EssaysOn AfricnLite&Folk - Book

Negotiating Afropolitanism
Essays on Borders
and Spaces in Contemporary
African Literature and Folklore
146
Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
In Verbindung mit
Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich

Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)
herausgegeben von
Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
Negotiating Afropolitanism
Essays on Borders
and Spaces in Contemporary
African Literature and Folklore
Edited by
Jennifer Wawrzinek
and J.K.S. Makokha
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover image: “Lines of Attitude” British Council South Africa collaborative
project, District 6, Cape Town, painted by the artists Phiks, Mode2, Faith47,
Dreph, and Falko.
Permission to reproduce the image granted by the artists and the British Council
South Africa.
Photograph courtesy of Lauren Joffe.
Cover design: Pier Post
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 8
Simon Gikandi
Foreword: On Afropolitanism 9
J. K. S. Makokha
Introduction: In the Spirit of Afropolitanism 13
Part I: Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism
Sim Kilosho Kabale

Afropolitanism and Erudition in Francophone African Novels,
1994 – 2000 25
Jens Frederic Elze-Volland

Precarity and Picaresque in Contemporary Nigerian Prose:
An Exemplary Reading of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road 47
Sola Ogunbayo
Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making:
The Unbarred Muse in Selected Nigerian Literature 61
Fella Benabed
Syncretic Worldviews in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters 75
Part II: Dissidence, Absence, Transgression
Catherine Kroll
Dogs and Dissidents at the Border:
Narrative Outbreak in Patrice Nganang’s Temps de Chien 89
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Addressing the Absent Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron 113
Phillip Rothwell
Nearly Ending the World the African Way:
Pepetela’s Suspension of Capital’s Frontiers and Flows in
O Quase Fim do Mundo 129
John E. Masterson
A Post-mortem on the Postmodern? Conflict and Corporeality in
Nuruddin Farah’s Links 141
Russell West-Pavlov
Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing: Space and Feminine
Transgression in Fanon’s Sociologie d’une révolution and
Chraibi’s La Civilisation, ma mere! 163
Part III: Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heterotopia
Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara

Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Space of Post-Colonial
Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting 183
Nalini Iyer
No Place to Call Home: Citizenship and Belonging in M. G.
Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall 205
Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha

Weaving Exilic Narratives: Homodiegetic Narration and
Postcolonial Translocation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Admiring Silence 215
Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira

Between Diasporic Identity and Agency: Versions of the Pastoral in
Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker 235
Godwin Siundu
Locating Cultural Ambivalence and Afropolitanism:
Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as Heterotopia in the Fiction of
Dawood and Vassanji 259
Part IV: Language, Borders, Spaces
Mikhail Gromov
Across the Language Border: The Case of Bilingual
Writers in Tanzania 283
Alina N. Rinkanya
Sheng Literature in Kenya: Socio-Linguistic Borders and Spaces
in Popular Poetry 293
Mbugua wa Mungai
“Na Hawa Watu Lazima Wakuwe Serious!: FM Radio Spaces
and Folkloric Performance of Cosmopolitan Identities in Kenya 313
Michael Wainaina
Empire Speaks Back: Authenticity, Folk Voices and
Re-Presentation of Across in Gikuyu Radio Narratives 347
Contributors 367
Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to Russell West-Pavlov of the English

Department, Freie Universität Berlin, whose financial support and
encouragement enabled this project. This volume is the result of commitment
by scholars both in Europe and abroad. We recognise and salute the efforts of
all the authors who contributed individual chapters to this book. We also
wish to extend our thanks to Gbemisola Adeoti, Babatunde Ayeleru,
Nicoletta Brazzelli, Reuben Chirambo, Eleni Coundouriotis, Ruth Finnegan,
Russell G. Hamilton, Frederick Kang’ethe Iraki, Stephanie Jones, Sim
Kilosho Kabale, Samuel Kasule, Susan Kiguli, Sue Kossew, Mike Marais,
Grace Musila, Evan Mwangi, Kimani Njogu, Hamza Njozi, Joyce Nyairo,
Dan Ojwang, Garnette Oluoch-Olunya, Tony Simoes da Silva, Pippa
Skotnes, Maria Suriano, Veronique Tadjo, Saeed-Reza Talajooy, Maria J. C.
Traseira, Daria Tunca, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Alex Wanjala, Chris
Wanjala, Peter Wasamba and Garth A. Myers.
We would like to extend a special note of appreciation to Simon Gikandi,
Harry Garuba, Bernth Lindfors, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni for providing
critical insights and useful suggestions for the improvement of various parts
of this collection. We would not have been able to complete this project
without the untiring assistance of Jens Frederic Elze-Volland on all matters
great and small, the careful and meticulous sub-editing of Judit Minczinger,
and the help of Caleb Sivyer and Jörg Kaufmann on the layout and
formatting of the final manuscript.
Simon Gikandi
Foreword: On Afropolitanism
It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that all current debates about the
future of Africa in regard to the production of knowledge and the role of the
creative imagination in the process are attempts to overcome the malady of
Afro-pessimism – the belief that the continent and its populace is hopelessly
imprisoned in its past, trapped a vicious cycle of underdevelopment, and held
hostage to corrupt institutions. Afro-pessimism, which emerged as the figure
of representing Africa during the political and economic crises of the 1980s
and 1990s, has become the dominant idiom through which African
experiences are recuperated and filtered. Fitting neatly into traditional
Western notions of Africa as the “other” of modern reason and progress,
Afro-pessimism has proven hard to dislodge because it seems to be the only
logical response to political failure and economic stagnation in Africa.
Increasingly, however, a younger generation of Africans – and scholars of
Africa – is beginning to question this idiom and to recover alternative
narratives of African identity in search of a hermeneutics of redemption. The
idea of Afropolitanism, the rubric around which the essays collected in this
book are organised, constitutes a significant attempt to rethink African
knowledge outside the trope of crisis. Initially conceived as a neologism to
describe the social imaginary of a generation of Africans born outside the
continent but connected to it through familial and cultural genealogies, the
term Afropolitanism can now be read as the description of a new
phenomenology of Africanness – a way of being African in the world.
Afropolitanism may sound awkward as a term, but there is no doubting that it
has been prompted by the desire to think of African identities as both rooted
in specific local geographies but also transcendental of them. To be
Afropolitan is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations,
and traditions; but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages,
and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity – to be
of Africa and of other worlds at the same time.
Once upon a time, this kind of hybridity was conceived as the source of
deep cultural anxieties and psychological division; narratives and essays were
produced to imagine the lives of Africans hopelessly, and sometimes
tragically, torn between cultures, languages, and traditions. Not any more.
For a new generation of Africans, being African and American, African and
German or Swede or Scottish is no longer considered to be a contradiction in
10 Simon Gikandi
terms; it is simply a recognition of how the structural disadjustment of

Africans in the crisis of the present has become an opportunity for
reimagining new narratives of the future. To live between cultures or
languages is one important way of coping with the disorientation of moral
geographies at the end of modernity.
But the discourse of Afropolitanism goes far beyond the existential
situations of Africans born across languages, nations, and identities. As the
essays in this collection illustrate vividly, Afropolitanism reflects a new
attitude towards Africa and the wider world in which it is a part. Instead of
conceiving the massive migration of Africans to other continents and
countries as a loss, the idiom of Afropolitanism embraces movement across
time and space as the condition of possibility of an African way of being.
Dispersal implies a new ontology, not a tragic drama of sorrow. Here, in
worlds that were furthest removed from Africa, from Iceland to China,
expatriated African imaginaries and knowledges are turned from an
intellectual deficit to a cultural bonus.
As its title suggests, Negotiating Afropolitanism goes beyond earlier
manifestos to provide specific examples of the way in which local
experiences encounter global narratives and how African writers, artists and
intellectuals manage the cultural traffic that takes place on both spheres of
social life. In addition to the rigour with which the contributors approach the
task of mapping these new identities and their modes of formation, one
salient aspect of this book is its ability to take up and expand the ideas of
Afropolitanism first proposed by Achille Mbembe and Taiye Tuakli-
Wosornu. Almost each contribution complicates the relationships in which
the narrative of African difference, hybridity and multiplicity is measured
against, or reconciled to, the continuing dream of a shared identity or the
vision that informs the continent that goes by that name. In other words, the
hybridity of Africa and the cosmopolitanism of its subjects does not imply
the negation of horizontal social relationships, local affiliations and the
modes of knowledge that they generate. Indeed, many of the essays here,
especially the ones dealing with popular cultural forms, provide powerful
testimony to one of the most remarkable transformations in the condition and
form of the African social imaginary – the paradoxical situation in which the
withering or delegitimation of the African state has given credence and
authority to both the idea of a global Africa and its particular localities. Once
seen as the major threat to the authority of the postcolonial state, the
vernacular and the region have become, together with the transnational, the
only sites in which African futures can be guaranteed.
Foreword: On Afropolitanism 11
A celebration of Afropolitanism should also, of course, consider the

negative consequences of transnationalism, the displacement of Africans
abroad, the difficulties they face as they try to overcome their alterity in alien
landscapes, the deep cultural anxieties that often make diasporas sites of
cultural fundamentalism and ethnic chauvinism. Still, this book is
outstanding in many respects. It carefully maps the stories Africans tell
themselves as they respond to transnational challenges, of the complicated
relationships between regions and traditions within Africa, and of the role of
the so-called “Africans of the world” in building cultural bridges between
countries, languages, and localities.
But perhaps the most compelling aspect of this book is to be found in the
range of topics it takes up and the diversity of methods and contributors
invited to rethink Afropolitanism. Why is this important? For several years
now I have been concerned about the domination of debates about Africa by
a small privileged elite located in American and European universities. I have
expressed the worry that the power and authority of this group as the
authorised arbiter of knowledge about Africa has been achieved at the
expense of work produced in African universities, which has increasingly
been marginalised or delegitimised. This book is an outstanding example of
the difference African sites of knowledge make in global debates. For here
we witness a multiplicity of theoretical approaches, ranging from semiology
and sociology, diverse linguistic traditions, deep literary histories and most
significantly a conception of Africa that recognises its complexity, its
vivaciousness, its imagination, and indeed its own particular way of seeing
and being in the world. J. K. S. Makokha and Jennifer Wawrzinek are to be
commended for recognising and reauthorising African modes of knowledge.
J. K. S. Makokha
Introduction: In the Spirit of Afropolitanism
In his 2001 introduction to a special edition of the African Studies Review at

the dawn of the new century, entitled “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New
Nativism,” the prominent social scientist and cultural theorist Achille
Mbembe offered a description of the newness of the new century in African
terms. He pointed out the various processes that were creating flows and
movements from issues and impasses across the social, political and cultural
spectrums of the continent. In his own words:
The rise of new sites of accumulation, the reconfiguration of economic and political
systems, the recomposition of gender relations, the fragmentation of nations into competing
war-zones and “fiefdoms,” the struggles over particular sites and resources, the partial
imposition of a market road to capitalism: All are as much a part of a complex reworking of
old historical social relations as a response to changed circumstances.
Over and above this, the various forms assumed by these processes in different countries are
the expression not of a state of anomie, but of a process of transnationalization. The rhythms
and logic of this process are played out in multiple ways. Almost everywhere, however, the
process itself accentuates the conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nativist vision of
identity and of African culture. (1)
His observation isolates some of the features, old and new, that are emerging,
in old and new ways, and contributing towards the production of the so-
called African condition at the turn of the century. In an attempt to find a way
out of the conflict between the cosmopolitan and nativist descriptions of
identity and culture, new terms have emerged. The spirit of the cultural re-
awakening in a post-Apartheid South Africa has given rise to the intellectual
clarion call for an African Renaissance. Initiatives to reconfigure economic
systems across the continent to respond to transnational flows of capital have
given rise to approaches such as the optimistic setting up of The New
Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001. In the important
summit of the African Heads of States in Addis Ababa held in February 2009,
the African Union devoted a whole session to debate the formation of a
Unites States of Africa on the path of a slow regional integration approach
which will enable countries in similar regions to coalesce into regional units
that will in turn ultimately coalesce to form a single continental political unit.
The other option, favoured by the current head of the AU, the Libyan
President Colonel Muammar Gaddafi called for the acceleration of the
14 J.K.S. Makokha
integration of the whole continent under a single government with a cabinet

drawn from each of the member countries commanding different executive
jurisdictions. One may choose to view these happenings as disparate events
and processes without any direct relation to each other. Yet it is obvious that
there are some common threads that bring the disparate developments
together in efforts towards the definition of what Mbembe calls the “New
Ways of Seeing” Africa today.
The continental desire to formulate responses to transnational challenges
that manifest themselves across the continent in political, security-based,
economic and social terms is a major guiding spirit that weaves the concerns
of nations and regions in 21st Century Africa. Whether one talks of a
philosophical movement such as the African Renaissance popular in the
South of Africa, an economic framework such as NEPAD popular in the
West of Africa or a renewed effort to cultivate a new pan-African spirit or
state espoused by the well-known efforts of President Gaddafi, the common
thread running through these realities is that, once again, like in the 50s and
60s, the continent and its regions, rather than singular nations, are the theatres
of problem-identification, reaction and aspirations.
Let us ponder this conviction via the arena of culture and society. The
impact of the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994 ushered in a new
political and economic dispensation in the southern part of the continent in
particular, and the whole continent in general. Laureate Wole Soyinka has
highlighted the umbilical connection between South Africa’s fate and that of
the rest of the continent in a recent workshop bringing together South African
writers and writers from the Francophone African countries in
Johannesburg. 1 The liberation of South Africa at the turn of the previous
century, which was celebrated across the continent, and indeed the world,
ushered in a crucial era that continues to witness the rise of the continental
powerhouse and its increasing role as a leading player, if not leader, in the
political, economic, social and especially cultural politics of Africa in the
21st century.
South Africa today is the location of a cosmopolitan African culture,
powered by the South Africans themselves as well as artists, intellectuals,
entrepreneurs, migrant labourers, investors from the rest of the continent,
with countries such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya and Zimbabwe playing a
crucial role, and others from farther a field such as African Americans and
Western Europeans. This observation is especially true if one is to argue from
1
See Pius Adesanmi’s report “The Many ‘Spaces’ of the African Writer: The Meeting of
African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2-7, 1998.”
Introduction 15
the standpoint of the urban and urbane trends in the cities of South Africa,
from the tourist hub of Cape Town to the cultural focus of Johannesburg and
the seasoned Durban. From these nuclei, culture, fashion and a new way of
being African is being transmitted, consciously and subconsciously, through
media and other modes, to other cities such as Maputo, Gaborone, Windhoek,
Nairobi and further North.
The location of the widely popular Big Brother African series, the
prestigious KORA music awards, the pan-African Channel O music channel,
the impending World Cup 2010, leading academic journals such as English
Studies in Africa and fine centres of learning and research such as WISER, all
in the new South Africa, has ensured the systematic cultural (re)connection of
the former pariah to the rest of post-colonial Africa, south of the Sahara. The
cultural impact of post 1994 South Africa on the cultural trends and patterns
across sectors such as fashion, literature, society and the arts deserves further
scholarly investigation across the humanities. 2
***
Understanding the continental impact of a new South Africa with its pan-
Africanist intelligentsia, both citizen and migrant, as well as its advanced
urban-centred resources is crucial for us. Mbembe, one of the leading
thinkers on issues of cosmopolitanism in recent African intellectual
discourses, is based at WISER, a distinguished research centre at one of the
competitive African universities, the University of Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, a fulcrum of culture and social trends in the new South Africa.
In a bid to elicit a response, a continental response, to the forces of nativism
that privilege primary identities and an autochthonous perspective on African
identities and African culture, Mbembe is credited for introducing a new term
2
The forces of the local and nativism are also hindering such expansion and spread of cultural
cosmopolitanism in Africa. Scholars are talking about “the return of the local” and
“increasing marketisation” as well as commodification of ethno-histories, ethno-cultures and
ethno-identities in such communities as the Zulu in South Africa. See Peter Geschiere’s The
Perils of Belonging and John L. and Jean Comaroff’s Ethnicity, INC. These insights discuss
ways in which nativism hinders or fails to consolidate some of the gains of cosmopolitanism
in contemporary Africa. Afropolitanism becomes problematic in such contexts as well as
within the politics of narrow nationalisms re-emerging across parts of the continent and
addressed in Sara Dorman, Daniel Hammett and Paul Nugent’s Making Nations, Creating
Strangers. How else should we understand the paradox that Mbembe’s Johannesburg is a
fulcrum of forces of cosmopolitanism as well as a theatre of the xenophobic attacks of 2008?
16 J.K.S. Makokha
into the continental cultural discourse, Afropolitanism. He arrived at the term

after his scholarly investigations of the roles and nature of culture and society
in a South Africa in transition using cosmopolitan Johannesburg as his case in
point. The term has since become a buzz word and, as such, is interpreted or
defined by different people and associations in different ways. A review of its
deployment in the arena of culture and society across contemporary Africa is
useful as we negotiate the references and impulses the term aspires to
describe.
There are two main descriptions and deployments of the term
Afropolitanism currently acknowledged in cultural discourse. One of the
interpretations is associated with Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu in her widely
acknowledged descriptive article, “Bye-bye Babar (Or What is
Afropolitan?)” Her definition has mainly been deployed in the realm of
popular discourse and the arts, appearing in many articles addressing issues
of architecture, art, lifestyles, fashion and design as well as in cyberspace
(e.g., Facebook). She defines the Afropolitan as “the newest generation of
African migrants.” They are the Africans or children of Africans who moved
to the West in the 1960s and 1970s for various reasons. Most of them are
now embodiments of inter-cultural or inter-racial union between Africa and
the rest of the world, especially the Occident. She observes that:
You’ll know us when you see us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon,
African ethics and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes e.g.
Ghanaian/Jamaican, Nigerian/Swiss; others are cultural mutts: American accents, European
affect, African ethos. Most of us are multilingual: In addition to English and a Romantic
language or two, we understand some indigenous language and speak a few urban
vernaculars. […] We are Afropolitans – not citizens but Africans of the world. (“Bye-bye
Babar”)
The definition is clear and so are the bearers of the label. African immigrants
and citizens of African nations living in the West are automatic Afropolitans.
Their dispersal across the world cities is an ongoing phenomenon powered by
personal ambition, political strife, the dynamics of transnational capital and
corporate culture as well as the quest for a better life away from an
“unpromising” continent. Some of the notable Afropolitans in the field of
culture and literature identified by Tuakli-Wosornu include the US based,
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie and the UK novelist Diran Adebayo
who has Nigerian roots. The founder-editor of Trace, Claude Gruzintsky,
architect David Adjaye and the artist Keziah Jones are defined as exemplary
Afropolitans. This list can be broadened to include the post-1990s icons of
African literature such as influential Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina
Introduction 17
who runs the Chinua Achebe Center at Bard College, Hisham Matar of Libya,
Laila Lalami of Morocco, Marie Ndiaye of France/Senegal, Alain
Mabanckou of Congo-Brazzaville, Abdourahman Waberi of Djibouti, Helon
Habila of Nigeria and his peers, Calixthe Beyala of Cameroon and her
compatriot Patrick Nganang, M. G. Vassanji and Shailja Patel of Kenya, as
well as the Zimbabwean short story writer Brian Chikwava just to mention a
few names across several regions of the continent.
These writers rose to prominence in African literary circles at the turn of
the century and have become increasingly familiar to most African readers
and critics during the past decade of the 21st century. They are both
cosmopolitan and internationally acclaimed. Most of them live outside the
continent but remain committed to the cultural politics of their own
native/natal nations and the continent at large. They are the cosmopolitan
African writers – a new generation that can boldly lay claim to the name, “the
Afropolitan generation.” The name is in keeping with Tuakli-Wosornu’s. In
the view of the writer:
What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to
complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that
mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is this refusal
to oversimplify: the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to
honour what is unique. Rather than essentializing the geographical entity, we seek to
comprehend its cultural complexity; to honour its intellectual and spiritual legacies; to
sustain our parent’s values. (“Bye-bye Babar”)
It is this anti-essentialist stance and the desire to complicate primary roots as

well as localised identities that connects Tuakli-Wosornu’s description of
Afropolitanism to Mbembe’s own. The two cultural critics take different
epistemological approaches, using different discursive trajectories to describe
their “new ways of seeing” Africa at the dawn of the 21st century.
Nevertheless, they both describe a novel critical term, at whose core are
questions of borders and spaces of new African identities. These questions, as
we shall see, are, interestingly, the themes that are prioritised and discussed in
the essays collected in this volume. The re-examination of how spaces and
borders can be engaged anew, within the parameters of literary criticism, to
bring out the nexus between history, culture and identity, with the continent
as a backdrop is the concern that connects both the reflections of Tuakli-
Wosornu and Mbembe together with the collective of authors whose essays
we present to you.
Achille Mbembe’s thinking has consistently, and at times provocatively,
asked us to rethink the limits and loculi of questions such as: Who is an
18 J.K.S. Makokha
African? Perhaps the debate needs to be kept alive even as provisional

answers lead to more questions being asked. One such way of going about it
may lie in a constant re-examination of such questions, at the core of African
literary criticism, in light of the diversity and history of the continent as well
as its present. In his widely published article on “Afropolitanism,” Mbembe
posits:
For many to be an African is to be ‘black’ and therefore ‘not White,’ with the degree of
authenticity being measured on the scale of raw racial difference. Thus, all sorts of people
have a link with, or simply something to do with Africa – something that gives them the
right ipso facto to lay claim to ‘African citizenship.’ There are naturally, those called
Negroes. They were born and live in African states, making up their nationals. Yet if Negro
Africans form the majority of the population in Africa, they are neither the sole inhabitants
nor the sole producers or art and culture of the continent. (26)
He proceeds to point out the presence and influence of peoples from the Far
East, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe in various parts and nation-
states of Africa. Such influences have always been occluded when nativist
interpretations of culture and the claim to autochthonous cultures are invoked
as the standards of measurement as far as African cultural production,
whether literary or otherwise, is concerned. The implicit contradictions in
such claims are many and have been discussed widely by cultural thinkers
such as Chinua Achebe and cultural theorists such as Anthony Kwame
Appiah, among others. 3
In so far as the reference and location of Afropolitanism is concerned,
both Mbembe and Tuakli-Wosornu hold common views. They both identify
the Africans at home and abroad who subscribe to anti-nativist and
cosmopolitan interpretations of African identities and cultures as
Afropolitans. Such Afropolitans abound in the continent’s bustling
Afropolises such as Cape Town, Accra, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos and
Abidjan, according to Mbembe. They also are a growing demographic in
Western metropolises such as Paris, London, New York and Toronto.
However, Mbembe departs from Tuakli-Wosornu when temporality is
factored into the definition of Afropolitanism. Unlike the latter, who chooses
to view Afropolitanism as a strictly novel phenomenon whose initial
appearance can be traced to post-colonial translocations, the former avers that
Afropolitanism, as a form of manifesting cosmopolitanism in Africa, is an
ancient phenomenon evident across centuries of continental history. He
3
For both references, see Appiah’s article and quotes from Achebe in it, “African Identities.”
See also Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, 101-54.
Introduction 19
elaborates this point further, using what he calls the “worlds-in-movement”

approach. The Cameroonian scholar sees Africa as a historical donor of
cultural trends and transporters to other continents, especially Europe and the
Americas as well as a recipient of the same. Intercultural hybridities and
transnationalisms, rather than cultural purity and essentialisms, are the
signature marks of an African cultural stamp. He observes:
When discussions arise about aesthetic creativity in contemporary Africa, and even knowing
who or what is an ‘African,’ the political and cultural critics tend to pass over in silence this
historical phenomenon of worlds in movement. (S)een from the viewpoint of Africa, the
worlds in movement phenomenon has at least two sides: that of dispersal as already
mentioned and that of immersion. Historically, the dispersal of populations and cultures was
not just about foreigners coming to settle in our backyard, in fact, the precolonial history of
African societies was a history of people in perpetual movement throughout the continent. It
is a history of colliding cultures, caught in the maelstrom of war, invasion, migration,
intermarriage, a history of various religions we make our own, of techniques we exchange
and of goods we trade. The cultural history of the continent can hardly be understood
outside the paradigm of itinerancy, mobility and displacement. (“Afropolitanism” 27)
Afropolitanism is the spirit that espouses this “paradigm of itinerancy,

mobility and displacement.” It is the spirit that emanates from those cultural
narratives and fictional memories being generated by migrants and their
descendants who live in racial minorities across Africa, such as the Asians of
Eastern and Southern Africa as well as the immigrants (and their
descendants) of African descent currently located in the Diaspora.
Afropolitanism as the mind of movement, naturally, calls for innovations in
modes and genres used to transport contemporary cultural narratives and
motifs. And in so far as the continent of Africa is a metaphor and
consequence of movement and its attendant necessary impulses of innovation
and tradition, Afropolitanism splits itself into a term that is both old and new.
This is a term that has probably existed in Africa for a long time, expressed in
the vocabulary of the hundreds of languages and dialects across the continent,
or preserved in the memories of forgotten and living griots.
In order for one to enthrone Afropolitanism as a new critical term within
the purview of African literary and cultural criticism today, it is important, as
we have argued, to recognise that its currency and value obtains from its
phenomenal rather than conditional quiddity. The phenomenon of
displacement and mobility across the limits of African spaces – physical,
epistemological and disciplinary – changes across teleology and geography
but the condition of humanity, or Africanity, remains existential across the
expanse of the continent. The journey motif and the figure of the migrant are
inherent, perhaps even essential, in the African condition but the phenomena
20 J.K.S. Makokha
that (in)forms the existence of the two vary across time and space. New
phenomena arise with the passage of time. The rise of such phenomena can
be attributed to shifts in spatial-temporal dimensions and their contexts.
Boundaries are normally traversed or transgressed in such scenarios but the
basic element, universal essence, of such experience is irreducible. It is
retained ad infinitum. Migration can forge new identities but the wanderlust
that sets migrants on the journey across borders to new spaces and ways of
being is as transcendental as it is elementary.
The contexts of phenomena arising from flows of global capital and the
present stage of globalisation, postcolonial translocations, constraints on
transnational migrations in light of recent events such as 9/11 and the recent
failed 25th December 2009 terror attack in the US, recent political stalemates
in Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Madagascar and Zimbabwe, the radical militancy
that persists in Algeria despite the withdrawal of the French decades ago, the
politics of incumbency and electoral fraud in Cameroon and Ethiopia, the
miasma of instability in northern Uganda, Southern Sudan and Eastern DR
Congo, other forms of privatisation of state violence, the salient and silent
disillusionment in Nigeria, the commingling of ethnic cultures in the context
of rapid urbanisation as well as the proliferation of new media and digital
technology across the continent are some of the new contexts in which the
phenomena of transnationalisation and cosmopolitanism are being
experienced in Africa.
Out of these new conditions, the dynamics of cultural mobility and
translocation identified by Mbembe continue to inspire African writers and
the writings from Africa in significant ways. Forms are being innovated,
styles imported, traditions revised, issues revisited and arguments
deconstructed by some of the writers who have gained prominence in African
literature in the recent past, in their remarkable attempts to understand the
newness of our times and beingness. The prominent writers at the turn of the
century are evidently those who have given original and refreshing
(re)presentations of the good, old and familiar narratives of relocation and
recollection in the context of the new forces and times of cultural mobility.
Readers readily identify (with) their protagonists, and critics are alert to
the shifts in narrative styles and techniques as well as affiliations to modes
associated with migrant writers and immigrant literatures. The very best of
the Afropolitan generation have won accolades for their sterling works in the
past fifteen years. They have taken home various internationally competitive
awards from the Orange Prize to the Commonwealth Prize, from the Booker
to the Giller Prize, from the Prix Goncourt Prize to a gamut of national
awards given by literary associations and organisations across Africa from
Introduction 21
Senegal to South Africa and inbetween. Their names are familiar to pundits
and students who attend literary festivals across the world from the annual
International Literature Festival in Berlin and the famous Frankfurt Book Fair
in Germany. African-based events such as the annual Kwani? Litfest in
Nairobi, Kenya and the Time of the Writer festival in Kwazulu-Natal, South
Africa are some of the platforms where audiences on the continents have
interacted with and questioned some of the Afropolitan writers identified in
this introduction. In Afropolitanism, cultural theorists and workers such as
Mbembe and Tuakle-Wosornu offer us a term that we can find useful in our
attempts to negotiate fundamental questions at the centre of new African
literatures in Europhone and Afrophone languages being produced by a new
generation of writers for a new time and a new century. Let the critics
continue to engage.
***
This volume brings together a range of scholars located in English

Departments, Departments of Literature, Departments of Foreign Languages
and Folklore across Africa, Western Europe and the United States. Their
essays reflect the continental diversity in terms of region and linguistic
tradition. Articles treat writers from Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone,
Afrophone and the Maghrebian linguistic traditions – writers from all four
corners of the continent. The essays treat both younger African writers such
as Patrice Nganang, M. G. Vassanji, Goretti Kyomuhendo, Jamal Mahjoub,
Abdulrazak Gurnah and Calixthe Beyala as well as offering fresh re-readings
of some canonical writers such Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J. M. Coetzee,
Idris Chraibi and the late Ahmadou Kourouma. Oral artists using slang and
vernacular mediums to traverse genres and participate in the culture of
mobility across space and generation are also treated. The volume, therefore,
brings these contemporary cultural workers, and their emerging concerns on
questions of borders, spaces and identities across contemporary Africa,
together in support of a cosmopolitan turn within African literary studies.
Some authors approach the theme of border-crossing by situating their
subject in given critical traditions for the purposes of criticism whereas others
approach the same theme by situating their subject in given cultural contexts.
The final product is a volume that showcases, as Gikandi observes, various
aspects of Afropolitan African literature – form, content, style and context –
ensuring that a recent panorama of some of the literary patterns and praxis
across regions of the continent continues to emerge.
22 J.K.S. Makokha
Works Cited
Adesanmi, Pius. “The Many ‘Spaces’ of the African Writer: The Meeting of
African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2-7, 1998.” Research in
African Literatures 31.1 (2000): 144-48.
Appiah, Anthony Kwame. “African Identities.” Social Postmodernism:
Beyond Identity Politics. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson and Steven Seidman.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 103-15.
——., Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London: Penguin,
2007.
Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, INC. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2009.
Dorman, Sara, Daniel Hammett, and Paul Nugent, eds. Making Nations,
Creating Strangers. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and
Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009.
Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Trans. Laurent Chauvet. African Remix:
Contemporary Art of a Continent. Ed. Simon Njami and Lucy Duran.
Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2007. 26-29.
——., “Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism.” African Studies Review
44.2 (2001): 1-14.
Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye. “Bye-bye Babar (Or What is Afropolitan?)”
Afropolis 26. Jan. 2009. 20 July 2009 <http://afropolis.wordpress.com
/2009/>.
Part I
Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism

