SOURCE: DeLombard, Jeannine. English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World, Radhika Mohanram and Gita Rajan, pp. 63-76. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, DeLombard uses the writing and critical career of Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o as a representative example of postcoloniality and its relationship to the development of East African literature.]

Addressing the topic of postcoloniality and its relationship to East African literature, one immediately faces a dilemma. Such a discussion must acknowledge in some depth the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o—East Africa's most celebrated author and one of the continent's most outspoken and controversial critics of neo-colonialism and cultural imperialism—without ignoring or slighting the work of other, lesser known but equally important authors from Ngugi's own Kenya, as well as neighboring Tanzania and Uganda. This essay will seek to resolve this dilemma by demonstrating how a crucial period in Ngugi's career as a writer and cultural critic encapsulates some of the major issues faced by other East African writers in the postcolonial era.¹

In 1977, fourteen years after Kenya had achieved independence² and made English its official language, Ngugi wa Thiong'o was detained without trial for a year as a result of his participation in a community theater project, a production of Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), the Gikuyu-language play he coauthored with Ngugi wa Mirii and the members of the Kamiriithu Education and Cultural Centre. Although this work is less critical of the hypocrisy, corruption and brutality of postcolonial Kenya than Ngugi's previous English-language novels, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, Ngugi was not only detained for his role in this allegedly subversive project, but also lost his post as the chairman of the University of Nairobi's Literature Department (which he helped to found). Ngugi's involvement in a second Gikuyu play, Maitu Njugira (Mother Sing for Me), in late 1981 led to the destruction of the Kamiriithu Centre, the prohibition of drama and theater activities in Kamiriithu, and, eventually, to Ngugi's exile from Kenya. In this same time period, during and immediately after his 1978 imprisonment, Ngugi authored two books, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary and Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross). The former is an autobiographical meditation on Kenyan history, while the latter, according to its author, “was the first novel of its kind in scope and size in the Gikuyu language” (Decolonising 63), a sign of Ngugi's growing commitment to writing in African languages.

Although Ngugi's detention, his work with the Kamiriithu Centre, and his decision to write in Gikuyu have attracted a great deal of international attention, he would be the first to acknowledge that his experiences are anything but unique in East Africa. Ngugi is not the only, or even the first East African writer to stress the importance of writing in African languages. Nor is he the only East African intellectual to collaborate with everyday people in a popular theater project. Nor, unfortunately, is he the only East African author to be imprisoned, censored, or driven into exile for his writing.

This essay will use Ngugi's experiences in 1977-78 as a point of departure from which to examine three issues that have dominated postcolonial East African language: the language debate, the role of popular literature, and the emergence of testimonial literature in response to government repression.

LANGUAGE

Since 1981, when Ngugi bade a formal “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writings” in Decolonising the Mind (xiv), the language issue has dominated the critical discourse on African literature, with intellectuals like Abiola Irele defending and expanding Ngugi's position and others, like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Lewis Nkosi, challenging the efficacy, relevance, and political expediency of writing literature in African languages.³ Still, the basic tenets of Ngugi's argument, as outlined in Decolonising the Mind and Moving the Centre, remain compelling: that, by writing in English, French or Portuguese, African authors enrich these languages and cultures at the cost of impoverishing or even endangering their own; that European languages are not only inadequate for expressing African concerns and experiences, but also carry with them the ideological baggage of slavery and colonialism; and that Europhone African literature automatically excludes the majority of African people from its audience.

Although Ngugi successfully has brought the language debate into the global spotlight, he is by no means the first to raise the issue. In a 1963 article, “The Dead End of African Literature,” Obiajunwa Wali anticipated Ngugi by arguing that authentic African literature must be written in African languages, sparking a continent-wide debate over the issue (cited in Westley 171). That such a statement should have appeared in Transition, an East African literary journal based in newly independent Uganda, was more than a little ironic. Uganda was, after all, the home of Makerere University, the birthplace of anglophone East African literature (Bakari and Mazrui 876).

