, 2023, from Nashville film Institute: www.nfl.edu/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-a-movie/

Ogola, M. A. (1994). The river and the source. Nairobi: Focus Books.

Ogola, M. A. (2002). I Swear by Apollo. Focus Publishers.

Ogola, M. A. (2005). Place of destiny. Paulines Publications Africa.

Ogola, M. A. (2012). Mandate of the People. Focus Publishers.

Ogola, M. A., & Roche, M. (1999). Cardinal Otunga: a gift of grace (Vol. 3). Paulines Publications Africa.

Owuor, Y. A. (2014). Dust. Granta Books.

Owuor, Y. A. (2019). The dragonfly sea: A novel. Vintage.

Sembene, O. (1975). Xala [Film]. New Yorker Films.

Shelley, M. (2012). Frankenstein. Broadview Press.

Sinclair, J. (Writer). (1986). Shaka Zulu [TV Series]. SABC.

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