Sim Kilosho Kabale
Afropolitanism and Erudition in Francophone African

Novels, 1994–2000
The spread of cosmopolitan trends in African literary production at the turn

of the century has made critics to talk of “the new generation” of writers.
Some of the writers may be new voices indeed but others are established
names in the field who have kept up with the changing times by adjusting to
current trends with remarkable success. The literature of the new generation
appears not to be rigid of form or governed by conventions of a single genre.
Rather the works appear as crucibles of interdisciplinary knowledge of all
kinds: historical, political, customary, philosophical, sociological, et cetera
framed by conventional genre forms such as the postcolonial novel. A
reading of the following novels serves as proof: Calixthe Beyala’s Assèze
l’Africaine (1994), Emmanuel Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi
des étoiles (1998), and Ahmadou Kourouma’s two novels, En attendant le
vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) and Allah n’est pas obligé (2000). The novels
form our basis for discussing the themes of Afropolitanism and erudition in
contemporary African fiction, key concerns of the new generation writing.
In spite of diversity in individual talent and idiosyncratic concerns raised
in the craft of each of the selected writers, our intention is to highlight the
expansion of several common aspects converging around the themes of
Afropolitanism and erudition in the selected novels. These aspects evolve in
each novel as if the authors were acting in concert to enable readers’ access
common realities of cultural hybridism across the continent where the fiction
is set. Out of the convergence of the shared concerns comes our assumption
that expression of Afropolitanism and the condensation of universal
knowledge into African fiction is a noticeable feature of the so-called new
generation writing. Let us recall with Achille Mbembe that Afropolitanism is
an African aesthetic, which stands apart from its precursors, Panafricanism
and Negritude:
C’est une esthétique et une certaine poétique du monde. C’est une manière d’être au monde
qui refuse, par principe, toute forme d’identité victimaire – ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elle
n’est pas consciente des injustices et de la violence que la loi du monde a infligé à ce
continent et à ses gens. C’est également une prise de position politique et culturelle par
rapport à la nation, à la race et à la question de la différence en général. Dans la mesure où
nos États sont de pures inventions (récentes, de surcroît), ils n’ont, strictement parlant, rien
26 Sim Kilosho Kabale
dans leur essence qui nous obligeât à leur vouer un culte – ce qui ne signifie pas que l’on
soit indifférent à leur sort. (“Afropolitanisme”)
It is aesthetics and a certain poetics of the world. It is a manner of being in the world which
refuses, by principle, any form of victim identity - that does not mean that it is not conscious
of the injustices and the violence which the law of the world inflicted on this continent and
its people. It is also a political and cultural standpoint regarding the nation, the race and the
question of cultural difference in general. Insofar as our States are pure fabrications (in
addition, recent), they have, strictly speaking, nothing in their essence which should make us
worship them that does not mean that one is indifferent to their fate. 1
On the basis of this concept of Afropolitanism, we want to examine the self-

consciousness of the main characters of the novels named above. We will see
how their identities evolve in various spaces and how they assume the
posture of well-travelled, erudite persons in their efforts to inform the reader
about the experiences and occurrences at home and abroad which have made
them embodiments of the Afropolitan spirit.
Phenomenon of Border Crossings and Voyages of Protagonists
According to Mbembe, Afropolitanism results from an experience of several

cultural worlds. It is in a way about the expression of a transnational culture
by African individuals open to the worlds:
Beaucoup d’entre eux ayant eu la chance d’aller et de revenir, développant au détour de ces
mouvements, une incalculable richesse du regard et de la sensibilité. Il s’agit généralement
de gens qui peuvent s’exprimer en plus d’une langue. (“Afropolitanisme”)
Many of them have likely been able to travel and come back, developing in the course of
these movements, an incalculable richness of the glance and sensitivity. It is generally about
people who can express themselves in another language besides their own (as a result of
their experience abroad).
Indeed, the narrative unit of each novel of our corpus is presented in the form
of a fusion of reports that bring together the experiences of indigenous
people, foreigners and protagonists as a result of border crossings from one
country to another for various reasons. Some travel between African
countries while others travel abroad.
Such is the case in En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) by the
distinguished Ivorian novelist, Ahmadou Kourouma. Koyaga the hero
plunges the readers into a captivating tale on his quixotic adventures, war
exploits and outlandish political expediency. He travels for the first time in
1
All the translations are the author’s.
Afropolitanism and Erudition 27
his life outside his native village when “the Whiteman sought him to attend
their newly established school” (23). He thus left the mountains of Tchaotchi
to study at the rural school in the urban centre of Ramaka, before being
registered in Kati, close to Bamako. This change of place taught him to hide
his nudity by wearing clothes and to disavow his own African traditions, the
customs of the naked men, his people’s ancient way of life. From then on, the
enlightened Koyaga dons clothes imported by the white man until the end of
the account. His travels do not cease with the completion of his studies.
Later, he undertakes several other voyages when he enlists as an officer in the
French colonial army.
Koyaga’s military service takes him to the deserts of Algeria and the
distant lands of Indo-china. When the Second World War ends and General
De Gaulle returns the African riflemen back to their home countries, Koyaga
requests to be integrated in the young national army of his home country.
Luck does not smile on him. The government even refuses to pay him his
pension, allowances of demobilisation and savings. He is devastated. But all
is not lost. According to his native customs and the culture of the naked men,
which is still deep inside him in spite of his proclaimed “transformation” into
a modern man through schooling, it is necessary to resort to revenge and
force in the event of provocation or aggression. Consequently, he issues a
death threat to his superiors and decides to pursue political power and gun for
the presidency. Unfortunately for him, he is picked and locked up in the
Central Prison of the capital city before his evacuation to the Ramaka Prison
near his native village. Here he learns of his father’s death.
This return to his native village is also a return to the fold of his kinsmen
and the ancient customary way of life and beliefs of his now distant
childhood. It is a period where he relearns the ancient ways of the so-called
naked men. Koyaga learns from his mother and the Bokano marabout
(muslim mystic), the powerful magic formulas that will later enable him to
kill the leader of his country, President Fricassa Santos, to win the presidency
and by extension the destiny of his country. When he ascends to the
presidency, the protagonist draws much from lessons learned during the
voyages abroad of yesteryears and his new travels as the president, especially
in Africa, where he has been quickly admitted to the exclusive club of fellow
dictators. He finds a new cause in the so-called South-South bilateral
relations. The now famous “novice” Head of State endorses ebulliently the
idea of Panafricanism and prefers to place his confidence in the ideal of an
Africa that would trade with Africa rather than be a junior partner on the
global trade arena. The connection between his eloquent enthusiasm for a
transnational political framework and the cosmopolitan outlook acquired
during his voyages to distant lands in the past is obvious. His is now a world
view defined as much by the local as by the translocal or the transnational.
The phenomenon of dislocation whereby African characters travel from
their countries to other foreign countries is also illustrated in Kourouma’s last
novel, Allah n’est pas oblige (2000). After the death of his mother, Birahima,
an Ivorian youth, leaves with Yacouba for neighbouring Liberia in search of
his long lost Aunt Mahan. On the way, in order to be secure in the foreign
country embroiled in a vicious tribal war, Birahima disguises himself as a
child soldier and Yacouba as a fétichor (fetishist). Their mission in search of
the aunt always forces them to move on from one place to the other. Each
time they move they switch loyalties between different rebellious factions
that control different ethnic parts of the country. Sometimes they cross
borders from one region to another under their real names but use aliases at
other times, perpetually shifting their local identities as it were. Birahima
gives the light on a range of identities they assume while moving towards the
South: “Nous (c’est-à-dire le bandit boiteux, le multiplicateur des billets de
banque, le féticheur musulman, et moi, Birahima, l’enfant de la rue sans peur
ni reproche, the small-soldier, nous allions vers le sud quand nous avons
rencontré notre ami Sékou; 137)” (“We [i.e. the lame gangster, the multiplier
of banknotes, the Moslem fetishist and me, Birahima, the street child without
fear or reproach, the small-soldier, we went towards the south when we met
our friend Sékou]”). Following the exemplary typical hero of the novels of
adventure, these characters become ontological outlines in perpetual
reconfiguration.
‘South-South border-crossings’ involve someone travelling between two
or more African countries rather than from an African country to, say, a
European one. This phenomenon can be clarified through a description of
journeys undertaken by tradesmen in several African countries where bloody
civil wars are raging:
Et quand tout est au prix cadeau dans un pays […] les commerçants et les commerçantes qui
veulent s’enrichir vont tous au Liberia pour acheter ou échanger […] ça vient le vendre ici
en Guinée et en Côte d’Ivoire à des prix forts […] Et quand il y a guerre tribale dans un
pays, on entre dans ce pays par convoi. On entrait au Liberia par convoi. (Kourouma, Allah
n’esy pas obligé 38)
And when all is at the price of a gift in a country […] business people who want to grow
rich all go to Liberia to buy or exchange […] then come to sell it here in Guinea and Ivory
Coast at high prices […] and when there is a tribal war in a country, one enters this country
in a convoy. One entered Liberia as part of a convoy.
Let us note that in these two kouroumanesque novels, these African

characters are not locked up all their life in their own native countries. Their
consciousness is not bound by the limits of their national borders nor their
national experience. The spirit of Afropolitanism is evident here in three
tendencies; namely, the desire to leave home, the need to meet and trade with
others.
Elsewhere, a ‘South-North’ crossing is highlighted in Les petits garçons
naissent aussi des étoiles (1998) by Emmanuel Dongala, the famous novelist
from the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). It is articulated when Matapari
tells how the character Bidié made a fabulous round- the-world tour before
his final return to the fold of his native African home:
Au milieu des années soixante, jeune garçon, alors que les jeunes générations rêvaient de la
France et des diplômes, lui il rêvait d’Amérique. Il s’était embarqué clandestinement sur un
bateau panaméen ancré à Pointe-Noire, et après de longues péripéties […] où il fut jeté à la
mer par les marins qui le découvrirent dans la cale où il s’était caché, où il battit à la nage un
requin et où il fut repêché par un autre navire, il se retrouva sous la protection d’un capitaine
au long cours argentin qui l’embaucha comme marmiton sur son bateau. (Dongala 213)
In the middle of the Sixties, young boy, whereas the youth of his generation dreamed of
France and degrees, him he dreamed of America. He had embarked clandestinely as a stow-
away on a Panamanian boat anchored at the port of Pointe-Noir, and after long adventures
[…] he was thrown into the sea by the sailors when they discovered him in the hold where
he had hidden. He fought with a shark before being fished out of the sea by another ship. He
found protection and patronage under the ship’s Argentinean captain and was employed as a
kitchen boy on the ship during the long journey back to South America.
The narrator continues that they made a voyage along the South American
coast. Bidie discovered the exotic cities of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo,
Montevideo and Bahia Blanca. When the Captain finally retired and left for
Argentina, he took Bidié with him to his home near Pampa. On the death of
the captain, Bidié returned to Buenos Aires where he worked initially as a
bouncer in a nightclub before becoming a Tango musician. Later in life Bidie
returned again to Africa and had his own band. Although he ravished his
countrymen with exotic dances from unknown countries, his music career
ended badly. His small enterprise fell into bankruptcy when Tonton Boula
Boula ensnared him with his lovely wife, Tantine Lolo. The quixotic
character eventually died blind after seeing the wonders of the world. Let us
retain this adventure of Bidié and his taste of exile that led him to discover
the remote countries abroad and become a citizen of the world.
Nomadist sensibilities feature also in the novel Assèze l’Africaine (1994)
by the Cameroonian writer, Calixthe Beyala. Assèze is the heroine. She is
born and brought up in a remote corner of Cameroon but does not spend her
entire life there. Like Koyaga, her wanderlust begins with the experience of
schooling. Her grandmother and her mother take her to a school located
fifteen kilometres from their native village to learn how to read, write and “to
count starting with sticks” (43). Her alienation and dislocation from her
native home and the local worldview becomes more obvious with the death
of her grandmother. She travels to Douala, the largest city in her native
Cameroon for further studies and eventually moves on to “discover the
crowded glands of Paris” where she will “tempt the white cake with sweet
mysteries of Africa” (301). Afterwards her life journeys take her across
several African villages, cities and tourist places. The migrations make the
protagonist view herself as “Assèze the African” rather than the more
nondescript “Assèze the Cameroonian.” She hails this transnational
expansion of her local identity when she self-consciously points out to the
readers as much:
Les villes traversées m’avaient légué leurs fièvres, leurs tristesses ou leurs sourires. J’avais
quitté Douala, fait un détour par N’Gaoundéré, Garoua, j’avais remonté, Ndjamena et
Bardjal, grimpé le Kilimandjaro, bifurqué par Edjeleh, Hadssi Rhat, Tripoli, Tunis et accosté
à Marseille. (Beyala 232)
The cities I visited had bequeathed me their fevers, sadness or smiles. I had left Douala,
passed through Gaoundéré, Garoua, I had gone up Ndjamena and Bardjal, had climbed
Kilimanjaro, had forked by Edjeleh, Hadssi Rhat, Tripoli, Tunis and had docked at
Marseilles.
It follows that Assèze the African is a character emancipated from the limits
of a national consciousness and is possessed with a cosmopolitan yet African
spirit. Her travels lead her to different places and she meets peoples other
than her own. She subsequently attains a cosmopolitan outlook of the world
even as she retains her African roots. The travels open her to the world and
she becomes its citizen. Some of her folks cannot understand her “tourist
passion” for travels that lead her beyond her national borders. They utter in
astonishment, “Be insane for You, completely nut, to leave in a country
where you know me nobody!” (232).
Out of these four exemplary works analysed above, the trend of creating
African characters who frequently transgress their national borders and
achieve cosmopolitan worldviews on top of their native traditions, becomes
clear and consistent across contemporary African fiction at the turn of the
century. Koyaga, Birahima, Bidié or Assèze, all find pleasure in exile and the
experience of journeys abroad across national borders.
The Fiction of Erudition
It is a challenging undertaking when one sets out to determine at every

instant the real source of all speeches and ideas of the highlighted
protagonists out of the four novels under discussion. The echo of a rich range
of personal knowledge that they produce shows how much their authors
embrace the knowledge of the world other than theirs in the true spirit of
cosmopolitanism. The literature which these fictions offer to us, testifies on
behalf of the authors several tendencies like a true “mathésis” (Barthes 59) or
universal field of knowledge beside the familiar African cultural experience.
Let us quote inter alia their tastes for documentation and quests for the truth
as well as the romantic escape leading both authors and their protagonists to
seek textual release in all the fields of the life. The tendency for erudition and
scholarship in the authors and their mentioned chief characters (who appear
as authorial voices in most cases) is evident when they assume various roles
as connoisseurs of learning, prosaic observers of daily life, voices of popular
wisdom and sometimes as erudites having the concern of sharing their deep
knowledge and broad experience with fellow characters and readers.
Michel Matapari’s father, a well educated teacher takes every occasion to
teach his son about life. Michel remembers, for example, the geography
lesson that his father gave him when he entered one day in his small office
filled with books, pencils and scattered sheets:
Viens voir, Michel. […] “Ces lignes que tu vois s’appellent des Méridiens.” Il en pointa une
et la remonta avec la pointe de son crayon jusqu’au point où toutes se croisaient: “l’heure est
la même sur toute cette ligne, du sud jusqu’au Nord. Maintenant, regarde. Regarde ce point
où se croisent tous les méridiens. […] C’est le point zéro du globe terrestre, origine et
aboutissement de tous les méridiens.” (Dongala 72)
Come see, Michel. […] “Those lines you see are called Meridians.” He pointed one and
traced it with the tip of his pencil to the point where all crossed: “The time is the same
throughout the line, south to north. Now, look. Look at this point where all meridians
intersect. […] This is the point zero of the terrestrial sphere [earth], the origin and
culmination of all the meridians.”
His father-teacher proceeds to expound the famous “Fermat’s theorem”, the

“balance of atoms” and the thoughts of great scientists like Einstein, Matt
Henson, Peary, and so on to his awe-stricken son (237, 245, 108). To have
grown up in the shadow of such a highly educated father and a grandfather
who routinely quips at him, “my baby can read, can read the books and the
universe,” Matapari himself becomes a scholar. Throughout the novel he
flaunts his encyclopaedic knowledge not only in mathematics and biology but
also in philosophy. To convince us he quotes by heart a few titles of his

bedside books:
J’ai déjà lu Robinson Crusoé, L’île au trésor, L’Enfant noir, Cent ans de solitude, Le
Merveilleux voyage de Niels Holgersson à travers la Suède, Tom Sawyer et Les Aventures
de Huckleberry Finn, Les Contes d’Anderson, des Contes du Bengale, Les aventures de
Pinocchio et son nez qui s’allongeait chaque fois qu’il mentait, j’en passe car je ne peux les
citer tous. (Dongala 160)
I’ve already read Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, The African Child, One Hundred Years
of Solitude, The Wonderful Trip of Niels Holgersson through Sweden, Tom Sawyer and The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Tales of Anderson, Tales of Bengal, The Adventures
of Pinocchio and his nose that grew longer every time he lied, I stop because I cannot
mention all of them.
Note that these titles include several genres (stories, novels and comic books)
and the classics from different nations such as France, USA, Cameroon,
Colombia and so on. And to demonstrate to readers that this list is not
exhaustive of the numerous books he has read, Matapari concludes that he
has to stop for the list of the titles he has read is lengthy. Previously he had
already declared that due to his “burning desire to know” he reads the
biographies of famous scientists and political figures. He pontificates, “I read
the biographies of Albert Einstein, Arthur Ashe, Matt Henson, George
Washington Carver, Srinivasa Ramanuja and also those of Alexander
Pushkin, of Rigoberta Menchu…” (155).
In addition to the numerous scientific books that he has read and thinks
has understood very well, Matapari studied physics and the theory of
evolution (296, 297). Our erudite protagonist is not only a devourer of books,
he is also a voracious consumer of movies and enjoys listening to music. He
speaks from time to time about a few titles such as Paysages après la bataille
(Landscape after the Battle) (70) in his father’s library and the videos of his
brothers (219). Finally, the young Matapari announces his passion for the
“music of the Kora and the Balafon” (156).
In an Africa plagued by civil wars, this African character who quests for
erudition and celebrates pursuits of knowledge as avenues of engaging the
world, has a remarkable command of the lexicon of criminology. His enmity
with the father of his lover Alédia serves as a pretext to enumerate a long list
of fatal procedures that he could use to eliminate his foe. Among the
traditional as well as international methods, which he learned by watching
military films, he cites, hanging on a Draculian pole of torments and
shooting. He then enumerates the burial alive of adulterers, the “necklace
method”, which is to put a burning rubber tyre around the neck of a thief,
execution with blows from blunt machetes practised in the genocide of

Rwanda and Burundi and so on and so forth (Dongala 94).
In Beyala’s Assèze l’Africaine, the narrator also flaunts the bookish
knowledge she has acquired since leaving her childhood and life in the
remote village where she was born and where traditional lifestyle still reigns.
Assèze the African admires the intellectual rigour of her teachers. They made
such an impression on her at school that lasted a lifetime:
Les maîtres avaient des livres Mamadou et Bineta et la bible. […] Il avait été formé quelque
part du coté de Marseilles. Il parlait comme une bibliothèque. Il avait lu Proust, Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Zola. La langue de maître d’école était à la fois abstraite et pleine d’esprit.
(Beyala 92)
The teachers had books like Mamadou and Bineta and the Bible. […] He was educated
somewhere near Marseilles. He spoke like a library. He had read Proust, Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Zola. The language teacher was both abstract and full of intellectual spirit.
Recognise the rapid transformation of the protagonist as the plot of the novel
develops. Assèze grows from a local village girl to an emancipated woman, a
citizen of the world. She is no longer an African villager of Batouala or as
traditional an African as one who is forced by circumstances to grow up, live
and die in his native village. Nevertheless her bookish knowledge has not
eroded her roots in her customary African culture. She is a child of both
worlds. She exists in-between the two with such comfort that it sets her apart
from the Westernised African characters of novels by early generations of
writers from the continent.
Just like a Samba Diallo or a Giambatista Vico, she too studied the
classics but did not lose local knowledge such as the art of wood binding. In
Douala she reads Simone de Beauvoir. She also attends an impressive library
“a great library with diverse contents—books by Baudelaire, Bellay, Victor
Hugo, Sartre, tests on one’s hair, hard, hard” (111). She later encounters “the
cubism of Kant, Hegel and Jean Paul Sartre” (114). In Douala, while
attending an event featuring an agitated crowd of dancers made up of the
children of the Whites and the wealthy Africans, the heroine opens up to the
spirit of Afropolitanism hitherto not yet declared. Her discovery is that there
is no cogency in the idea of cultural purity and the notion that cultural
identities are ideally local and traditional. White and Black mix. Africa, she
learns, exists in constant contact with the rest of the world, especially the
West. It is at this time that it dawns on her that even the other (the White) is
indescribably quite common to her. For this reason she concludes that “the
future of the music (and by extension literature, in Africa) is in cultural
mixing” (Beyala 99, 114).
African Religious Beliefs and Tradtitions
Cultures of mobility bear the spirit of Afropolitanism, Achille Mbembe has

argued. Afropolitanism goes hand in hand with cultural ambivalence, cultural
amalgamation and overlap:
L’on peut aller jusqu’à affirmer qu’au fond, ce que l’on appelle la « tradition » n’existe pas.
Qu’il s’agisse de l’Islam, du christianisme, des manières de s’habiller, de faire du
commerce, de parler […] rien de tout cela ne survécut au rouleau compresseur du métissage
et de la vernacularisation. C’était le cas bien avant la colonisation. Il y a, en effet, une
modernité africaine pré-coloniale qui n’a pas encore fait l’objet d’une prise en compte dans
la créativité contemporaine. (“Afropolitanisme”)
We can go on to say that, basically, what we call ‘tradition’ does not exist. Whether it's
Islam, Christianity, ways of dressing, trading and talking […] none of this would survive the
steamroller of miscegenation and vernacularisation. This was the case long before
colonisation. There is, indeed, a pre-colonial African modernity which has not yet been
taken into account in contemporary creativity.
We focus particularly on characters that mix the practices of Paganism,

Christianity and African religions, and even magic and witchcraft. In some
recent studies, there are throughout the world, “Ten great religions and
around 10,000 sects. 6000 sects exist in Africa, 1200 in the United States and
hundreds in other countries” (Watchtower 310). This survey shows how
religion, the opium of the people, as Marx famously said, occupies a
prominent place in the lives and letters of Africans, both contemporary and
otherwise. In the Sixties, Merville J. Herskovits stipulated that “the religion
has an important role in the life of Africans and in fact is an intimate part of
it” (99). The various beliefs in God and in the supernatural forces that the
characters in the selected novels engage further elaborate the view.
Let us consider on a purely illustrative basis the temptation that Tonton
Boula Boula fails to overcome in Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi
des étoiles. He was sworn into high office by the Leader of the Revolution.
Tonton venerates the Leader of the Revolution and has publicly and solemnly
declared that his faith is in him alone. But, in spite of the oath of fidelity,
Tonton Boula Boula acknowledges being seduced by religion, “I ask
forgiveness, forgiveness. I admit that several times I have succumbed to the
lure of the opium of the people because I attended two Catholic Masses
clandestinely. […] I also consulted a Malian marabout and a Pigmy fetishist
when I felt my position in the party was under threat” (191). In spite of all
such preemptive and preventive methods against malefaction, his position is
extremely threatened when Tonton Boula Boula is “accused of leading the
biggest conspiracy ever organised” to overthrow the regime. In such perilous
times, it is still spiritualism that his sister turns to in order to find the right
solution out of the dire situation in which Tonton finds himself:
Sa sœur est allée voir un “prophète de Dieu” de la capitale, pas un marabout musulman, ni
un féticheur animiste, mais un prophète de Dieu qui basait ses évocations sur la bible.
Certes, avec lui des cornes d’animaux, des cauris, des statuettes et autres ingrédients dont les
féticheurs faisaient usage étaient là, mais la bible était là qui neutralisait toute influence
animiste ou païenne. (Dongala 160)
His sister went to a “prophet of God” in the capital, not a Muslim marabout, animist or a
fetishist, but a prophet of God, who based his evocations on the Bible. Of course, the horns
of animals, cowries, statuettes and other ingredients, which fetishists use, were there but the
bible was the only influence which was neutralising animist or pagan influences.
The neutralisation of animism and paganism forces by biblical power implied

in this passage is symbolic. It refers to the distrust shown at the beginning of
the same novel for the colonists, accused of having “chased her ancestors
from the graves (figurines) behind the boxes where they lived and replaced
them with Jesus Christ, the Bible and the Cross” (10).
A similar phenomenon also appears in Beyala’s novel, Assèze l’Africaine,
when the natives of Assèze’s land struggle to adopt Christianity and regard it
as a religion of the White. Although Father Michel teaches them catechism
and baptises them in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit, for them God of the White is white and worries little about Blacks.
This God manufactures marvellous things for the White and blesses them.
Assèze’s fellow villagers arrive at this conclusion quite understandably when
a native was crushed into the dust as Father Michael reverses his motor cycle
one bright day:
C’est le Dieu des Blancs qui a invité ça, dit le Nègre.

- Tu peux nous montrer comment fonctionne cet engin, mon frère. Et ce Dieu, c’est le Dieu
des Blancs.
- Et comment qu’il fait pour me montrer? Redemanda mon concitoyen. Le Nègre nous
expliqua qu’il fallait écouter le père Michel. Il était venu dans notre pays nous apporter la
lumière. […] Il dit qu’il fallait que nous soyons baptisés sinon on mourait pauvres, car seul
le Dieu des Blancs apportait la richesse. (Beyala 32)
It is the God of the Whites who caused that, says the Black man.
- Can you show us how this machine works my brother? And that God is the God of the
Whites.
- And what I need to do so as to be shown? My fellow citizen asked again. Tha Black man
explained to us that we should listen to Father Michael. He came to our country to bring us
the light. […] He says that we should be baptized or else we would die poor because itis
only the God of the whites who brings wealth.
The trick to make them believe in the new faith is found to be in wealth. In
order for the locals to be as rich as the whites, they need to embrace the new
faith. They will receive many blessings, including material benefits upon
their conversion. It is therefore clear the indigenous community in the novel
feels obliged to abandon the traditional beliefs lest they die poor and “all
burn in hell” (32). Despite their racist indifference, a latent spirit of
Afropolitanism leads them to accept the white missionary, Father Michel, to
convert and teach them biblical truths about the “White God” and a way of
life so foreign from their ancient ways. In response to this “meeting of alien
cultures,” the head of the village himself, the custodian of the people’s way
of life and their leader mobilises the people on these terms:
J’aime mon peuple, les choses ont changé, nous devons suivre le chemin du progrès c’est
avec plaisir que j’autorise les habitants de mon village à être baptisés. Que faut-il faire? Le
Nègre dit qu’il fallait obéir à certaines règles.
Règle 1: rapporter nos fétiches.
Règle 2: suivre des cours d’évangélisation des enfants à la préfecture
Règle 3: envoyer nos enfants à l’école. (Beyala 32-33)
I love my people [and their way of life] but things have changed, we must follow the path of
progress. It is with pleasure that I authorise the people of my village to be baptised. Let me
know whether there is more to be done. He was told that he had to obey certain rules.
Rule 1: report their fetishes.
Rule 2: take lessons in the evangelisation of children in the prefecture.
Rule 3: send their children to school.
This awakening of the chief reflects the will of all the African characters of
the novel dedicated to the change of traditional lifestyles and beliefs in favour
of the new Western message. However, certain characters such as the
grandparents of Assèze oppose it categorically. And yet there are others who
simply pretend they have accepted the religion. This last group in the words
of Mukala Kadima Nzuji, “rock quietly to any religious conviction that
vibrates deep in their spiritual flesh” (9). However, it is important to
announce that the apologetic deference for and acceptance of Christianity in
Beyala’s novel does not dominate the rest of the sample. From the start, the
revealing title of Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé, announces how Allah,
the most powerful God as the Moslems confess, does not act under any
external pressure. “He is not obliged to be right with all his creation” (9, 13).
Dongala in Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles, manifests Allah
as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Allah rewards the faithful and
reserves additional happiness in the paradise for them only (296, 297). He
strikes down the malicious and does not answer their prayers. The child
soldier Birahima and his fellow characters are aware that Allah indeed is the
master of his own will. With this in their minds, they believe in Allah and
pray five times per day. However, when their prayers go answered, they
resort to the paganic intervention of their ancestral spirits by consulting
marabouts, the wizards and the féticheurs. It is in awe of the marabouts, that
Yacouba picks up the alias “maker of amulets.” The irony of fate occurs
when neither Allah, nor the African spirits manage to solve the problems of
their religious admirers. Solutions may sometimes not exist both in local and
alien prescriptions. The mother of Birahima, an enthusiastic Moslem woman
suffers from the bad fate launched against her right leg by an evil-eyed one.
When she dies from it, he declares “Allah killed her by use of ulcer and the
tears she shed so much in her life because Allah, he of the sky does his own
will; he is not obliged to do always all that is right (32)”. The child soldiers
of Liberia who appear in the novel believe also that their fetishes bearing
inscriptions from the Koran will protect them from their enemy in combat
(76-80).
The belief in fetishism, the evil eye, and magic is evident in the intrigues
of Kourouma’s other work, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. In an
account of a purificatory ceremony, the reader discovers how characters with
supernatural powers dominate trade by controlling the minds of their peers
using nefarious forces. Bokano the healer of the dispossessed, the insane, and
the incurable among other ailing groups, is an astute scholar in the evil eye
and divination arts. He handles with ease the teachings and prophecies of
Mahomet drawn from the Koran. The Djinns and the ancestral spirits do not
conceal any secrets from him when he questions them with the thimble, a
sabre of mystery, on his finger (51). He is the one who helps Koyaga’s sister
to right the wrongs committed to him after the hero returns to his native land
from the wars of De Gaulle and is denied his allowances, a chance in the
army before ending up in prison. Bokano the marabout helps Koyaga’s sister
Nadjouma through consultation with his nether worlds. As a result of his
interventions, Koyaga becomes a “superman” protected by all the powers of
mysterious African divinities. The hero becomes invincible and gains the
favour of the gods of the land (29).
Let us remain with the same novel and note that a clear margin is traced
between Christianity and Islam. According to the narrator, to proclaim his
faith in the Bible amounts believing in the blessing of the Whites (Shem,
Japheth) and the curse of the Blacks (Ham, Canaan) written in the book, or
the dominance of light (incarnated by the White) on darkness (Black) (234).
Islam is conceived differently, “This religion born of the heat of the sand of
the desert is a faith of the men and women of the desert. Paradise, celestial
residence, and the eternal kingdom it promises, and is sort after by the pious
of its adherents is a safety haven from tormenting deserts” (356). The Koran
is viewed as a book of morals and ethics. The narrator explains that “Islam
forbids a woman to start a conversation with a man who is absorbed in his
communication with her creator, the women being impure” (234).
The idea of female impurity develops more elsewhere. In En attendant le
vote des bêtes sauvages, the marabout accustomed to reciting intense prayers
of “rhirib of icha” for two or three hours each morning feels unable to
concentrate because his thought turns to Nadjouma. He sees her, dressed so
decently, just as he offers his last invocations addressed to Allah:
Cette quête par plusieurs fois avait été gâtée par l’irruption inopportune, blasphématoire, des
images de la jeune femme; Il retrouvait dans le ciel le regard de la jeune femme, ses
muscles, son pagne à moitié dénoué et même. […] Le marabout arrêtait sa quête, disait
quatre vingt dix-neuf fois sarafoulahi (le pardon d’Allah), s’imposait quelques jours
supplémentaires de sévères jeûnes comme pénitence. (62)
This quest several times had been spoiled by the inappropriate, profane, irruption of images
of the young woman, and he saw in the sky the glance of the young woman, her muscles, her
loincloth half unwound and even. […] The Marabout stopped his quest, and said the
Sarafoulahi (forgiveness of Allah) ninety-nine times. He gave himself a few additional days
of severe fasting as penitence.
Philosophical Thoughts
We understand by philosophical thought the reflexions or knowledge aimed

at understanding the main causes, absolute realities as well as the base of
human values. In Africa, according to Dominique Zahan, in his seminal work
Religion, spiritualité et pensée africaine, “The problems of life and death
constitute the basis for many of the religious feeling and the unconscious
background of philosophical reflection” (62). Africans like all humans raise
questions about existence, death and life in the hereafter.
In the four novels of our corpus, the ambiguity of a number of situations
leads people to ask fundamental questions about their destiny. Let us
illustrate this by listening to Matapari’s conversation with his mother about
death in Dongala’s Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles. The
protagonist’s grandfather is very ill and he does not want him to die. With
this in mind, Matapari raises an akward question on dying that his mother
replies with a detour: What is death precisely, mom?:
Ah! Je ne sais pas, Matapari. Cela dépend de ta croyance. Quand je connaissais que la
spiritualité chrétienne, je t’aurais répondu que la mort est une délivrance du péché originel et
qu’elle n’est qu’une voie de passage vers le paradis. Un musulman te dirait peut être la
même chose, que la vie ici-bas est éphémère, seul compte le paradis que l’on rejoint après la
mort. Dans nos religions traditionnelles par contre, la mort n’est pas un état, elle n’est qu’un
voyage pour rejoindre le pays des ancêtres. Ce pays s’appelle Pemba chez les Kongos et
c’est d’ailleurs là que va aussi le soleil le soir quand il disparaît du ciel. C’est dire que les
morts ne sont jamais morts. (294-95)
Ah! I do not know, Matapari. It depends on your belief. Within Christian spirituality, I may
answer that death is salvation from original sin and therefore it’s just a path to Paradise. A
Muslim can reply the same way, that life here is fleeting, heaven is the ultimate destination
and one can only enter it after death. In our traditional religions on the other hand, death is
not a state, it is only a voyage to the country of the ancestors to join them. This country is
called called Pemba among the Kongos and that is where the sun goes at night when it
disappears from the sky. This means that the dead are never dead.
This display of encyclopaedic religious knowledge continues when the