Uganda was also the adopted home of Sudanese writer Okot p'Bitek, the acclaimed Acholi author/poet. Okot struggled with the question of language throughout his career. Okot's lyrical Wer pa Lawino, the lament of a traditional Acholi woman about her politician husband's corrupt, Westernized ways, was an immediate critical success when the author's English translation was published as Song of Lawino in 1966. The Acholi original was not published until 1969. But as Ugandan cultural critic and author Taban lo Liyong has observed, “Okot did not translate Wer pa Lawino into Song of Lawino. He wrote two books: Wer pa Lawino (a very deep, philosophical book in Acholi; a book of morals, religion, anthropology and wisdom) and a second light book, Song of Lawino” (88). In a 1978 interview Okot himself discusses the impossibility of translating both his Acholi novel Lak Tar and the last verse (chapter 14) of Song of Lawino into English (Nichols 244-45). Okot partially resolved this dilemma by publishing a volume of poetry, Horn of My Love, in which the Acholi originals appear alongside the author's English translations. Although Lak Tar was eventually published in English as White Teeth, and although Okot himself authored several works of poetry and prose in English, his experiences illustrate the complexity of the language issue. For, while Ngugi's stress on the importance of African authors' writing in African languages is supported by Okot's insistence of the inadequacy of European languages to express certain aspects of African experience, Ngugi's faith in translation as the key to a viable Afrophone literature is called into question by Okot's contention that important components of African languages (i.e., praise names) cannot be translated into Western languages.⁴

Language choice has been a highly contested issue in East African literature ever since coastal poets made the switch from Arabic to Kiswahili in their literary compositions.⁵ In the late eighteenth century Abu Bakari concluded his epic poem Utenzi wa Katirifu by stating that “his purpose had been to tell an Arabic tradition in the vernacular (Ki'ajami)” (Gerard 98).⁶ At the time, Arabic, as the language of a foreign imperialist power and world religion, was to Kiswahili as English, French, Portuguese are to it and other African languages today. That the switch from Arabic to Kiswahili was soon followed by “The Golden Age of Classical Swahili Literature” (Gerard 98) augurs well for the proposed move from a Europhone to an Afrophone African literature.

Under colonialism, East African authors not only continued to write in Kiswahili, they began writing in other African languages that had been reduced to writing by European missionaries. The government-sponsored vernacular newspaper became an important forum for this writing. The earliest, Msimulizi (Storyteller), appeared in German Tanganyika in 1888; the most significant for East African literary production was Mambo Leo (Issues of the Day), founded by the British in 1923 (Gerard 134). Just as missionaries discovered that the easiest way to reach potential African converts was through their own languages, the British colonial administration often used such vernacular publications in an attempt to win the hearts and minds of its East African subjects.

Here the case of Kenyan author Gakaara wa Wanjau bears mentioning, illustrating as it does the different political purposes vernacular literature has been made to serve. Gakaara was arrested and detained on October 20, 1952, the eve of the State of Emergency (declared by the British colonial government in an attempt to gain control of the quickly spreading insurgent Mau Mau movement).⁷ Although he was not tried nor given any reason for his arrest, Gakaara learned that he had been detained for his pro-Mau Mau and nationalist writing in Kiswahili and Gikuyu. After four years of being subjected to an intensive program of government brainwashing in what the British authorities, after World War II, called “concentration camps,” Gakaara once again began writing in Gikuyu. This time, however, he wrote anti-Mau Mau propaganda designed both to weaken his fellow prisoners' resistance and to prove his own “rehabilitation.” As well as editing a weekly camp newspaper, Atiriri! Gitugi kia Muccii (The Pillar of the Home), Gakaara also composed and directed a series of anti-Mau Mau plays and concerts to be performed by and for detainees (Gakaara 179-197). In 1961, after his release from detention and restriction, Gakaara resuscitated the publishing company he had founded before the Emergency. As Ann Bierstecker has noted in her survey of Gakaara's post-independence short fiction published in his Gikuyu language Gikuyu na Mumbi magazine, Gakaara's writing has become increasingly critical of the postcolonial Kenyan government and elite. This may explain why he was detained in 1986 “for alleged association with ‘Mwakenya’ underground movement, but was released after signing an officially prepared false ‘confession’ in which he repudiated his works, including his prize winning diary [documenting his experiences in colonial detention camps]” (Bierstecker 75).

Gakaara's colonial detention experience suggests that vernacular literature does not necessarily help to decolonize the African mind, but, in fact, may actively assist in its colonization. On the other hand, Gakaara's literary activities before and after the Emergency—and the repressive manner in which both the colonial and postcolonial Kenyan government responded to these activities—testify to vernacular literature's potential as a form of cultural resistance to imperialism.

