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.

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 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.

The War of Legs

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-120
Author(s):  
Michael Pesek
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Transport Infrastructure ◽  
World War ◽  
East African ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
Belgian Congo

This article describes the little-known history of military labor and transport during the East African campaign of World War I. Based on sources from German, Belgian, and British archives and publications, it considers the issue of military transport and supply in the thick of war. Traditional histories of World War I tend to be those of battles, but what follows is a history of roads and footpaths. More than a million Africans served as porters for the troops. Many paid with their lives. The organization of military labor was a huge task for the colonial and military bureaucracies for which they were hardly prepared. However, the need to organize military transport eventually initiated a process of modernization of the colonial state in the Belgian Congo and British East Africa. This process was not without backlash or failure. The Germans lost their well-developed military transport infrastructure during the Allied offensive of 1916. The British and Belgians went to war with the question of transport unresolved. They were unable to recruit enough Africans for military labor, a situation made worse by failures in the supplies by porters of food and medical care. One of the main factors that contributed to the success of German forces was the Allies' failure in the “war of legs.”

scholarly journals Crustal variability along the rifted/sheared East African margin: a review

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maren Vormann ◽  
Wilfried Jokat
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
Shear Zone ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
The South ◽  
East African ◽  
The North ◽  
Rifted Margins ◽  
Continental Block ◽  
Seismic Lines ◽  
Southeastern Madagascar

AbstractThe East African margin between the Somali Basin in the north and the Natal Basin in the south formed as a result of the Jurassic/Cretaceous dispersal of Gondwana. While the initial movements between East and West Gondwana left (oblique) rifted margins behind, the subsequent southward drift of East Gondwana from 157 Ma onwards created a major shear zone, the Davie Fracture Zone (DFZ), along East Africa. To document the structural variability of the DFZ, several deep seismic lines were acquired off northern Mozambique. The profiles clearly indicate the structural changes along the shear zone from an elevated continental block in the south (14°–20°S) to non-elevated basement covered by up to 6-km-thick sediments in the north (9°–13°S). Here, we compile the geological/geophysical knowledge of five profiles along East Africa and interpret them in the context of one of the latest kinematic reconstructions. A pre-rift position of the detached continental sliver of the Davie Ridge between Tanzania/Kenya and southeastern Madagascar fits to this kinematic reconstruction without general changes of the rotation poles.

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