scholarly journals East African Literature and the Gandasation of Metropolitan Language – Reading from Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-97
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Adeniyi
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
English Language ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
East African ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
The Core ◽  
Historical Text ◽  
Unique Style

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is, without doubt, one of the finest literary writers to have come out of East Africa. The Ugandan has succeeded in writing herself into global reckoning by telling a completely absorbing and canon-worthy epic. Her creative impulse is compelling, considering her narration of a riveting multi-layered historiography of (B)-Uganda nation in her debut novel, Kintu. With her unique style of story-telling and intelligent use of analepsis and prolepsis to (re)construct spatial and temporal settings of a people’s history, Makumbi succeeds in giving readers an evocative historical text. In narrating the aetiological myth of her people, Makumbi bridges metonymic gaps between two languages – core and marginal. She deliberately attenuates the expressive strength of the English language in Kintu by deploying her traditional Luganda language in the text so as to achieve certain primal goals. The present study seeks to disinter these goals by examining the use of Metonymic Gaps as a postcolonial model to construct indigenous knowledges within a Europhone East African text. The study also mines overall implications of this practice for East African Literature. I argue that, just like her contemporaries from other parts of Africa, Makumbi projects Luganda epistemology to checkmate European linguistic heteronomy on East African literary expression. Her intentionality also revolves around the need to bend the English language and force it to carry the weight of Luganda socio-cultural peculiarities. Consequently, her text becomes a locus of postcolonial disputations where the marginal jostles for supremacy with the core in East African literary landscape.

Introduction: Temp/orality in Law and East African Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Peter Leman
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
East African ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
Postcolonial Literatures ◽  
The Relationship

The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.

Singing the Law

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Leman
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Global South ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
East African ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Many

“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., they both promote and retreat from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.

scholarly journals (East) African postcolonial ecocriticism: Revisiting Okot p’ Bitek’s Song of Prisoner

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-157
Author(s):  
Alex Nelungo Wanjala
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Environmental Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
East African ◽  
Literature Reading ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Postcolonial Ecocriticism

This article celebrates Okot p’Bitek’s contribution to East African literature in general and the song school of East Africa in particular, by revisiting one of his less-known works, Song of Prisoner on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. I subject the text to a close reading in order to demonstrate how p’Bitek uses imagery that is drawn from East Africa’s natural environment in a way that evokes issues that are an assault on the prevailing social and political order in East Africa at the time, in a nuanced manner. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper establishes that p’Bitek’s attempt to preserve his natural environment (that of East Africa) through writing it into his poetry, was a precursor for texts that would later be examined within the framework of the contemporary critical theory of postcolonial ecocriticism, and that using the text, one can narrow the scope further in a manner that takes into account the specificities of (East) African environmental literature. In so doing, the paper establishes that p’Bitek indeed highlights social realities through his poetry, in order to launch his attack on the existing neo-colonial capitalistic order prevailing at the historical moment of his writing, thus confirming that he displays a social vision that strives for decolonisation without the exploitative aftermath encapsulating modernity. The paper thus demonstrates how this poem is still relevant as a study to the student of East African literature reading it in the 21st century.

scholarly journals Devices of comic in the work of the 20th century English-speaking Ugandan poets

2019 ◽  
pp. 140-144
Author(s):  
Natal'ya S. Frolova
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
East African ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

Poetry of the Ugandans are analysed in an article in the context of the use of devices of comic in the East African English-language poetry. The critical-realistic and enlightener tendencies that were eagerly apprehended by most East African authors in the 1960s have not allowed them going beyond the direct criticism of damning poetry to this day as well, although point-by-point attempts to use humour and satire when contemplating socio-political issues, do occur throughout the sixty-year existence of East Africa English-language poetry. The dilogy by Okot p’Bitek, Timothy Wangusa and Taban Lo Liyong are clear examples of such attempts made in Uganda literature. At the same time, the three authors use fundamentally different techniques of comic, when portraying modern reality, both purely African and universal human.

scholarly journals Expatriate Kenyan poetry: Marjorie Phyllis Oludhe Macgoye and Stephen Derwent Partington

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 172-178
Author(s):  
Natal’ya S. Frolova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
East African ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
Poetic Work

English-language poetry in Kenya emerges and begins to develop in the 1970s, a decade later than the Ugandan one. It was at this time that the first truly brilliant examples of poetic work appeared – these are poems of Jared Angira and Micere Githae Mugo, who later became classics of Kenyan literature, whose work characterises the two main directions of Kenyan English-language poetry of the second half of the 20th century – critical-realistic and philosophical-mystical [Frolova: 75–90]. Studying the English-language poetry of Kenya draws attention to such an interesting phenomenon as the Kenyan poetry of expatriate writers. These are the creative work of Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye and the Stephen Partington, whose creative work cannot be called typical for East African literature. Both Macgoye and Partington are ethnic British, who had moved, each at own time, to Kenya and devoted themselves to literature, and, what is most important, called Kenya their homeland and themselves, Kenyans. In their poems, one can feel sincere love for the land, which has become their home, sympathy for Africans who suffer social injustice, and huge efforts to understand African reality through the eyes of a European.

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