POPULAR LITERATURE

To raise the question of language is to raise the question of audience. In East Africa, as in other areas of the continent, language unites and divides along not only ethnic, but class lines. By writing in a European language an African author automatically addresses an exclusive minority urban, educated, often elite local audience, as well as a larger, more diverse international one. Indeed, Ngugi's decision to write exclusively in Gikuyu and Kiswahili was motivated by his experiences with the Kamiriithu Centre and his desire to reach the masses of East African peasants and workers.

But does writing in an African language necessarily guarantee that one is speaking to the masses? Is vernacular literature de facto popular literature? Or is popular literature by definition an apolitical, unliterary genre—“what the unsophisticated reader has chosen for pleasure”?⁸ Which is more “popular”—a Gikuyu novel that is read in bars in exchange for beer by professional readers (and eventually banned and confiscated)⁹ or the English language romances that can be found in “the satchel of any teenage [African] girl” (Versi, “Romantic” 4)?

Since independence, a strong tradition of popular literature in the latter, “un-sophisticated” sense has developed in both English and Kiswahili in East Africa. According to Knight, Kenya in the early 1970s saw “a positive flood of literature often printed in the form of series designed to cater [to] the low-brow taste of the recently literate urban reader” (“Kenya” 909). These books, by Charles Mangua (Son of Woman, A Tail in the Mouth), Mwangi Ruheni (the What a Life series), David Maillu (Unfit for Human Consumption, The Ayah) and the more self-consciously literary Meja Mwangi (Kill Me Quick, Carcase for Hounds, and Going Down River Road), tend to have sentimental or melodramatic plots, an urban setting, stereotyped characters, and a considerable amount of slangy dialogue (Knight, “Kenya” 911). The same could probably be said of the more recent spate of Kiswahili popular literature in Tanzania, such as Ben R. Mtobwa's Pesa Zako Zinanuka (published in English as Give Me Money), Tutarudi na Roho Zetu! (published as Zero Hour) and Dar es Salaam Usiku (Dar es Salaam at Night) or Agoro Anduru's Laana ya Pesa (The Curse of Money) in Tanzania, although much work remains to be done on this genre.

Postcolonial economics and the contradictions of the international publishing business have conspired to render such indigenous adventure novels and romances relatively unpopular among East African readers, especially those in Kenya, since “imported books of the James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins type [are] often cheaper than local works of a similar nature” (Knight, “Kenya” 910). Given this, it will be interesting to see how the Heinemann Heartbeats series of English language African romances fares. So far, only one of these, Jessica Maji's The Place of Gentle Waters (which reportedly couples British colloquialisms with faulty Kiswahili), is set in East Africa (Versi, “Romantic” 7).¹⁰ Ironically, in postcolonial Kenya at least, such Western popular fiction in European languages is often more easily available, more widely read, and therefore literally more “popular” than locally produced fiction about the East African populace.

Defining East African literature as that which was written in languages understood by the majority of the people in a given community poses equally knotty problems. A case in point is the translation of Julius Caesar, by Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, which was published in 1963, the same year Obiajunwa Wali issued his call for an Afrophone African literature (Gerard 134). The translation powerfully demonstrated not only Kiswahili's suitability as a literary language, but also the newly independent government's commitment to Kiswahili as Tanzania's official language. Today, however, in the context of the language debate, Nyerere's linguistic appropriation of Shakespeare's play also highlights the distinction that some East African scholars have drawn between linguistic and formal accessibility: chances are, the translated Julius Caesar will seem no more approachable to the Kiswahili-literate masses than the original does to the majority of English speakers today. In the same vein, critics like Simon Gikandi have questioned the efficacy of Ngugi's decision to write in Gikuyu while retaining the formal properties of the nineteenth-century European novel in his fiction.¹¹

But again, Ngugi is not alone in addressing these issues. In particular, heirs to the Swahili literary tradition have had to negotiate among language choice, formal sophistication, and audience accessibility. Alain Ricard summarizes the difficulties encountered by Ebrahim Hussein, Tanzania's premier playwright:

Hussein has paid dearly for his accomplishments. … On the one hand they have fostered the impression that he is a difficult, esoteric writer who has lost contact with the socialist masses; his more recent works have created a gulf between himself and the principal audience for Kiswahili writing in Tanzania, and his resignation from his teaching post at the University of Dar es Salaam marked the culmination of his gradual shift away from the mainstream of Tanzanian society. On the other hand, his works have failed to attract the attention of foreign critics because a knowledge of Kiswahili is not sufficiently widespread among them to permit a wider appreciation of his work in the original language or to stimulate the urge to translate it.