mother offers critical reflection on the Buddhist beliefs and the reincarnation
cycle governed by karma (295). She also considers the Jewish notion of death
as the means to return humans to the covenant with God broken by the first
man, Adam. Accustomed to logical and scientific reasoning, Matapari
expressed amazement about the inconsistency of all these responses. He said,
“Mom, after all you told me, what is the best way to reach God? The mother
warns her Cartesian-minded son by insisting that religion should not be put in
the field of human rationality. Such a move only leads to loss of answers or
answers that are ridiculous” (295).
In his time, Kant showed how fear of death is natural to all men, even the
most unfortunate, and the wise “shudder not from horror at the fact of dying,
but out of the horror of having perished the thought of death” (46-47). The
moral and psychological imbalance of Assèze the African as a young girl
after the sudden disappearance of his grandmother serves as an example. Like
Matapari, the girl raises several questions concerning the origin of death and
the destiny of humans. And when she does not find satisfactory answers she
is sorry: “I was like one standing at the end of heat, I felt uneasy to an
indefinable point. Hell was out […] that night grandmother died in her sleep.
I really became aware of this disaster as soon as grandmother was buried on
the day of the funeral” (Beyala 54).
Despite this awareness, the disappearance of a person she cherished so
much affects even her school results, “My grades remained mediocre. Why? I
preferred to go to my house to watch the curling green leaves and to think
about my grandmother” (55). Obviously, the narrator plunges the reader in a
religious philosophy. Man is crushed by destiny and envisioned as the eternal
listener to God. The upheaval of Assèze points out to us the three beautiful
formulas of Zahan relating to African spirituality: (1) “the favorite place of
the beatific vision of the Black remains the ground.” (2) “The African is
primarily a stubborn terrier” and (3) “The sky is the large village, it is the
resting place for the departed who want to return to Earth. It is far, but not
really” (Zahan 33).
From the foregoing rumination, the palpable fear of death expressed by
the characters cited above demonstrates two important points. On the one
hand it demonstrates the continual commitment of Africans to their native
traditions as well as natural connection with the cosmos. On the other hand, it
demonstrates the intellectual thought harnessed from modernity and erudition
as they find pathways to understanding their reactions to the death and fate of
their missing loved ones. The journey motif and the concept of border-
crossings at the centre of Afropolitanism as a spirit of the African people, are
thus discussed beyond the mundane realm. Human life itself is
conceptualised as the ultimate journey and death, perhaps, the ultimate
border-crossing point to the realm of beyond.
The Historical Frames of Pre-colonial Africa
Reading the four novels shows that contemporary African authors do not
ignore the past in their texts. Without attempting to measure the gap or
accuracy between these works of fiction and reality, we want to highlight a
close relationship between them and the texts of the social sciences. It is
certain that the novels aspire towards realism but they are not held to respect
reality by their very nature and location in the domain of imaginative writing
(Cressent 55). However, nothing prevents the reader from investing in the
work and recognising the historical events or social issues the fiction reflects.
Let us start with a typical statement. In the incipit or first paragraph of
Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, the griot of the hunters
who tells Koyaga’s biography immerses readers in Egyptology and in the
pre-colonial history of Africa. He first compares metaphorically Koyaga to
Rameses II, the warlike Pharaoh of ancient Egypt around 1400 BC., to J. C.
and to Soundiata. “Your name: Koyaga! […] You are a hunter! You will
remain with Rameses II and Soundiata, one of the three hunters of humanity”
(9). Moreover, at the end of the novel, the popular Radio Liberty circulates
false information that Koyaga, the leader, had been assassinated. When he
resurfaces in the midst of the speculations, the narrator recalls and draws
parallels between this condition and the apocalyptic spectacle of the end of
the reign of the great leaders of yesteryear: Rameses II, Sundiata Keita, and
Alexander the Great. The evocation of the last name further amplifies the
greatness of Koyaga (62). Doesn’t the history of ancient Greece teach us that
the destiny of Alexander the Great was exceptional? No doubt, this young
monarch who died at age 33 seeing himself as “god and emperor of the
world” fed from the same pot of grandeur and power as did Ramses,
Sundiata, and in our case, Koyaga.
Let us note that the intersection between the chronology of the real-world
and that of the romantic universe of Kourouma arises thus through the
veracity of certain testimonies. Historically speaking, starting from the 13th
Century until the end of the 17th Century, Africa made great strides in the
establishment of several great medieval empires: Songhai, Lunda, those of
Kanem-Bornu, Ghana and Mali, the kingdoms (Kongo, Ashanti, Zulu, of
Monomotapa…). African culture and indigenous customs are viewed as
derivatives if not offsprings of this great heritage.
The so-called custom of the naked man so loathed by protagonists in the
novel and the very idea of nakedness as backwardness to be discarded at the
earliest chance of schooling are both given a rational justification. In a
revealing episode, Koyaga’s father is sentenced to death under the most
inhumane conditions for violating the custom of his people and betraying his
kin to the French. In his agony, the traitor tells how the custom of nudity has
protected his people against the invasions of the great imperial African
powers of the medieval times quoted above:
Il est vrai que c’est la nudité et rien d’autre qui, des millénaires durant, nous a protégés
contre les Mandingues, les Haoussas, les Peuls, les Mossis, les Songhaïs, les Berbères, les
Arabes…C’est à cause de notre nudité que tous les envahisseurs, bâtisseurs d’empires,
prosélytes de croyances étrangères nous ont méprisés et jugés trop sauvages pour être
coreligionnaires, des exploitables. Peut être les colonisateurs français auraient eu le même
mépris. (Kourouma, En attendant le vote 20)
It is true that nudity and nothing else, in this millennia, has protected us against the
Mandingo, the Hausa, the Fulani, the Mossi, the Songhai, the Berbers, the Arabs ... It is
because of our nudity that all the invaders from these great kingdoms, the builders of
empires, proselytes of foreign beliefs (some of the empires were Islamic) scorned and
judged us too wild to be co-religionists. Maybe the French colonisers had the same
contempt.
Fascinated by the history of the world, the griot does not only strive to tell the
glorious past of pre-colonial Africa. He is also interested in dates and events
which have marked the world in general but that are especially meaningful to
Africa.
Consider for example, numerous references to the “Berlin Conference”
which took place from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885 and led the
colonial partition of Africa (11, 211, 229). In order to engrave the memory of
the First and Second World Wars in the memory of the readers, the griot on
several occasions quotes them in its accounts (85, 211, 258, 287, 288). He
speaks not only about the year 1960 having marked African independences
but explains also the fall of “communist democracies” of capitalism and the
legacy of the Cold War (286, 287, 288). Fascinated by the history of France,
the same character masquerading as a connoisseur of Gaullism tells a
humorous account of the war of Algeria and the defeat of the French and
their allies in Indo-china, in the face of Viets—these little inventive, brave
and smart, like small marmosets (33).
When talking about Mitterrand, the griot refers primarily to the “Summit
of La Baule in which the French president recommended to the Heads of
African States to change policy, to stop being dictators to become angelic
Democrats” (344). This reference is drawn indeed out of the 16th Franco-
African summit held in the seaside resort of La Baule, near Nantes (France)
from 19 to 21 June 1990 where the French president then announced by
implication that the traditional support of France would be reconsidered in
the case of regimes which behave in an authoritarian manner, without
accepting the move towards democracy and would be bolstered for those who
take this step with courage. The result is well known. Several presidents held
high the banner of democracy even as they remained astute dictators
marching to the tune of their own authoritarianism. They organised,
controlled, and conducted sham national conferences and manipulated the
multiparty elections they held in haste. They adopted the Western political
practice of multi-partism and reduced their prerogatives tactfully and
symbolically by naming friendly members of the Opposition as Prime
Ministers. Unfortunately, all these political posturing and charades only
caused riots and widespread civil chaos in Zaire, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire and the
list continues.
The juxtaposition of history and humorous revelations on African
dictatorships in Kourouma oeuvre does not stop with, En attendant le vote
des bêtes sauvages. In his final novel before his demise, Allah n’est pas
obligé, the Ivorian author adopts a journalistic style in order to, if one may
quote Patrick Charaudeau, “inform the citizen [readers] on what happened or
is currently happening in the world from the social life” in Liberia and Sierra
Leone (74). Moreover, while at times remaining in the realm of imagination
and outside the “constructive perspective” of the journalist, the novelist tells
real facts to actual dates and in the well-known places. Thus, although the
character Balla says that “dates do not have importance and interest nobody,”
Nathalie Roy points out that the passages reporting historical events are
accurate and the very dates of occurences are also precise in Allah n’est pas
obligé. Let us for example look at 27 April 1961, date of independence of
Sierra Leone, the death of Milton and his succession by Albert Margai, 28
April 1964, or the coup d'état against Siaka Momoh Steven in 1991. One
could also cite 23 March 1991, when the outbreak of civil war happened or
15 April 1995 marking the Sankoh offensive (Allah n’est pas oblige 172,
173, 176).
Apart from the historical evidence found in the novels of Kourouma, it
should be noted that Emmanuel Dongala and Calixthe Beyala also display
their knowledge of history and events of the past. Dongala, for example,
refers repeatedly to the twentieth anniversary of the independence of Congo-
Brazzaville, 15 August 1980 (11). On the ninety fourth and ninety fifth pages
of the novel, he immerses readers in the history of Russia, Communism and
more particularly that of Lenin and Poutchkine, “He did not know if this
Poutchkine were a revolutionary companion of Lenin or one of these
bourgeois intellectuals that Lenin fought firmly. […] You joke? You dare put
Lenin on the same plane as Pushkin? […] Boula Boula, Leninist or Marxist?”
(94, 95) Matapari returns to this point when he recalled later that their
“revolution, modeled on that of the Soviet Union was Marxist, Leninist and
atheist,” whereas religion was “opium of the people” (116, 191). Moreover,
as if inspired by Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages,
Emmanuel Dongala also alludes to the “fall of the Berlin Wall” (197, 198) in
the “war in Vietnam” (60) and “16th Franco-African Summit under
Mitterand's patronage” (198) cited above.
In Assèze l’Africaine, although Beyala’s narrator is committed to Africa,
she also immerses the reader in the history of France. Several times the
characters sing the Marseillaise and talk about the French Revolution. For
example, we refer to the history of the mother who says, “À quatorze ans,
maman était toute développée, des mamelles immenses, une peau couleur
noire de mangue […] le 14 juillet, c’est elle qui brandissait le coq. […] Elle
levait la rue principale derrière elle à bander la marseillaise” (“When she was
fourteen years old, my mother became very attractive, with immense breasts,
a Black skin of a mango […], on July 14th , she was the one tooking the cock.
[…] In the street behind the principal she was singing “La marseillaise”; 23).
In the same novel, when the new school teacher trained in Moscow
intends his students to sing the Marseillaise, he interposes his low voice and
speaks of the Russians and their impenetrable wonders of Marxism at the
time “There was the world of alarming miracles, inventions of atomic bombs,
from remote-controlled planes to cosmonauts and Russian spies with
Bulgarian umbrellas” (146-7).
Conclusion
From the foregoing, it is clear that the contemporary African novels we have
studied share the spirit of Afropolitanism advocated by Achille Mbembe.
Their characters are driven by self-consciousness that is located within and
outside their national boundaries. They wear both the labels of Africanness
and universalism. Their cosmopolitan worldview points to a newness in the
African sensibility driven by contemporary dynamics, stimuli and patterns of
movements across and beyond the continent. Like multicoloured tapestries
whose frames unite several stories of travel, these works provide readers with
a woven texture where many threads come together to accentuate the
aesthetic value of the handiwork. The selected authors illustrate a trend in
contemporary African literature arising from the nexus between the local and
the universal. The historical traces in concert with fiction, the religious-
philosophical thoughts mixed with tradition, and the multiplicity of foreign
and familiar allusions and references are the proof. Fiction and
encyclopaedism are brought together to articulate the spirit of Afropolitanism
embodied by the protagonists in the novels and the newness of contemporary
African literature becomes evident.
Works Cited
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Beyala, Calixthe. Assèze l’Africaine. Albin: Michel, 1994.
Charaudeau, Patrick. Le discours de l’information médiatique. La
construction du miroir social. Paris: Nathan, 1997.
Chartier, Pierre. Introduction aux grandes théories du roman. Paris: Dunod,
1998.
Chevrier, Jacques. Littérature nègre. Paris: Armand Colin, 1984.
Coussy, Denise. La littérature africaine moderne au Sud du Sahara. Paris:
Karthala, 1995.
Cressent, Armelle. “Penser une guerre de libération et (ré) écrire l’histoire.
Le cas de Mongo Beti.” Études littéraires 35.1 (2003): 55-71.
Dongala, Emmanuel. Les petits garçons naissent aussi des étoiles. Paris : Le
serpent plumes, 1998.
Elungu, P. E. A. Tradition africaine et rationalité moderne. Paris: Harmattan,
1987.
Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Garnier, Xavier, and Pierre Zaberman, eds. Qu’est-ce qu’un espace littéraire.
Presse universitaires de Vincennes, 2006.
Herskovits, Merville. L’ héritage du Noir. Paris: Présence africaine, 1966.
Kant, Emmanuel. Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique. Traduction de
Michel Foucault, 1984 (1798), édition Vrin.
Kourouma, Ahmadou. Allah n’esy pas obligé. Paris: Seuil, 2002.
——., En attendant les votes des bêtes sauvages. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanisme.” Africultures 66 (2006). 14 Dec. 2008
<http://www.africultures.com/>.
Mukala, Kadima Nzuji. Roman africain et christianisme. Paris: L’Harmattan,
2002.
Nathalie, Roy. “Chaos temporal et chaos romanesque dans Allah n’est pas
oblige.” Revue internationale de langue et de litterature 63 (2004):
115-29.
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Comment raisonner à partir des
écritures. Brooklyn: New York, 1989.
Zahan, Dominique. Religion, spiritualité et pensée africaine. Paris: Payot,
1972.
Jens Frederic Elze-Volland
Precarity and Picaresque in Contemporary Nigerian

Prose: An Exemplary Reading of Ben Okri’s The
Famished Road
After Ben Okri’s The Famished Road was published in 1991 it became the
first West-African novel to win the prestigious Booker-Prize and has
retrospectively been posited as being one of the emblematic representatives
of a so called ‚third generation’ in African literatures. Third generation
writers have subsequently been attached many labels, among them
postmodern (Appiah), magical realist (Cooper) and/or cosmopolitan
(Brennan), and were seen as standing in rigid opposition to decolonisation
predecessors, like Chinua Achebe or Ngugi Wa Thiongo, whose texts are
considered nationalist realist epics which “seem to belong to the world of
eighteenth and nineteenth century literary nationalism” (Appiah 349). As
tempting and useful as such a stagist polarisation can sometimes be, it is also
not entirely unproblematic because it assumes a one-tiered development in
West African (written) literature from Achebe’s realism over Armah’s
modernism to Okri’s postmodernism. However, anti-realist forms of writing
have always existed parallel in Anglophone African literatures, most
prominently in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, which could be
considered the seminal countertext to Things Fall Apart (Newell 79).
Therefore, one might well support the claim that “Okri’s text operates in the
same [alternative] tradition as Soyinka’s and Tutuola’s” (Quayson, Strategic
Transformations 121). Rather than a new phase in a postcolonial literary
history that is constructed as a high-speed avatar of Western literary history,
it seems, therefore, to make more sense to speak of various parallel modes of
writing, which can be either emergent, dominant or residual, to use Raymond
Williams’ terminology.
To allow for such a dynamic shift in Anglophone African literary history
without reinforcing the rigid binary discussed above, it is helpful to consult
Ato Quayson’s conceptualisation of two poles of postcoloniality. He
distinguishes between:
Postcolonialty of ‘normativity and proleptic designation’ and that of ‘interstitial and liminal’
postcoloniality. The first category […] often entails a return to cultural sources, the
projection of a futurist agenda, and the celebration of authenticity. […] ‘interstitial’
48 Jens Frederic Elze-Volland
postcoloniality, embraces what is normally perceived in the West as a metropolitan or

hybrid sensibility. (Quayson, Postcolonialism 77-78)
I would therefore opt for understanding the post-1980s transformations not so

much as a radical rupture between realism and postmodernism or nationalism
and cosmopolitanism, but as what Brian McHale – for a different context –
called a “change of dominant” between these two postcolonialities; towards a
postcoloniality that no longer projects a better future after a rite du passage,
which is independence, but becomes increasingly sceptic about such
teleological, bildungsroman-like, narratives of development. The central
condition of possibility for this shift has not only been a mere frustration with
postcolonial nationalisms, as is mostly asserted (see Gaylard, Appiah,
Cooper) but also – if not foremost – a large scale material precarity, which
has dramatically increased in many African nations – with Nigeria definitely
among them – after the implementation of the so-called structural adjustment
politics of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These were
introduced in the early 1980s following a trend of deregulation initiated by
the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. In the wake of this heightened
precarity, a dominantly “proleptic designation” and only emergently
“interstitial or liminal” designation is transformed into a postcoloniality that
is dominantly “interstitial or liminal” but also residually “proleptic”
(Quayson, Postcolonialism 77). I will, drawing largely on Achille Mbembe’s
work On the Postcolony, discuss these social and economic shifts and the
large scale material and existential precarity they produced and will
exemplify in a reading of The Famished Road how picaresque structures and
motifs reverberate in that text and suggest that the picaresque is an more
generally an appropriate mode of narration for expressing this large scale
liminality and precarity.
Aside from better understanding the dynamics that shaped texts like The
Famished Road, this emphasis on material precarity must also be seen in a
larger context of redeeming postcolonial studies – in Europe almost
exclusively institutionalised in literature departments – from recent
accusation of culturalism and overtheorisation. Since the mid 1990s it has
been argued “that the impasse which now besets the field derives from the
failure of its practicioners ... to move out from a focus on essentially literary
concerns to engage with disciplines like economics and sociology, in
particular” (Moore-Gilbert 186). While in European academia, there is a
“tendency to exclude economic factors from works of art and literature [that]
mystifies their very nature” (Maiorino, “Picaresque Econopoetics” 6) and a
focus is placed on formalism, African literary studies have contrarily “tended
Precarity and Picaresque 49
to be in thrall to the sociohistorical” (Gaylard 7). I consider it indispensable

for postcolonial literary studies to combine the two aspects and to overcome
its ignorance of economics since “postcoloniality today is necessarily shaped
by the operations of capitalism … neither local nor global cultures, neither
nation nor hybridity, can be thought about seriously without considering how
they are shaped by the economic system” (Loomba 208). Because of its
tendency to deal with the “marginality [of] lives shaped by survival”,
picaresque texts lend themselves very approproiately to such
“economopoetic” approaches in which “economy presents a distinctive ‘point
of entry’ into a reading that pays equal attention to aesthetics and social
relationships” (Maiorino, “Picaresque Econopoetics” 5-6).
Relative social cohesion, even in the poorest African countries had,
according to Achille Mbembe, in the first phase of formal independence from
colonialism been provided through an elaborated and mostly uneconomical
system of social services, trough salaries provided via employment in what
can – even by people critical of deregulation and anti-state policies of the
Worldbank and IMF – only be described as an overblown bureaucratic state
apparatus. A relative lavishness of means especially in countries rich in
natural resources like Nigeria financed this state apparatus and provided the
state with a certain capacity to regulate. Such systems of management were
of course seen as highly problematic – especially in the West – because they
were not designed to be efficient but to ensure submission and domination
through obligation and dependency:
salary is transformed into a claim whereby the state granted means of livelihood to all it had
put under obligation. This meant that any salaried worker was necessarily a dependant. The
means of livelihood he or she received were not designed to reward a process of converting
energy into wealth, but were helping to shape a particular figure of submission and
domination. (Mbembe 45)
Despite the almost unanimous Western critique of this form of governance,

these processes have also assured a degree of social cohesion and burdened
political leaders with a certain responsibility. Similarly, Mbembe states that
“This does not mean that state domination was total and unyielding or that
the holders of power had complete autonomy and were not subject to social
pressures” (Mbembe 42; emphasis in original). Indeed, he reemphasises that,
despite being hierarchical and repeatedly relying on force in securing their
domination:
until the late 1970s, a number of postcolonial systems of inequality and domination could be
credited with a degree of effectiveness in the allocations of utilities … the state was also
able to control ethnic and regional tensions either by creating jobs in the public services or
through borrowing or direct intervention in the productive system … In short by partly or
wholly replacing the market, the state became a vast machine creating and regulating
inequalities. (Mbembe 43-4)
In The Famished Road, this double function of – often violent – domination

combined with a degree of social responsibility, necessary to uphold one’s
domination, is reflected in the two political parties, the Party of the Rich and
the Party of the Poor, who provided milk and money but also almost
indiscriminately made use of violence and “seemed prepared for war and
charity at the same time” (Okri 180). Okri however does not seem to suggest
the same effectiveness in the allocation of resources that Mbembe diagnoses,
since the money and milk provided by the parties only produced
intracommunal violence and vomiting and diarrhea. Furthermore both
instances of “generosity” are clearly linked to political rallies prior to
elections.
However, let us follow Mbembe’s insistence that this type of allocation
and domination provided for at least a minimal degree of social cohesion and
a minimum of material security and thereby created what I would, rather
crudely, like to call biographical predictability for many of its citizens. With
the deregulation of the 1980s these governments and economies have been
compelled to reposition themselves, as the IMF and the World Bank
intervened more explicitely in African politics via “credit control,
implementing privatisations, laying down consumption requirements,
determining import policies, agricultural programs and cutting costs – or even
direct control of the treasury” (Mbembe 74; emphasis added). This robbed
many states of their bases of legitimation:
subsidies that are targeted for dismantling have previously underpinned a system that albeit
involving coercion, also involved transfers, reciprocity, and obligations and created a degree
of social cohesion and prevented a slide into complete arbitrary rule and raw violence …
neoliberal claims to reduce the social role of the state robbed it of its already fragile base.
(Mbembe 76; emphasis added)
This base of state legitimacy, social cohesion, state allocation and relative
income security has now vanished almost completely. Social peace and state
agency have become extremely precarious, as have the material and social
well-being of most individuals, who could no longer rely on state allocations
– provided either directly or via state employed family members – but had to
become small time entrepreneurs or daily labourers which resulted in very
unreliable income. Such highly unreliable forms of income had so widely
come to replace state salaries and wage labour that Mbembe had to assert that
“wage employment almost disappeared in Africa since the deregulation of the

1980s” (Mbembe 52). The economic situation of most characters in The
Famished Road corresponds to this loss of secure employment and a
worsening of working and living conditions. Dad is a daily labourer who has
unreliable, physically hard and badly paid employment. One day after he
returns home from one of these jobs, Azaro asserts: “He smelt of overwork,
sadness, and ash” (Okri 291). Mom on the other hand goes hawking which
can is the the epitome of unreliable precarious income.
Biographies that are lived before the backdrop of such material scarcities
and, more importantly, insecurities and unpredictabilities – such as those in
The Famished Road –generally lose what I have termed biographical
predictability and are no longer concerned with maturation, development and
conscious self-fashioning (often designed precisely to break out of these
biographical predictabilities) but with mere survival. Long term “strategies”
for designing a life are now replaced by short term “tactics” for survival (De
Certeau xiv). While such indeterminacy and ateleology is hailed by
poststructuralist critics and embraced by many first world subjects, they must
be experienced as less than liberating if that what is being undetermined are
the most basic necessities. To misconstrue this ateleology and indeterminacy
as an expression of cultural specificity would be a blatant depoliticisation of
poverty. A picaresque mode of narration is one appropriate way of expressing
and critiquing this existential precarity and the change of dominant towards a
more liminal and ateleological postcoloniality, because typically – for better
or worse – “the picaresque form in the novel is intended to be deformative of
teleology“ (Quayson, Postcolonialism 96). Therefore the second part of this
essay will be devoted to reading the most important picaresque motifs and
structures that reverberate in The Famished Road. This analysis will not
amount to a close reading of the text, since it will not be about making an
essentialist statement and conceptualising Okri’s text as a fully fledged
picaresque or African reality as inherently picaresque but is more of an
attempt to establish the productivity of a mode of reading recent African texts
in relation to the European picaresque tradition, especially with regard to
material and existential precarity. When applied other African, or even
postcolonial texts in general, some texts will definitely employ other
picaresque motifs and structures than others. The Famished Road is “a work
revealing a multiplicity of narrative dimension and cultural interdiscursivity”
(Ogunsanwo 41) one of these dimensions is, at least residually, a picaresque
mode (see also Ogunsanwo, and Mo). Especially when understanding the
picaresque mode as the precarious underside of the developmentalist, self-
fashioning and proleptic bildungsroman.
On a first glance, the picaresque and the Bildungsroman are not so

different, as both usually portray the voyages of an adolescent hero.
Therefore, not a few novels have been attached with both labels, like for
example Fielding’s Tom Jones or Thomas Mann’s Die Bekenntnisse des
Hochstaplers Felix Krull [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. One
feature that distinguishes the two forms is, in my opinion, the narrative
typology. While often narrated in the first person (e.g. Gottfried Keller’s Der
Grüne Heinrich [Green Henry], Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
[Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship]), the Bildungsroman can also be narrated
in third (e.g. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Clarín’s La Regenta [The
Regent’s Wife]) person perspective. The picaresque novel is – in my
estimation – inevitably narrated as a first-person fictional autobiography
because the life narrative always connects a “pseudoautobiograohischen
Erzählstrang der Selbstdarstellung mit einem paraenzyklopädischen
Erzählstrang der Weltdarstellung” (“a pseudoautobiographical portrait of the
self with a paraencyclopaedic portrait of the world”; Bauer 1-2, my
translation). Inevitably, problems of credibility result from this mix of inner
and outer perspective applied in this mode of writing. In a fictional
autobiography, the first-person narrator is necessarily the protagonist of his
own narration, which should make the reader suspicious to his reliability and
limitedness from the outset. According to Franz K. Stanzel, we should always
suspect that “bei Ich-Erzählern auf Grund ihrer existentiellen Motivation zum
Erzählen eher eine gewisse Parteilichkeit in der Wiedergabe ihrer Geschichte
anzunehmen ist als bei auktorialen Erzählern” (Theorie des Erzählens 200)
(“because of their existential motivation for narrating first person narrators
are more likely to exhibit a certain bias in the rendering of their story than are
authorial narrators”; Theory of Narrative 150). For the postcolonial narrator
this perspective creates an inherent narrative inside-outside aporia, as he/she
can no longer “suppl(y) readings of national liberation struggles from the
comfort of the observation tower” (Brennan ix); very much unlike the
decolonisation nationalist epics, which have mostly been narrated “from the
observation tower” by omniscient third person narrators helping to render
their depictions supposedly authoritative and unbiased. This limited and
biased picaresque narrator only has a precarious control over his own life
narrative, whereby the narrative structure reflects the basic problem of the
picaresque world: insecurity. The Famished Road – though a first-person
narrative – obviously is no fictional autobiography (Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children or Adinga’s The White Tiger for example perform this picaresque
pseudoautobiographical narrative structure much more fully) in the sense that
it narrates or stages the full maturation of a hero, especially since Azaro does
not significantly age throughout the novel. This, however, can be construed
as a literalisation of the lack of the protagonist’s development, which I
consider to be another central aspect distinguishing the picaresque from the
Bildungsroman, and a dominantly ‘proleptic’ designation from dominantly
‘liminal’ designation.
The first, and most obvious hint, that probably leads many academic
readers to assume a connection between The Famished Road and the
picaresque novel is the protagonist’s name “Lazaro” (almost immediately
shortened to Azaro – Okri 5), which is also the name of the narrator of the
first and most popular Golden Age Spanish picaresque novel, the
anonymously published, La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). While the
name Lazaro or Lazarus has many other cultural and theological
connotations, I would argue that in a novelistic context it almost inevitably
reverberates the Spanish picaresque novel and thereby provides a first
intertextual link.
Secondly, both the picaresque and The Famished Road feature an
unmarked and unnegotiated incorporation of folktales into novelistic
text(ure)s. In West-African Anglophone fiction such devices were generally
on the increase since the early 1980s (see Quayson, Strategic
Transformations). Likewise, the Spanish picaresque also retains so many
elements from folktales and epics that its status as novel has always been
heavily disputed (Bauer 20).
Another crucial motif of the picaresque is mobility. The hero of Lazarillo
de Tormes is the prototypical “servant to many masters”, as he subsequently
serves a blind man, a priest, a squire, a friar, a pardoner, a chaplain and a
bailiff, in the course of a story that in some editions spans less than a hundred
pages. The unavoidable mobility accompanying such unsteady affiliations is
more curse than blessing and seems heavily contingent, rather than
continuous, let alone teleological. Unlike the rite du passage in the
Bildungsroman this is not a self-willed movement (like Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister’s famous Wanderjahre) necessary for eventually achieving maturity
and development over time. Instead the movements – as also in Azaro’s case
– become non-directional, repetitive and seemingly random, replacing the
Bildungsroman idea of a consistent development in time with a contingent
meandering through space. This undirected straying, often at the margins of
society, has been interpreted as being in stark contrast to the regulated
movement of bodies, even as rendering it absurd through the inflationary use
of the motive of mobility and dislocation. Through this mobility Lazarillo
and Azaro paint a “social panorama” (Wicks 242) of the territory they
traverse. While Azaro meanders through a more geographically confined
area, that is still ordered by his parent’s house and his home village, he
nevertheless betrays a constant desire to sneak out and walk around and also
repeatedly wanders off his path (e.g. 279 “and then I wandered. I wandered
for a long time in the forest”) on his way home and often gets into situations
from which he has to hurry off or flee. In one passage Azaro explicitely
reflects his strong desire for mobility and his restlessness in an assertion that
could easily be transposed onto the heroes of the novela picaresca and could
easily be the motto of any picaresque hero: “my feet started to itch again, and
I resumed wandering the roads of the world” (169).
Similarly, “during the 1980s a different trope of culture heroism becomes
manifest in urban Nigeria … that of the trickster figure” (Quayson
Postcolonialism, 87). Previously very prominent in the West-African oral
tradition, the trickster now also gained prominence in prose fiction. Though
not interchangeable, the picaro and the trickster have much in common, as
both are mobile marginal, interstitial and protean in nature. This transgressive
picaresque mobility that inherently comes with a protean adaptability, or
even a strategic use of mimicry – another important motif of the picaresque –
is reflected in the first lines in The Famished Road with respect to the Abiku
Spirit children: “We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds.
We knew no boundaries” (Okri 3).
These short affiliations and the external characterisation they necessarily
enforce lead to another aspect Okri’s text shares with the picaresque, namely
that no specific names, both place names and full names for persons are used
throughout most of the text. Most personal names are typicalisations or
generalisations, being either professions (the photographer, the carpenter),
functions (Mum, Dad), descriptions (the blind man) or only first or last
names, mostly clearly allegorically charged (Madame Koto, Lazaro). This
lack of full names is also a clear parallel with the picaresque tradition. In this
specific respect not only handed down from the Spanish picaresque but also
from the British Picaresque of the late 18th century, most notably Fielding,
Smollett and Sterne, whose lack of full names has been discussed by Ian
Watts seminal study The Rise of the Novel. He claimed that “it is a custom
initiated by Defoe and Richardson of using ordinary contemporary proper
names for their names […] although this custom was not always followed by
some of the later eighteenth century novelists, such as Smollett and Sterne”
and “that Fielding’s practice in the naming, and indeed in the whole portrayal
of his characters, is a departure from the usual treatment of these matters in
the novel” (Watt 20). The short affiliations that define precarious and highly
mobile biographies are reflected in (and only allow for) such typicalised
external characterisation rather than for a full psychological and introspective
creation of characters, and is hence more panoramic than realistic. This style
of characterisation and naming, that is also taken up by Okri, is characteristic
of the picaresque tradition as it is more appropriate for a “social panorama”
(Wicks 242), a “Sittengemälde” (portrait of manners) and/or a “Typenrevue”
(revue of types; Bauer 2, 21, my translation) which picaresque texts always
combine with their pseudoautobiographic narrative. For conveying such a,
mostly satiric, social panorama typicalisation is the appropriate form of
characterisation and naming. This mode of external characterisation always
runs parallel to the realistic characterisation – which of course also
typicalises to an extent – of writers like Samuel Richardson or George Elliot
but becomes dominant, in the Spanish picaresque, the late 18th century
picaresque and in more recent postcolonial writing.
Third generation writers, especially when based in the metropolis – like
Okri who is based in London – have been accused of their “escapist post-
modernist pretensions” (qtd. in Newell 131). These accusations have mostly
been levelled by Marxist critics and the so called AlterNative poets like Niyi
Osundare of Nigeria and Kofi Anyidoho of Ghana. They considered
postmodernism valuable for its rejection of the dichotomies that enabled
racism and colonialism, but it was at the same time seen as “insufferable” in
its supposed “effort to run away from the kind of art that means, the type that
effects” (Newell 131). While it is true that some of postmodernism’s,
poststructuralism’s and postcolonialism’s most prominent terms and concepts
“such as ‘multiplicity’, ‘polyvocality’, and ‘indeterminacy’ can too easily
erase important social and political determinants of a text” (Newell 181), no-
one reading The Famished Road can convincingly claim that it is a purely
self-reflexive text that avoids portraying local specificity and social plight.
There is an abundance of blatantly realist passages depicting physical
violence, disgusting hygienic standards and the struggle for food. The feeling
of being hungry is mentioned dozens of times throughout the text (e.g. Okri
18, 93, 98, 194, 373, 419). This economic marginality, scarcity of food, the
vivid depiction of hunger and survival as primary purpose and preoccupation
of life, while being surely a reference to Nigerian realities, are also a shared
trope with the early modern picaresque tradition, as two of the most
important recent studies such as Anne J. Cruz’s Discourse of Poverty (1999)
or Giancarlo Maiorino’s At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de
Tormes and the picaresque Art for Survival (2003) already document in their
titles. Lazarillo de Tormes suffers from hunger throughout most of the text
and repeatedly tells us how thin he or his poor masters have gotten. The third
chapter of the text, for example, revolves solely around a piece of old bread,
which one of Lazarillo’s masters keeps in his cupboard. Lazarillo designs
very elaborated tricks only to get a crumb from this loaf of bread, every now
and then and we constantly hear him complaining about his growling
stomach.
This grim portrayal of socio-economic reality also includes the vivid
depiction of bodily excesses, vomit, feces, sex, vermin, rotten food, dead
bodies, puss. This places the text within a long tradition of scatological
writing in West-Africa (see Newell ch. 5), which has in postcolonial writing
been re-opened with Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not yet Born
(1968). It has been noted that especially excremental motifs in postcolonial
texts can function as “symbolic disturbance of inside outside models” (Esty
35), forming an essential aspect of the texts’ transformation of earlier modes
of postcolonial nationalist writing (see Esty). As Michael Bakhtin has shown
in his Rabelais and his World, first published in 1941, scatological motifs,
however, also have a long history in European literature, and especially in the
early modern picaresque. Its carnivalistic nature was “promoting unoffical
dimensions of society and human life and does so through a profane language
and drama of the lower bodily stratum”, depicting, above all in Francisco de
Quevedo’s picaresque novel Él Buscon, “images of huge bodies, bloated
stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity“ (Allen 22).
Images that are all too prominent in The Famished Road, for example in the
“refrain of vomiting” (Okri 153) which set in after most of the compound
population has consumed rotten milk which had so generally been distributed
by the “Party of the Rich” or when a customer in Madame Koto’s bar
“brought out his gigantic prick, and pissed in every direction” (100). There
are many more of these unsettling passages throughout the text. With the rise
of individualism, which is often equalled to a so-called process of civilisation
such vital functions and bodily spheres of human life have, in the West, been
almost entirely sublimated. They have either been relegated to the level of
disgust or repressed into the unconscious. In carnivalistic literature, of which
the picaresque novel is an important exponent, these aspects were (re-
)accentuated. Therefore, the scatological motifs of The Famished Road,
which has indeed been seen as indicative of a “rise to prominence of
sprawling Rabelaisian epics” (Gaylard 6), place it both in an African tradition
of scatological writing but are also a parallel to the carnivalistic picaresque
tradition.
Aside from these motifs, existential precarity in The Famished Road is
structurally expressed in the literal non-development of the protagonist and
the text’s episodic plot structure. Even though Azaro has some degree of
formal education, as he is able to read and seems to be going to school
occasionally, he does not pereceivably grow or age, and neither does he seem
to mature. Very much like the picaresque heroes of El Buscón and Lazarillo
de Tormes, who experience a series of substantially similar and structurally
equal adventures and affiliations without applying their insights and
experiences to later situations, Azaro seems to be almost immune to learning
and developing. Whatever lesson one would expect him to learn from an
incident, provoked by his extensive wanderings, he does not. Soon, he seems
to have forgotten whatever incident and wanders off to his next adventure
often following a very similar pattern. Some of these episodes might even be
read as standing for themselves and could quite unproblematically be
separated from the others. Often, the only thing connecting them is the
presence of Azaro’s character – a lose plot-structure more reminiscent of the
prose epic. Arguably, some episodes could even be erased, or skipped over
without perceiving a lack in the development of the narrative or the
characters. At the end of most stories, or adventures, Azaro is at a similar
point as he was in previous chapters, and many chapters reverberate earlier
chapters, which mostly end with Azaro walking off or even escaping a
situation he was involved in or witnessed (e.g. 17, 22, 287, 298, 218, 320).
This circularity and repetitiveness reflects the deadlock of non-development
characteristic of precarious biographies. From the point of view of character
development and motivation of action, many of these repetitive episodes are
quite literally futile in the sense that what Azaro has learned or experienced
in the respective incidents or episodes bears no relevance since it almost
never informs Azaro’s future behaviour and actions. Thereby, he stands in
stark contrast to what Ian Watt had to say about characterisation and plotting
in the modern novel. His dictum, especially with regard to Richardson was
that “the novel’s plot is […] distinguished from most previous fiction by its
use of past experience as the cause of present action” (Watt 22). Azaro, on
the other hand, regardless how badly he gets into trouble will not be cured
from strolling around and getting into trouble again and again. Hence, the
idea of consistent development through learning from experiences over time
which inform and motivate future behaviour and eventually lead to
maturation are literally made impossible – especially by a hero, who does not
age or grow throughout a novel spanning 600 pages – and gets replaced with
a contingent meandering through space. Whereas the Bildungsroman is often
about self-development via the non-conformist breaking-out of such narrow,
predictable and teleological structures and biographical itineraries, which
seem to hamper the self-fulfillment of its paradigmatic adolescent
protagonist, the picaresque is precisely about breaking-in to such predictable
and security-providing structures.
This picaresque non-development of the subject can also be transplanted

to the level of the non-development of the whole nation or region. Okri is
probably not interested in perpetuating the usual Eurocentric view of Nigeria
as a dark, war-ridden, irrational body where the “idea of progress is said to
disintegrate” (Mbembe 4) – and neither am I. Nevertheless, the picaresque
repetitiveness of the story, the recurring violence, the recurring hunger, the
recurring question of how to pay the rent, the recurring emasculating
frustration with which Azaro’s Dad arrives home from his jobs every night,
Azaro’s recurring disappearance, does not paint a picture of a linear way
from the region’s problems but seems to be synecdochic of a society caught
in a deadlock, which “follows a predictable pattern of trouble, crisis, escape
and resolution” (Mo 80), mirroring the increasing frustration with the
independent African nations and the all-pervasive existential precarity.
Therefore, the picaresque episodic structure reflects not only precarious
existences of African individuals but also the non-development and deadlock
and repetitive structures of Nigeria and other African nations and regions, in
whose recent history democratic models and military regimes reliably
alternate, and the endpoint of each circle, just as in episodes of a picaresque,
is structurally similar to the previous. The national or regional experience of
a disaster often does not often help prevent very similar patterns of events
from happening again and again, even though the fact that Azaro, as an
Abiku child who normally die before they are twelve, decides to stay in the
earthly realm, seems to shed a more optimistic light on Okri’s imagination of
a Nigerian or regional (since the Abiku-myth is transgressive of national
borders as it can also be found in Benin or Ghana – a cultural reference that is
therefore more regional than purely national) future. Despite this slightly
optimistic turn with respect to the Nigerian national project, the large scale
material and existential peracrity that pervades the text and shapes many
contemporary Nigerian biographies transforms a dominantly proleptic
postcoloniality into a dominantly interstitial postcoloniality and is modelled
literarily in a shift of the dominant mode of fictional autobiographies from
the teleological Bildungsroman to the ateleological and precarious picaresque
tale.
Works Cited
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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in
Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 336-57.
Bauer, Matthias. Der Schelmenroman. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1994.
Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the
Nation. London: MacMillan, 1989.
Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a
Third Eye. London: Routledge, 1997.
Cruz, Anne J. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque
Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999.
De Certau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Dunn, Peter, H. Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
Esty, Joshua D. “Excremental Postcolonialism.” Contemporary Literature
40.1 (1999): 22-59.
Gaylard, Gerald. After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical
Realism. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2005.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2005.
Maiorino, Giancarlo. At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes
and the Picaresque Art of Survival. University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2003.
——., “Picaresque Econopoetics: At the Watershed of Living Standards.”
The Picaresque Tradition and Displacement. Ed. Giancarlo Maiorino.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 1-39.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Trans. Steven Rendall et al. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Mo, Felicia Alu. Ben Okri: An Introduction to his Early Fiction. Enugu:
Fourth Dimension Publishers, 2002.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics.
London: Verso, 1997.
Newell, Stephanie. West-African Literatures: Ways of Reading London:
Oxford University Press, 2006.
Ogunsanwo, Olatubosun. “Intertextuality and Post-Colonial Literature in Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road.” Research in African Literatures 26.1
(1995): 40-52.
Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Random House, 1992.

