General Overview
East African literature includes literatures from Kenyan, Ugandan and Tanzanian amongst others. It is literature with one entity, but the justification proposed-that the three countries were joined under British rule as the East African Protectorate – is misleading. Tanzania has a double German-British colonial heritage, Kenya was a settler colony where the peasants in the highlands were expropriated, while in the Ugandan Protectorate the established kingdoms of Buganda, Toro, and Bunyoro continued to play important roles under "indirect rule." All these factors make for very different post-independence histories. Beyond the political differences, language policies in all three countries have varied drastically: In Tanzania, Swahili was adopted as the national language, whereas in Uganda, Luganda speakers rejected Swahili, considering it as the language of the military and of oppression.
The significance of Idi Amin's era in Uganda lies in creative impulses it engendered among Ugandans and non-Ugandans alike, leading to an almost unprecedented flowering of literature in East Africa. It is true that Amin's reign of terror provided subject matter for a number of novels, plays, and films. But it is also true that Amin not only killed intellectuals and writers but also destroyed the whole cultural infrastructure, driving writers, artists, and intellectuals into exile. At the end of the Amin-Obote terror, the flourishing literature, publishing, and theatre scene of the "Golden Age" had completely vanished, and the only thing left was the shallow commercial theatre of domestic farce. In the case of Ugandan literature, the issue of selection also becomes apparent. It is always easy, of course, to argue about inclusions and exclusions in reference works. Uniformity and consistency in structure and methodology are essential in a reference work.
Okot p'Bitek from Uganda and Taban Io Liyong are among the most significant writers from East Africa, whose works have impacted on their countries positively. Many East African writers, especially Ngugi wa Thiong’o, has emphasized that East Africa is not a literary desert undermining the people’s government which pounces heavily on writers and most often sends them on exile. Other writers like Grace Ogot, Micere Mugo and the recent Caine Prize Winner Biyavanga Wainana have been in the pivot of making literature live in East Africa.
Central Africa seems a large expanse including East Africa. It includes countries such as Congo, Cameron, Somalia, Gabon and Rwanda amongst other countries. They all have complex colonial experiences. Most of the countries were colonized by the French and the Portuguese.
A country like Somalia was colonized by Britain and Italy at the same time. Unlike West Africa with French and British colonial experiences, the Central African bloc had a hybrid of colonial invasion with complex linguistic, political and sociological make up. These are parts of the reasons why Central African countries have been described as ‘enclave of freight and the suburb of scavengers’
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Explain the complex socio-political make-up of Central and East Africa which are reflected in most of their prose fiction.
East African Prose: Ngugi’s The River Between
The River Between is a good example of colonial East African novel. Ngugi's first novel was originally to be called The Black Messiah: it was written during 1961 during a period when he was reading for his degree. He read D. H. Lawrence who he says influenced him with "his way of entering into the spirit of things." Such an attitude could easily be potentially attractive to anyone whose inherited culture sees an essential unity between the spiritual and physical aspects of the world. Ngugi goes on: "You know I felt as if he was entering into the soul of the people, and not only of the people, but even of the land, of the countryside, of things like plants, of the atmosphere." This interpenetration maybe seen in The River Between, in the role of spatial features such as trees, the ridges and the river.
Ngugi's use of spatial features in his longer works if prefigured by certain of his early stories. In the earliest of these, "The Fig Tree", the tree of the title is the locus of the turning point. The central character Mukami achieves a kind of spiritual vindication and self-knowledge in the shelter of the sacred Mugumo tree. And in "The Return" the River Honia plays an important role. Kamau returns from the camps of the Emergency period carrying a bundle which "held the bitterness and hardships of the years spent in the detention camps." He is dismayed to hear that his wife has in the meantime gone with another man, but begins to find reconciliation with this and other changes when the symbolic bundle is washed away by the healing river.
Both the sacred fig tree and River Honia reappear in The River Between, the former when Waiyaki's father takes him to the Mugumo tree and reveals his destiny. The tree is sacred because it was there that Gikuyu and Mumbi, the father and mother of the tribe, stood; so Chege brings him here to tell him that he is born of a line of prophets, and is very likely to be the foretold saviour who will come from the hills to deliver the tribe from the white man. Waiyaki remembers the occasion as he endures the pain of the circumcision (p.53); and he revisits the place as he prepares for the final confrontation of the action, in an attempt to understand the nature of his dedication and to renew his contact with the mythic past (pp.161- 164).