(176-77)

Ebrahim Hussein's “predicament” is shared by postcolonial Swahili poets. A recent essay by Kenyan poet/playwright Alamin Mazrui traces the debate over the form of Swahili poetry that has been waged since independence. On one side are the “conservationists,” who favor “a prosodic norm that combines meter and rhyme in a variety of largely fixed patterns”; on the other are the “liberalists,” who are “more inclined toward free verse” (Mazrui 67).¹² Interestingly, each camp claims its poetry is authentically African, accusing the other of mimicking foreign formal conventions: the conservationists believe “the introduction of free verse into Swahili poetry constitutes yet another case of African artists capitulating to European cultural colonization,” while liberalists insist that “prosodic poetry is merely a form of Arabic cultural imperialism” (Mazrui 67, 68). Not surprisingly, each camp also insists that it is writing for “the people” and that the other addresses a privileged elite. As Mazrui points out, however “part of the … problem depends upon the kinds of audiences for which the two schools of poets are composing” (73). The “common” Swahili audience could be the coastal, ethnic Swahili who are familiar with the prosodic tradition as well as other classical conventions such as the use of Arabisms, archaisms, contractions and dialect; or it could be the masses of mainland Africans for whom Kiswahili is a second language and who are familiar with free-verse Bantu oral traditions. As Mazrui (himself a free-verse poet) concludes, however, the question of audience has become a moot point:

Ironically, what was intended to be “the common language of the people” in Swahili free verse has turned out to be as incomprehensible as the “specialized language” of classical poetry. If prosodic poetry has been accused of being a restricted dialogue within a small group of literary conservationists or “organic intellectuals,” free verse might now be regarded as having assumed the character of a specialized discourse within a small circle of “inorganic intellectuals.”

(75)

The issues raised by both the Swahili poetry debate and Ebrahim Hussein's predicament suggest that, in the East African context, questions of form are at least as pressing—and contested—as the question of language is at the international level. Such questions also complicate any notion of popular literature, for they suggest that the linguistic and cultural diversity of postcolonial East Africa precludes the possibility of writing or composing for a monolithic popular audience.

One Tanzanian playwright and novelist, Penina Muhando Mlama, has responded to the predicament of multiple audiences by “operat[ing] as an artist with two faces—one as a playwright for urban audiences and the other as an oral creator and performer for rural audiences” (“Creating” 11). In the latter capacity Mlama has discovered that “writing in the mother-tongue is not enough,” and that in order for their work to be meaningful on the local level, “African writers must extend their interest to areas outside the realm of literary creations,” and to theater in particular (“Creating” 13). Here again, formal considerations come into play. In order to be truly popular, Mlama insists, such theater must arise from indigenous “oral literary and performative forms,” rather than imported Western dramatic traditions. Mlama and other African intellectuals like Ngugi and Mlama's fellow Tanzanian playwright Amandina Lihamba have collaborated with everyday African people, many of whom are illiterate and live in rural areas, to produce a literature that is popular in its origins as well as its destination.¹³

POLITICAL REPRESSION AND TESTIMONIAL LITERATURE

After participating in a number of popular theater projects, Penina Muhando Mlama realized that their “mode of operation assured that problems related to the oppression and exploitation of women would be raised,” although the projects had not been originally formulated to do so (“Women” 44). Because they give women and other traditionally marginalized people, such as African peasants and workers, a forum in which to testify to the harsh circumstances of their lives—and, ideally, to make the first step toward changing these circumstances—these popular theater projects constitute a kind of testimonial literature.

Although testimonial literature usually takes the form of an autobiographical narrative composed by a representative marginalized person (see Beverley, “Margin” 93; Gugelberger and Kearney 4), many of the genre's constitutive characteristics resemble those of East African popular theater. Like popular theater, testimonial literature is marked by an emphasis on the collective rather than the individual, an incorporation of the oral into the written literary text, and a commitment to social change. This literature is often collaborative,¹⁴ multivocal, and documentary. Written from the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed, testimonial literature is intended to serve as a corrective to official, hegemonic versions of history (see Gugelberger and Kearney). Although scholarship on testimonal literature has tended to focus on that produced in response to the Holocaust or in postcolonial Latin America, testimonial literature based on the Mau Mau uprising has flourished in Kenya since the colonial period.¹⁵