Quayson, Ato. Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Malden: Polity
Press, 2000.
——., Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in
the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka &
Ben Okri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Stanzel, Franz K. Theorie des Erzählens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2001.
——., Theory of Narrative. Trans. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
La Vida del Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades. In La
Novela Picaresca Espanola. Ed. Francisco Rico. Barcelona: Planeta,
2002. 6-80.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe.
London: Pimlico, 1957.
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89.2 (1974): 240-49.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. London: Oxford University
Press, 1978.
Sola Ogunbayo
Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making:

The Unbarred Muse in Selected Nigerian Literature
Introduction
The term myth has been variously defined but what unites these definitions is
that a myth is a story. E. B. Tylor deems myth as a causal explanation that
happens to take the form of a story. To him, a myth is a literal account (Segal
10). For a sociologist like Emile Durkheim, a myth is a projection of the sum
of “consciousness of a society held in a delicate balance and shared in mutual
understanding” (qtd. in Segal 19). Durkheim considers social roles, group
norms and shared values before reaching his conclusion. Max Muller sees
myth as a “perceptual activity” (qtd. in Segal 55) based on feeling or
imaginative construct. That is, a myth is an account rendered by a group of
person based on sheer opinion. To Max, a myth is an idea about the cosmos
rendered in a story form. Claude Levi-Strauss, on the contrary, defines myth
as “a type of tale which stands midway between history and fiction that is
characterised by being based on a firm structure of binary oppositions” (qtd.
in Segal 57). A myth, to Levi-Strauss, is a human construct based on
classification and pairs of structural opposition and projected in narratives.
Bronislaw Malinowski opines that “myth comes into play when rite,
ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification […] and sanctity”
(qtd. in Segal 107). To this anthropologist, a myth is created when a
conciliatory function is demanded or when an explanation is needed to
resolve our puzzles. This is in consonance with Rene Girard’s view that
myths are accounts which help us to cope with “human nature […] and
human aggression” (qtd. in Segal 129). Georges Sorel asserts that beyond
entertainment and placation, “a myth is a narration that advocates an
imminent end to oppression” (qtd. in Segal 133). For Sorel a myth is
contemporaneous and not only primitive and, antithetically to Malinowski
and Girard, serves not only to bolster the society but also significantly to
change it. Sorel’s position supports the view that a myth is a tale which
envisions an alternative way of life or, in a socialist term, an ideology.
The foregoing definitions of a myth underline its universality,
communality and contemproreneity. However for the purpose of this
research, we shall subscribe to Richard Chase’s view who considers a myth
62 Sola Ogunbayo
from the literary perspective. To him, a myth is essentially an aesthetic

creation rather than philosophical creation (15). In this sense, the stories
narrated in a myth are rich in symbolic significations such that the
epistemological values derived from them transcend even their peculiar
cultural production. In other words, because a myth is particularised,
nationalised and indigenised does not limit its universal appeal. This
reiterates W. K. Wimsatt’s opinion in “The Concrete Universal” where he
explains that “an object […] is both highly general and highly particular”
(160). This idea is implicit in Aristotle’s poetic polemics that poetry imitates
action which also consequently expresses the universal (17). Philip
Wheelwright argues that “myth consciousness is the bond that unites men
both with one another and with the unplumbed mystery from which mankind
is sprung” (qtd. in Alade 119).
The universal bent of myth is further strengthened by “archetypes”, a
term popularly credited to Carl Jung (qtd. in Cirlot 19). According to Jung,
myths contain images or “archetypes,” traditional expressions of collective
dreams, developed over thousands of years, of symbols upon which the
society as a whole has come to depend. These archetypes, revealed in
peoples' tales, establish patterns of behaviour that can serve as exemplars, as
when we note that the lives of many heroes and heroines share a remarkable
number of similar features that can be identified as worthy of emulation.
Similarly, other kinds of concept are to be classified among the many and
varied types of Jungian archetype embedded in our mythic heritage: the great
earth mother, the supreme sky-god, the wise old man, the idealistic young
lover and so forth. We see the archetypes of unreciprocated love in Ben
Okri’s Starbook and human ambivalence in Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman
and they are comprehensible to all readers because, still in the words of Jung,
these are primordial images embedded in the “collective unconscious,” a
shared pool of memories, ideas, and modes of thought which comes from the
life experience of one's ancestors and from the entire human race. Primal
experiences are represented in the collective unconscious by archetypes,
symbolic pictures, or personifications that appear in dreams and are the
common elements in all myths.
It is clear now that a myth or narrative whose thematic preoccupation or
ideational bent transcend the shores and creeks of its creation is said to have
crossed the borders, howbeit imaginative. It means therefore that the
imagination, the tool of mythmaking, could be deployed as a border-crossing
mechanism which first imbues ingenuity and particularisation on the first
draft of the myth and then casts originality and universality upon the strength
of its global acceptance. In this discourse, border crossing through
Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making 63
imaginative creation means that the artist can deploy myth to communicate
beyond a cultural affinity.
The Politicised Imagination in Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman
Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman relies on Thomas Mokopu Mofolo’s Chaka,

the story of the great Zulu leader in the history of Southern Africa military
traditions, together with the Ogun myth to exhort black people fighting for
freedom and human rights in Southern Africa. Ogun is a war god in Yoruba
mythology and the bringing together of Ogun and Shaka fuses the best in
black Africa’s military experience. Among the Yoruba and the Zulu people
war is a noble act, especially when fought to assert one's dignity. The kinship
between Shaka and Ogun is emphasised in these lines:
Beset by demons of blood, /Shaka reaped Harvests of manhood when time wavered
/Uncertainly and the mind was transposed in /Another place. /Yet Shaka, king and general
/Fought battles, invented rare techniques, created /Order from chaos, coloured the sight of
men /In self-transcending visions, sought Man’s renewal in the front of knowledge (Ogun
Abibiman 15)
Soyinka's mythmaking ability transcends the pantheon of Yoruba mythology

to include another god, Shaka. The mythic power is enhanced by the
combination of the gods and it imbues pungency on the subject matter of
revolt. Soyinka's statement to other borders is explicit in the view that every
human shares this common archetypal experience: frustration leads to
agitation. It does not matter therefore if the frustrated people are in the
borders of Africa: the only qualification for this universal experience is to be
in flesh and blood. For instance, the French Revolution (1789-1799) was a
period of political and social upheaval in the history of France, during which
the French government structure, previously an absolute monarchy with
feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent a radical
change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of nationalism,
citizenship and inalienable rights (19). But these changes were accompanied
by pandemonium and turmoil which were the effects of frustrations and
lachrymose.
In “Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype,” the first session of
Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka demonstrates his penchant
for cross-border appeal by stating right at the start:
64 Sola Ogunbayo
I shall begin by commemorating the gods for their self- sacrifice on the altar of literature,
and […] press them into further service on behalf of human society and its quest for the
application of being. (1)
Self-sacrifice is an archetypal idea personified by Ogun and Shaka and

literature or mythmaking is needed to project this germane attribute as an
example to the human society, especially when the names of these deities
resonate in the arts and technology of other creeks such as Cuba, Brazil and
“much of the Caribbean” (1).
Soyinka’s predilection is for a poetry that is earthed in an indigenous
culture but reaches out to other cultures by the diversification of its subject
matter. The poetic truth in Ogun Abibiman, fictitious, mysterious,
paradoxical, is universal because it is intensely particularised; it has crossed
beyond the borders of Nigeria and South Africa. In the first section titled
“Induction” we see Ogun Abibiman as a call for violent change if other
means fail to win a just cause. References to “embers,” “steel events,”
“slumbering ore,” are related to Ogun and the newly acquired will. The war-
god “in vow of silence till the task is done/ kindles the forge,” neglecting his
farm for the urgent task of liberation and when “The Blacksmith’s forearm
lifts/ and dances/ its swathes are not of peace,” “Hammer and anvil,” “the
craft man’s hand unclenches” and “in depths of molten bronze aflame” (19-
22) refer to Ogun, kindling the black fighters with a strong will.
In apartheid South Africa, the failure of dialogue and sanctions left the
black with no alternative but war. The war situation in South Africa is a re-
enactment of Ogun’s violence:
Ogun, who right to a wrong emptied reservoirs of blood in heaven yet rage, with thirst- I
reed his savage beauty on black brows, in depths of molten bronze aflame beyond their eyes
fixation distances […] and tremble. (Ogun Abibiman 7)
The point of equivalence is that Ogun is like Samora Machael: ambivalent

figures who believe in restoration through destruction. Another is that just as
Ogun strengthens the will so also does Samora, an act which Soyinka
describes in the preface as, “the primary detonation of a people’s collective
will” (iv), an act which condemns the futility of dialogue in apartheid South
Africa but applauds change through confrontation. The tenacity to confront
oppression is underlined in the fourth stanza of the first section where the
oppressors of South Africa are associated with steel and iron, which indicates
that the one in whose footsteps they are following is none other than the god
of iron or metals. This impregnable steel is mentioned again in the fifth
stanza:
A savage truth, the steel event /Shall even dislodge the sun if dark /Must be our aid… (Ogun
Abibiman 10)
The tension rises in the sixth stanza as the Earth Rings in unaccustomed accents /Time
Shudders at the enforced pace Ogun /In vow of silence till the task is done, /Kindles the
forge (Ogun Abibiman 11)
Thus, the myth of Ogun is a universal metaphor for a revolution, a change.

Ogun’s relevance occupies a space beyond the creek of Africa; it is a
blueprint available for anybody whose self dignity has been mortgaged.
In the second section, Soyinka mythologises history by reminding the
readers of some semblances in the life of Shaka of which, foremost, is that
the will, and not necessarily the size, wins war or achieves success:
The termite is no match for the black soldier ant, /Yet termites gnawed the house posts of
our kraal (Ogun Abibiman 12)
That is “the will should far outrace/ swords in sinews.” These lines are
reminiscent of the popular maxim: “where there is a will there is a way.”
Ogun Abibiman is not a clarion call to pandemonium but a creative piece
which abhors inhumanity and thus supports revolt through our common
impregnable will. In his opinion, Stephan Larsen adds that “The gigantic
hand of Ogun grasps forests and mountains, gathering all his warriors into a
great whole, inspired by a single will” (131). It is this point that makes
Soyinka’s art a statement beyond the space of Africa to include every human
community whose cultural pride is at stake and thus seeks for change and
order. To Soyinka violence and revolt beget peace and tranquillity; the Ogun
myth is restorative, cathartic and therapeutic. The calmness that results from
a revolution is part of the entry in the list of our common archetypes or
common residual epistemology.
The deployment of chorus in Ogun Abibiman or the adaptation of Yoruba
praise-chant reinforces the ritual content and structure. The chorus comes in
the middle section, and with its regular cheers of “Bayete”, “Rogbodiyan…”
(73) makes the poem a dramatic enactment of the concept of change. The
chorus enhances the communal act and, generally speaking, adds to its
universal appeal. It shows that the passage of Shaka and the ambivalent
activities of Ogun have a global credibility. The mythical re-enactment of
Shaka’s moral regeneration is the same act that Soyinka advocates for in our
society. The myth thus becomes the paradigm, the metaphor of moral
signification. In addition, the communal temper in ‘Sigidi’ section is a myth
which buttresses Soyinka’s stance: change can only be necessitated by a
collective, social action propagated by the will.
66 Sola Ogunbayo
In Ogun Abibiman, we see Soyinka setting a binary opposite against the

inhumane myth of dialogue as offered by the oppressors. Dialogue is taken to
be the creative synonym of diplomacy and it has failed to solve the problems
of the black people. All that remains is armed resistance. The myth of failed
dialogue confronts active change through violence. Ogun advocates that
violence must be driven away by means of violence, since the dialogue
proposed by the oppressors is only a smokescreen:
Sanctions followed Dialogue, games Of time-pleading. /And Sharpeville followed Dialogue/

And Dialogue /Chased its tail, a dogged dog Dodging the febrile barks /Of Protest (Ogun
Abibiman 21)
In character of Ogun and Shaka, Soyinka mythologises the timeless truth that
if nothing is sacrificed, nothing is gained. Larsen observes that “The violence
exercised by Ogun and Shaka and those who follow these leaders is the
violence not of death but of life” (134). Reconstruction, healing and rebirth
all stem from some measure of violence, resistance and opposition.
Ogun Abibiman is a celebration and a racial call to the black people to
imbibe the spirit of Ogun and Shaka to fight for the liberation of apartheid
Southern Africa. The poet is politically committed in his support for the
victims of apartheid. He does not rely on fancy as in the “lone figure”and
“grey season” (5) poems of Idanre and Other Poems but on available
materials: the Ogun myth, Shaka’s history, literary tradition and
contemporary African history. The Ogun myth lends immediacy, vividness
and urgency to Soyinka’s voice. By extension, readers from other borders are
able to garner common archetypal experiences from the travails of Ogun and
Shaka, as they peep into the peculiar socio-cultural space called Africa.
Larsen avers that “Ogun Abibiman expresses a firm repudiation not only of
the oppression and violations of personal liberty, both in Africa and in other
parts of the world” (136).
The figure of Ogun that straddles Ogun Abibiman can be interpreted on
the artistic, political, historical, mythical, spatial, scientific and temporal
levels. The fundamental intention behind Soyinka’s interest in Yoruba myth
has little to do with popularising the archaic; his concern would appear rather
to be that of discovering in mythic history certain principles upon which
contemporary behaviour might be based and by which it might be
legitimately judged. This judgement of behaviour and assessment of plausible
human actions from the plots of the narrated myth are not exclusive to the
terrain of the creator. The archetypal content of myth fosters its universal
understanding. Indeed, there is a profound sense in which it might be said
that the chaotic nature of social behaviour in our time is the single most
important justification for Soyinka’s mediation on myth.
The multidimensionality of Ogun’s personality accounts for the ease with
which Soyinka moves in and out of borders, creates peculiarity of space and
then crosses to another space, speaks of one medium in the language of
another and collapse many discrete idioms into one. The result is an eclectic
artistic method. In “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of
Liberation” Soyinka declares:
Genuine eclecticism manifests itself in awareness more than in application …eclectic mind
employs for its own regulation a constant matrix of possible idioms of expression for a
particular reality…from these various choices, it selects, evolves or recreates an apposite
metaphor. (19)
From the above, it is clear that the process of selection of “possible idioms of
expression” through eclecticism generates myths and for Soyinka every myth
has a symbolic value. Like William Blake’s The Four Zoas, Ogun Abibiman
therefore is a collage of possible medium of expression which births myths
that counter the oppressive ideology of the ruling class. While William Blake
condemns the inhumane reasoning Urizen in The Four Zoas, Wole Soyinka
vilifies oppressive acts and erects the war-god Ogun as the liberator but the
point of sameness is that both William Blake and Wole Soyinka resolve the
contradiction of the chaotic world at the realm of symbols, the realm of
mythmaking. The duo communicates to other borders by first imaginatively
creating space (Urizen, Los, Orc, Urthorna for Blake; Ogun, Shaka, Obatala,
etc for Soyinka) and then symbolically plotting humanity’s common
archetypes in such a way that one could make either The Four Zoas or Ogun
Abibiman a literary document for change and revolution.
The Concretised Universe in Ben Okri’s Starbook
Ben Okri’s Starbook clearly shows that the mythmaking process can stem
from the indigenous and shoot to the global. Okri announces this in the first
page: “The shrinehouse was at the edge of the village and the path that ran
past it led to the outside world” (1). The “shrinehouse” is the mythmaking
seat, the “village” is the footing of the author, the “outside world” is the
international bearing or relevance while “the path that ran past” may be
described as the imaginative art of border crossing. On the one hand, the
entire Starbook narrates a myth that serves as a protocol of reading the
paradoxes of existence and of surviving in it and because myths do not
68 Sola Ogunbayo
delimit boundaries, Starbook, on the other hand performs the utilitarian value
of world regeneration. This creative ingenuity of a mythmaker aligns with
Edward Young’s view in “Conjectures on Original Composition” where he
asserts that
Spirit rouse at an original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn what news from a
foreign land…we are at the writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his imagination, we are
snatched from Britain to Italy, from climate to climate, from pleasure to pleasure. (160)
Starbook thrives on personal myths whose explication crosses borders,

nationality and race. The essentials of myths are manifest in the narratives in
that it is timeless, dateless and there is little or no hint about the spatio-
temporal location. The central characters, the prince and the maiden, have no
proper names, save some few minor characters: Mamba and Chief Okadu.
All these imbue neutrality on the created myth and further enhance its
universality.
Principally, Starbook treats the subject of degeneration and
unreciprocated love as they affect a nameless kingdom. Shawn Peterson
submits that it is “a novel about art and its capacity to creatively reconfigure
the cruelties of the world” (14). Degeneration and unreciprocated love are
few of the archetypal concerns of Okri and the adept treatment of these
strong parts of our ‘collective unconscious’ fosters Okri’s speed of crossing.
Structurally speaking, degeneration is in binary opposition to regeneration
and it exists in every gathering of humans just like unrequited love is an
unavoidable presence. Both are archetypes in that they are not culturally
restricted; degeneration is not restricted to Africa just like unrequited love
goes beyond the Renaissance English literature. According to Lévi-Strauss,
“mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions
toward their resolution” (19). In other words, myths consist of elements that
oppose or contradict each other and other elements that resolve those
oppositions. While the council of elders and Mamba may be described as sets
of contradictions and degeneration, the dying prince serve to resolve the
paradoxes of these existing disorders. The motive behind the maiden’s
refusal of Mamba’s proposal is resolved in the myth of longsuffering enacted
by the prince.
The story of the decaying kingdom in Starbook is narrated against the
backdrop of a superior myth anchored by the prince, “If I am to be future
king I want to know what good and what evils we have done as a people”
here was deep silence among the elders. Then they began to murmur in great
perplexity (18). The dying prince, who is also cast as the new pupil (384) in
Starbook is set in binary contrast to Mamba: the former signifies tenacity of
purpose and truthfulness of vision while Mamba, the present generation of

false cleverness and shortsightedness, mythically symbolises pseudo-
existence marked by celebrated carnality. The conflict in these two
oppositions is later resolved by a mythical juxtaposition during a duel (382-
89) and the enduring humane value of the new pupil supersedes the carnality
and self-centredness of Mamba.
Degeneration is personified in the dying prince whose ailment affects the
entire land. Degeneration is treated by Okri to signify a universal malaise;
every country in the world is affected by one ailment or the other, primarily
the disease of character. The entire gamut of magical incidences in Starbook
is about the degeneration of characters and morals, especially from the
leaders. The council of elders, a resemblance of party politics, holds a myth
(21) which degenerates the entire kingdom and the questioning prince, whose
concern is to explode their inhumane ideology of life, is made to pay the
price (18-21). This border crossing archetype called degeneration is a
common denominator of contemporary nation-states. In developing nations,
degeneration is aptly captured in the brazen activities of “advancing […]
privileges, acquiring mew wives, furthering the interest of […] children,
families and tribes” while the super powers are enmeshed in “slippery words”
and “attitudes that cannot be detected” – two expressions which underline
hypocrisy an self-centredness of developed nations (45). But the dying prince
is the mythical representation of an overwhelmed antidote: he is symbolic of
a new system, a questioning attitude, a newer generation which eschews the
inhumanity of the council of elders. However, the enormity of the decadence
overwhelms him:
He fell into a deep illness because of all the evils in the kingdom that he was shown in his
dreams. All the hidden evils affected him so powerfully that he slid into a profound sickness
that lasted a long time. (Starbook 50)
It is a common epistemology and a universal truth that one positive voice

amongst the irrationality, the corruption and the treachery of evil
perpetrators, is ineffective. That is, the mind of such advocate of change
would soon be stifled by the immensity of corruption but not like Ayi Kwei
Armah plotted in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born where everyone is a
transgressor. Rather, it is a degeneration that holds the breath of inspiration
and mythmaking; a decay that frustrates progress and cripples attempts to
erect a sustainable binary opposite. This view is upheld towards the end of
the narrative where Okri posits that, “Somebody has to create a myth.
Somebody has to turn a life into a legend. Somebody has to project a story
into the future” (415). The prince’s counter narrative stands in opposition to
70 Sola Ogunbayo
the degeneration of the kingdom and the resolution is made manifest in the
magical encounter between him and Mamba (384-87).
Degeneration as an archetypal concern is also amplified in Okri’s
examination of a sub-theme called ‘gaps’ (272, 273). Taken to be a creative
synonym of degeneration, gaps are observed by the prince shortly after his
recuperation and he suspects the activities of the council of elders (279). It is
clear that gaps are the handmaiden of corruption and degeneration and it is a
universal experience. The resolutions of the gaps seem far-fetched because
even the wise people are incapable of solving the puzzle since it is a deep
rooted corruption with phenomena spread. In this sub-plot, it is demonstrable
that the panacea to the disturbing case of gaps cannot come from members of
the degenerated kingdom because even the philosophers, magicians, savants
and sages are all guilty of gaps. Okri universalises corruption by redefining it
as a gap. Hence, any system that has a loophole is replete with gaps,
including democracy as it is practised in the developed nations. Any system
that forbids questions and constructive self-criticism (274, 275) suffers from
gaps. Spaces, hollows, emptiness, mediocrity are gaps and agents of
corruption which are common quotidian experiences in all ages, tribes and
cultures. The gaps in Starbook seems irresolvable and so Okri describes it
‘ultimate mysteries’ (279) much so because the painful efforts of all
humanity (policies, rules, edicts, constitution) have been to erase gaps but
they keep appearing because the supposed agents of change, Chief Okadu for
instance, are also full of gaps. Undoubtedly, the fight against degeneration,
corruption or gaps is not exclusive to Africa or the developing world; rather it
is a cosmic disorder which craves for a sacrifice, an attitudinal change. In
Starbook, the prince is the sacrifice just like Olunde in Wole Soyinka’s Death
and the King’s Horseman, Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and
Jesus in Jewish mythology.
While unreciprocated love is widely acknowledged as characteristic of
English Renaissance age and the medieval era, it is far from true to make it
exclusive. Every society at every time experiences emotional interactions
which include unrequited love. The universal law that governs the myth of
unrequited love sets it as an archetypal opposition which is reducible thus:
attraction and repulsion. The maiden’s disregard for Mamba unfurls the
former’s quest for an idealistic young lover and, in opposition, reveals the
latter’s disposition towards rumour mongering, an attitude which really repels
him not only from the maiden but also from all readers who share the same
primordial knowledge (187-93). Mamba’s failure in winning the heart of the
maiden is reminiscent of Thomas Wyatt’s “The Hind” where the persona
“faintly follows” (43) the hind, after a series of fiascos. In Starbook,
unrequited love is an apt archetype in that it correlates with common human

experience that there is more danger in embracing or managing half-truth.
Here, Mamba is the mythical figure of half-truth. Though he appears to be
the best of the legion of suitors, he lacks depth of character, the mysterious
artistry and the fearful humility which the heart of the maiden craves for.
Mamba represents the favoured, arrogant elites who, because of the silver
spoon advantage (170), see it as a right to impose their selfish myths on
others: myths without humanity, myths without a heart, myths without
character. What the maiden, a representation of the cosmic corporate concern,
desires is a love that is borne out of patient learning, as did the prince in the
her father’s workshop, attentiveness to the heart of the matter, condescension
to the lowly and ability to reconcile warring opposites. The maiden, our
world, is love sick of character and not the charisma of Mamba: the only
antidote to her love illness is not the menacing muscles of the wrestlers
seeking her hands in marriage but the mighty mind of the learning prince:
The new servant that he was, he sat there quietly, and obediently and still. He learnt the art
of statues. He learnt their stillness. He learnt their repose…how to absorb all things, all
energies, all memories all thoughts and moods around him into his unresisting being.
(Starbook 299)
But even the prince must indeed be patient in the creation of his myth of
selflessness, attentiveness, character and humility because, observably, it
takes time before the depressed maiden notices the new myth, the prince
(296). Somehow, the prince also has his share of the unrequited love. It
appears that the tormented maiden has grouped all myths to be Mamba type
because of the loss of confidence but the prince’s servant attitude, the
gracefulness in stillness and longsuffering approach to life’s vicissitudes
enhance the originality of his myth. What it means therefore is that a love
remains unrequited until the other mate finds what satisfies the heart. In other
words, there shall continue to be rebellion, fracas, wars, indifferences,
political lethargy so long as the leaders fail to meet the love demand of our
maiden, our world.
Conclusion
Both Starbook and Ogun Abibiman reinforce the idea that even indigenous
myths can be understood across borders. The space occupied by a created
myth has only taken a shape or a form. Okri clarifies that “Those
stories…took form and wandered about the world and one day would take on
72 Sola Ogunbayo
a life of their own” (Starbook 4). Every myth takes the life of its own,
garnishes itself with a universal content called archetypes and when an
official language, say English for postcolonial countries, is deployed to
project this myth, it is called translation. For postcolonial literature, every
narrative in English is a translated myth. And what are actually keenly
translated are the common archetypes, the primordial shared symbols of our
common memory. The official language may serve as sign in the translation
process, but the actual substance in translation is the archetype. It is
archetype that Okri creatively describes as “the book of life among the stars,
in which all things are known” (3). Hence, Starbook, we have seen, parades
translated archetypes called degeneration and unrequited love such that the
“fragment of that story” (418) haunts every reader in any space or border.
In Ogun Abibiman the merging of the forest and savannah cultures of
Ogun and Shaka may have provided an epic background for the gods who are
seemingly transformed into ancestral deities of modern Africa but the
motives behind their vagaries are of universal human interest. African
postcolonial literature has sufficiently carved a niche as a tour de force in
mythmaking not just an attempt to exult the cultic or the exotic, but as a bold
imaginative endeavour to remind all humanity of our shared dreams. Isidore
Okpewho in Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance,
takes on scholars like Ruth Finnegan who claim that myth is absent in Africa.
He argues that the contention is borne out of inadequate information and
rather restricted definition of the word “myth.” To Okpewho, it is a prejudice
which ignores the creative element in myth and which also sees it as solely as
a sacred tale that commands an awed acceptance from its tellers (155-221).
Okri and Soyinka have creatively highlighted the abstract tendencies that
unite us, though different in spaces and borders, but common in memories,
dreams and consciousness. It follows therefore that our borders should be
marked with carefulness and with the comprehensive consideration for other
spaces since, unavoidably, in Okri’s words, our indigenous borders are
“fragments” in the vast “infinity” (Starbook 422) of sameness.
Works Cited
Alade, Toriola, ed. Mythic Thinkers: A Critique. Lagos: Scrollthrough Press,

2001.
Aristotle. “The Poetics.” Poetry: Theory and Practice. Ed. Lawrence Perrine.
2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 2003. 15-35.
Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London:
Heinemann, 1968.
Chase, Richard. “Notes on the Story of Myth.” The Mythic Experience. Ed.
Bedgiel Rose. New York: Oxford, 2003. 5-19.
Cirlot, Juan Eduardo, ed. A Dictionary of Symbols. 5th ed. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2000.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. United Kingdom: Faber and Faber,
1954.
Larsen, Stephan. A Writer and His Gods. Stockholm: University of
Stockholm Press, 1983.
Okpewho, Isidore. Myth in Africa: A Study of its Aesthetics and Cultural
Relevance. London: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Okri, Ben. Starbook. Lagos: Farafina Press, 2007.
Peterson, Shawn. “Starbook in Rider Books Review.” Reviewing Literary
Quotes (2005-2008). Ed. Jacob-Allyson Zainab. Lagos: Mamily
and Konilly Press, 2008. 14-19.
Sean, Alfred, ed. The Revolutionary Years: A Compendium. Johannesburg:
Innocenta Press, 2006.
Segal, Robert, ed. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford,
2004.
Soyinka, Wole. “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of
Liberation.” Wole Soyinka: Statements. Ed. Adejare Dele. Lagos: Lilt
Press, 2005. 10-19.
——., Death and the King’s Horseman. London: Norton and Company,
1986.
——., Myth, Literature and the African World. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1976.
——., Ogun Abibiman. London: Rex Collings, 1976.
Wimsatt, W. K. “The Concrete Universals.” Poetry: Theory and Practice.
Ed. Lawrence Perrine. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
2003. 159-66.
Wyatt, Thomas. “The Hind.” The Poet’s World. Ed. James Reeves. London:
Heinemann, 1978. 42-43.
Young, Edward. “Conjectures on Original Compositions.” Poetry: Theory
and Practice. Ed. Lawrence Perrine. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 2003. 171-82.
Fella Benabed
Syncretic Worldviews in Wole Soyinka’s The

Interpreters
Introduction
In this era of global cultural rifts, it is interesting to ponder on the value of

cultural syncretism in Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, a novel written in
1965, in which African and foreign cultural traits are blended to depict the
reality of post-independence Nigeria. The book explains that the colonial
situation caused severe identity confusions for the Yoruba, but their
obsession with the past would hinder their development. It describes the
reality of syncretism, defined as the “fusion of two distinct traditions to
produce a new and distinctive whole” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 229). In
Soyinka’s view, this situation requires a continuous “self-apprehension”
(Myth, Literature and the African World xi) to reconcile tradition and
modernity, and to find the right balance between Yoruban and foreign values.
The chapter initially provides some theoretical guidelines to understand the
theme of syncretism in The Interpreters. It subsequently ramifies the topic
into two parts: syncretic spirituality and syncretic mentality. The former
describes the author’s insertion of ancient myth into modern reality as a
complementary source of knowledge. The latter examines his description of
hybrid intellectuals trained in (neo)colonial institutions, and finally inquires
about the possibility for the African to relieve the burden of the past, to take
inspiration from it, and to build a better future.
Theoretical Signposts
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis advances that every language uniquely

expresses the specific worldview of its native speakers. Benjamin Lee Whorf
contends, “[w]e dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages”
(qtd. in Valsiner and Rosa 42). No other borrowed language can
appropriately replace a mother tongue in the expression of its specific
worldview. When using a foreign language, therefore, post-colonial writers
suffer from what David Crystal calls “the conflict between intelligibility and
identity” (134), a kind of ambivalent attitude towards it for both its alienating
76 Fella Benabed
and liberating potentials. They rely on numerous sources of inspiration, both

local and foreign; they draw from the wide repertoire of orality, and insert
vernacular lexis within the foreign language. This strategy is part of the post-
colonial struggle for discursive liberation from the norms of the Euro-
American canon.
Soyinka, like many post-colonial writers, uses the English language as a
counter-discursive strategy that, in his words, assaults “the West […] with
the West’s own dialectical weapons” (Myth, Literature and the African
World 82). The hybrid style of The Interpreters, a blend of oral Yoruba and
written English techniques, creates a considerable difficulty for readers to
fathom its cultural differences and nuances. Julia Kristeva believes that such
writers are lost in the “kaleidoscope” of their “multiple identities” and
“unbearable memories.” She refers to the “silence of the polyglot” to describe
the formal and sophisticated use of the foreign language, because the
subconscious does not participate in its production (57). This literary
strategy, however, has an ethnographic function; it is a sign of cultural
difference and a form of identity affirmation.
Cultural theorists presently consider that the preservation of a pristine
cultural identity is impossible, because the interconnectedness initiated by
colonialism and intensified by globalisation require change in continuity.
Cultural identity, in this view, is not predetermined and static; it undergoes a
permanent change through contact with other cultures. This new conception
of identity requires a new conception of culture. The history of the world
indeed shows that a careful cultural selection has always been the law for
cultural growth. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin use the image of the
“palimpsest,” an old document whose writing is partially or completely
erased to be replaced by another, to describe the particularly synthetic nature
of cultures in the post-colonial context. In their words, “previous
‘inscriptions’ are erased and overwritten, yet remain as traces within present
consciousness. This confirms the dynamic, contestatory and dialogic nature
of linguistic, geographic, and cultural space as it emerges in post-colonial
experience” (176). Culture is thus seen as a storehouse of traditions that can
continuously be adapted to changing situations, while useful traits can be
selectively added to avoid regression or extremism.
Syncretic Spirituality
When colonial missionaries started preaching the Holy Scriptures in Africa,

the natives have simultaneously felt wonder and threat. Homi K. Bhabha
Syncretic Worldviews 77
notes that despite apparent acceptance, the natives have slyly rejected the
imposed religion by “using the powers of hybridity to resist baptism and to
put the project of conversion in an impossible position” (118). As a result,
some “animist” beliefs have disappeared, but others have tarried thanks to
religious syncretism. They have mingled with Abrahamic religions through
what Bolaji Idowu calls “diffused monotheism,” which is the belief in a
Supreme Being and a pantheon of deities called “orisas.” The Yoruba
creation story relates that “Olodumare,” the Supreme Being, breathed life in
the bodies created by “Obàtálá,” King of the white cloth. As he was once
drunk with palm wine, he created the albino, the dwarf, the lame, the blind,
and so forth (135-36).
In his autobiography Aké: The Years of Childhood, Soyinka relates that
his grandfather has initiated him to the Yoruba religion, while his mother,
whom he calls the “Wild Christian,” has initiated him to Christianity. He
remembers that he used to watch the parade of the “elegúngún” 1 in the streets
of his hometown Abeokuta, and to project them on the Christian saints
appearing through the windows of the church. He says, “the stained-glass
window behind the altar of St. Peter’s church [which] displayed the figures of
three white men, dressed in robes which were very clearly egúngún robes”
(32). As he grows old, he understands that the resolution “to replant the
displaced racial psyche was one reason for the ease and permanence with
which the African gods were syncretised with Roman Catholic saints” (Myth,
Literature and the African World 17). Roger Bastide, in his studies of
religious practices among Yoruba deported slaves in Brazil, explains how
they created “correspondences” between their Yoruba gods and Christian
saints; he concludes that syncretism provides a psychologically appeasing
solution to the stress of acculturation (391).
Although The Interpreters is firmly rooted in the Yoruba ground, it also
relies on the Christian tradition. It includes many Biblical passages, such as:
“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me shall not perish,
but shall have everlasting life” (165; emphasis in original), and “the Lord
giveth and the Lord taketh away; blessed be his name for ever” (170;
1
In the Yoruba glossary at the end of The Interpreters, Soyinka defines “elegúngún” as an
“ancestral masquerade” (260). It refers to the one who wears “egúngún”, which means
“bone” and symbolises the “skeleton” of the dead. The “elegúngún” is a man with a long
robe and a mask that often represents an appalling human face or an animal. He stands for a
returnee from the land of the dead to inquire about the conduct of the living; he leaps,
dances and shouts to frighten those who committed a mischief. It is traditionally believed
among the Yoruba that touching “elegúngún,” even accidentally, leads to death (Ellis, Chap.
VI., n. p.).
78 Fella Benabed
emphasis in orginal). In addition to such direct quoting from the Bible, there
are some allusions, for example, in the comparison of the African American
Joe Golder to the Biblical character Esau who was “cheated of his birthright”
(102). He expresses his uprootedness from Africa, his mother land, in the
song “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” (244; emphasis in original).
Yet, Soyinka maintains that the missionaries have been “spreading a Word
which in spite of ritual acceptance altered little” (12). This means that they
have tried to wipe out the Yoruba inherited beliefs, but these attempts have
been circumvented in a variety of ways, such as through the reinterpretation
of ancient myths through Abrahamic beliefs.
Soyinka demonstrates that counter-acculturation can take the form of
myth revival, which appears in what anthropologists call “messianic,”
“nativistic,” or “millenarian” movements common among indigenous
societies across the world. They are symptomatic of a cultural and
psychological malaise, and echo a desperate search for the preservation of a
threatened worldview. Their prophet leaders or Messiahs attempt to revitalise
important elements of their agonising native cultures, by prophesying the
advent of a golden age that would restore the lost dignity of the natives
(Balandier 42). It is important to note that Soyinka wrote The Interpreters in
the sixties, a period marked by the proliferation of breakaway Churches in
Africa seeking a change in ritual practices. For Pope Paul VI, the “language
and mode of manifesting this one Faith may be manifold; hence, it may be
original, suitable to the tongue, the style, the character, the genius and the
culture of those who profess this One Faith. From this point of view a certain
pluralism is not only legitimate but desirable” (n. p.). The mainline Church
then accepted to adapt to local traditions, and African Christianity was
recognised.
African Christians started imagining new representations of religious
symbols to express their particularity, such as a black Christ and a black
Mary. In The Interpreters, for instance, Egbo forms a syncretic image of the
Mother and Child as “a brown sepulchre amidst dew greenness” (132). He
takes the unnamed student to his place of pilgrimage in the province of
“Ògún,” and tells her about his conception of Christianity in Yorubaland. He
shows her “the desolate cathedrals, ignored now by the fat whitish ants who
built them. There were new ones rising slowly from the ground” (132). This
image symbolises the demise of the white man’s Church in Africa, and the
birth of the black man’s own one.
In another instance, Soyinka syncretises the Biblical belief in the return of
Jesus and the Yoruba myth of the “Àbíkú,” a child who continually dies and
returns, to illustrate again his “cyclical view of history and the hope of
escaping from it” (King 92). Lazarus converts this child, re-baptises him
Noah, and asks him to hold a huge cross on his shoulder, saying that it is
“one of the few gifts which [they] have for the new church” (The Interpreters
176). A musical group called “àgídìgbo” plays the liturgy during Noah’s
baptism by tuning up Yoruba religious chants with drums and violins (174).
Like the “Àbíkú” and the Christ, the child Noah dies at the end of the novel,
and he is supposed to come back as a saviour.
Soyinka also takes inspiration from Biblical parables such as the
resurrection of Lazarus to represent his conception of a new African
Christianity. A Nigerian messianic prophet leader pretends that after his
death, he was resuscitated as an albino and “re-baptised Lazarus, the good
Lord raiseth from the dead” (165). The albino symbol might mean that
African Christianity would put all human beings on an equal footing,
regardless of their skin pigmentation. In the Yoruba pantheon painted by
Kola, Lazarus represents “Esumare” (also written as “Òsùmàrè” or
“Oshumare,” the literal translation of rainbow), an intermediary between man
and his deities who can prevent the rain from falling (Ellis, Chap. III, n. p.).
Lazarus, however, cannot ward off the rain, since he believes that God might
soon provoke another Deluge, from which he wants to save his community.
The Bible relates that when God saved Noah and his followers, He made a
covenant with them that He would no more punish them with another
Deluge, and the rainbow would permanently symbolise this covenant. For
Lazarus, therefore, human beings forgot their duty towards God; He will also
revoke His covenant, and plague them with a new Deluge. In his view, “it
was the time of floods and […] Revivalist Services” (The Interpreters 229).
Egbo saves Lazarus and the child Noah from the flames, and they escape “in
an arc framing a canoe” (222). The use of the words “arc” might allude to
Noah’s Ark, with its connotations of salvation; the symbol of the fire stands
for the healing and redemptive force. Since the Biblical “Curse of Ham” 2 has
considerably substantiated the colonial racist theories, Soyinka is probably
deconstructing the disadvantageous look at his descendents by giving a “new
dimension to the covenant” (232).
In Soyinka’s mythic vision, materialism has destroyed “the cosmic
principle of complementarity” (Myth, Literature and the African World 22)
with the supernatural world, and the revival of primeval myths can renew the
“assertive links with a lost sense of origin” (54). His “cosmic vision” can be
2
The Biblical parable of Noah has a particular importance in the history of colonialism and
slavery; it recounts that Ham found his father Noah drunk and naked in his tent, and that, as
a punishment, God cursed Ham by giving him a black progeny, forever condemned to
servility to the progeny of Shem and Japheth (Genesis 9: 20-29).
80 Fella Benabed
summarised in the existence of three worlds; each belongs to the “ancestors,”