Another sacred place in The River Between, and one which is central to the work, is the initiation grove, where Waiyaki and Muthoni are both circumcised, and where he and Nyambura meet. The connexion with the soil is established at the moment of the symbolic operation: "Blood trickled freely on to the ground, sinking into the soil. Henceforth a religious bond linked Waiyaki to the earth..." (p.53) The same place is later the scene of Waiyaki's declaration of love for Nyambura. It is here, where Muthoni was initiated, that she can feel close to her dead sister. The area is given further significance when it is associated in Waiyaki's thoughts with the precinct of the fig tree: "Waiyaki could not tell why the place reminded him so much of the sacred grove where long ago his father had taken him and revealed the ancient prophecy. This place she was in was sacred too." (p.119). Finally, it is the "sacred ground" where Waiyaki and Nyambura make love. The confluence of all these elements of the action with this spatial feature is completed by the proximity of the river. The River Honia is, as the title suggests, the most significant of these features in the work, the central element in its structure.
The structure of The River Between is lucid: its ideology finds its basic symbolic expression in a simple combination of three elements, the river and the two ridges between which it runs. The ridges, it seems, represent the opposition which exists between two social groups as a result of their espousing a different metaphysics, while at the same time showing their common humanity; the river also corresponds to other features of the work in its ambivalence. While obviously dividing the two ridges and the two factions, it further embodies the possibility of union - by joining the two banks. It is emphasized that its name "Honia" means 'cure' or 'bring-back-to-life' (p.1).
The ridges, Makuyu and Kameno, are the most predominant of a series of binary oppositions. Each of the groups living on the ridges claims predominance over the other because of its own favourable version of the origin myth. Each has its patriarchal figure; but whereas Chege of Kameno is a descendant of Mugo wa Kibiro, the seer who warned the tribe of the coming of the white man, Joshua of Makuyu has been won over to the European religion and is its local representative. The ridges have now been divided: the ideal of the conservation of tribal beliefs and customs confronts the pragmatic acceptance of Europeanization.
Attempting to overcome this opposition and unite the divided people are the children of the patriarchs, who are associated with the river in its role as a symbol of healing and unity. Muthoni, Joshua's younger daughter, attempts to live in both worlds. Although not wishing to give up Christianity, she nevertheless wants to be circumcised, so as to become "a real woman, knowing all the ways of the hills and ridges" (p.29), and also to become eligible for marriage. But she is disowned by Joshua and then dies as a result of infection after the operation. Her death hardens attitudes on either side; it also has the effect of altering the way in which she is seen by the reader: her role in the work takes on a deeper significance.
Waiyaki's role is special from the outset as has been indicated above. He is set apart by his birth for the role of hero who must perform the rites of passage: separation, initiation, return. He is sent by Chege away from his family to the European school at Siriana. At this point, Waiyaki is separated from the 'here' of the tribal environment and enters the 'there' of the territory of the newcomers. The space of the action expands to include an only partially seen quasi-European environment. The main threat to the world of the book is thus distanced and left somewhat mysterious. The hero returns from the mission school having been 'initiated' into the ways of the Europeans, so that he will be better able to help his people to resist them. However, unlike Muthoni who is prepared to live out the ideal of unification, Waiyaki is unable to close the gap: he embodies the ambivalence which runs through the book at all levels. He can see the strengths of both the opposing religions but cannot reconcile their systems; he sees the need for political unity and joins but then leaves the Kiama, the organisation for tribal unity and purity; he wants to give Western education as his gift brought back from outside, but knows that the tribe will disintegrate without its roots in the past. Although "committed to reconciliation" (p.125), at the crucial moment he 'forgets to speak of it.
This ambivalence may also be seen in the way the narrative breaks off before the resolution of the fate of Waiyaki and Nyambura. The open structure in the narration is resumed in the final image of the river, its "beat ... reaching into the heart of the people of Makuyu and Kameno", thus allowing the possibility of unity, while at the same time continuing to manifest division.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
Carefully assess the juxtaposition of African and Christian religions and how they affected the lives of the people in The River Between.
Central African Prose: Nuruddin Farah’s From a Crooked Rib
Nuruddin Farah is known as one of the most stimulating contemporary prose writers in Africa. His works typically address the theme of individual freedom in the face of arbitrary power that is relevant to Africans and non-Africans alike. Farah's novels demonstrate a facility with poetic language and great intellectual depth, and frequently focus on political and social issues in his homeland of Somalia, a nation in the Horn of Africa. While Farah's work contains an undeniable political element, he does not preach a particular political vision for his nation. Farah's experiences as a young person in Somalia give his writings an international appeal. The history of colonization and border conflicts in Somalia, coupled with Farah's travels and educational opportunities, gives him access to a wide variety of cultures and enables him to write about Somalia with a detached perspective. The rich oral culture in Somalia and Farah's command of several languages also make his writing unique. Farah's novels are noted for their poetic and symbolic nature and for their epic and satirical elements as well.