Ugandan writer and critic Peter Nazareth has characterized Mau Mau as the “anti-colonial war and corresponding myth” that has given Kenyan literature its focus (9). Indeed, an extraordinary volume of Mau Mau-themed novels, plays, poetry and memoirs have been produced since independence.¹⁶ It would be wrong, however, to see this outpouring as “the literary exorcism of the Mau Mau experience” (Knight, “Kenya” 899). This observation is particularly erroneous with respect to the memoirs published since the mid-1960s by former freedom fighters and other Mau Mau participants. By composing and publishing their memoirs men¹⁷ like J. M. Kariuki, Gakaara wa Wanjau, Karari Njama, Gucu Gikoyo, Joram Wamweya and Koboi Muriithi (to name but a few) sought not to exorcise or forget the past—as the newly independent Kenyan government urged them to¹⁸—but, quite the contrary, to break the national silence that has been imposed on the subject of Mau Mau and to erect a literary memorial to their struggles in the absence of a physical one.¹⁹ Likewise, prison memoirs by Ngugi and Koigi wa Wamwere, as well as Abdilatif Abdalla's collection of poetry Sauti ya Dhiki (Voice of Agony, written while the author was in prison), also illustrate the continuities between what Ngugi has called “the colonial culture of fear and silence” (Detained 106) and the repressive postcolonial regimes of Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel T. Arap Moi.²⁰

The extremely repressive conditions in postcolonial Uganda under first Idi Amin then Milton Obote, and the resulting mass exodus of both Asians and intellectuals from the country (the former against their will), would seem to be fertile ground for a national testimonial literary tradition on par with that of Kenya. Indeed, one poem by Ugandan author and cultural critic Taban lo Liyong counsels the nation's youth to fight with a pen instead of a sword. Despite this, however, as George Heron has observed, “It is conspicuous that Ugandan writers in exile failed, or more probably, refrained to comment through art on their country's tragedy” (947). Perhaps, like Okot p'Bitek, they have found the experience simply too overwhelming to relate. Heron sees Okot's discussion of his experience writing Song of a Soldier as representative: “It is a very terrible book because I lost quite a lot of relatives in the Uganda coup, a lot of friends, too, and after I write a few lines, I drop it because it causes a lot of tears” (cited in Heron 947). With the passage of time—and with the passing of the kind of debilitating personal grief described by Okot—a literary tradition that testifies to the brutality of the first two decades of the postcolonial era may still emerge in Uganda.

CONCLUSION

This essay has focused on how the issues raised by Ngugi's involvement with the Kamiriithu Centre and his subsequent detention by the Kenyan authorities are representative of those faced by other East African authors in the postcolonial era. These issues—the language debate, the question of popular literature, and the impact of political repression on a nation's literature—are all manifestations of a single underlying question: What are the role and the responsibility of the author/intellectual in postcolonial East Africa? Like Ngugi, many East African authors have responded to this question by working to create a literature that is not only about everyday East African people in all their diversity, but for and, in some cases, by them. For many this has meant composing and publishing in African languages, using indigenous literary and cultural forms, and/or collaborating with collectives of (often) illiterate peasants and workers. Too often, however, these efforts are stunted or silenced by neocolonial economics or government repression.

Although Kenya, as its tradition of testimonial literature attests, is currently the most repressive of the three East African nations, the 1990s have seen Uganda and Tanzania resorting to similar measures in order to intimidate and silence dissident voices. Since February 1990 the government of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has routinely harassed, arrested and detained journalists merely for doing their job.²¹ And, although economic liberalization has led to an increase in publishing possibilities for Tanzanian writers and to the growth of an independent press, in the past few years several political dissidents have been detained, broadcast and print journalists have been harassed, and two Swahili newspapers have been banned under the 1976 Unwholesomeness Act, apparently for political rather than moral reasons (see “Voices” and Tagama). It is soon to ascertain what effect, if any, the revived East African community will have on these conditions, or on literature in general.

Ironically, the answer to some of postcolonial East African literature's dilemmas may lie in another medium, namely, film. Although almost prohibitively expensive and as susceptible to censorship as books are, film is capable of reaching wide audiences, does not require literacy, can be translated through subtitles or dubbing, and has already proven a popular medium in urban East Africa. Like theater, film lends itself easily to collaboration and collective participation. Although, since independence, West Africans have dominated this medium, the tide may be turning. Already Tanzanian Flora M'Mbungu Schelling's Swahili film Kumekucha has received international critical attention (Versi, “Africa” 10-11), and Kenyan film-maker Anne Mugai won several awards at the 1993 Pan-African Festival of Film and Television for Saikati, her fourth film (Msoka 28). But perhaps the most auspicious sign of things to come is that Ngugi wa Thiong'o—following in the footsteps of Sembene Ousmane, the acclaimed Senegalese author who effectively ceased writing in French to make films in Wolof and French—has begun to experiment with filmaking.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Knight takes a similar approach when she observes that “the history of Kenyan literature since independence can largely be summarized by reference to [Ngugi's] career” (Knight, “Kenya” 916). But while Knight focuses on thematic and aesthetic trends, my concern here is to explore how the political issues faced by Ngugi in the late 1970s and the 1980s and their subsequent effect on his literary production are representative of the experiences of other East African writers.

