Conclusion: Temp/orality and Law in the End Times

The conclusion briefly returns to the question of East Africa’s place in the history of modern law. It argues, through a reading of Shaaban Robert’s Kiswahili parable Kusadikika: A Country in the Sky (1951), that the models of oral jurisprudence offered by East Africa’s many writers who touch on, investigate, or otherwise sing about the legacies of colonial law and the crisis of modernity may ultimately offer new ways of thinking about modern law itself. More specifically, these models reveal how “modern law” is not an invention of the West, but a product of a long, complex, and often violent collaboration between the Global North and Global South.

Catching History by the Tail: Colonial Non-Fiction, Atavism, and the Crisis of Modernity in Kenya

This chapter examines colonial responses to African oral jurisprudence as it interacted with laws that recast resistance to colonialism as evidence of an African crisis of modernity. The origins of this crisis discourse become clear in two trials that correspond to significant moments in colonial Kenya and in the evolution of legalistic orature’s challenge to colonial law. In Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa (1937), a “traditional” Kikuyu court convenes to resolve a crisis that has disrupted Dinsen’s pastoral fantasy of Africa as a home for her aristocratic values. She attempts to control the court through a written contract but is frustrated as orature exposes the true crisis of modernity within colonialism. Similarly, Montagu Slater’s The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta (1955) emphasizes the tension between African orality and colonial literacy in the famous Emergency-era trial. Slater shows how orature challenged the meaning of written evidence and, like the court on Dinesen’s farm, exposed the crisis discourse as evidence of an ongoing crisis within colonialism itself. These trials enable necessary perspectives on the larger picture of law, orature, and literature in colonial East Africa.

Between Formal and Infinite Time: Labor Law and Revolutionary Futures in Kenyan Popular Performance

Chapter two examines Kenyan orature and revolutionary performance in relationship to the history of colonial labour law, which became increasingly oppressive through emergency regulations. Among the most important responses to this history is that offered by novelist, activist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognizing that the state and the oral artist are “rivals” in articulating and disseminating the law and, further, that orature played “the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, Ngũgĩ draws heavily on Kikuyu and other Kenyan oral traditions in addressing the history of exceptionalized labour law and its lasting effects in the postcolonial period. Through workers’ songs, revolutionary hymns, proverbs, and myths, Ngũgĩ’s theatre draws on the performative force of oral jurisprudence to challenge the temporal foundations of colonial labour law and also explore alternative models of democratic work that embody a vision of Kenya’s future. Specifically, I argue that through oratorical strategies (including formal open-endedness) in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and “Mother, Sing for Me” (1983), Ngũgĩ and his co-authors “[break] the barrier between formal and infinite time,” constellating (in the Benjaminian sense) past moments of revolution with both the present and possible revolutionary futures.

Introduction: Temp/orality in Law and East African Literature

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.

Time Heals All Regimes: Temporality, Somali Oral Law, and the Illegality of African Dictatorships

Chapter three examines the emergence of dictatorships in post-independence Africa. In his dictatorship-trilogy (1979-1983), Nuruddin Farah provides a fictional account of the state of emergency that was Siad Barre’s dictatorship in Somalia (1969-1991). Like Okot and Ngũgĩ, Farah also draws heavily on oral conventions, specifically those tied to Xeer, or Somali oral law. However, legalistic orature in Somalia is available not only to revolutionaries but to the dictator himself, who turns oral poetry to his purposes. Farah, therefore, asks: if orature can serve injustice as easily as justice, can it be effective in challenging dictatorial power? The presence of orality coincides once again with a temporal motif, punctuated at the end of each novel with formal open-endedness. In the context of Somalia’s legal history, this open-endedness provides a definite, though perplexing, solution to the problem of colonial/postcolonial crisis seen in previous chapters: as one of Farah’s characters observes, “time was ultimately a decider.” This suggests that however indefinite a dictator’s rule may seem to be, however indefinite the crisis, time will eventually outlive agents of injustice. Dictators will die. Regimes will pass on. And, hopefully, justice will prevail, even if in a “future beyond the future of a future.”

A Song Whose Time Has Come: Northern Uganda, Apocalyptic Futures, and the Oral Jurisprudence of Okot p’Bitek

In Artist, the Ruler (1986), Okot p’Bitek claims that the oral artist in Africa “proclaims the laws but expresses them in the most indirect language: through metaphor and symbol, in image and fable. He sings and dances his laws.” This provocative observation was one of the starting points for this book as a whole, and, here, I examine Song of Lawino (1966) and Song of Ocol (1967) in light of his claim that the oral artist is a lawmaker. I also situate his work in relationship to recent conversations about law and modernity in Northern Uganda’s struggle against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Although his work appeared long before the LRA, many of Okot’s texts have reemerged as part of a conversation about how to achieve reconciliation now that the conflict has largely ended. To account for this reception, I draw on Russell Samolsky’s concept of “apocalyptic futures,” arguing that the oral jurisprudence of Okot’s texts has “revealed itself to be ahead of its time,” taking on new significance in the context of the LRA, particularly in portraying Acholi legal principles critical to post-conflict reconciliation.