the “living” or the “unborn,” to which he adds the fourth stage, a median
location in the life-death “continuum […] the abyss of transition” (26)
inhabited by “Ògún,” the god of iron, the warrior and explorer. When the
“cosmic balance” is shaken, he and his disciples catalyse an “organic
revolution” to bridge the widening abyss. Continuous ritual observance
soothes the cosmic forces of this gulf, the function of art, like ceremonies of
food offering and dancing, is to mediate between these worlds.
A proverb foreshadows the sacrificial death of Sekoni, the engineer and
artist, “[t]he rains of May become in July slit arteries of the sacrificial bull”
(The Interpreters 155). From an anthropological standpoint, sacrifices are
forms of defensive reactions and collective “exorcism”; they enable the
human being to enter into contact with “numinous” forces to draw strength,
and to restore the lost harmony of the cosmos (Cazeneuve 143). Sekoni
significantly dies in the road, the abyss of transition where “Ògún” lives; he
is run down by a lorry, a modern invention made of iron. 3 This event shows
that although “Ògún” is a creative god, when the “cosmic balance” is shaken
as in the post-independence period, his wrath becomes destructive; it needs to
be appeased by a sacrifice. Metaphorically speaking, therefore, Sekoni is
sacrificed on the altar of modernity; his blood would atone for the sins of his
community to engage in a guiltless borrowing of science and technology.
Soyinka believes that the artist is “the embodiment of challenge […]
constantly at the service of society for its full self-realisation” (Myth,
Literature and the African World 30); so the novel ends on a posthumous
celebration of Sekoni’s sculpture, a man strangling a python. Knowing that in
African traditional beliefs, serpents symbolise renewal or reincarnation, this
can be interpreted in terms of the author’s opinion about the cyclic
conception of history. The image of python reflects two well-known
alchemical symbols, the “ouroboros” and the “Möbius strip,” which represent
the cyclic vision of history, and question the possibility of escape from it.
The “ouroboros” is “the tail-devouring snake” which also symbolises “the
doom of repetition” (88). The “Möbius strip,” named after the mathematician
August Ferdinand Möbius, is a geometrical figure formed by twisting a band
180°, and then attaching its two ends. Soyinka describes it as a “mathe-
magical ring, infinite in self-recreation into independent but linked rings”
(Idanre 87). It is thus for him a symbol of hope, since the torsion of the strip
3
In a poem entitled “In Memory of Segun Awolowo”, Soyinka describes “Ògún” as the
agency of death in the road: “Death the scrap-iron dealer/Breeds a glut on trade. The fault/Is
His of seven paths whose whim/Gave death his agency” (1967, 14).
is a way out from the circle, from endless repetition and historical
determinism.
With its supernatural elements inserted in the texture of the realistic
discourse, The Interpreters can be categorised under the genre of “magic
realism,” in which “man, nature and supernatural agencies are united in a
complex cosmogonic design in which the laws of logic and causality peter
out into irrelevance” (Amuta 44). Soyinka therefore takes inspiration from
the mythical world to subvert the realistic conventions; he meshes the real
and the marvellous as part of the Africans’ belief in the power of gods and
ancestors on the living. The imagery of the novel particularly bears a local
hue, and reflects the Africans’ symbiotic alliance with their deities and their
environment.
Syncretic Mentality
Colonial education tried to divest the colonised of their distinctive cultural

identity, and to create a category of semi-westernised elite that would
perpetuate hegemonic interests. Analysing the process that underlies the
backwardness of Africa, Walter Rodney considers that Africans did not hear
about education from the colonisers, because they had had their own pre-
colonial systems of knowledge acquisition. He states, “colonial education
was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental
confusion and the development of underdevelopment” (263).
Notwithstanding its philanthropic guise, therefore, colonial education aimed
to produce alienated Africans to serve the hegemonic system, and to train a
minority to help in the exploitation of the majority.
By the time The Interpreters was published in 1965, most African
countries had obtained their political independence, but were still under the
economic and cultural yoke of their former colonisers. The reins of power
shifted to bourgeois compradors deculturated in colonial schools and
missionary churches; they chose to rule their countries with calqued Euro-
American forms of governance. According to Frantz Fanon, this category of
Africans “follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of negation and
decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stage of exploration and
invention. […] It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance,
the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth” (The Wretched of the Earth
123). This reflection reveals that the rulers of newly independent African
nations, being too unfledged for a successful nation building, imitated the
appearance of progress and discarded its essence. They turned to their former
82 Fella Benabed
colonisers seeking political and technical support, thereby causing the

permanent dependence of their countries upon them.
In The Interpreters, Soyinka describes the post-independence
repercussions of colonial education, which created caricatures of Westerners
that he calls “black oyinbos.” 4 They hastened after independence to benefit
from the commodities so far forbidden to them, seeking the white man’s
recognition by identifying with him. He also indicates that colonial education
created disillusioned intellectuals who suffer from “an overdose of cynicism”
(227), while post-independence nation building needs a kind of “organic
intellectuals,” whose role is “active participation in practical life, as
constructor, organiser, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator”
(Gramsci 10). Such intellectuals would constitute a responsible organising
body in the community; they would change the minds of their fellow-citizens,
remind them of their endangered values, and inject new ones acquired
throughout their education.
The Interpreters opens with Sagoe, the journalist, saying that “metal on
concrete jars [his] drink lobes” (7). He holds industrialisation and
urbanisation responsible for the secularisation of the Yoruba spiritual
worldview; the sight of “the Petrified Forest” (140), and “congealed sheets of
rust and silver patches” (189) irritates his “drink lobes,” the locus of his
sensibility. He finds refuge in alcohol to obliterate these stressful signs of
modernity, and asks his attendant Mathias to drink, because it “puts [him] in
a receptive mood” (70), but he regrets that “those whiskers burnt out all [his]
negritude” (34). Sagoe’s words reflect his awareness about the effect of
alcohol on Africans. While in the past, it was a colonial weapon of
subjugation, in the present, it is has become a self-destructive means of
oblivion.
Sagoe equally finds refuge in what he calls a “voidancy” philosophy, a
scatological ritual that reflects the socio-political situation of post-
independence Nigeria; it is, according to him, “the last uncharted mine of
creative energies” (71). With his “been-to” girl friend Dehinwa, Sagoe stands
for a generation that is losing its traditional grounds. After a drinking party,
they both go to the girl’s apartment, causing her mother to wonder furiously
if that is “a decent time for a young girl to be out?”; the aunt, in turn,
reprimands the girl of her promiscuous behaviour (36-37). This scene of
intergenerational conflict reflects the widening chasm and misunderstanding
4
The word “oyinbo” is translated in the glossary of The Interpreters as “white man” (260);
therefore, “black oyinbo” means black white man.
between young persons, who adapted to modern life, and their conservative
parents, who cannot tolerate the severance from time-honoured traditions.
In a traditional African community, a person can only be respected as a
member of a group, and whatever happens to the individual should affect the
group. For instance, Sekoni grows with the hope of serving his community;
he builds a power plant that would symbolically set the social machine in
motion. His chairman, however, thwarts these rosy prospects by summoning
the “expert-expat,” 5 who says that it is a “junk” (28). Soyinka uses this
episode to denounce the inferiority complex of the African bourgeois leaders,
who consider that their fellow Africans cannot intellectually vie with their
foreign “masters”; Sekoni consequently starts stuttering and goes mad.
The author treats the theme of mimicry in his novel with a satiric tone; he
shows how Ayo Faseyi, the x-ray analyst, keeps caring about “the code of
etiquette” (145) instead of diagnosing the diseases of his society. According
to Kola, he married the European Monica to get “the prestige of a white
wife” (214). Such interracial marriage is, in Fanon’s view, motivated by the
white woman’s need for “exoticism” and the black man’s desire of
“lactification.” “Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping
of my mind,” he says, “surges this desire to be suddenly white. I marry white
culture, white beauty, white whiteness” (Black Skin, White Masks 63;
emphasis in original). This quotation reflects the depth of the inferiority
complex in the colonised man’s mind, whose self-concept is boosted by the
love of a white woman, through whom he can embrace white culture, and get
children with a fairer skin.
Mr. Oguazor, a university Professor, is another prototype of “black
oyinbos” who seem to bow “from the marionette pages of Victoriana” (The
Interpreters 142); his house, speech and manners are all grotesque mimicries
of old-fashioned European styles. The description of his carnivalesque party
seems to ridicule the new upper class and its superficiality; Sagoe ironically
compares the guests to the Knights of the Round Table, saying that the “place
is crawling with Sir Galahads” (146). With this sarcasm, Soyinka depicts a
negative type of cultural hybridity. However, a positive alternative exists,
although not apparent in the novel, probably because it was written in the
early years after independence, when the cultural question was more
ambiguous. Today, many African people believe that they have benefited
from a positive type of acculturation, based on a careful cultural selection. As
bearers of flexible identities, they remain faithful to their traditional values,
but they also cross cultural boundaries for a fruitful exchange.
5
The “expert-expat” is Soyinka’s ironic appellation for the expatriate expert.
84 Fella Benabed
Throughout the novel, Egbo is burdened by questions about the past and
the dead, tradition and modernity, until the death of Sekoni catalyses his
opinions. In the beginning, he feels “the burden of a choice” (14) between
replacing his ageing grandfather at the head of his tribe, or working in the
Nigerian Foreign Office, but he follows the tide and ambivalently opts for the
second option. Deep inside, however, he finds in his grandfather “a virile
essence, a redeeming grace. [...] And this was being destroyed he knew, and
by cozening half-men who came bloated on empty wind” (11-12). Yet, in his
view, since the dead have no power over the living, they should no longer
determine his life. All choices should come from his own will, “not from
promptings of his past,” which should “stay in its harmless anachronistic unit
so [he] can dip into it at will and leave it without commitment, without
impositions!” (120-21). He understands that he should honour his past, but he
can substantiate it or condemn it through his present and future experiences.
The image of the bridge in The Interpreters can be interpreted as the
permanent bond between the past and the present, modernity and tradition,
the living and the dead. Sekoni, who views history as a continuum, believes
that “a bridge also faces backwards” (9). Significantly, the bridge is an
important symbol in the theory of cultural hybridity; Bhabha notes, “always
and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of
men to and fro, so that they may get to other banks” (5). The bridge here
stands for the link between cultures, but under it, there is a permanent risk of
drowning, and this is another leitmotif in the novel. In the beginning, Egbo
shows his friends the place where his parents drowned, and at the end, he
tells them that his decision to go “with the tide” (14) was “a choice of
drowning” (251). Soyinka means that Egbo should have chosen to become
the warlord of the creeks after his grandfather, among the traditional elders
known as “ogboni”, “a conclave of elders, a kind of executive council to the
throne” (240). 6 He affirms that, as opposed to the negative practices which
African leaders have inherited from their former colonisers, the Yoruba
chieftaincy rests on the principles of polyarchy, check and balance.
When Kola paints Egbo, therefore, he projects on him only the negative
sides of “Ògún”; this is due to Egbo’s failure to play a vital role in his
community, that of change and creativity. While in the myth, “Ògún” accepts
to rule his people, Egbo refuses to become the warlord of the creeks; he does
not resemble “Ògún” in his ingenuity and craft, but in his aggressivity and
6
In the meetings of the “Ogboni Society”, the members deliberate on all the concerns of the
community; their decisions are irrevocable, and no importance decision can be taken without
their approbation. “The Ogboni Society really holds the reins of government, and kings
themselves are obliged to submit to its decrees” (Ellis, Chap. V, n. p.).
lust. He has an affair with Simi the prostitute and impregnates a student of
Bandele. With his moral values and wiser visions, the latter represents
“Obàtálá,” whose disciples observe strict rules of moral rectitude, as
unstained as the white robe he wears.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis demonstrates that Soyinka’s The Interpreters

provides a pertinent illustration of syncretic worldviews in post-independence
Nigeria. It indicates that colonialism imposed an alien worldview on
Africans, and created an irreversible cultural hybridity. The novel describes
negative cultural hybrids, who break with their native culture, and embrace
the foreign one, in which they see more prestige. Others strive, but do not yet
succeed, to be positive cultural hybrids, by staying halfway between their
traditional culture and the foreign one, where there is a considerable potential
of mutual enrichment. The author himself is an interesting example of
positive hybrid intellectuals who have been exposed to foreign cultures, but
who nonetheless succeed in maintaining their basic African personality. He
believes that the insertion of primeval myth into contemporary reality
enhances Yoruba “self-apprehension,” to avoid the errors of the past and
envisage a more harmonious future. This way, traditions would be preserved
but not petrified, continually re-examined, re-adapted and syncretised with
beneficial modern practices. To the tradition / modernity dichotomy, he
proposes “a marriage of the two contending tendencies that will produce a
healing millennial trilogy: Truth, Reparations and Reconciliation” (The
Burden of Memory 92). The Interpreters demonstrates his attempt to adapt
Yoruba myths to the modern reality of Nigeria, Africa, and the world at large,
in a manner that transcends religious boundaries.
Works Cited
Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature. London and New Jersey:
Zed Books, 1989.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-colonial Studies: The
Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Balandier, Roger. “Messianismes et nationalismes en Afrique noire.” Cahiers
internationaux de sociologie 14 (1953): 41-65.
Bastide, Roger. Les religions africaines au Brésil. Paris: PUF, 1960.
86 Fella Benabed
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York:

Routledge, 1994.
Cazeneuve, Jean. Sociologie du rite. Paris: PUF, 1971.
Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
Ellis, A. B. Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa.
1894. Internet Sacred Texts Archive. 16 Aug. 2009
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/yor/index.htm>.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. C. L. Mankman. New York:
Grove Press, 1967.
——., The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. C. Farrington. London: Penguin
Books, 1963.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci.
Trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith. New York:
International Publishers, 1971.
The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992.
Idowu, Bolaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. London: SCM
Press, 1973.
King, Bruce. The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a
Changing World. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-mêmes. Frantzia: Arthème Fayard, 1988.
Pope Paul VI. “Eucharistic Celebration at the Conclusion of the Symposium
Organized by the Bishops of Africa.” 31 July 1969. 10 August 2007
<http://www.vatican.net/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1969/document
s/hf_pvi_hom_19690731_en.html>.
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Harare: ZPH, 1981.
Soyinka, Wole. Aké: The Years of Childhood. London: Rex Collins, 1981.
——., The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford
——., Idanre and Other Poems. London: Metheun & Company, 1967.
——., The Interpreters. London: Heinemann and Andre Deutsch, 1965.
——., Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge
Valsiner Jaan and Rosa, Alberto, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of
Sociocultural Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Part II
Dissidence, Absence, Transgression

Catherine Kroll
Dogs and Dissidents at the Border: Narrative Outbreak

in Patrick Nganang’s Temps de Chien
“Was willst du denn jetzt noch wissen?” fragt der Türhüter, “du bist unersättlich.” “Alle
streben doch nach dem Gesetz,” sagt der Mann, “wieso kommt es, daß in den vielen Jahren
niemand außer mir Einlaß verlangt hat?” Der Türhüter erkennt, daß der Mann schon an
seinem Ende ist, und, um sein vergehendes Gehör noch zu erreichen, brüllt er ihn an: “Hier
konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich
gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.”
Franz Kafka, “Vor dem Gesetz” (132)
… we must clear an intellectual space for rethinking those temporalities that are always
simultaneously branching out toward several different futures and, in so doing, open the way
for the possibility of multiple ancestries.
Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing” (258)
The reader’s experience of Patrice Nganang’s Temps de chien is mediated by

intersecting narratives: in the background hover Enlightenment grands récits
of liberation with their pronounced valorisation of reason dividing the world
into “civilised” and “primitive” spheres. Other narratives formative for the
African social imaginary 1 include a Marxist teleology of history on the one
hand, and the discourse on racial “authenticity” on the other. Cameroon’s Big
Men and political elites have their own iron-fisted narratives of how to
maintain peace on the streets: by silencing oppositional speech and
imprisoning dissidents. The novel is peppered by the street narratives of
radio trottoir (“pavement radio” or rumour) that attempt to make sense of the
power and sorcery infiltrating daily life. Writing against all of these
narratives, Nganang deploys textual “outbreaks” that erupt in barks, shouts,
vehement denunciations of unethical behaviour, mockery, and self-defence.
An earlier version of this essay was presented as part of the “Representations of Power in
African Literature” panel at the Modern Language Association Conference in San Francisco
in December 2008. My thanks to Livinus Odozor for organizing this session.
1
Charles Taylor uses the term social imaginary to express what “extends beyond the
immediate background understanding that makes sense of our particular practices,” which
include the “‘repertory’ of collective actions at the disposal of a given sector of society.” See
“Modern Social Imaginaries” 107.
90 Catherine Kroll
The first glimpse of Yaoundé’s power hierarchy appears as Mboudjak, the

canine narrator of the novel, offers a clear-eyed assessment of his subjected
state within his master’s household. Because of the audacious intelligence of
his speech, we are impelled to see it as a political allegory that ruptures the
chronology of the novel, referring to an individual and collective past and
gesturing proleptically into the future. This outbreak both expresses his
dignified, agonistic position vis-à-vis his master, Massa Yo, and it
metonymises the neocolonial relationship between Africa and the West. His
master’s derisive term for him – “dog” – reflects the human world’s
obsession with hierarchies of power:
Au tout début, je ressentais une blessure jusque dans les mots les plus anodins des hommes.
Tout ordre m’ensanglantait le regard. Il m’arrivait même d’entendre mon nom comme une
insulte, de confondre un appel avec un crachat morveux. ‘Chien’ était alors une de ces
innombrables choses humaines qui m’étranglaient, me décapitaient, m’éventraient,
m’édentaient, m’embouaient, me tuaient, m’enterraient. C’est qu’il me signifiait l’arrogance
qu’ont les hommes de nommer le monde, de donner une place aux choses autour d’eux, et
de leur intimer l’ordre de se taire. (Nganang, Temps de chien 11-12)
At first I was wounded by even the most innocuous human words. Any order made me see
red. At times I even heard my own name as an insult, mistaking someone’s call for the splat
of a gob of spit. Then ‘dog’ was just another of the countless human things that grabbed me
by the throat, cut off my head, tore out my guts and my teeth, covered me with filth, killed
and buried me. Because for me the word signified the arrogance with which men name the
world, assigning a place to each thing, and ordering them to be silent. (Nganang, Dog Days
7) 2
The allegorical tenor of these words echoes widely in time and space: sub-
Saharan Africa has endured several centuries of subjection in the form of the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade, inscription into European Enlightenment
narratives as the “dark continent,” and colonisation of its land, peoples, and
cultures. Today, the region labours under the neocolonial yoke of
unfavourable financial relationships with the West, including mandates by
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to pursue structural
adjustment programs. As is well known, such programs have led to high
unemployment and uneven economic development, as well as massive debt
servicing that has crippled countries’ abilities to fund health, education, and
other elements of their core infrastructure (Bond 31-54; Sen 96-99; Stiglitz
41-42, 228-229). Thus, when Mboudjak barks out his critique of the
arrogance, predation, and silencing to which he has been subject, we hear not
2
I have used Amy Baram Reid’s English translation of Dog Days; all other translations from
the French are my own. I am grateful to Jörn Kroll for assistance with the translation of
Hegel. Throughout, I use the English word “dog” for its acoustic marking of the pejorative.
Dogs and Dissidents at the Border 91
only his justifiable outrage at his own subaltern status, but also allusions to
Africa’s cultural memory and present material realities that reflect its
peripheral position in the global economic hierarchy.
In this chapter, I theorise the space between dog and “dog.” By what is
each term inflected, and what is signified by crossing the borders between
dog and “dog,” and from “dog” and dog? Given Cameroon’s contemporary
political realities, how does the text cross from a localised narrative to a
commentary on French neocolonial interference and a country hijacked by
autocracy? Further, in the global frame of signification, how does the trope of
border-crossing from “dog” to dog allegorise two conceptions of Africa:
“Africa-read-by-the-West” and Africa qua Africa, or Africa seizing its own
sphere of definition? What kinds of ontological, political, and expressive
issues are raised in moving from one defining border to another?
With his interrogation of terms, borders, and identities in Temps de chien,
what Nganang tacitly discloses is a web of multi-sited indigenous authority
shared among “dogs,” women, children, bayamsalam (market women), town
criers, poets, seers with an open democracy in front of them (“La République
invisible”), and men who are genuine men, recalled to their traditional
masculine obligations. The characters’ “outbreaks”—small acts of daily
defiance that reveal their dignity and irrefutable claim to their existence—
counter the totalising narratives that pass for public discourse in the banality
of the quotidian (Le Principe dissident 15). Temps de chien thus removes
itself from inscription in either a Western narrative of the modern or an
agonistic response to it in the form of a Marxist revolution. Nganang suggests
that, for Cameroon, the border that needs to be crossed is a debilitating
mentality, rather than the threshold to a specific teleology.
Theorising “Dog”
Expressing the dissonance between his self-understanding as dog and the

ways in which human beings interpellate him as “dog,” Mboudjak
pragmatically acknowledges the world of human judgments and hierarchies.
Of the word “dog,” he comments: “Il me signifiait, toutes les fois qu’il était
prononcé à mon endroit, que je faisais partie de l’univers humain, que j’avais
cessé d’être ce que je suis réellement, que je n’avais point droit à la parole”
(12) (“Each and every time it was used to refer to me, the word let me know I
was an object in the human universe, that I had stopped being what I really
was, and that I had no right to speak”; 7). In this introductory speech, he
twice references the “arrogance” which characterises human beings’
92 Catherine Kroll
presumptuous efforts to name or “fix” the arrangement of the world. What

we notice here is the contrast between the human proclivity to arrogate
according to fixed hierarchies and Mboudjak’s mobility of perspective and
fluid mastery of human grammar, language, philosophy, and ethics:
Je suis un chien. Qui d’autre que moi peut le reconnaître avec autant d’humilité? Parce que
je ne me reproche rien, ‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom: c’est le nom que les
hommes m’ont donné. Mais voilà: j’ai fini par m’y accommoder. J’ai fini par me reconnaître
en la destinée dont il m’affuble. Dorénavant ‘chien’ fait partie de mon univers, car j’ai fait
miens les mots des hommes. J’ai digéré les constructions de leurs phrases et les intonations
de leurs paroles. J’ai appris leur langage et je flirte avec leurs modes de pensée. Je me suis
accommodé jusqu’à l’arrogance de leurs ordres. Qui aurait seulement pu l’imaginer jadis? Je
m’exécute sans rage aucune quand mon maître m’appelle, même si je le fais toujours en
traînant un peu la patte. (11)
I am a dog. Who else but me could admit it with such humility? Since I see no reproach in
this confession, ‘dog’ becomes nothing more than a word, a noun: the noun men use to refer
to me. But there you have it; in the end, I’ve gotten used to it. I’ve assumed the destiny it
places on my shoulders. From here on out, ‘dog’ is part of my universe, since I’ve made
men’s words my own. I’ve digested the structures of their sentences and the intonations of
their speech. I’ve learned their language and I flirt with their ways of thinking. I’ve even
gotten used to the arrogance of their orders. Who could ever have imagined such a thing? I
obey without the slightest bit of anger whenever my master calls, even if I do always drag
my paws a little. (7)
Mboudjak seizes upon the arbitrary nature of signifiers here: in his analysis,
“‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom” (11) (“‘dog’ becomes nothing
more than a word, a noun”; 7). He, in turn, displays such a versatility of tone
and emotion that we cannot help but ascribe human characteristics to him:
mimicry, derision, and pragmatic metis. This harnessing of a plurality of
personal characteristics – from undaunted courage to “scientific objectivity”
– and knowing how to play each of them at the appropriate moment
distinguishes him from the human beings in the text who are stuck at the
borders of their own short-term interests. Incredible though it may be, this
dog has a wider social and historical vision than those humans who exalt
themselves above him. Mboudjak allies himself directly with those who were
subjected to physical and psychic violence in the colonial era. It is precisely
this nexus of naming and violence that Pius Adesanmi points to as having
fuelled the colonial imperative: “Naming precedes and begets
(mis)representation which, in turn, is deployed as justification for all the
forms of violence that have been masquerading for five centuries as a mission
civilisatrice” (108).
As if these memories of violence had become reality once again,
Mboudjak almost loses his life at the hands of Massa Yo’s son, Soumi, who
tries to hang him. Massa Yo had scolded Soumi for not sharing his meal with
Mboudjak, and Soumi had then sought revenge by tricking Mboudjak into a
game of “horse” when he was tethered. When Soumi climbs the tree,
Mboudjak becomes stuck in the branches and is left hanging by the rope.
Soumi unleashes a cascade of curses at the suffering dog and leaves him for
dead. Mboudjak is rescued by a passerby and, upon reflecting on Soumi’s
“murderous plot,” he decides nonetheless to return to Massa Yo’s house:
Entre nous: pourquoi ne diriez-vous pas alors que je suis le fidèle compagnon de l’homme?
Car en effet, pourquoi faut-il que, plusieurs fois victime de la rage folle de ce nommé Massa
Yo et maintenant rescapé du meurtre de son Soumi de fils, je me retrouve encore à l’ombre
d’un homme, là même dans la maison de la faim qui causa ma mort? Faut-il, diriez-vous,
que je sois tué, retué, reretué et rereretué, faut-il que je meure une, deux, trois, dix, cent,
mille fois, pour enfin penser à quitter mon sempiternel assassin? Pensez tout ce que vous
voulez, cher lecteur, mais ne dites pas que je ne suis retourné chez mon maître que parce que
je suis un chien, car voici: je suis avant tout rentré chez Massa Yo, poussé par ma décision
de me rendre justice moi-même. Insistons bien sur le ‘moi-même.’ (31)
Just between us, wouldn’t you say that I’m man’s best friend? Why else would I—more than
once the victim of the insane rage of that man known as Massa Yo, and now the survivor of
his son Soumi’s murderous plot—find myself back again in that man’s shadow, in that
house of hunger, which had led me to my death? Do I have to be killed, re-killed, re-re-
killed, and re-re-re-killed? Do I have to die once, twice, thrice, ten, a hundred, or a thousand
times before I finally consider leaving my perpetual assassin? Think what you will, dear
reader, but don’t say I returned home to my master just because I’m a dog. No, here’s why:
more than anything else, it was my decision to seek justice for myself that pushed me back to
Massa Yo’s. Let’s underscore the word ‘myself,’ shall we? (20)
The communal cultural memory he bears within him and his determination to
claim a “self” underlie his resolve to operate with bold agency: “flirting” with
human thought and pursuing justice. Nganang’s emphasis here on the
courage of claiming and asserting a self even in the face of overwhelming
autocratic predation is a rallying cry for Cameroon’s citizens. For political
change to be effected, there must first be an elemental valuing of oneself as
worthy of justice.
Mboudjak expresses the mounting cruelty he faces in Massa Yo’s
household as predation raised to exponential proportions: “Faut-il, diriez-
vous, que je sois tué, retué, reretué et rereretué?” (31) (“Do I have to be
killed, re-killed, re-re-killed, and re-re-re-killed?”; 20). When he later reflects
on Soumi’s attempts to pretend as if nothing had happened, his memory
becomes distorted, and he starts to blame himself: “Et d’ailleurs: y avait-il
crime? Toutes les fois, oui toutes les fois, c’est à moi qu’ils demandaient
méchamment de foutre le camp” (33) (“But then again, did a crime really
take place? I was always the one they brutally told to get the hell out”; 22). In
94 Catherine Kroll
this passage, Nganang directly references the discrepancies among stories of

the killing of students during a demonstration in support of opposition parties
on 6 May 1991 in Obili, the quarter adjoining the University of Yaoundé.
According to Ladislas Nzessé, conflicting reports of the demonstration
circulated, ranging from accounts of a number of students killed by the police
to no casualties at all (82).
But this passage also recalls the suppressed historical memory of the
violence of both the colonial era and of France’s withdrawal from its
colonies. 3 This suppression of memory occurs not just in the West, but it also
occludes the consciousness of those struggling to rebuild their countries after
independence. In the shadowy spaces of suppressed memories, the
boundaries of guilt slide into one another, to the point that past and present
victims become subject to regimes of blame. A line of voice-over narration
from Jean-Marie Teno’s film Afrique: Je te plumerai throws this point into
high relief: in contemporary Cameroon, “Tout ce passe comme si le système
a refusé un développement pour la société, comme si une partie de ses fils
doit expié pour quelque chose” (“Events unfold as if the system refused
development for society, as if a part of the citizenry must atone for
something”). Teno’s perspective reinforces the widely held view that Africa’s
victims of colonial domination are being further victimised by their own
post-independence governments, who induce further internalisation of blame
and inferiority in their citizens. Charles Forsdick explains the wider loss of
historical memory in francophone Africa in this way: violence in the French
colonial era and during the withdrawal of Empire was “often censored in the
short term and subsequently suppressed in the official memories of both
coloniser and colonised (a suppression whose institutional form is the
amnesty) as part of a desire for a post-independence ‘clean-break’ settlement
with the past” (42). In Temps de chien, Mboudjak must thus navigate the
potentially treacherous streets of the neighbourhood – bereft of the memory
of past wrongs – with his only ally The Crow.
Mboudjak realises the pragmatic advantages of accepting his designation
of “dog,” since this term has more to do with the perspective of his selfish
3
In France-Afrique: Le crime continue, François-Xavier Verschave describes the violent
suppression of the Union des peuples du Cameroun (UPC) during the 1950s: “Tous les
leaders indépendantistes camerounais ont été assassinés, empoisonnés, toute une partie de la
population de l’ouest du Cameroun, la région bamiléké (où l’UPC connut son essor le plus
considérable) a été massacrée.” (“All of the Cameroonian independence leaders were
assassinated, poisoned; a portion of the population in Western Cameroon, the Bamileke
region [where it was known that the UPC had the most extensive influence] were
massacred”; 14-15).
master than with him. This frees him for the language games and “poaching”
possibilities that allow him to straddle a space between interpellated “dog”
and his integral subjectivity as dog. Further, he is conscious of the
contingencies of place within multiple hierarchies: his place within Massa
Yo’s family, within the hierarchy of Mini Minor’s dogs, and within the
hierarchy of street dogs, who accuse him of being a “petit-bourgeois” dog
(17), of being alienated from his “canitude” [read: négritude] (21), and of
failing to join the ranks of those preparing for the canine revolution (34). It is
because he sees something more fluid and pragmatic ahead of him that he
takes aim at the strictures of Marxist rhetoric:
Oui, tous les jours, j’observe les hommes, je les observe, je les observe et je les observe
encore. Je regarde, j’écoute, je tapote, je hume, je croque, je rehume, je goûte, je guette, je
prends bref, je thèse, j’antithèse, je synthèse, je prothèse leur quotidien, bref encore: j’ouvre
mes sens sur leurs cours et leurs rues, et j’appelle leur univers dans mon esprit. (35-36)
Yes, every day I observe men: I observe them, and observe them, and observe them some
more. I watch, I listen, I tap, I sniff, I chew, I sniff some more, I taste, I lie in wait, I
conclude; I come up with a thesis, an antithesis, a synthesis, and a prosthesis on their daily
routine. In short, I open up my senses to their courtyards and their streets, I invite their
universe into my spirit. (23-24)
While the tone here is puckishly comic, the sentiment is not. One reason
Nganang satirises the rhetoric of Marxist revolution is that, during the Cold
War era, African nations were subjected to violent internal power struggles
that were in part fueled by imported Marxist ideas, leading to what Mbembe
has termed “politics as a sacramental practice” of violence (“African Modes
of Self-Writing” 251).
Nganang further develops the theme of contingent hierarchies in the
allegory of Mama Mado’s makeover of Mboudjak into a French poodle: “le
chien du futur” (104) (“the dog of the future”; 70). Commenting on this
coercive cultural re-fashioning, he describes himself as “tout petit chien de
rien du tout, tchotchoro à dire vrai, enfoncé dans le fauteuil de ma
métamorphose” (100) (“a real little nothing of a dog, a tchotchoro, if truth be
told—sunk deep into the easy chair of my metamorphosis”; 67). He uses the
term “tchotchoro” ironically, aware of the context in which he has found
himself: he is both small vis-à-vis the chair and lacking in the expected
glamour of this feminine ethos. Yet, as before when he realised that “dog”
was only a word from the human world, he only looks like a “nothing” in the
context of this particular place. There can be no definitive judgments about
him, given his place both within and among so many shifting hierarchical
contexts.
96 Catherine Kroll
Mboudjak’s realisation of his place in the mammalian hierarchy is echoed

in the mix of ironic resignation (“Le Cameroun, c’est le Cameroun” [141];
“Cameroon is Cameroon” [96]) and the outright defiance of radio trottoir.
Speaking of his creative process in composing Temps de chien, Nganang
explains that his intention was to produce an “école de la rue,” with rumour
serving as the linguistically animating force of the novel: “La rumeur et les
commentaires ont une subversion terrible que les écrivains n’ont pas, même
les écrivains les plus chevronnés n’ont pas la liberté de ton de la rue”
(“Rumor and commentaries have a terrible subversive power that writers do
not have, even the most celebrated writers do not have the liberty of tone of
the street”; “L’écrivain à l’école de la rue” 104). Those on the street are not
as cowed as their leaders may believe, for radio trottoir bends the force of
power, extruding it into colourful caricature and disemia: “Leurs rires
habillaient également la petitesse de la Mini Minor d’une menaçante vitalité”
(68-69) (“Their laughter also enveloped Mini Minor’s small self in a garb of
threatening vitality”; 46). Similarly, the police commissioner Etienne
survivait dans la parole du bar en caricature magnanime, en un verbe conjugable à souhait:

‘Étienne’. Au présent de l’indicatif: ‘Je vous dis qu’elle le tient, dites donc.’
À l’imparfait: ‘No-o, c’est lui qui la tenait.’
Au futur: ‘Laissez-moi vous dire. Le tiennement-là va finir demain.’ (69)
lived on as a magnanimous caricature in the vernacular of the bar, as a verb that could be
conjugated at will: ‘Etienne’: to have a hold on or control someone.’ In the present
indicative: “I tell you, she sure ‘Etiennes’ him.”
The imperfect: “No-o-o, he was ‘Etienning’ her.”
The future tense: “I’ll tell you something—that ‘Etienning’ will stop tomorrow.” (46)
Thus, the bar’s regulars reduce Etienne, the civically powerful police
commissioner, to someone disempowered (or “held,” punning on the French
tient) in his own interpersonal affairs. Addressing the shifting status of
signifiers within any given context, Jean-François Lyotard reminds us that all
communication exists within
a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. […] One is
always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the
least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and
position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. (15)
Michel de Certeau likewise insists upon the social configuration of meaning,

suggesting a productive “leveling” of hierarchies as power circulates among
all of those who wield language:
Innumerable ways of playing and foiling the other’s game. […] That is, the space instituted
by others, characterize the subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups which, since they
lack their own space, have to get along in a network of already established forces and
representations. People have to make do with what they have. In these combatants’
stratagems, there is a certain art of placing one’s blows, a pleasure in getting around the
rules of a constraining space. We see the tactical and joyful dexterity of the mastery of a
technique. (18)
This passage speaks directly to Mboudjak’s subjected posture as Massa Yo’s

“dog,” and yet also to his canny realisation of how he can “play it.” It is
Mboudjak’s distinctive ability to adopt perspectives from the entire
circumference of these positions – to see with a comprehensiveness that
knows no borders – that makes his perspective trustworthy for us.
Mboudjak’s analysis of the name given to him by Massa Yo – “main qui
cherche” (13) (“the outstretched hand”; 8) – constitutes one such example of
his ability to “flirt” with human ways of thinking and to see
comprehensively, since it signifies his own creative grafting of a name onto
his higher purposes of seeking justice. Mboudjak exploits the full meaning of
his name as signifying a jointly dependent relationship: there is, first of all,
Massa Yo’s idealised self-regard that characterises his support of his wife,
son, and dog, but Mboudjak also postulates that there must be a receiving
hand (“Ne suppose-t-il pas que j’ai une main moi aussi?”[13]; “But doesn’t it
suggest that I have a hand of my own?” [8]) which makes him effectively
Massa Yo’s equal, and, as he takes it further, perhaps even his master’s hand.
Here we can appreciate a kind of triumphant ambiguity: while Massa Yo
may see Mboudjak as a passive receiver – “main qui cherche” – the locution
in fact signifies an active stance: a hand that looks for something, and,
indeed, Mboudjak is our intrepid seer in this text. Further, Mboudjak seizes
“le domaine de définition des choses” (39) (“the field of definition”; 26) and
masters human grammar, scientific observation, and analysis. The decidedly
human wit and analytical acumen of his commentary are posed ironically
against his ebullient “doggish delights” of sniffing, chewing on leather,
urinating on walls, and his utter horror at being confused for a man: “Être
pris pour un homme demeure cependant toujours l’insulte la plus terrible
qu’on puisse me faire” 46) (“Yet, to be taken for a man is the worst insult of
all”; 30).
Mboudjak treads lightly among men obsessed with their positions within
hierarchies, barking out his warnings and denunciations. The role of town
crier is one he shares with the philosopher-writer (and Nganang’s avatar) The
Crow. Both Mboudjak and The Crow are self-described “scientific
98 Catherine Kroll
observers” who cry out repeatedly “Where is the man?” in response to the
pervasive womanising, cowardice, and lassitude of the men of the quarter.
Indeed, the very mobility of Mboudjak’s linguistic craft (in contrast to the
relentlessly arrogating utterances of the chief men in the novel) reveals how
he crosses the border from dog to “dog” and back again. Mboudjak puts in
practice Hegel’s notion of how “the negation of the negation” produces the
“Fürsichsein” (“being-for-oneself”): “Da in diesem Sein Negation ist, ist es
Dasein, aber da sie ferner wesentlich Negation der Negation, die sich auf sich
beziehende Negation ist, ist sie das Dasein, welches Fürsichsein genannt
wird” (“Since this [self-reflected] being contains negation, it is existence. But
since this negation is essentially negation of negation – negation that refers to
itself – it is that existence which is called ‘being-for-oneself’”; 166). It is in
negating the negation – through analysis, through parody, through insurgency
– that the subjected seize their subject status for themselves: “Moi, son
chien” (15) (“Me, his ‘dog’”; 9). Mboudjak’s ironic deployment of the term
“dog” buffers him from interpellation at the same time as it deflates Massa
Yo’s authority.
This negative dialectic informs Fanon’s well-known critique of imperial
rhetoric in The Wretched of the Earth: “The violence with which the
supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has
permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of
the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western
values are mentioned in front of him” (43). Similarly, Mboudjak realises that
he has been relegated to the lower rungs of the mammalian hierarchy (or
“dogged”) by a man who has no claim to ethical authority at all. When the
term “dog” is rescued from the tyranny and contingency of the flawed judge,
Mboudjak moves from “dog” to dog, turning the energy of derision back to
the source and reclaiming dog for himself.
When Mboudjak takes charge of the narrative and becomes its ethical
diviner (showing himself to be no mere “dog”), he displaces human beings
once and for all from their position of assumed authority. His commentary on
the foibles of humans operating in the world constitutes both an ironic trope
and also the necessary leverage for us to be able to form comprehensive
judgments. This crossing of creatures and their characteristics is what we
might term chiasmic irony: the reversed pairs of wise dog/human fool,
courageous dog/human coward, and compassionate dog/human tyrant signify
the decomposing ethical context in which Nganang’s critique unfolds.
The hurling of names to point up the deficiencies of Man structures both
the irony and the political critique of the novel. Mboudjak’s increasingly
impatient question “Où est l’homme?” (35) (“Where is Man in all of this?”;
23) is elaborated by “l’homme à la tête de bouledogue” (234) (“the man with

the bulldog head”; 163), whose oppositional critique helps build momentum
for the final scenes:
Ils pillent nos richesses […] ils mangent nos rêves. […] Ils faussent notre passé, ils mentent
notre présent, ils suspendent tout ce qui pourrait nous advenir de bien. Ils nous disent que
c’est nous les éternels responsables, et nous croyons que c’est à nous la faute si nous
sommes pauvres. Ils montrent des boucs émissaires parmi nous, et nous nous mettons à nous
entredéchirer. Des chiens, ils sont tous, rien que des chiens! (235)
They loot our wealth […] they eat up our dreams. […] They distort our history and lie about
our present. They put off anything good that might be coming our way. They say we’re
always to blame, and we believe it’s our fault we’re poor. They point out scapegoats among
us, and we start tearing each other limb from limb. Dogs, they’re all nothing but dogs! (164)
After being denounced as “a member of the opposition,” The Crow echoes

Mboudjak’s earlier theorising on names: “Notre homme en noir-noir ne
semblait pourtant pas en être impressionné. Pour lui, ‘opposant’ n’était
apparemment qu’un mot de la langue française” (141) (“Our man in black
didn’t seem overly impressed by it though. For him, ‘opposition’ was nothing
more than a word in the French language”; 97). The Crow’s observation
recalls Mboudjak’s view that “‘chien’ ne devient plus qu’un mot, un nom:
c’est le nom que les hommes m’ont donné” (11) (“‘dog’ becomes nothing
more than a word, a noun: the noun men use to refer to me”; 7). The ethical
intention is clear here: to expose the contingency of interpellative signifiers
and thereby to neutralise their force.
The Invisible in the Visible
The border-crossing from dog to “dog” and from “dog” to dog is more than
an ironic tropological feature of the text. The juxtaposition of a shrewd, light-
footed dog taking to task his rotund, authoritarian master exemplifies the
interpenetrating realms of the “real” and the occult, of the visible and the
invisible in this novel. The dog effectively changes places with the human,
penetrating the human world, while men repeatedly reveal themselves to be
dogs. Massa Yo—a witless womaniser who opens a bar after he is laid off
during Cameroon’s crisis of 1989—tries to mould reality to suit his tastes
(teaching his son Soumi to do the same), while Mboudjak continually proves
his canny judgment, courage, and ethical determination. Nganang
incorporates a key element of the Cameroonian episteme in his rendering of
metamorphoses from animal to human (Mboudjak) and from human to
animal (the men of Yaoundé’s district of Madagascar).
100 Catherine Kroll
The visible migrates into the invisible—with Mini Minor’s mysterious

boxes disappearing behind the walls of her chantier – and the invisible haunts
the neighbourhood’s visible daily realities, evincing Cameroonians’ deep
suspicion of wealth accumulation and the contingencies of the modern
economy (Geschiere 25; Fisiy and Geschiere 242-43; Shaw 203). Mbembe
has coined the term “simultaneous multiplicities” to capture the traditional
Cameroonian episteme that recognises the presence of the invisible in the
visible, and the visible within the invisible (On the Postcolony 145). Temps
de chien pulses with spectacular rumours, taking its readers down
passageways into the invisible, but plausible realms of Cameroon’s psychic
realities. Nganang evokes a world in which business is transacted behind
walls and in back rooms out of reach of the public eye, but not entirely out of
its consciousness.
The visible is only a shadow of the full reality, which also includes the
invisible. Geschiere explains that it is the occult force of djambe that allows a
person “to transform himself or herself into a spirit or an animal and to do all
sorts of other exceptional things” (13). Thus, in Temps de chien, Docta’s
guilty girlfriend claims that her husband has transmigrated into Mboudjak:
“‘Qui sait si ce n’est pas mon mari’, avait répondu la femme. Et elle avait
ajouté peureuse: ‘Docta, tu as vu comment il nous regarde?’” (45) (“‘How do
you know it’s not my husband?’ the woman replied. And then she added
fearfully, ‘Docta, did you see how he’s looking at us?’”; 30). Massa Yo
speaks casually of thieves’ disappearing potions (50). Mboudjak observes
The Crow fly into the air: “Je voyais sa silhouette lugubre planer au ciel
comme un oiseau de malheur” (172) (“I saw his lugubrious silhouette soaring
ominously overhead, a bird-like portent of evil”; 119). People fear their
shadows will be sold to Famla (123), a Bamileke secret society rumoured to
be comprised of shady entrepreneurs (Geschiere 158). Dogs howl with
cannibalistic laughs (187), and both Massa Yo and Docta “eat up” the women
of the street with their eyes and their predatory scams (52).
Presence, absence, predation, and privation all circulate in radio trottoir.
Frances Nyamnjoh explains that
The popular epistemological order in Cameroon and most of Africa does not subscribe to the
same dichotomies [of rational vs. irrational, real vs. unreal]. On the contrary, it builds
bridges between or marries the so-called natural and supernatural, rational and irrational,
objective and subjective, scientific and superstitious, visible and invisible, real and unreal;
making it impossible for anything to be one without also being the other. […] In this
epistemology emphasis is on the whole, and truth is something consensual, not the result of
artificial disqualification, dismemberment or atomization. (29)
One of the more arresting stories set in motion by Panther is that of the
bangala (penis) thief: “‘il paraît qu’un homme passe de quartier en quartier et
fait disparaître le bangala des gens’” (117) (“‘it seems there’s a guy going
from quarter to quarter, making men’s bangalas disappear’”; 79). Such
stories regularly circulate in Central and West Africa and are widely regarded
as credible (Nyamnjoh 33). Nganang’s inclusion of the bangala thief story
reveals Panther’s striking ability to bend reality for entertainment purposes,
since “‘la vie est invivable si elle n’est pas réinventée’” (94) (“‘life is
unlivable if it’s not reinvented’”; 64). But here we also see the decidedly
material effects of rumour: because the thief is identified as a member of the
opposition, his actions infect everyday reality with threat and portent,
effectively paralysing the will for concerted political action against the Biya
regime.
Nganang’s text thematises border-crossings in both tropological and
ontological respects. His attribution of human virtues to a dog and of animal-
like failings to men structures the satire of the text, but, of even more
consequence are the ontological borders dissolving in the face of
“simultaneous multiplicities.” Given that everyday realities consist of the
invisible within the visible, Nganang reminds us of the power of writing to
keep alive invisible or dormant ethical principles “comme une transcendance
de la barbarie” (“like a transcendence of barbarism”; Le Principe dissident
45). His text reveals how Cameroon is engaged in a battle for the field of
definition: a battle of naming and denunciation. In this text, Mboudjak strips
away the artifice of names and the arrogance of power, while the
countervailing force of ratio trottoir embellishes stories in ever more
hysterical iterations.
The Autocrat
Story both accounts for Cameroonian daily life, and it works as an anodyne
for what Mboudjak calls “l’insultante réalité de la rue” (106) (“the insulting
reality of the street”; 72). But story can be a debilitating distraction from the
exigencies of the present. In the midst of telling his own narrative, Nganang
critiques Panther’s imagination as being little more than “web-web” (chatter)
(109): “Sa gueule inventrice d’histoires rocambolesques ne bégayait que son
silence devant les tragédies de la vie” (148) (“He told stories of the
superfluous so he could keep silent about the essential”; 102). And what is
this essential? Shortly after Panther delivers his bangala thief story (and after
Mama Mado “reinvents” Mboudjak as a French poodle in the beauty parlor),
102 Catherine Kroll
the cigarette vendor reads aloud The Crow’s notes on the neighbourhood’s
invisible potential: “‘Les sous-quartiers sont la forge inventive de l’homme.
La misère de leur environnement n’est qu’illusion. Elle cache la réalité
profonde de l’inconnu qu’il faut découvrir: la vérité de l’Histoire se faisant’”
(121) (“‘The neighborhoods are the forge of mankind’s creativity. The
wretchedness of their surroundings is but an illusion. It conceals the profound
reality of the unknown which remains to be discovered: the truth of History
in its creation!’”; 82). As we will see, it is in this transformed seeing that
neighbourhoods are awakened to their potential, and illusion can be
superseded by genuine political renewal.
Panther’s stimulus of the endless kongossa (gossip) of the street fosters
the very “mutual ‘zombification’” that Mbembe theorises is constitutive of
autocratic regimes: “the postcolonial relationship is not primarily a
relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can be best characterized as
convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of the commandement and its
‘subjects’ having to share the same living space” (On the Postcolony 104). It
is thus ironic that Paul Biya speaks of himself as a trustworthy father,
claiming that his government is the sole organ of truth: “Truth comes from
above; rumour comes from below” (qtd. in Ellis and Ter Haar 30). Because
rumour generates fear, quiescence, and mistrust, it becomes a potent weapon
of control wielded by political elites. Harry Garuba argues that “the new
elites who control economic and political power within the modern state
often prey upon the animist unconscious for spurious cultural instruments to
bolster their authority and legitimacy” (285). 4 And, as Nganang points out in
his essay on Jean-Marie Teno: “The autocratic society does not even need the
presence of the autocrat to function properly” (105) since its citizens replicate
the “totalizing structure” of autocracy themselves (104).
Beyond threats of personal harm and imprisonment from the regime,
“mutual ‘zombification’” and cowardice, are there other reasons why
Cameroon is stuck at the border between autocracy and political freedom?
Nganang cites Teno’s question “What shall we say about the fascination of
the people for authority . . .?” and comments: “The question helps us look
beyond the unified and centralising figure of one single possessor of power,
of one autocrat, Paul Biya, the administrative officers or the traditional
Chiefs, and see Cameroonian society as an autocratic society, as a society in
which the autocrat and his numerous victims are more or less chained
4
See also Ellis and Ter Haar’s citation of Ahmadou Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des
bêtes sauvages: “In Africa, there is not a single head of state who doesn’t have his magician
or his marabout; magic and political power are virtually one and the same thing” (81).
together” (105; emphasis in original). It is a society in which the peace of the

streets is equated with order, but, as Nganang explains in Le Principe
dissident, this “order” is bound to erupt in an uprising in the near future. He
cites the Cameroonian journalist Théophile Kouamouo as predicting that:
“tout peut basculer à n’importe quel moment” (“everything could seesaw at
any moment”; 19) and himself expresses the paradox of public life in
Cameroon: “même si nos journaux sont mortellement ennuyeux, nous vivons
à la lisière du cauchemar . . . “ (“even if our newspapers are deathly boring,
we are living at the edge of a nightmare”; 19). Mbembe has theorised
Cameroon’s crisis as
the persistence of a central excess, of a form of opaque violence and degree of terror that
flow from a particular failure: that of the postcolonial subject to exercise freely such
possibilities as he or she has, to give him/herself and the environment in which he/she lives a
form of reason that would make everyday existence readable, if not give it actual meaning.
(On the Postcolony 143)
What can account for this combination of the excessive violence of the
commandement and its vampiric extraction of Cameroon’s human potential?
Theodor Adorno and his co-authors in The Authoritarian Personality argue
that subjection can be understood as a psychological blockage resulting from
the proscription against confronting “ingroup authorities”:
the authoritarian [personality] must, out of an inner necessity, turn his aggression against
outgroups. He must do so because he is psychologically unable to attack ingroup authorities,
rather than because of intellectual confusion regarding the source of his frustration. If this
theory is correct, then authoritarian aggression and authoritarian submission should turn out
to be highly correlated. (233)
Following Adorno’s reasoning, one can see that, to the extent that
Cameroonian political elites represent themselves as heads of a national
“family” or at least are able to wield the propaganda of affinity and intimacy,
they prevent their own citizens from launching a political uprising.
Judith Butler poses the issue in somewhat different terms, conceptualising
the way in which the vulnerable become subject to power:
To underscore the abuses of power as real, not the creation or fantasy of the subject, power
is often cast as unequivocally external to the subject, something imposed against the
subject’s will. But if the very production of the subject and the formation of that will are the
consequences of a primary subordination, then the vulnerability of the subject to a power not
of its own making is unavoidable. That vulnerability qualifies the subject as an exploitable
kind of being. If one is to oppose the abuses of power (which is not the same as opposing
power itself), it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to that abuse consists. (20)
104 Catherine Kroll
Her proposition that “it seems wise to consider in what our vulnerability to
that abuse consists” offers an illluminating gloss on Mboudjak’s experience
of subjection and his border-crossing from “dog” to dog. He has indeed
theorised his own vulnerability in three respects: first, in a Fanonian gesture,
he denounces the ethical failures of Massa Yo, disqualifying his master from
being able to judge him as “dog.” Second, Mdoudjak grasps the contingency
of judgments, as we have seen in the allegory of the beauty parlor scene
(where he realises that, sitting in the beauty parlor chair in that pretentious
environment, he must indeed look like a “tchotchoro”). And third, he, like
The Crow, realises that “dog” is just a word. Thus, Nganang affirms that the
border-crossing from “dog” to dog that Mboudjak has been able to
accomplish – his seizing of the field of definition – is within the reach of
Cameroonians, and indeed this was the case in 1990-1991 during “les années
de braise” (“the years of burning embers”) when opposition parties demanded
that they be included within a multi-party democracy (Le Principe dissident
25).
Outbreaks
The world of Temps de chien is one of small, everyday triumphs: the exercise
of ethical determination that Nganang has made the core precept of Le
Principe dissident. The aspiration for political renewal remains vigorously
alive, as evidenced by the many courageous individuals Nganang cites in his
literary manifesto, as well as those few whom he depicts in Temps de chien.
In this way, the invisible power of hope penetrates the visible circumstances
of the quotidian. Nganang presents individuals who quietly and determinedly
call others to account. Chief among them are Mboudjak and The Crow,
whose jointly voiced admonition “Where is the man?” echoes throughout the
novel. This is not a tale of subjection or victimisation, but a celebration of the
power of outbreak, which Nganang upholds as the primary obligation of art:
Invisibility is cardinal to the artistic process. To make the invisible become visible is as
important in cinema, theatre arts, and painting as it is in literature. It is as important for the
European artist as it is for the African because it describes an outbreak, which is the essence
of all art. Beyond that general definition, the metaphor of invisibility gains a particular
meaning in autocratic societies, for in societies where the structures of power embrace all
spheres of life, places of sanity are invisible. In such a totalizing relation of power, making
the invisible visible can only be a subversive and political act: it means taking a challenging
position, looking for a position which is not allowed to exist. (“Filming an Autocratic
Society: Jean-Marie Teno” 107; emphasis added)
Numerous individuals fight back in outbreaks against all manner of

hierarchies and abuses of power in the novel, exemplifying Nganang’s
repeated point about the dignified resistance that individuals muster every
day of their lives. As he notes in his essay on Teno, “Women […] are not
pure victims” (104). Their own field of definition is to fight for their basic
rights. Consider the sharp-tongued bayamsalam (market women) and Docta’s
former girlfriend Rosalie, who induces him to take responsibility for
fathering their child. Likewise, Mboudjak returns after being nearly hung by
Soumi, “dirigé par [sa] volonté de voir Soumi répondre de sa cruauté” (31)
(“impelled by [his] desire to see Soumi held accountable for his cruelty”; 20).
The Crow stands up for justice throughout the novel, directly questioning the
rights of the police to arrest the cigarette vendor, chiding the bar-drinkers for
their cowardice, and writing a letter to Paul Biya requesting that he visit the
neighbourhood: “Il lui a simplement demandé de venir se balader dans un
sous-quartier, s’il avait du courage. Il l’a invité, quoi. Comme un homme
bien élevé. C’est tout. Et c’est pourquoi il a été arrêté” (278) (“He just asked
him to come take a walk through a neighborhood, if he had the courage. He
gave him an invitation, you know. Like a gentleman. That’s all. And that’s
why he was arrested”; 193). 5
For Nganang, political revolt is historic, democratised, and multi-sited. It
arises in the fields, spreads its ideals throughout all sectors of society, and is
distinguished by many everyday heroes, with the writer being just one among
them: “l’activité d’écriture est une parmi des milliers d’autres activités dans
lesquelles les Africains défendent, circonscrivent et définissent chaque jour
leur dignité” (“the activity of writing is one of among the thousands of other
activities in which Africans defend, delineate and define their dignity each
day”; Le Principe dissident 43).
In each instance of individuals calling others to account, we hear
Mboudjak’s “Where is the man?” as a sharp, shaming exhortation, as if to
say: “Be the term that you have called yourself in the first place; live within
that field of definition that you call your own.” Needless to say, this
admonition is meant especially for those in power, whose roles are defined
by indigenous expectations of leadership, chief among these being their
responsibility for the collective well-being of their people.
5
This episode in the novel directly alludes to the letter Célestin Monga wrote to the
Cameroon weekly Le Messager, for which act he was promptly arrested (Nzessé 83).
106 Catherine Kroll
Indeed, the activities of speaking out and breaking out dominate both Le
Principe dissident as well as Temps de chien. The Crow’s rage against the
cowardice of the street marks him as “le maître de la parole qui rend fou”
(172) (“the true master of the speech that drives people crazy”; 119).
Mboudjak barks out warnings, and Nganang specifically identifies himself
with the figure of the town crier rather than that of the griot (Le Principe
dissident 29), standing shoulder to shoulder with those in the marketplace as
a “colporteur de parole” (“peddler of words”; 30).
Les Étoiles du Quotidien
The young Eric Takou’s spoken confrontation with political authority

provokes his killing, and it is the street’s outrage at his fate that catalyses the
movement for democracy. The historical Eric Takou was killed in Douala
during the opposition demonstrations in 1991, which were mounted to create
a National Conference that would create an inclusive political system for all
opposition parties. Nganang dedicates Le Principe dissident to Takou –
“Dans l’esprit du parlement pour Eric Takou” – identifying with Césaire’s
goal of being “la voix de ceux qui n’ont point de voix” (“the voice of those
who have no voice at all”; Le Principe dissident 16). Takou, having absorbed
the neighbourhood’s slogans and its phantasmagoric radio trottoir, sums up
the mood of the street and yells out when he sees the police commissioner on
his way to visit Mini Minor:
le trop bavard gosse du Docta avait piaffé, secoué sa tête et dit suffisamment haut pour que
toute la rue entende: ‘Vraiment, le Cameroun, c’est le Cameroun, hein!’
C’était la parole d’un autre, c’était la parole commune de la rue, et d’ailleurs, c’était la
parole d’un enfant. Seulement, Monsieur le Commissaire l’avait pris trop personnellement.
Il avait sorti simplement son arme et avait tiré un coup sur l’opposant en puissance. L’enfant
était tombé en silence. (289)
Docta’s overly talkative kid had stamped his feet, shaken his head, and said loud enough for
the whole street to hear, ‘Really, Cameroon is Cameroon, huh!’
They were someone else’s words, heard often enough on the street and, what’s more, they
were spoken by a child. But the police commissioner had taken it too personally. He had
simply pulled out his weapon and shot at the powerful opposition figure. The child fell
silently. (201)
When Takou is transformed into an angel (283), the full power of radio
trottoir is unleashed, this time in English: “Biya must go!” (295).
Madagascar’s streets erupt like a flow of lava, with the tar exploding (296)
and Mboudjak marching along with collective Man: “Unis nous étions,
l’homme et moi, dans la précipitation saccadée du langage nôtre: dans nos

aboiements” (296) (“United we were, Man and me, in the spasmodic rush of
our language: our barks”; 206). But this is no tidy resolution to the struggle,
for Mboudjak recognises its unformed, provisional character:
moi j’attendais toujours l’arrivée de la Rosalie-Sylvie-Yvette Menzui, en abrégé Rosalie,

pour moi, pour moi seul Rosa Rosa Rose, mère du petit Takou, et je me disais – ô
convainquez-moi donc que ce ne sera pas illusion! – qu’avec elle viendrait à coup sûr
l’ultime marche: la revendication de la mère sevrée de son fils. Et toutes les fois que je
passais à l’endroit de la mort de Takou, je humais je rehumais je rerehumais et je
rererehumais le goudron qui plus que quiconque avait vu le silence abrupt de son infantile
parole. Oui, croyez-moi chers lecteurs, l’odeur de son sang y était toujours chaude. (296-97)
I was still waiting for the arrival of Rosalie-Sylvie-Yvette Menzui, Rosalie, for short – or as
I alone call her, Rosa Rosa Rose, little Takou’s mother. And I said to myself – please
convince me it won’t be just an illusion – when she comes, it will surely be the last march of
all: the march for the demands of the mother brutally weaned from her child. Each time I
passed by the place where Takou died, I sniffed, re-sniffed, re-re-sniffed, and I re-re-re-
sniffed the tar that, more than anyone, had witnessed the abrupt silencing of his infantile
words. Yes, you can believe me, dear readers, the scent of his blood was still hot. (206)
Here Nganang evocatively explores the multi-layered significance of Takou’s

death. The street remains bloody after his killing, having turned into a
monument that spurs political action. Here we are meant to see the contrast
between Mboudjak’s earlier fear of suffering repeated assaults (“Faut-il,
diriez-vous, que je sois tué, retué, reretué and rereretué?” [31]; “Do I have to
be killed, re-killed, re-re-killed, and re-re-re-killed? [20]) and his vigorous
sniffing of the tar again and again for confirmation that a new movement has
begun. The “waiting for Rosalie” holds open the indefinite space of
democracy for Cameroon, echoing the suspended, inchoate democratic
project waiting to be forged: “nous savons déjà que l’écrivain, lui, même s’il
dansait avec les foules libérées un moment, n’abandonnera pas ce jour-là son
principe cardinal, car après tout, il sait, lui, qu’il écrira toujours pour une
République invisible” (“we know already that the writer himself, even if he
were to dance with the liberated crowd for awhile, will not abandon his
cardinal principle that day, because, after all, he himself knows that he will
always write for an invisible Republic”; Le Principe dissident 48).
Nganang states that it is the Cameroonian writer’s role to engage in the
building of a République invisible, a République de l’imagination, and a
République de l’espoir (“an invisible republic, a republic of the imagination,
and a republic of hope”; Le Principe dissident 48). Writers living in times of
acute struggle must, like German authors writing within the era of Nazi
fascism, keep alive their guiding ethical principles, even if the prevailing
108 Catherine Kroll
social conditions threaten their resolve (Le Principe dissident 15, 46). In
these last sentences of Temps de chien, the imagery of the fiery streets, blood,
and a mother’s connection to her child (with the suggestion of the elemental
bonds of blood and milk) signify that this is a struggle which can be born at
any moment.
Thus, the larger trajectory of this novel crosses over from the apparent
calm or “mutual ‘zombification’” of Cameroon’s streets to the “colère des
rues” (“anger of the streets”; Le Principe dissident 27). Nganang insists that
the Cameroonian writer must define a “space of civility” generous and
flexible enough to represent the country’s democratic strivings:
l’écrivain Camerounais d’aujourd’hui, quand il écrit, définit un espace de civilité

républicain dans lequel toutes les colères, toutes les revendications, toutes les convulsions
de notre présent et de notre futur devraient trouver leur maison. Il bâtit une vraie maison de
sorcière donc, une République de l’imagination, et ceci ne peut être acquis que s’il accepte
le principe de cette larve infinie, de ces feux qui secouent les dessous des goudrons de nos
rues, bref, s’il fait corps avec le principe dissident de notre société. (27-28; emphasis in
original)
Today’s Cameroonian writer, when he writes, defines a space of republican civility in which
all the angers, all the demands, all the convulsions of our present and our future must find
their dwelling. He builds a true house of sorcery, therefore, a republic of the imagination,
and this will only be attained if he accepts the principle of this infinite larva, of these fires
which shake underneath the asphalt of our streets; in short, if he joins himself to the
dissident principle of our society.
Crucially, this “vraie maison de sorcière” (“true house of sorcery”) can be

wrought from the fires of the streets only by Cameroon’s citizens themselves
within the coordinates of an autochthonous African time-space. It is in this
spirit that Paul Zeleza urges intellectuals “to formulate historiographies that
are not Eurocentric, to write history with multiple pathways, that focuses on
varieties of human experiences and connections, and tells stories of change
without presenting linear tales of progress” (26).
Temps de chien constitutes one such defiant border-crossing of the
conceptual terrain. Despite Nganang’s allusions to a non-violent Marxist
coming-to-consciousness, this novel has no definitive “grands récits” of its
own. The movement toward democracy is always provisional: it is a
democratic project permeated by outbreaks, and, further, it is envisioned as
incipient and open. All telic movement is suspect, whether long- or short-
term, whether forward-looking – “preparing for the revolution” – or
backward-looking – “pursuing one’s canitude” (négritude) – or both.
Jean-François Bayart has written extensively on what he terms the
“totalitarianising and detotalitarianising” vectors of power at play in
contemporary African states, reminding us that Africans have long engaged

in creative appropriation of the power wielded over them. 6 Nganang in
Temps de chien emphasises that the political story of contemporary Africa
will unfold not as yet another narrative of victimisation, but as a polyphonic
weaving of multiple voices, informed by the many narratives of the African
past and the principled dissent of the present. This chapter has theorised the
border-crossing from the contested identities of “dog” and dog and has
considered the resonance produced by the mobility of such a trope. Because
one assigned a place as “dog” can theorise and transcend this position, by the
end of the text, we readily appreciate the chiasmic irony of wise dogs and
human fools. But the novel’s allegorical inflections do not amount to simple
categorical equations: dog, “dog,” Man, men, Cameroon, and Africa are all
malleable, self-determining signifiers. Temps de chien suggests not that all
men are dogs, but instead juxtaposes the mobility and courage of a dog
returning to the lion’s den to fight for justice against the human
rationalisations that perpetuate epistemic barriers and political stasis.
Nganang’s larger purpose is not simply to give value to the humblest dog
among us; his real centre-piece are the “étoiles du quotidien” (“stars of the
quotidian”) whose political determination was boldly displayed in “les
années de braise” of 1990-1991 (Le Principe dissident 44). Given the
country’s recent history, Cameroon will not long remain stuck at the border
of freedom. Without reaching for a deterministic conclusion, we can perhaps
simply say with Mboudjak that the first necessary act of dissidence is to
emulate those Cameroonians who bravely traversed borders: “qui s’étaient
fâchés et l’avaient fait savoir sans demander l’avis de personne” (270)
(“who’d gotten mad—and who’d done so without asking anyone’s
permission”; 188).
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6
See Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly: “the production of a political space
is on the one hand the work of an ensemble of actors, dominant and dominated, and […] on
the other hand it is in turn subjected to a double logic of totalitarianising and
detotalitarianising” (249).
110 Catherine Kroll
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Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:
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——., On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Moore, Henriette L., and Todd Sanders. Magical Interpretations, Material
Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Postcolonial
Africa. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Nganang, Patrice. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle. Trans. Amy Baram Reid.
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——., “Filming an Autocratic Society: Jean-Marie Teno.” The Literary Griot
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——., Le Principe dissident. Yaoundé: éditions interlignes, 2005.
——., Temps de chien: Chronique animale. Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes,
2001.
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Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in
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33 (2004): 75-93.
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Jennifer Wawrzinek
Addressing the Absent Other in J. M. Coetzee’s