2. Tanzania gained its independence in 1961, Uganda in 1963.

3. The recent surge of government-sponsored ethnic violence in Kenya complicates this issue even further. See “Spectre.”

4. For further criticism of Ngugi's faith in translation and a discussion of the effect of English translation on his own work, see Gikandi, “Epistemology.”

5. It is unclear exactly when this occurred. While Gerard states that there is no “objective support” for oral traditions identifying “a warrior-poet named Liyongo Fumo who is alleged to have been active on the island of Lamu (c. 1150-1204)” (93-94), Shariff has asserted the validity of these traditions. As Shariff states, there are “a number of poems which are attributed to Fumo Liyongo … [in which he] uses Arabic and Swahilized Arabic phrases” (“Liyongo” 159). Gerard notes that “when Ibn Battuta visited Kilwa [in present-day Tanzania] … in 1332, he reported meeting with native poets, who composed lyric and epic works in Swahili” (95). Gerard himself claims that the “earliest surviving manuscript in Swahili was written for the Sultan of Pate in 1728. Composed by the author who identified himself as Mwengo bin Athumani, the poem is known as Chu cha Tambuka (“The Book of the Battle of Tabuk”) or as Utenzi wa Herekali (“The Epic of Heraklios” Gerard 96).

6. For a further discussion of ajami (vernacular literature in Arabic script) as it developed in West Africa see chapter 3 in volume 2 of European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Gerard.

7. Considerable debate surrounds the history of Mau Mau, making it difficult to define the movement in simple terms. Loosely speaking, Mau Mau was a militant grass-roots movement for “land and freedom” that was composed predominantly (but by no means exclusively) of the Agikuyu, and which had its roots in nationalist organizations like the East African Association (founded in 1919), the Young Gikuyu Association (1920), the Kikuyu Central Association (1925), and the Kenya African (Study) Union (1944; in 1947 the word “Study” was dropped). See also Barnet and Njama.

8. Victor E. Neuberg cited in Knight, “Popular Literature” 177. Gakaara wa Wanjau's serialized Gikuyu wa-Nduuta stories are of particular interest because they are both vernacular and popular, both “entertaining” and politically oriented.

9. Ngugi describes the reception of Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross) in Kenya:

   [An] example of the community's collective appropriation of the novel was the emergence of professional readers in bars. Someone would start reading the novel aloud while drinking his beer, and when the beer was finished, he would just put the novel down. And of course the other customers would have to offer him another round to get him started again.

   (Ngugi, “On Writing” 154)

   After a similar reception, Matigari, Ngugi's second Gikuyu novel, was confiscated by the police and subsequently banned in Kenya. See Ngugi, “Moving.”

10. Despite the Swahili pen name, the nationality of the author is unclear, a point which Versi, unfortunately, does not address.

11. Gikandi argues persuasively that for Ngugi “writing in Gikuyu did not constitute an epistemological break, and it did not result in the creation of a new kind of African novel. What Ngugi's linguistic conversion did accomplish, however, was significant; it brought the conventions of the European novel to the Gikuyu reader, and brought the Gikuyu language into the orbit of the global novelistic tradition” (“Ngugi” 143).

12. For an account of this debate from the conservationist perspective see Shariff, Tungo.

13. See also Mlama, Popular Theatre. Mlama notes that because “women are often the most talented practitioners of the community's traditional theater forms … [w]ithout having to acquire new skills and techniques of the mass media [as required by other development projects which tend to ignore or exclude women], they gain access to a powerful tool of communication” in such theater for development projects. Likewise, Mlama points out that “popular theater is one of the few communication media in which women are active participants. … It offers them a voice generally denied to them by radio, television, film and print media” (“Women” 45). It would be interesting to compare the impact on women of this kind of popular literature with that represented by the Heinemann Heartbeats series, which appears to be targeted at a female audience.