From a Crooked Rib examines the plight of women in traditional Islamic societies through the eyes of a young village girl, Ebla, as she struggles with issues of female circumcision, arranged marriages, and polygamy. The story is written from the perspective of Ebla (perhaps so named because at the time of the writing in 1968, Italian archeologists had just identified the site of ancient city of the same name in Syria), an 18-year-old nomad woman who flees her rural settlement when she learns of her impending marriage to a middle-aged man. In doing so, she is spurning the traditional values of her culture - perhaps foreshadowing for the societal changes that will come with independence and modernity.
Sneaking out of her hut in the wee hours, she flees without a plan, leaving her brother and grandfather behind. Her first stop is a small town (although quite large and bewildering to her), where she stays with a distant cousin. There, she cares for her cousin's pregnant wife and makes the acquaintance of a confident woman next door. Drawn into smuggling by her cousin and alerted to his plan to sell her off as a bride, she flees again, this time to Mogadishu with the nephew of the neighbour. Here, life is even more confusing, as she becomes his bride. When he leaves for several months training in Italy, she must rely on another self-sufficient older woman in her building. She somewhat passively reacts to this abandonment by allowing herself to be propelled into the arms of yet another man, who pays her for the distinction of becoming his "wife."
The cultural mechanics of all this are somewhat confusing to the non- native reader and a certain amount of annotation would certainly help this almost 40-year-old book. For example, some background on the quasi-Islamic practice of informal "temporary" marriages at the time would provide some much-needed context for some of Ebla's actions. So while the broad theme of Ebla's treatment as just another "beast" or "cattle" subject to the whim of the men around her is evident, there's a good deal of nuance that lost along the way. Written when Farah was only in his early 20s, the English prose is rather awkward and makes for choppy reading. While certainly of interest to those interested in feminism in Africa, those seeking a more accessible introduction to Farah's work might be better off trying his more recent novels, Links and Knots, which are set in Mogadishu during and after the American peacekeeping efforts in the early '90s.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Nuruddin Farah is male but writes for the cause of women. Explain how the socio-cultural situation in Somalia prompted this.
CONCLUSION
East and Central African states were and still are environments of anarchy. This is because there are still high neo-colonial effects in their governance. According to Ngugi, "Struggle" is a part of nature and a part of our history and cultures in East Africa. As a central concept in my aesthetic or cultural vision, "struggle" has been developing, I think, starting from my essays on writers and politics. One can see this theme become more and more dominant in my cultural theory and aesthetic theory. "Struggle" is central to nature, to human art and to my history. For the proletariat to be able to dictate its will to modern society, its party must not be ashamed of being a proletarian party and of speaking its own language, not the language of national revanche, but the language of international revolution. In The River Between, we see the struggle by the people to overcome the forces of oppression. Heroes emerge from among the commoners to fight the rich and the colonials in order to restore peace in their enclaves.
Farah's artistic sources are an eclectic mixture of Somali oral traditions, Italian culture, and Anglo-Irish modernism. Reviewers praise Farah for his highly textured prose style and mythical imagination. The influence of Somalia's oral tradition on Farah's style reveals in the powerful imagery, exotic symbolism, and richly textured language, which are traits evolved out of the rich poetic heritage of Somalia. The influence of Italy on Farah’s works is enormous because both Italy's colonization of Somalia and the time that Farah spent living in Italy affected his writing style. Although there is a definite element of political commentary in Farah's work, especially in From a Crooked Rib, critics are quick to point out that Farah does not espouse a particular ideology. Many people laud Farah for his stark portrayal of the effects of patriarchal subjugation of women, praising him as one of a select few male writers willing to critique a patriarchic system. Although Farah's novels are essentially African, they are thematically relevant not only to the realities of African societies, but also to universal human conditions, in a manner which transcends the contemporary settings of his works.
SUMMARY
East and Central African prose fiction reflect the socio-political make-up of their countries. Ngugi has been in the vanguard of fighting imperialism and this is reflected in most of his novels. According to Ngugi, Christian religion and English language were the two imperial spells that stole the soul and mind of Africans. It was mainly through the colonial system of education that cultural and psychological colonization of Africans was achieved. Though calling Ngugi an anti- imperialist may be fitting, understanding his works merely in that context might limit his wider aspirations. It is also possible to view his works as Marxist or feminist, as they portray gender and social equality. Ngugi though, would like to gloss over such minor confines.
Nuruddin Farah is known as one of the most stimulating contemporary prose writers in Africa. His works typically address the theme of individual freedom in the face of arbitrary power that is relevant to Africans and non-Africans alike. Farah's novels demonstrate a facility with poetic language and great intellectual depth, and frequently focus on political and social issues in his homeland of Somalia, a nation in the Horn of Africa. While Farah's work contains an undeniable political element, he does not preach a particular political vision for his nation. The rich oral culture in Somalia and Farah's command of several languages also make his writing unique. Farah's novels are noted for their poetic and symbolic nature and for their epic and satirical elements as well.
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