Age of Iron
J. M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron describes a period of social and moral

breakdown during the South African Emergency Period of the late 1980s,
when civil society under apartheid was collapsing under the strain of forty
years of racial segregation, political protest and increasingly violent state-
enforced repression. The depiction of social breakdown in Age of Iron is
allegorised as a malignant cancer that is destroying the body of the novel’s
protagonist, classics professor Mrs Curren. It is this juxtaposition between
Mrs Curren’s bourgeois liberal humanism and the political demands of a
country divided and torn apart by racial segregation under apartheid that
foregrounds not only the troubled relationship between ethical humanism and
political commitment, but also between the self and the others produced by
these discourses. Moreover, this relationship is complicated by a history of
colonisation and revolution that has ensured the difficulty of locating any
single centre of hegemonic power.
Michiel Heyns argues that the South African context complicates the
notion of imperial centre because, to many Afrikaners, colonial domination
was represented by the English occupation of the Cape and Natal, and the
annexation of the Boer republics. In this sense, the Nationalist victory in
1948 and the declaration of the Republic in 1961 was, to these people, an
articulation of liberation from an oppressive British colonial power.
However, as Heyns notes, these dates also signify to the majority of South
Africans the accession to power of a racist Afrikaner nationalism that was far
more oppressive and violent than the previous British colonial authority had
been (105). In this case, power comes to be disseminated from multiple
localities as an obvious and direct display of political repression under
Afrikaner rule and in the cultural and linguistic vestiges of British colonial
rule, evident in Mrs Curren’s reference to her Hillman as a car that came
from the days when “British was best” (AI 99). In Age of Iron the complex
assertion of a political and discursive power that emanates from various sites
but is nevertheless invasive and colonising is powerfully depicted in the body
of Mrs Curren as a painful and debilitating cancerous growth that divides and
multiplies so excessively it destroys the body on which it depends.
114 Jennifer Wawrzinek
In its malignant form cancer is a class of disease where a particular group

of cells displays an uncontrolled growth. These cells invade and destroy
surrounding tissue as they proliferate, often spreading to other locations via
the lymphatic and circulatory systems. Mrs Curren’s suffering body enacts
the destructive potential of a power that seeks to replicate itself endlessly
regardless of the location of that power. Teresa Dovey, writing on Coetzee’s
earlier novel Waiting for the Barbarians, suggests that Coetzee’s portrayal of
the suffering body functions as a critique of liberal humanist discourse that is
shown to be impotent (61). In Age of Iron, Mrs Curren’s training as a classics
professor, together with the weight and authority of Western civilisation this
carries, proves inadequate in helping her to come to terms with the
breakdown of her own body and the social body of a divided South African
society. South African writer Nadine Gordimer has argued that the only way
to change to world is to “describe a situation so truthfully” that it would be
impossible for the reader to avoid or to negate the world that is being
described (248-50). André Brink similarly attests to a confidence in the
ability of literature and discourse to recover the histories of those who have
been marginalised and silenced by the workings of socio-political oppression
(17). For Mrs Curren, however, this proves to be a difficult task and is
complicated by the clash of discursive contexts and ideologies that have
proliferated as a result of South Africa’s complicated history. Barbara
Eckstein suggests that even though discourse can never reveal history as
such, one must nevertheless comprehend one’s others across the boundaries
of difference. But as Jacques Derrida has shown, the very comprehension of
otherness effectively reduces the other to the same, thereby negating the
otherness of the other. Even the categorisation of the other under the banner
of racism is, as Derrida argues, not a response to alterity or the singularity of
the other, but is rather a form of exclusion and reduction of otherness as it is
circumscribed and contained by discourse (336 n17).
In Age of Iron, as in many other of his works, Coetzee attests to an
otherness outside history that cannot be reduced to the same, and a notion of
history that is not a priori but that remains open to the future and to
refiguration. The characters that Mrs Curren encounters throughout the
narrative of the novel resist comprehension, as do many of the specific events
she experiences. It is this radical alterity as an ineffability beyond the limits
of discourse that forces her to question her Enlightenment values and the
liberal philosophies underwriting her sense of self. It is this radical otherness
that the logocentric discourse underwriting systems of colonisation and
domination seeks to reduce or to expel. However, as Simon Critchley’s work
on Derrida illustrates, the demand that alterity places on us is an ethical
Addressing the Absent Other 115
demand (296). At the basis of the act of comprehension is the reduction of

alterity to identity and of otherness to the same. The reduction of otherness in
this way fails to acknowledge the otherness of the other.
Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas both attempt to locate an
otherness as a transcendent point of exteriority to the logos. Blanchot argues
for that which is “prior to the day”, that is, prior to revelation and
comprehension and thus prior to negation by human language and systems of
communication (The Work of Fire 329). In contrast to Blanchot’s generalised
mysteriousness, Levinas posits the point of absolute exteriority to the logos in
what he refers to as the face of the Autrui – a wholly singular other who, as
Critchley writes, “denies himself to me by escaping my field of
comprehension” (91). In this way, the self can no longer exert power over the
other. Rather it must welcome alterity and in so doing open the self to
interrogation.
In many philosophical discussions, the other refers to an already existing
entity such as a human being. Indeed, Levinas uses the term Autrui in order
to distinguish a singular human dimension from the more general conception
of l’Autre. In postolonial studies, the other generally refers to the colonised
culture and its people. But as Derek Attridge notes, in both cases, the
otherness that is being described functions as “an impingement from the
outside that challenges assumptions, habits, and values and that demands a
response” (“Innovation” 23). In Coetzee’s earlier novel entitled Foe, the
protagonist Susan Barton attempts to comprehend the tongueless Friday’s
silence but fails in her attempt. His radical alterity demands what Michael
Marais refers to as “an attentional response to his otherness” (172). Similarly
in Age of Iron Mrs Curren’s confrontation with an inexplicable otherness
opens a dimension of alterity that can neither be reduced, comprehended or
even thought. Otherness in this novel is not instantiated, neither is it negated.
Rather, the text self-reflexively alludes to an otherness that is absolutely
foreign to the subject and her experiences. Moreover, the singularity of this
otherness instates an obligation for the other that demands responsiveness
and that highlights otherness as a mode of relating.
Age of Iron begins self-reflexively and metatextually as an address, in the
form of a letter, to an absent other. On the day that Mrs Curren receives the
news that she has a particularly aggressive form of cancer she begins writing
to her absent daughter who has left South Africa in disgust and is living in
the United States. On the same day, a homeless alcoholic named Vercueil
takes up residence on Mrs Curren’s doorstep and, in the ensuing weeks,
becomes her only companion. At the time of writing Mrs Curren is an old
woman. She is a retired classics professor, opposed to the ruling Afrikaans
regime, sympathetic to the struggle of black South Africans but averse to

their revolutionary and sometimes violent political strategies. As Mrs Curren
recounts to Vercueil one day as they are waiting in her car, the policies of
Afrikaner nationalism were the direct cause of the daughter’s decision to
leave the country, vowing never to return until the people responsible for
apartheid were “hanging by their heels from the lampposts”. If that were to
happen, Mrs Curren tells Vercueil, her daughter would happily “throw stones
at their bodies and dance in the streets” (AI 75).
In a novel that depicts the socially and corporeally destructive
consequences of subversion, domination and colonisation, Coetzee’s choice
of an old and dying woman as narrator in conjunction with a homeless
alcoholic and absent daughter as addressee and potential witness suggests
that the figure of the displaced provides a deliberate strategy to resist and
disturb the authority of South African white hegemony from a position of
exteriority. Fiona Probyn argues that Coetzee’s use of the feminine voice in
particular, not only in Age of Iron but across his literary oeuvre in general,
constitutes a textual strategy of disabling authority with the promise of a non-
position outside one that would rival structures of state, truth or realism (4).
This use of the feminine is predicated on the idea that women’s access to
representation and to power has been marginalised under patriarchy. In this
sense, Mrs Curren’s recounting of her last days in the form of an address to
her absent daughter functions as a limit narrative – one that does not invade
and colonise the space of the other but rather, as Michael du Plessis writes,
enunciates “femininity to test the limits of meaning” (120).
This use of the feminine voice as a mode of disruption to structures of
authority and meaning is, as I mentioned earlier, a strategy that Coetzee also
employs in Foe. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reads this novel as an
illustration of the “wholly otherness of margins”, suggesting that it serves as
a warning against feminist readings that do not heed the “Eurocentric
arrogance” inherent within attempts to give voice to the margins (157).
Spivak’s argument highlights the importance of gaps and silences, or what
Coetzee himself refers to as “the veiled; the dark, the buried, the feminine;
alterities” (White Writing 81), but cautions against any desire to speak for the
other. In his book of essays entitled White Writing, Coetzee similarly
suggests that reading the other as a mode of subversion can all too easily,
“like all triumphant subversion” become simply another dominant mode of
representation” (81). Whilst the gaps of knowing in the text of Age of Iron
are important for the way they suggest strains and tensions that allude to the
presence of radical alterity and the ineffable, it is not simply the trace of
otherness that is important here but rather the way in which these gaps in the
conceptual material of the text function as sites of disruption. Circumscribing

or containing otherness as a conceptual category would do little to change
hegemonic systems of representation. In Age of Iron it is rather the way in
which these gaps and silences break down Mrs Curren’s familiar world as the
irruption of the other into the same and as a result of the internal
contradictions produced through the exclusion of otherness.
Mrs Curren’s ethical humanism depends upon concepts such as ‘wisdom’,
‘knowledge’, ‘understanding’, and ‘insight’. These belong to a discourse of
European philosophical universalism, or what we might otherwise call
cosmopolitanism – a concept that designates an intellectual ethic of universal
humanism that transcends regional particularism. According to the ideal of
cosmopolitanism, there is only one worldwide community of human beings.
To this end, Immanuel Kant dreamed of a cosmopolitan point of view that
would lead to what he referred to as “perpetual peace” and was invoked as a
reassertion of Greek and Enlightenment values. However, when Mrs Curren
is asked by her maid, Florence, to take her to Guguletu and then to Site C in
order to find her teenage black activist son, Bheki, this discourse appears
inappropriate to the context of violence and suffering she encounters on the
journey and the following events stage an acute awareness of Mrs Curren’s
comprehensive limitations.
In Guguletu Mrs Curren discovers a settlement under siege. She writes,
“there was a smell of burning in the air, of wet ash, burning rubber. Slowly
we drove down a broad unpaved street lined with matchbox houses. A police
van armoured in wire mesh cruised past us” (AI 90). This scene of foreboding
intensifies when Mrs Curren accompanies Florence’s brother, Mr Thabane, to
Site C and witnesses the burning of a black township. She stands in a large
crowd as shanties burn and pour forth black smoke. Groups of men, she
writes, “were at work trying to rescue the contents of the burning shacks,
going from one to another, putting out the fires,” except that she then realises
these groups of men are “not rescuers but incendiaries.” They are not battling
the fires but the rain (AI 95). They eventually find Bheki in a nondescript
building not far from the burning township, laid out with four other teenagers
against a wall after having been executed by gunfire. Mr Thabane tells
Florence that she will find the bullets used to kill the children are “SABS
approved” (AI 103).
As Abdul JanMohamed suggests in another context, comprehension is
possible only “if the self can somehow negate or at least severely bracket the
values, assumptions, and ideology of his culture” (59). The events of violence
and brutality that Mrs Curren witnesses emphasise the limitations of her
ethical system, something that is further highlighted when Mrs Curren
discovers Bheki’s friend, John, hiding out in her house. Despite her efforts to
contact Mr Thabane and to protect the boy from the authorities, the police
arrive and eventually kill him, notwithstanding Mrs Curren’s protestations or
her efforts to save the teenager. It is these very moments of blindness, or
incomprehension, that attest to the trace of an alterity that exceeds human
systems of meaning and which Derrida would suggest also exceed the
logocentrism of state authority. Mrs Curren is at a loss to comprehend the
experience of the township people whose houses are destroyed by state-
sanctioned burnings, the motivations and desires of the teenage black
activists who are assassinated by state troopers, and especially the
motivations of John, who first appears in her back yard harassing the
homeless alcoholic Vercueil, is then hit by a van as he is cycling with Bheki
on the street in front of Mrs Curren’s house, and is finally shot by the South
African police when he takes refuge in the small room beside her kitchen.
Coetzee depicts a woman whose cultural values and assumptions delimit
her narrative awareness of other/s but not, however, her ability to act
ethically despite those limitations. Indeed, Mrs Curren’s responses to the
otherness she encounters acknowledge an impenetrability between self and
other and an acceptance that the other’s ethical claims cannot be limited. This
is indeed a response to otherness as generic, that is, to a Levinasian l’Autre.
However, the attentionality that Mrs Curren displays towards the specificities
of otherness and the way that she describes the faces of the young
revolutionaries who have been executed with “eyes open and staring” and a
“dead look” (AI 102) also suggest a responsiveness to the singularity, the
Autrui, of the other. As Levinas explains, it is “in the exposure to wounds and
outrages, in the feeling proper to responsibility, the oneself is provoked as
irreplaceable, as devoted to others, without being able to resign, and thus as
incarnated in order to offer itself, to suffer and to give” (Levinas Reader 95).
For Levinas, the reponse that is demanded by such a confrontation instates
the ethical relation as one that is open to the other and which takes
responsibility for the other.
The Ethical Relation
To varying degrees, each of the characters in Age of Iron exists in a different

relationship to structures of state power, although they are all variously
external to those structures. Their bodies are marked and re-marked with
signs of otherness to both the ruling Afrikaner society under apartheid and
the previous colonial administration of the British Empire. These bodies,
whether aged and female, derelict and homeless, or black and militant, are
compromised in their abilities to be heard or to be represented according to
their own determinations. They are simply not recognised as legitimate
persons within the socio-political structures of state. This is illustrated most
dramatically in the siege narrative when the police invade Mrs Curren’s
house in search of the fugitive John and when she is forcibly removed after
trying to negotiate with the boy. After he is shot by the police, Mrs Curren
walks to a vacant lot beneath the overpass where she falls asleep wrapped up
in a pink quilt. There she is mistaken for a homeless person by a band of
children who force a stick into her mouth in order to look for gold fillings (AI
159). This scene of utter degradation mimics the rape of her body by the
invasive cancerous cells that will soon destroy her. And yet, it is this very
experience of the world around her, of its violence and suffering, its “wounds
and outrages”, that generates the narrative which forms the address to Mrs
Curren’s absent daughter ironically as an articulation of love.
Addressing the other as absent other in Age of Iron is significant because
the moment of interpellation does not demand a response or a legitimation of
self that the moment of self-reflective transmission might. The recounting of
such terrible suffering and violence to someone who has left the country and
refuses to return whilst such atrocities are being repeatedly enacted not only
calls the absence of the other to account, but projects that accounting into the
future as one that is open-ended and non-directed. Mrs Curren’s addresses to
the other primary characters of the novel are all to some extent unable to be
answered, either because of physical absence in the case of the daughter;
absolute indifference in the case of Vercueil; or due to the radical differences
between her own socio-cultural position and that of John and Bheki. Rather
than invoking relations of reciprocity, which are founded on a contractual
logic of give and take, the relationships depicted in Age of Iron are
distinguished by their asymmetrical and distinctly non-reciprocal character.
Michael Gardiner argues that this is nevertheless a dialogic relation because
of the way it demands a response not for what has been said but in terms of
the relation it forges (131-32) – a relation not founded on a dialectic of
recognition but on one of openness.
The absence of Mrs Curren’s daughter draws the narrative of Coetzee’s
novel into being as a gesture of openness towards an/other across boundaries
of self and nation. In one sense, the daughter’s very decision to leave a
country torn apart by the political tensions of apartheid can be understood as
a privileged but irresponsible detachment. Her absence from the political
regime that she detests does little in the novel to enact any form of change.
Moreover, the irony of her escape to the United States cannot be
underestimated. She leaves ostensibly as a protest against the Afrikaner

government for its policy of racial segregation, police repression and the
maintenance of white domination and relocates to a country where, in 1991,
the brutal bashing of African-American Rodney King by the Los Angeles
Police Department underscored the continuing legacy of American racial
division and discrimination. Mrs Curren’s direct address to her daughter as a
letter to be delivered only after her death, and which therefore cannot be
answered, announces the openness of Blanchot’s “Here I am” as an act of
self-exposure and vulnerability. In this sense, the letter gestures to what Yi-
Fu Tan refers to as “cosmopolites who are inhabitants of a vast universe”
(159), demanding that they witness the suffering of others not as spectacle
but as an appeal for the respect of human suffering – irrespective of
difference.
Whilst Mrs Curren is acutely aware of the heroism evident in the self-
sacrifice of the five teenage activists who were lined up against a wall and
brutally executed, she cannot support a revolutionary cause she perceives as
one that re-inscribes the divisions of black and white. The difference between
the political commitment of the activists and her own ethical humanism is
further emphasised throughout Mrs Curren’s encounter with the unlikeable
John. After the boy is run over by a van in the street outside her house, Mrs
Curren searches for and finds him in Woodstock Hospital. As John is lying
on the hospital bed, suffering from injuries that are the direct cause of his
blind commitment to black activism, Mrs Curren lectures him on the
importance of allowing for exceptions in the general rules, even as she half-
acknowledges that the situation of the Emergency Period does not allow for
“all that close listening, all those exceptions, all that mercy” (AI 81). On a
later occasion, she once again disputes John’s Manichean, masculine and iron
view of the world in order to argue for “everything indefinite, everything that
gives when you press it” (AI 146).
Mrs Curren not only opposes John’s radical and revolutionary political
beliefs, she dislikes him as a person. As she writes to her daughter, she is
unable to find a way to sympathise or connect with this teenage militant, of
whom she knows little:
I do not like him. I do not like him. I look into my heart and nowhere do I find any trace of
feeling for him. As there are people to whom one spontaneously warms, so there are people
to whom one is, from the first, cold. That is all. […] A simplified person, simplified in every
way: swifter, nimbler, more tireless than real people, without doubts or scruples, without
humour, ruthless, innocent. While he lay in the street, while I thought he was dying, I did
what I could for him. But, to be candid, I would rather I had spent myself on someone else.
(AI 78-79)
Nevertheless and despite her dislike of the young teenage activist, Mrs
Curren does not dismiss him. As Critchley argues, “the otherness of
Necessity is the writing that calls us beyond desire” (90). Mrs Curren
delineates a contradiction in her response to John between her desire to spend
time on someone else, and the necessity of helping the injured boy. John
comes to be figured as the personification of necessity, that is, as a singular
other who instantiates the process of the self’s deconstruction. The
truthfulness of this relation is not an objective truth comprehended by a
dispassionate subject. Rather it is, as Levinas argues elsewhere, “a
commitment in which the other remains in his otherness” (“Meaning” 67),
but which alters the subject by rendering that subject responsible for the other
and placing the self into question.
When John appears at Mrs Curren’s house to hide from the authorities,
still suffering from the injuries sustained by the hit and run, Mrs Curren
nurses the boy and then later attempts to protect him from the police. In her
letter to her daughter, she once again questions the appropriateness of her
values and her ethical system in a context that appears to demand something
quite different:
What I had not calculated on what that more might be called for than to be good. For there
are plenty of good people in this country. We are two a penny, we good and nearly-good.
What the times call for is different from goodness. The times call for heroism. As word that,
as I speak it, sounds foreign to my lips. I doubt that I have ever used it before, even in a
lecture … I would have used the words heroic status instead. (AI 165-66)
The realisation here is that Mrs Curren’s values are not quite appropriate to a
political struggle that demands the heroic self-sacrifice evidenced by the
teenage activists. As Derek Attridge argues, this is a situation that demands
“an ethic of comradeship, single-mindedness and blind courage” (“Trusting
the Other” 76). The shift in Mrs Curren’s understanding of the word ‘heroic’
in the context of political events rather than as the abstract concept suggested
by the phrase ‘heroic status’, indicates a shift in Mrs Curren’s thinking from
the general to the particular. Moreover, in acknowledging the specificity of
individual heroism, rather than heroic status as an abstract concept, Mrs
Curren simultaneously attests to the sigularity of John’s otherness and to the
impossibility of locating him within a generalised system of meaning.
John’s otherness is, however, very different to the otherness represented
by the homeless alcoholic, Vercueil. His difference from Florence, Bheki and
John is highlighted by the hostility displayed by the latter towards the former.
Florence pronounces that Vercueil is “rubbish” and that he is “good for
nothing” (AI 47). The boys, Bheki and John, are openly aggressive and
violent towards Vercueil when they chase him out of the shed, push him to
the ground and begin to kick him. Bheki takes off his belt and begins to lash
the homeless man who lifts his hands to his face in a gesture of self-
protection and supplication (AI 46). This scene illustrates the self-
perpetuating brutality of political resistance that re-enacts the violence of the
apartheid regime. Here the teenage boys simply repeat the violence that has
previously been perpetrated against them. In this sense, we cannot read the
critique of Mrs Curren’s ethical humanism that I discussed earlier as one that
would support in its place a militant political activism because Coetzee
critiques such activism itself as one that has the potential to replicate the
structures of domination and oppression it seeks to overthrow.
Vercueil takes up residence on Mrs Curren’s doorstep on the day she
receives the news that she is suffering from an aggressive type of cancer that
does not leave her long to live. Just as the political activism of John and
Bheki challenges her ethical humanism, so too does Vercueil’s presence
challenge her daily habits of order and cleanliness together with her moral
principles of moral responsibility and obligation. David Attwell argues that
Vercueil’s role in the narrative is to serve as an “Archimedean point of
reference outside of the dimensions of what is recognisably real” (174). To
this extent, his absence of social position (homeless, alcohol-dependant,
unpredictable and unreadable) within the black/white economy of the South
African socio-political system means that, as Attridge notes, he is “outside
any of the normal codes that govern interpersonal relations” (“Trusting the
Other” 62). As such he is unaffected by the obligations of human relationship
or community and is impervious to the logic of labour and reward, service
and debt, governing the social economy.
Vercueil’s paradoxical presence in the novel both reminds Mrs Curren of
her limitations and enables her to transcend the distinction between strangers
and friends. This constitutes the ethical not, as Anthony Appiah suggests, a
universal that represents only another form of Western arrogance and the
universalising of culturally conditioned norms (155). Rather it gestures
towards the humanitarian recognition of suffering despite the radical
unknowability of the other. Mrs Curren gives refuge to John and tries to
protect him from the police despite her confession that she does not like him
and that she disagrees with his politics. Likewise, Mrs Curren entrusts
Vercueil with the delivery of the letter to her daughter, even though she
knows little about him and his lack of reliability throws his appropriateness to
this task into doubt.
Like the figure himself, who appears from nowhere and then disappears
and reappears unpredictably, the name Vercueil alludes to the hidden, the
forgotten and the unknowable. The alliteration of the name Vercueil with the
Afrikaans word ‘verskuil’ (to hide) suggests the figure of the homeless man
as one who remains intrinsically unknowable because any appearance of
presence is necessarily deceptive. The name itself, however, is not typically
Afrikaans, English or African. As such, Vercueil cannot be racially or
culturally classified. His naming thus locates him as marginal to the
classificatory systems governing apartheid South Africa.
It is therefore surprising that this figure should serve as the locus for Mrs
Curren’s intimacies and the repository of her trust. Yet the relationship that
Mrs Curren develops with Vercueil during her last days is one of startling
intimacy, generosity and openness. It serves as a counter-current to the
frustrations of her inability to deal with the violence and suffering that she
witnesses in the township and through the figures of the teenage activists.
Attentional Responsiveness
In his 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University (subsequently

published as The Lives of Animals), Coetzee presented a ficto-critical
narrative about an Australian novelist and animal rights campaigner named
Elizabeth Costello. She delivers lectures at the fictional Appleton College
where she enjoins her audience to open themselves to the fullness of
another’s being, despite the apparent impenetrability of that otherness. The
alterity to which Elizabeth Costello refers is in this instance the non-human
animal. Her call for ethical compassion towards the suffering of others,
despite the radical otherness of that other, is instantiated upon the notion of
“the sympathetic imagination”, which Costello explains as “the seat of a
faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another” (LA
35). This appeal to the imagination has the potential to define collectivities of
belonging and responsibility in the absence of reciprocal communication that
is normally thought essential to the idea of community. As such it designates
what Bruce Robbins refers to as “a field rather than an identity” (3), thus
enabling intimacy and contact without dissolving the otherness of the other.
In Age of Iron the sympathetic imagination is illustrated most poignantly
in the scene where Mrs Curren imagines Vercueil, who is standing outside
smoking a cigarette, listening with her to a piece of music. She describes the
moment with the proximity of love-making when she writes, “Together we
listened. At this moment, I thought, I know how he feels as surely as if he
and I were making love.” She then goes on to imagine their bodies pressed
together as though they were strangers travelling on a bus in Sicily, their
souls “twined together, ravished. Like insects mating tail to tail, facing away
from each other” (AI 30). This curious description of an intimacy that is at
the same time a turning away designates more a shared terrain, a mutual
sphere, than a reading of the self through the other or an attempt to possess or
contain the other.
The description does not make it clear whether Vercueil is listening to the
music or not. He is simply shown leaning against a brick wall, smoking his
cigarette and then flicking the butt into the darkness. Mrs Curren’s
experience of Vercueil is therefore depicted as a highly creative
responsiveness that remains respectful of Vercueil’s radical alterity because
of the disjunction that is highlighted between Mrs Curren’s fantasies of erotic
intimacy and Verceuil’s primal darkness. The sympathetic imagination is
here instated as a means of transgressing, for a moment, the radical divide
between self and other. Mrs Curren can never know Vercueil, just as
Elizabeth Costello can never know what it is like to be a dog or a cow, but
she can approximate an experience in order to create a resonance that is
shared as a fullness of being and an ethical gesture of compassion. For
George Salemohamed, this creative attentional responsiveness constitues
what he refers to as “true pluralism,” where “darkness and secret prevail; and
allow the other to be the other: the face which the other presents to the self
symbolises the impossibility of synthesising him/her” (199, 200).
The reciprocity of listening between Mrs Curren and Vercueil is less
important here than the resonance that is created through an acute
responsiveness to the other’s otherness. This is an ethical relation that is not
founded on a Kantian or Platonic dichotomy of reason and emotion. Nor is it
founded upon a connection or dialogue that transforms the relationship
between Vercueil and Mrs Curren, dissolving Vercueil’s incomprehensible
otherness in order to engender true commuication across radical difference.
As Attridge has shown, Vercueil’s otherness cannot be erased or dissolved.
He remains unknowable to the end of the novel, where he fuses with “the
equable irreducible otherness of death” (“Trusting the Other” 67).
Nevertheless, this otherness is not depicted as malevolent or sinister.
Vercueil’s generosity towards Mrs Curren is exemplified both in his
companionship and in the way he listens to her as witness without judgement.
Moreover, he appears as a kind of fallen angel to comfort and aid her when
she has been traumatised by the siege of John in her house and is then
molested by the gang of children beneath the overpass.
The kind of relationship depicted between Vercueil and Mrs Curren
parallels the “Here I am” articulated in Mrs Curren’s letter to her absent
daughter, and Coetzee’s address to the reader of his novel. There is of course
a certain risk involved with opening the self to the other as an attentional
responsiveness. Attridge describes this risk as an obligation to affirm
something “with all that I am before I know what it is, before, in fact, it is”
(“Innovation” 28). It is only by accepting responsibility for Vercueil that Mrs
Curren brings his otherness into existence because this responsibility
necessarily precedes the self that responds to the other.
In Age of Iron the address to the (radical) other as the other who cannot be
apprehended and is, therefore, either partially or fully absent, is therefore a
gesture towards the unknown. As such, it cannot be directed or controlled.
The address Mrs Curren makes to her daughter in the form of the letter
remains open-ended because the recipient of the address will not read her
words (if they are read at all) until after her death. In other words, she places
her trust in the other who will read the letter and this other cannot be known
or fixed in advance. She similarly places her trust in Vercueil by asking him
to make sure the letter is delivered. Both relations are therefore projected into
a future where they necessarily remain undetermined. It is this insistence on a
future that remains open and full of potential that informs the staging of the
ethical in Age of Iron. The gesture of the novel as a whole is towards the
unpredictability of the future and of the other. We cannot know if Vercueil
will deliver the letter. If the letter is delivered, we cannot measure its effect
on Mrs Curren’s daughter in advance. As Attridge shows, the importance of
literature as a cultural practice is that it has the ability to dramatise social
issues in a way that cannot be measured according to pre-determined ends
and, as such, compels one to accept “the responsibility imposed by the
work’s singularity and difference” (“Trusting the Other” 77).
The ethical relation in Age of Iron is therefore not one that can transcend
the particularities of time and place as an ethical universal. Mrs Curren’s
perception and understanding of the world around her under apartheid cannot
be separated from the particular negotiations and self-questionings she
experiences on an everyday basis. The ethical does not exist in Coetzee’s
novel as a detached and abstracted humanism but as a process subject to the
demands of space and time. As a consequence it remains necessarily open to
constant reappraisal. When understood under the rubric of what Paul
Rabinow describes as “an ethos of macro-interdependencies” (258), or what I
previously referred to as an overlapping resonance, the ethical response on
the part of white South Africans such as Mrs Curren and her expatriate
daughter to the violence perpetrated under the banner of apartheid would be
one that Attridge describes as a “living-through (in concrete action as well as
in thought and emotion) of the torsions it produces in shared value systems”
(“Trusting the Other” 76). In the context of South Africa in 1986 during the
late phase of apartheid, the ethical response engendered by the address to an

absent other who remains radically other is one that calls the other to bear
witness to the suffering of others as a non-determined contextualised
responsiveness that simultaneously questions the self of the address.
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Phillip Rothwell
Nearly Ending the World the African Way: Pepetela’s

Suspension of Capital’s Frontiers and Flows in O
Quase Fim do Mundo
The modern history Africa and Europe share is one of constant flows and
rigid frontiers. From the times of the Moors in Iberia and the so-called
Christian Reconquest, to the Portuguese expansion into the African continent,
and subsequent facilitation of the slave trade on a monumental scale, the
dynamics between the two continents have often rested on the twin pillars of
rapid movement and rigorous restriction. What may flow and what may not
has varied over time. At one time, one of the resources most on the move was
Africa’s humanity, sent to the New World as a commodity in the service of
the Old World. In the era of global capitalism, humanity is the continent’s
resource whose movement is most impaired. Of course, in the age of the
slave trade, Africans were not free to move where they wished. However, as
part of the economic paradigm that governed the inception of Modernity – a
paradigm that Northern Europeans often forget began on the Iberian
Peninsula – African labour was repeatedly relocated. The greatest marker of
global flows was once the lives forcibly transported as a commodity over vast
distances. As the world economic system evolved, becoming more abstracted
in a system of capitalist alienation championed by northern European powers,
the notion of what needed to flow for the economic system to function
became firmly entrenched in the concept of the flow of capital itself. Capital
demanded all frontiers and restrictions on it be removed, while sanctioning
restrictions on which people could move freely, and who was to be left on the
other side of opulent fortresses’ impenetrable walls. In its most recent
manifestation, prior to the apparent collapse of the global financial system,
the world’s affluent regions became ever more impregnable, exclusive
citadels, like “Fortress Schengen,” designed to facilitate internal labour flows
and capital’s volatility, but prohibit absolutely a flow of labour from Africa
to Europe, or from the global south to the global north. At the same time, the
designator of wealth within that system, capital itself, demanded the greatest
of liberty in its movements over frontiers, pulling out of one area without
notice, and redeploying elsewhere regardless of the human consequence.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were repeatedly told that global
capitalism was the only game in town. Ideological debates were successfully
130 Phillip Rothwell
reduced to questions of “cultural” politics that never fundamentally

challenged the predominant economic model. This dogma was particularly
championed by “Third Way” politicians in the global north, and a plethora of
former anticolonial freedom fighters in the global south who opened up their
nations’ frontiers to the vagaries of free-flowing capital often in return for
personal gain. Capitalism, we were expected to believe, was the (Darwinian)
Law trumping all other laws. Everything operated under its dictates. Political
differences were merely a “cultural” issue. Yet, as the global financial system
begins to sputter to a halt, nose-diving and taking with it the sense of
invulnerability and inevitability of its Law, it is increasingly important to
conceive of a political debate in which what has been relegated to the realm
of “cultural” differences assumes a more strident role in the realm of real
“grown-up” politics. Only there will we be able to imagine alternate systems
to legislate human interactions. One author who understood the importance
of this debate before the recent crisis was the Angolan, Pepetela. In one of his
latest works, he literally suspends capitalism as the Law, in order to allow the
“cultural” realms of science, religion, feminism and African tradition, to
dialogue with each other, unencumbered by subservience to capitalist
normativity. In the post-apocalyptic world order Pepetela imagines, Africans
can move freely into the space once occupied by Fortress Schengen. At the
same time, the only flow that is restricted, or rather discarded, is that of
capital itself, which no longer makes sense in a world that has ceased to
imbue bits of paper, or numbers in electronic bank accounts, with any
exchange value.
Pepetela has an impressive literary trajectory, witnessing the multiple
phases of his nation’s political journey over the last half century. From his
early short story, “As Cinco Vidas de Teresa” (1962) [Teresa’s Five Lives],
published under his legal name, Artur Carlos Pestana, to his novel, O Quase
Fim do Mundo (2008) [The Near End of the World], Pepetela has repeatedly
critiqued the political shortfalls and injustices afflicting the Angolan polity. 1
First, there were the abuses under Portuguese colonialism and the consequent
struggle for independence. Then, there was a shabby rhetorical brand of
scientific socialism imposing the clientelism of an authoritarian one-party
rule and exacerbating a horrific civil conflict. Now, there is a superimposed
system of increasingly malfunctioning, all-appropriating global capitalism.
The style with which Pepetela has critiqued these various systems has
developed from the stilted dialogues of the first novel he wrote, Mayombe
1
Pepetela was a nom de guerre which became a nom de plume. It means “eyelash” in
Umbundu, as “pestana” does in Portuguese.
Nearly Ending the World the African Way 131
(1980), to the brazen humour of the Jaime Bunda parodies (2001; 2003). So
too has his format, from the highly didactic short story As Aventuras de
Ngunga (1973) [Ngunga’s Adventures], and the equally pedagogical play A
Corda (1978) [The Rope], to the palpable sense of utopian betrayal in A
Geração da Utopia (1992) [The Generation of Utopia], and the amusing
mordancy of his latest fiction.
A common thread in Pepetela’s literary output is the centrality of dialogic
characterisation. In his first novel, Mayombe, the dialogic technique was
blatant, as a multiplicity of characters controlled the narrative, laying bear the
foibles and strengths of the struggle for independence from the Portuguese of
the Marxist-leaning Angolan Independence movement, the MPLA (the
People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola). As Pepetela became a
more accomplished writer, this dialogism remained, but in more nuanced
forms, such as in Lueji, O Nascimento de um Império (1990) [Lueji, the Birth
of an Empire], a novel in which past and future fuse in a multiplicity of
voices that all reflect on the corrupting processes of power across the ages,
genders, and classes.
In this article, I will focus on Pepetela’s recent O Quase Fim do Mundo. It
is a novel which demonstrates once again the author’s commitment to
narrative dialogism, as well as his constant probing of the machinations and
mechanisms of power. As is often the case in Pepetela’s writing, each
character embodies a discourse. The plot is designed to allow each discourse
to compete against the other discourses, as a means of teasing out the flaws
and challenges of all the ideologies which have staked a claim to Angola, and
more generally Africa, over its history as a political entity. As is increasingly
the case in Pepetela’s fiction, Angola is replaced as the setting for the action.
In O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia (2007) [The Terrorist of Berkeley,
California], for example, Angola is only present in the epistemology of the
narration, in a peculiar reconfiguration of the narrator’s gaze that thwarts the
Orientalist tendencies of modern colonialisms by telling a story of American
insanity through the appropriating voice of an Angolan third-person narrator.
O Quase Fim do Mundo takes place primarily in Calpe, an imagined point
in Africa at the centre of a triangulation between the sources of the Nile, the
Zambezi and the Congo rivers. There, in the heart of the “Dark Continent,”
life persists among a very small group, after a mysterious annihilation of all
other living beings takes place. The handful of survivors each represents an
ideology: from religious fundamentalism and scientific positivism to
women’s liberation and African traditions. The rather contrived plot
conspires to land them all together in a situation in which the dominance of
the Law of capitalism – both symbolic and judicial – has been suspended. As
a result, each ideology embodied in a character must interact unmediated by