14. Usually, but not always, this is a collaboration between the intellectual and the so-called masses. John Beverley has warned that we should not misread testimonial literature as the coming to voice of the silenced subaltern but, rather, as “the union of a radicalized (Marxist) intelligentsia with the subaltern … a discursive space where the possibilities of such an alliance can be negotiated without too much angst about otherness or ‘othering’” (Beverley, “Through” 4). This observation would appear to obtain with respect to the East African popular theater projects in which both Ngugi and Mlama have been involved.

15. In reference to the testimonial literature of the Holocaust, see Felman and Laub; in reference to Latin America, see Jara and Vidal and Voices of the Voiceless: Latin American Testimonial Literature, the two-volume special issue of Latin American Perspectives edited by Gugelberger and Kearney; in reference to Africa see Harrow and Harlow.

16. For a partial list see Knight, “Kenya” 896-900.

17. So far, full-length firsthand accounts of female freedom fighters are lacking, although women were actively involved in every aspect of the movement. For descriptions of Mau Mau from a female perspective, see Waciuma, Muthoni and Davison.

18. In 1964, President Jomo Kenyatta informed Kenyans that “the past is … dead,” and urged, “Let … all of us commit ourselves to erase from our minds all the hatreds and difficulties of those years that now belong to history. Let us agree that we shall never refer to the past” (Slater 241).

19. In his memoir Gakaara describes how after independence

    Mau Mau fighters … subdued their agonised spirits and learned to work and live with … Government administrators and workers who had been faithful servants of British imperialism and colonialism but were now conveniently serving an African nationalist Government. … [The fighters'] aspiration for active participation in the nationalist Government, which they had been instrumental in making a reality, fell into the river of history. And national gratitude in the form of magnanimous gestures to individual Mau Mau fighters or in the form of memorials to the movement was quite absent, for such gestures had few champions and many detractors

    (211).

    Twenty-five years earlier, J. M. Kariuki prophetically concluded his memoirs: “The future historian of these times may well find it difficult to get our side of the story. … May this book and our new state be a small part of [the freedom fighters'] memorial” (182).

20. See “Culture of Fear and Silence.” An important but little-known popular prison memoir, Michael Karanja Ngugi's Miaka 52 Jela (Fifty-Two Years in Jail), the autobiography of a common criminal who spent most of his life in colonial and postcolonial prisons, also illustrates, from the perspective of one of Kenya's dispossessed, this continuity.

21. See “Uganda: Journalists” and Rake. In 1992, however, Museveni, in a refreshingly novel approach to journalistic dissidence, penned a lengthy response to Uganda Confidential, a Kampala newsletter that had been critical of him (Musoke 17).

Works Cited

Abdalla, Abdilatif. Sauti ya Dhiki. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Anyidoho, Kofi. “Language and Development Strategy in Pan-African Literary Experience.” Research in African Literatures 23.1 (1992): 45-63.

Bakari, Mohamed, and Ali A. Mazrui. “The Early Phase.” In European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, vol. 2. Ed. Albert S. Gerard. Budapest: Akademia Kiado/UNESCO, 1986. 863-86.

Barnett, Donald, and Karari Njama. Mau Mau from Within: An Analysis of Kenya's Peasant Revolt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.

Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center: ON Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative).” In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography. Eds. Smith and Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 91-114.

———. “‘Through All Things Modern’: Second Thoughts on Testimonio.” Boundary 2 18.2 (1991): 4.

Bierstecker, Ann. “An Alternative East African Voice: The Wa-Nduuta Stories of Gakaara wa Wanjau.” Research in African Literatures 22.4 (1991): 63-78.

“Culture of Fear and Silence.” Index on Censorship 12.4 (1983): 20-23.

Davison, Jean, and the Women of Mutira. Voices from Mutira: Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 1989.

Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub, M.D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gakaara wa Wanjau. Mau Mau Author in Detention. Trans. Paul Ngigi Njoroge. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1988.

Gerard, Albert S. African-Language Literatures: An Introduction to the Literary History of Sub-Saharan Africa. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1981.

Gikoyo, Gucu. We Fought for Freedom: Tulipigania Uhuru. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, c. 1972.

Gikandi, Simon. “The Epistemology of Translation: Ngugi, Matigari, and the Politics of Language.” Research in African Literatures 22.4 (1991): 161-67.

———. “Ngugi's Conversion: Writing and the Politics of Language.” Research in African Literatures 23.1 (1992): 131-44.

Gugelberger, Georg, and Michael Kearney. “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives: A Journal on Capitalism and Socialism 18.3-18.4 (1991): 3-14.

Harlow, Barbara. Barred Women: Women, Writing and Political Detention. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992.

———. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Harrow, Kenneth. “The Poetics of African Litterature de Temoinage.” African Literature Studies: The Present State. Ed. Stephen Arnold. Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985. 135-49.

Heron, George. “Uganda.” In European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, vol. 2. Ed. Albert S. Gerard. Budapest: Akademia Kiado/UNESCO, 1986. 922-48.

Jara, Renee, and Hernan Vidal. Testimonio y Literatura. Edina, Minn.: Society for the Study of Hispanic and Lusophone Revolutionary Literatures, 1986.

Kariuki, Josiah Mwangi. Mau Mau Detainee: The Account by a Kenya African of His Experience in Detention Camps 1953-1960. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Knight, Elizabeth. “Kenya.” European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, vol. 2. Ed. Albert S. Gerard. Budapest: Akademia Kiado/UNESCO, 1986. 887-921.

———. “Popular Literature in East Africa.” African Literature Today 10: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones. New York: Africana, 1979. 177-90.

Koigi wa Wamwere. Conscience on Trial—Why I Was Detained: Notes of a Political Prisoner in Kenya. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1988.

Mazrui, Alamin. “Conservationism and Liberalism in Swahili Poetry: The Linguistic Dimension.” Research In African Literatures 23.4 (1992): 67-76.

Mlama, Penina Muhando. “Creating in the Mother-Tongue: The Challenges to the African Writer Today.” Research in African Literatures 21.4 (1990): 5-14.

———. The Popular Theatre Approach in Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, forthcoming.

———. “Women's Participation in ‘Communication for Development’: The Popular Theater Alternative in Africa.” Research in African Literatures 22.3 (1991): 41-53.

Msoka, Valerie. “The Image of an African Woman.” New African (November 1993): 28-29.

Muriithi, J. Kiboi, and Peter N. Ndoria. War in the Forest: The Autobiography of a Mau Mau Leader. Nairobi: East African, 1971.

Musoke, David. “Museveni Strikes Back.” New African (June 1992): 17.

Muthoni, Likimani. Passbook Number F.47927: Women and Mau Mau in Kenya. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Nazareth, Peter. “Waiting for Amin: Two Decades of Ugandan Literature.” In The Writing of East and Central Africa. Ed. G. D. Killam. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. 7-35.

Ngugi, Michael Karanja. Miaka 52 Jela. Nairobi: Heinemann, 1989.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1981.

———. Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary. Exeter, N.H.: Heinemann, 1984.

———. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994.

———. “On Writing In Gikuyu.” Research in African Literatures 16.2 (1985): 151-55.

Nichols, Lee, ed. Conversations with African Writers: Interviews with Twenty-Six African Authors. Washington D.C.: Voice of America, 1981.

Rake, Alan. “Who Is in Charge of Uganda?” New African (April 1992): 14-15.

Ricard, Alain. “Ebrahim's Predicament.” Research in African Literatures 23.1 (1992): 175-78.

Shariff, Ibrahim Noor. “The Liyongo Conundrum: Reexamining the Historicity of Swahili's National Poet-Hero.” Research in African Literatures 22.2 (1991): 153-67.

———. Tungo Zetu: Msingi wa Mashairi na Tungo Nyinginezo. Trenton, N.J.: Red Sea Press, 1988.

Slater, Montagu. The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta. London: Secker & Warburg, 1956.

“Spectre of Civil War.” New African (January 1994): 26.

Taban lo Liyong. “On Translating the ‘Untranslated’: Chapter 14 of Wer pa Lawino by Okot p'Bitek.” Research in African Literatures 24.3 (1993): 87-92.

Tagama, Herald. “Curbing the Press.” New African (April 1993): 41-42.

“Uganda: Journalists Imprisoned for Asking Questions.” New African (May 1990): 21.

Versi, Anver. “Africa at the Pictures.” New African Life (June 1993): 9-11.

———. “The Romantic African.” New African Life (June 1993): 4-8.

“Voices of Dissent.” New African (December 1990): 15.

Waciuma, Charity. Daughter of Mumbi. Nairobi: East African, 1969.

Wamweya, Joram. Freedom Fighter. Nairobi: East African, 1971.

Westley, David. “Choice of Language and African Literature: A Bibliographic Essay.” Research in African Literatures 23.1 (1992): 159-171.