the symbolic frontiers that customarily govern our interactions in a global
economy. It is Pepetela’s greatest attempt to date to bring the primary
discourses of Modernity into raw dialogue, and to oblige them to answer for
the ways they have operated in colonial, postcolonial and post-globalisation-
era Africa, without being mere byproducts or servants of Modernity’s most
prevalent ideology, capitalism.
The novel raises a set of issues around the meaning of frontiers in a world
based on the paradoxical and yet unified Law of free-flowing capital and
rigorously enforced borders. Pepetela speculates about how a variety of
ideological positions which are predominantly in the realm of “cultural”
politics (such as the discourses of religious fundamentalism, African
traditionalism, feminism, racism) interact when the dominant paradigm of
global capitalism, which has successfully co-opted them, is suddenly
removed from the equation. Can these discourses of the realm of “cultural”
politics negotiate with each other once they no longer bow before the
capitalist Law of appropriation? And what alliances would they make?
The narrative begins with the apparent near complete disappearance of all
sentient matter. Simba Ukolo, a Western-educated doctor, gets out of his car
to urinate, glimpses a flash, and returns to the centre of Calpe to realise that
every creature, from the simplest microbe to the most intelligent species,
seems to have vanished. Over time, other people begin appearing, who have
avoided whatever the “Thing” was that obliterated life. The cast of characters
assembles to include Geny, a religious fanatic who is a member of the cult of
the “Paladins of the Sacred Crown”; Joseph Kiboro, a thief by profession and
a communist by inclination; Janet Kinsley, an American doctoral researcher
more at home with her gorillas in the mist than with the rest of humanity; Jan
Dippenaar, a South African Boer with a mysterious past; Jude, a sensual
sixteen-year-old who desires to be treated like an adult; Julius, an engineer
who has erased his Masai heritage by living in a city; Riek, an Ethiopian
shaman; and Ísis, a Somali academic. The plot traces their interactions, and is
centred on discovering what the “Thing” was that led to humanity’s near
oblivion. Fortunately, Jan Dippenaar is a pilot, albeit with a flying trauma in
his past. He is able to teach some of the others to fly, and thus facilitate a trip
to Europe where they stumble across the cause of the demise of life. A
perniciously racist sect, the same sect to which Geny unwittingly belongs,
conspired to “cleanse” the world of impure races, by wiping out every living
being with the exception of a select few of “pure” white DNA, hidden in a
protected bunker in the Austrian Alps. However, the plan goes wrong, and
the sect members are all eliminated alongside the rest of humanity.
Furthermore, because of their disdain for Africa, they did not fully cover the
continent with their annihilation beam, leading to the anomaly of a handful of
survivors remaining in the middle of the continent whose people they most
despise for supposedly being furthest from the “superior” white gene.
From his very first literary endeavors, Pepetela has always been
intelligently critical of the shortcomings of power structures, even when he
supported the ideologies behind them. His Mayombe, a narrative of the
unsung heroes of Angola’s struggle for independence, already highlighted the
potential pitfalls of what would follow the revolution. He boldly asserts
through his first novel’s denouement that there would be no place for the true
heroes in the aftermath of the Marxist revolution. Only the corrupt and the
pragmatically political would survive to rule in the stead of the idealists.
Pepetela was himself a minister in the government of Agostinho Neto,
Angola’s first president. As a writer, Pepetela had foreseen the MPLA’s
failure to live up to its promises. When he left the Angolan government, and
dedicated more of his time to writing, Pepetela continued to document,
through his fiction, the failures of the revolution to deliver on the ideals it had
promised. His work witnessed the nation’s transition to one of the most
kleptocratic and inequitable embodiments of capitalism in Africa. His
increasing trend to locate his narratives outside Angola signposts a realisation
of the extent to which national frontiers – even those gained at the expense of
revolutionary blood and the anticolonial struggle – have become blurred in
the globalised flow of market forces. With O Quase Fim do Mundo, Pepetela
does not abnegate his interest in the Angolan polity. Instead, he foregrounds
the extent to which power structures are generalised, and what applies in
Calpe, applies in Angola, or in many other previously colonised African
countries. This does not mean that Pepetela homogenises the postcolonial
experience. Rather, he draws attention to a steady pattern in the functioning
of power structures in the world today and, with his 2008 novel, aims to
interrogate what would happen if competing discourses of power were free to
engage with one another in a “primordial” setting in which the future of the
world literally depended on the outcome of their debates. To achieve this
result, Pepetela fashions a circumstance that results in the collapse of all law,
and he signals this collapse of the Law – the occurrence that ruptures all the
symbolic relations between competing subjectivities – as the “Thing” (a
Coisa). 2
2
The “Thing,” or “das Ding” or “La Chose,” occupied much of the French psychoanalyst
Lacan’s interest at the turn of the 1960s. He used the term to designate, among other things,
a lost object that must be continually re-found. It is impossible to attain, and as such, a
constant object of desire. In the context of the Thing, Lacan interprets Freud’s Pleasure
Pepetela’s “Thing” annihilates almost everything, and the remnants of

subjectivity that remain by accident are Lawless. His interest is to see what
happens in such a situation, as the Law seeks to reassert itself after all its
symbolic strength has been sapped. The provenance of the Thing is a mixture
of science (the Gamma Alfa Ray that zaps the whole world is the creation of
American defence contractors) and religious extremism (the Paladin sect
triggers the technology’s effect on the world) – two discourses with
pretensions to be totalising. The remains of their discourses are represented in
the novel by Simba (the medical, positivist doctor) and Geny (the only
remaining member of the Paladin sect, and the self-declared guardian of the
moral Law). It is no coincidence that the pair is the first to meet in the
narrative, and never gets along. Each is suspicious of the other’s motives, and
in true Pepetela fashion, hypocritical and flawed within the parameters of the
discourses they both represent.
Simba comes across Geny as they both rob banks. His medical
materialism is confronted with her religious fundamentalism. She constantly
exhibits the psychotic traits of her utter conviction, and yet both indulge in
something they know to be prohibited by the disappeared Law. For the
greatest Law of capitalism is that the banking system and those who own it
are the only ones with the right to rob. The greatest proof that capitalist Law
has been suspended is the impunity with which they remove currency from
vaults. At the same time, the fact that they do steal sacks full of money
demonstrates the residual strength of the Law which has been suspended. The
irony of their theft – an irony that repeats itself as other characters appear in
the novel – is that what they steal has no meaning. As they stuff their bags
with paper currency, they remain captives of the financial fetishes of a
previous (reigning) order. The currency has, post-Thing, assumed its status as
a worthless paper marker only granted meaning by the residues of a
fetishistic fantasy for a pair whose own discourses always officially
disavowed the overriding value of capital exchange.
Pepetela describes how Simba first resists the temptation to riffle through
police files he comes across, as he still feels the threat of a Law lingering
even though there is no one there to restrain his formerly illegal curiosity.
Principle as the Law that maintains each person at a distance from the Thing, obliging us to
circle it, without ever being able to reach it. Until he transmuted many of the underpinning
attributes of the “Thing” into his later “objet petit a,” the Thing occupied for Lacan the
psychic space Freud assigned to the incest taboo – as something that is intensely desired but
simultaneously absolutely prohibited. To achieve the Thing is to be destroyed – to have
bypassed the Pleasure Principle’s limit, which is the limit of pain the body can bear. It also
means to enter a territory where there is no Law.
Yet, when the opportunity presents itself to walk into a deserted bank and
remove its money, he no longer resists, a clear indication of the extent to
which money fetishism has informed his prior existence despite his wish to
believe the contrary. Likewise, Geny’s high ideals and moral standing are
betrayed by her instinct to indulge her fetish even in a new world where it is
obvious that money has no value – intrinsic or imagined. Its only value is as a
residual fantasy of a symbolic order that once gave it supreme meaning.
Significantly, the first character to realise the meaninglessness of money
in the new world is Joseph Kiboro, the thief whose profession disappears
with the Law’s demise. In fact, as someone who always acted outside the
Law, he is the character most able to adapt to the new circumstances. He will
end up in Europe, in a twist of fate in which he, the guardian of Proudhonian
ideals that all property is theft, will become the adoptive father of another
man’s child, and alongside his Somali partner, may become the founder of a
New Europe populated entirely with African blood. His former profession is
the underside of the Law of capital flows. For all the talk of unfettered
movement of capital and the rhetorical conflation of democracy and
entrepreneurial opportunity for all within a global capitalist paradigm, the
free market has never been about a generic removal of frontiers. Rather, from
its colonial incarnation to its more recent neocolonial practice, it has always
rigorously enforced frontiers of exclusion, centripetally absorbing wealth and
resources and concomitantly fomenting and exaggerating gross disparities
between classes and regions. As a Marxist kleptomaniac, Kiboro only ever
robbed the rich from his first act of thievery as a six-year-old with no way to
pay for the trappings of his education. His pilfering was always
simultaneously an ideological statement about the sanctioned larceny of a
society which internalised the profoundly bourgeois, European and colonial
notion that exclusive ownership is a moral right, signaling a nation’s progress
into Modernity and away from “primitive” concepts of collective
stewardship.
There is another side to Kiboro’s pacifist socialism and commitment to
the redistribution of wealth: the extent to which he, too, has internalised the
trappings flaunted by the capitalism against which he strove in his profession.
In a typical Pepetela twist which prevents the complete deification of any
single characterisation, given the opportunity of the Law’s absence to choose
any car he wishes, Kiboro is obsessed with driving the most expensive
vehicles available in the showrooms the survivors “plunder” regardless of
transport’s usefulness or reliability. For him, the car’s price tag signifies its
importance and value. This obsession reveals how much Kiboro is a product
of capitalism and remains true to its Law. It is not so much that he worked
against the capitalist classes in his pre-Thing life, but rather that he aspired to
be the capitalist, and his profession was a symptom, revealing, as its
microcosm, the true nature of the capitalist system as a project of colossal
theft. In some ways, Pepetela targets in Kiboro those who espoused socialism
in Africa’s transition to independence, and rapidly acquired a taste for the
luxurious baggage of power, becoming more ardent supporters of the free
market than their colonial masters had ever been. Their commitment to
redistribute wealth became a commitment to sell off the nation’s resources
for their own personal gain. They were, psychologically, the greatest captives
of capitalism’s Law, for they were created by that very Law. Pepetela’s point
is that they really cannot exist without that Law. His other point is that one of
the greatest flaws of the African liberation movements, a flaw against which
they could hardly be immune, was to depend so utterly on a European
ideological posture created by the system against which they struggled.
The MPLA revolution in Angola (like its FRELIMO counterpart in
Mozambique) sought to create a Marxist New Men – scientific socialists who
would be free from both a mentality of colonial enslavement and racial
denigration, and also liberated from what the new regimes deemed to be the
unsavory superstitions of traditional Africa. These New Men were always
males who claimed a near monopoly on the political arena of the newly born
nations. Throughout his work, Pepetela has been concerned with how women
have been enmeshed in the discourses of post-revolutionary power, and how
they have never fared as well as men, or been granted the same ground on
which to operate as political subjects. His depiction of Ondina, in Mayombe,
a woman who acts on her desire and whose body becomes the target of
appropriation by a range of different discourses, raised the opprobrium of
Agostinho Neto. 3 Pepetela repeated his depiction of women in positions of
political strength in Lueji, O Nascimento dum Império, and less attractively in
O Desejo de Kianda (1995) [Return of the Water Spirit]. In the former, the
narration focuses in part on the Lunda Queen, Lueji, whose Machiavellian
spirit enables her to create a centralised empire. In the latter, Carmina is an
MPLA party apparatchik whose rhetoric transmutes from a vacant Marxism
to a crude capitalism.
In O Quase Fim do Mundo, Pepetela foregrounds the challenges that
feminism poses to religious, traditional, and (scientific) socialist discourses in
Africa, as well as the challenges it faces on its own terms. The problematics
of feminism beyond the confines of a western, middle-class white, Anglo-
Saxon academy have been well debated. One of the greatest grounds of
3
For more on this, see Rothwell.
contention for feminism beyond the western world is the role of

motherhood. 4 The notion of motherhood as a positive sacrifice-for-another,
which infuses the cultural parameters of many societies, has, in certain strains
of feminism, been deemed intrinsically enslaving to the potential self-
realisation of women. In the African context, the political conflation of
Africa itself with motherhood, over-utilised in the lusophone African context
as part of the imagery of the independence struggles, has complicated the
issue further. 5 A sleight of hand took place, post-independence, in which
motherhood was designated an act of national service. The attitudes of
Agostinho Neto, in Angola, and Samora Machel, in Mozambique, who
nominally spoke in favour of equality of the sexes, were profoundly informed
by the dogma that women’s rights were a distraction from the real politics of
the class struggle against colonialism and capitalism’s oppression of the
masses. With his suspension of capitalism’s Law, Pepetela interrogates what
happens to feminism’s various positions if it is no longer deemed politically
subservient to an economic structure, or a “cultural” issue that can wait for
the success of the class struggle before any attention is paid to it.
Pepetela presents four principal female positions in his novel. The first is
Geny, who espouses a discourse of feminine abjection, grounded in extreme
religious psychosis. The narrative gives her little credence, presenting her as
the most pitiable of characters. Her delusions are not altered by the discovery
that the sect to which she belongs is responsible for the near annihilation of
humanity. Rather, she narcissistically sees the opportunity to rise up the ranks
of her church, becoming one of its apostles in the absence of other male
members. She sees her calling as the rapid conversion of as many survivors
as possible to her psychotic belief system.
The second female position is occupied by Ísis, the Somali beauty, who is
often confused with a mulatto, and whose father left their homeland to
prevent his daughter being circumcised. Thanks to her father’s
progressiveness, she escapes a practice that denies female pleasure, and
receives a high level of formal education. In the post-Thing world, she will
be the first to become pregnant, inseminated by the shaman, Riek, whose
appeal is precisely that he reminds her of her father. Most importantly, both
4
A particularly instructive work referencing motherhood in the debate around feminism as a
politics with concerns well beyond the sphere of white, middle-class women is Obioma
Nnaemeka’s edited volume.
5
See Hilary Owen’s groundbreaking Mother Africa, Father Marx, for an analysis of how the
rhetoric of Africa-as-Matrix-for-another and paternal political authority inform and are
contested by twentieth-century women’s writing in Mozambique.
her father and Riek are African men concerned with realising the hopes and
aspirations of women.
The third female characterisation is Janet Kinsley, the white American
and Berkeley doctoral candidate. Both her name and her research project (the
sexual practices of gorillas) are haunted by Alfred Kinsey, one of the
twentieth-century’s greatest researchers of sexuality. He was primarily
responsible for breaking in the West many of the sexual taboos surrounding
sexual orientation and pleasure. Janet, too, will become pregnant in the plot,
pairing up with Julius, whose African phallus is so big it does not fit
completely inside his American partner. The stereotyping is completed in the
pairing by Janet’s desire repeatedly to call Julius her “gorilla.” Having
studied the simian’s sexual practices, her primary fantasy is to be loved by a
gorilla, a desire she transfers onto her relationship with Julius.
Finally, the fourth female characterisation is Jude, the adolescent who is
desperate to seduce Simba. She learns quickly whatever she is taught, from
driving to flying. She is headstrong. At the same time, she is the only female
prepared to accept Simba’s declaration that the primary duty of women in the
new order is to be reproductive vassals guaranteeing the future of humanity.
Simba’s assertion becomes the focus of a debate between discourses about
what is the role of woman in Africa today. And, more pointedly, is feminism
only a luxury of developed societies? His contention, as a scientist, is that
women’s biology assigns them a “natural” role as mothers in the new world
order in which they find themselves. Neither Ísis nor Janet is prepared to
countenance the role of perpetual reproducers. They hold firmly to the belief
that a woman’s right to her control her own fertility and to self-realisation are
values it took too long to achieve to give up, no matter how dire the situation.
Pepetela’s deployment of this debate reminds us of arguments rehearsed at
the time of the independence struggles, when women were expected to put on
hold their aspirations for equal rights in the name of a greater struggle.
Marxist Leninism trumped all, and the woman’s greatest national service
alongside policing her husband into an essentially westernised family unit
was to produce and rear New Men for the revolution.
Simba, the westernised scientist, is the greatest advocate of this policy of
obliged reproduction. Pointedly, the representative of African tradition, Riek,
the fertility shaman, is the character most in tune with female desire, and
most capable of letting Ísis, the carrier of his own child, follow her own path.
Ísis wants to see the world. She wants to visit where the first woman head of
state, the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut, once ruled. She wants to see the sights
of Europe. Ultimately, she will remain in Europe, with Kiboro, when the rest
of the group returns to Africa. There, she will give birth to the shaman’s
child, who will be raised by her and Kiboro, the thief with leftist leanings and
the obscene underside of the suspended capitalist model.
Simba and Kiboro are closer to Geny and Jude’s positions on the role of
women in society. Geny abnegates the equality of the sexes. Jude is happy to
be used as a womb, as many times as necessary and possible. Particularly
Simba becomes obsessed with the need to reproduce for the sake of
humanity. Yet, both men find most attractive Ísis, and her ideological
position is furthest from theirs. Once again, Pepetela uses the woman’s body,
like Ondina in Mayombe, as a conflict zone. However, the case of Ísis differs
from Ondina. The moral charge associated with Ísis’s claim to be the mistress
of her own body and her own destiny has changed from the times when
Pepetela fashioned Ondina. While Ondina ended up used by three men, and
blamed for it in both the text and by Agostinho Neto who disapproved of her
“immoral” example to Angolan women, Ísis literally rides the desire of the
men near her. As the sexual atmosphere around her becomes increasingly
tense, with most of the men competing for her attention, her narrative voice
claims she took pleasure in their desire (“a ter prazer com o desejo deles”;
231).
Her desire feeds off their desire, and has nothing to do with a duty to
procreate but rather with the irrational promise of jouissance which the text
makes clear is hers to seize. Shortly after this scene, she chooses to make
love with Riek, the one man none of the others envisage being a rival for her
affection. An alliance is thus formed between her feminism and his African
tradition – an alliance that counters the rationalist discourses of science and
socialism, as well as the rhetoric of female abjection present in Geny’s
religious position. Even in Geny’s position, the power to decide may rest
with a woman. Geny may make choices that the other characters abhor as
self-abjecting, but she is making choices for herself. The result is that the
discourse that remains intransigently least sympathetic to women’s rights
once capitalism’s Law is in abeyance is the scientific socialism that always
claimed a sympathy toward female emancipation, even if as a tangential
benefit of the revolution and progress of the masses. At the same time,
African traditions, often disparaged as oppressive to women in the rhetoric of
scientific socialism, are embodied in the man, Riek, who is most attuned to
what a woman wants. It is no coincidence that one of Ísis’s primary desires
is, then, to see the place in the world where a woman ruled first – a place
located in Africa.
Pepetela’s message gives pause for thought. For Pepetela, in the absence
of the symbolic mediator of Modernity – capitalism – the discourse revealed
to be most caught up in the tenets of its Law is a socialism born of it. The
materialist parameters of science, claimed by the socialist experiments of

lusophone Africa as underpinning their ideology, also remain tied up
discursively in that same Law. Pepetela seems to be calling for new
alignments, new commitments and new debates between ideologies that
capitalism deemed utterly antagonistic and incapable of dialogue. The new
beginnings Pepetela’s narrative offers rely on a wholistic coming to terms of
what capitalist and socialist New Men dismissed as primitive tradition, and a
(feminist) discourse of true emancipation no longer enmeshed in a perpetual
framework of constant deferral. In that (near) ending of the old world, the
African way, Pepetela dreams of a new world where ideological positions
come back into real dialogue, no longer constrained or silenced by the
enforced frontiers and fictitious flows of global capital.
Works Cited
Nnaemeka, Obioma, ed. The Politics of (M)Othering: Womanhood, Identity

and Resistance in African Literature. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Owen, Hilary. Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of
Mozambique, 1948-2002. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
2007.
Pepetela. “As Cinco Vidas da Teresa.” Novos Contos d’África. Ed.
Garibaldino de Andrade and Leonel Cosme. Sá de Bandeira:
Publicações Imbondeiro, 1962. 44-54.
——., A Corda. Luanda: União dos Escritores Angolanos, 1978.
——., O Desejo de Kianda. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1995.
——., Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2001.
——., Jaime Bunda: Secret Agent. Trans. Richard Bartlett. Laverstock:
Aflame Books, 2007.
——., Jaime Bunda e a Morte dum Americano. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2003.
——., Mayombe. Lisbon: Dom Quixote (Edições 70), 1980.
——., Mayombe. Trans. Michael Wolfers. London: Heinemann, 1996.
——., Ngunga’s Adventures. Trans. Andrew Zankanani. Harare: Anvil Press,
1988.
——., O Quase Fim do Mundo. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2008.
——., Return of the Water Spirit. Trans. Luís Mitras. London: Heinemann,
2002.
——., O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2007.
Rothwell, Phillip. “Unmasking Structures: The Dynamics of Power in
Pepetela’s Mayombe.” Luso-Brazilian Review 39.1 (2002): 121-28.
John E. Masterson
A Post-mortem on the Postmodern?

Conflict and Corporeality in Nuruddin Farah’s Links
There are none so ignorant of geography as those with their military bases in every quarter
of the planet. It is possible to have satellites which survey every square inch of the globe
while producing schoolchildren who think Malawi is a Disney character.
Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (85)
‘American movies, English books – remember how they all end? … The American or the
Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out
of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta … He’s going home. So the war, to all
purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two
hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.’
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (285-86)
Eagleton’s notion of schoolchildren imagining Malawi as a Disney character

is typically provocative. Were Somalia to be captured in animated form, so
the Western media narrative goes, it would have to carry a parental advisory
sticker rather than a Mickey Mouse club badge. 1 Yet, it is the way
international conflicts are represented as made-for-television productions that
is one of the most compelling features of Links, which takes an imagined
post-Operation Restore Hope setting as its backdrop. As Slavoj Zizek
maintains, issues of “out-there” and “up-close” have been definitively
problematised post-9/11:
The same ‘derealization’ of the horror went on after the WTC collapse: while the number of
victims – 3000 – is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we
see – no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people … in clear
contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a
scoop of some gruesome detail: Somalis dying of hunger, raped Bosnian women … These
shots are always accompanied by an advance warning that ‘some of the images you will see
are extremely graphic and may upset children’ – a warning which we never heard in the
reports on the WTC collapse. Is this not yet further proof of how, even in this tragic
1
“If Me Against My Brother were to be shown on television, it would require a disclaimer
often used for much weaker material: We must warn you that what you are about to see
includes graphic images that some may find offensive” (Peterson xxi).
142 John E. Masterson
moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the
real horror happens there, not here? (Zizek 13) 2
For the purposes of this analysis, Zizek’s visceral attention to the body and its
(mis)representation in discourses concerning “postmodern” conflict is
salutary. From Farah’s critically and commercially acclaimed Maps (1986),
which focussed on the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia in the late
seventies, his work has often been saddled with the postmodern tag. Whilst
many of these speculations have added new dimensions to Farah scholarship,
others have somewhat side-stepped the material concern with body politics
and the body politic that, I believe, has defined his oeuvre. By offering a
closer analysis of Links, taking account of the peculiar context in which it
was conceived, produced and consumed, I aim to reassert the significance of
those discomfortingly fleshy realities that have always been so central to
Farah’s authorial vision.
The novel draws significantly from ongoing discussions of the myriad
politics of (dis)location, encompassing everything from transnational travel
to military strategy. As such, the familiar journey motif assumes an even
greater burden of significance here. It provides a gateway into those geo-
politically broader concerns with displacement, detachment and distance
sometimes problematically filed under ‘postmodern.’ 3 Emerging from the
same U.S.-based Somali diaspora as Sholoongo in Secrets, Jeebleh is another
prominent returnee in Farah’s work. Flying in for his first visit to Somalia in
“more than two decades,” he returns to visit his mother’s desecrated grave
and settle her outstanding accounts. Like Farah in 1996, he witnesses the
apocalyptic state of the nation where carrion birds appear to be the only
adequately fed creatures. After disembarking, Jeebleh attempts to justify his
return to himself and others. Seasoned Farah readers will note the familiar
jostling of pronouns in the following, as his protagonist bemoans those
interrogations endured at the hands of host patrons:
‘I had returned to reemphasize my Somaliness – give a needed boost to my identity. […] I

was fed up being asked by Americans whether I belonged to this or that clan […] many
assuming that I was a just-arrived refugee. […] It’s irritating to be asked by people at the
supermarket which clan I belong to. […] 4 You see, we Somalis who live in America, we
2
Also see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 63-64.
3
See, for example, Caren Kaplan’s illuminating study, Questions of Travel: Postmodern
Discourses of Displacement.
4
“There has been a conflation of ethnicity with the old meaning of race as social
differentiation with a biological basis, and many ethnic explanations of conflict are in fact
inherently racist” (Allen and Seaton 31). See also Crawford and Lipschutz.
A Post-mortem on the Postmodern? 143
keep asking one another where we stand on the matter of our acquired new American
identity. I’ve come because I want to know answers.’ (Links 36)
As in earlier novels, such as Sweet and Sour Milk and Close Sesame,
questions are open-ended and answers conclusively inconclusive. When
thinking about more recent work, the comparative reader can trace overlaps
and differences in the textual dialogue between Secrets and Links. In the
former, ‘stayee’ Kalaman expresses his weariness with ‘returnee’
misrepresentations of Somalia’s intricate lineage system. In the latter, it is the
diasporic figure who frames his concerns in terms of an ambiguous, because
transnational, politics of personhood. As he seeks to patch the schism in his
hyphenated identity by bearing firsthand witness to conditions on the ground,
Jeebleh’s exasperation might be read as a transposition of Farah’s own
sentiments in Yesterday, Tomorrow: “there were areas of their lives that I had
no access to, because I was not there when the horror came to visit their
homes. They were part of a ‘we,’ sharing the communal nightmare. That I
was not included in the ‘we’ was made clear to me. But then I was not
assumed to be part of the ‘they’ either” (5). Similar pronominal strains
between ‘I,’ ‘we’ and ‘our’ pepper Links. If Secrets’ fraught terrain exists
somewhere between pre-Islamic myth and postmodern global village, the
diasporic dynamics of Links only amplify these competing claims and
loyalties. Now, the extreme, if representative juxtaposition is between
American supermarket and Somali shantytown.
In an early survey, D.R. Ewen suggested Somalia would gradually lose its
central status in Farah’s novels (209). If this prediction proved somewhat
premature, it is testimony both to the author’s intention to “keep my country
alive by writing about it” and to the fact that the turbulent national narrative
has provided so much fictional mileage. 5 With the publication of Links,
however, Ewen’s thematic wager might be renegotiated. With the opening up
and subsequent dissolution of the nation in post-dictatorship and then post-
interventionist contexts, the lines of Farah’s fictive maps have been redrawn
accordingly. The newly globalised labyrinth of Links refracts the explosion of
Somalia and its diaspora onto broader territories and, thus, a more truly
global consciousness. With the compression of time and space, achieved by
technological advances, comes a concomitant attention to grim reality shows
being played out in previously ‘dark,’ now dimly-exposed, areas of ‘Google
Earth.’ Textual references to what some consider a postmodern politics of
media, travel and conflict, therefore, exist in an intertwined triptych
5
See “Nuruddin Farah.”
purposely designed to focus attention on issues of distance and disparity,

transnational traffic and territories.
Considering Links in the post-Restore Hope and 9/11 context in which it
was produced and consumed, the reader is struck with this new focus. With
the realignment of global power following the lifting “of the fog of cold
war,” the ‘Che’ Guevara posters and Soviet insignia of the Variations on the
Theme of an African Dictatorship cycle have been replaced with other
commodity fetishes (Moynihan 9). On his return to once familiar, now
disorientating Mogadiscian streets, Jeebleh’s pronominal struggles become
even more intense. Cut adrift on the precarious soil of his homeland, an
errant re-memory casts him back to his New York apartment. He recalls a
distant Somali drama depicted, not by Pixar but CNN:
‘But despite everything, and despite the prevailing obfuscation, I’ve come to assess the
extent of my culpability as a Somali.’ And he imagined seeing corpses buried in haste by his
kinsmen, the palms of the victims waving as though in supplication. Similar images had
come to him, several times, in the comfort of his own home, in New York, and on one
occasion, in Central Park, he had been so disturbed that he had mistaken the stump of a tree
for a man buried alive … This was soon after he had watched on television the corpse of an
American Ranger being dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadiscio. These images had
given him cold fevers for months. Now he felt the strange sensation of a many-pronged
invasion, as if his nightmares were calling on him afresh. His throat smarted, as with an
attack of flu coming on. (Links 32)
For some commentators, the symbolic representation of besieged bodies is a

little overdetermined in Maps and Secrets. Here, it might be argued, Farah is
engaging in a slightly subtler exploration. It is multiply revealing, for
example, that, in this globalised context, Jeebleh’s own anxieties back up on
and betray him at the corporeal level. The critical supplement is that these
queasy after-effects result from his interaction with the virtual reality
projected onto his television screen. The sanitised representation of distant
events, he both craves and fears, is called into question at the level of his own
divided subjectivity. Jeebleh feels his flesh crawl as he attempts to come to
terms with his own detachment from events, as well as trying to negotiate the
contested hyphen in his Somali-American identity. It is highly significant that
the media replay leaves him stranded, to borrow from Zizek once more, in a
desert of the “virtual real.” His disturbed psychological state leads him to
confuse a tree trunk with a human corpse. The keyword in the passage as a
whole, therefore, appears to be ‘obfuscation,’ as it characterises the very
uncertain terrain upon which, at various levels, he now roams. The rules of
the game, however repressive, were indeed much clearer in the old days of
autocracy. 6
Farah attends to this spiralling chronology in revealing detail. Jeebleh
stumbles in the newly disorientating wasteland of Central Park following his
encounter with the “media ‘flashframe’” that burnt itself into the unpopular
American consciousness during the Somali debacle (Hoskins 6). 7 The critical
point is that this haunting image of a mutilated U.S. Ranger captures the
corporeal fracture between militaristic engagements in the far-flung “out
there” and an all-too-material corporeality brought painfully “back home.”
This is captured by Ignatieff, who states, “if the consensus in favor of
humanitarian interventions can be shaken – as it was in Somalia – by the
sight of a single American serviceman’s body being dragged through the
streets of Mogadishu, then keeping those images off the screen becomes a
central objective of the military art” (Ignatieff 191-92). With the graphic
representation of such flashframes, in the novel and beyond, transnational
audiences are connected to one another through their very disconnection from
events. As he bids the reader accompany diasporic Jeebleh on his problematic
return journey, Farah invites us to consider much broader political questions.
In a context where concerns over the use and abuse of transnational power
and contested body politics remain paramount, the text has a peculiarly
haunting resonance today. As Baudrillard suggests, spectres of the abuse
carried out at Abu Ghraib prison hang heavy over many of these issues: “the
bad conscience of the entire West is crystallised in these images. The whole
West is contained in the burst of the sadistic laughter of the American
soldiers. […] This is where the truth of these images lies; this is what they are
full of: the excessiveness of a power designating itself as abject and
pornographic” (Baudrillard 207). 8 Once again, I suggest, overlaps between
concerns with the contested body politic, both national and transnational, and
individual body politics are central both to Links and the wider discourses
with which it engages. When thinking about the value, as well as limitations,
of a notion such as “postmodern conflict,” numerous scholars have pointed to
strategic links between operational failures in Vietnam and Somalia. Using
revealingly embodied rhetoric, U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke maintained
that “the scars from [the Somali disaster] would deeply affect our Bosnia
6
“The Siyad Barre dictatorship was easy to find as a theme, whereas it was very difficult
nowadays, you couldn’t actually tell” (Farah, “How Can We Talk of Democracy” 43).
7
“Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of
Others 19).
8
For Susan Sontag, there is “a larger confluence of torture and pornography” in this Abu
Ghraib context (“Regarding The Torture of Others” 134).
policy. Combined with Vietnam, they had what might be called a ‘Vietmalia
syndrome’ in Washington” (qtd. in Peterson 163). A supporting intertext
might be used to illuminate some of the issues pertinent to what might be the
latest incarnation of Farah’s body politics project.
“I speak with the voice of things to come” 9
The first-person narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Vietnam Project’ is Eugene

Dawn. A military scientist commissioned to research the conflictual fallout
by the American administration, he subsequently finds himself in a mental
institution for harming his son. He is a disturbed and suitably disturbing
bookish type who, once ensconced in the sanatorium, takes unbridled
pleasure in assisting his therapists with their diagnosis:
When it comes to my turn I point out that I hate war as deeply as the next man. I gave
myself to the war on Vietnam only because I wanted to see it end. […] I believe in life. […]
Nor do I want to see the children of America poisoned by guilt. Guilt is a black poison. I
used to sit in the library in the old days feeling the black guilt chuckling through my veins. I
was being taken over. I was not my own man. It was insupportable. Guilt was entering our
homes through TV cables. We ate our meals in the glare of that beast’s glass eye from the
darkest corner. Good food was being dropped down our throats into puddles of corrosion. It
was unnatural to bear such suffering. (Coetzee 48) 10
The most intriguing connection with Links concerns the relationship between
the militaristic aspects of what has been called “postmodern warfare” and its
dissemination via global news providers. Vietnam, of course, represents the
decisive chapter in the U.S.’s post-war interventions. 11 Yet, for Dawn, it is
the representation of this fallout that most disturbs, leading to physiognomic
disruption. Parallels between Coetzee’s Dawn and Farah’s Jeebleh are
intriguing. For both, the television metamorphoses into a penetrative glass-
eye, invading the home and inducing “a tele-intimacy with death and
destruction” (Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 18). A “grotesque
infantile reality-show” it may be, but the at once beautiful and brutal truth is
9
Coetzee 29.
10
Consider Dawn’s words alongside those of Marlin Fitzwater, the White House Press
secretary, who offered the following comment on U.S. deployment to starving Somalia: “we
heard it from every corner, that something had to be done […] the pressure was too great
[…] TV tipped us over the top […] I could not stand to eat my dinner watching TV at night.
It made me sick” (qtd. in Robinson 50).
11
See David Culbert’s counter-argument (204-13).
that the spectator can switch to another channel or shut off (Baudrillard 206).
As Sontag maintains, “the whole point of television is that one can switch
channels. […] Consumers droop. They need to be stimulated, jump started,
again and again” (Regarding the Pain of Others 94). Fast forward to present-
day Iraq and Afghanistan, which bear the scars of Abu Ghraib, and debates
concerning the intricacies of postmodern warfare and its representational
regurgitation become even more charged. 12
In Postmodern War, Chris Gray is eager to explore the inherent fractures
of that notion of cynically/clinically-detached conflict so brilliantly captured
by Zizek: “we should note the structural homology between this new
warfare-at-a-distance, where the ‘soldier’ (a computer specialist) pushes
buttons hundreds of miles away, and the decisions of managerial bodies
which affect millions … in both cases, abstraction is inscribed into a very
‘real’ situation” (35-36). When militaristic discourse is still peppered with
references to “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage,” attending to these
fractures, both rhetorical and real, appears as urgent as ever. For Gray, the
cataclysmic, because never quite closed event, is Vietnam. He goes on to
speculate about continuities between his experiences with, what Jameson
calls, the “first terrible postmodernist war” (Jameson 1971) and an earlier
Gulf conflict: 13
A few years ago I visited an embalmed Titan missile silo in Green Valley, Arizona. It floats
on giant springs for riding out a near-miss. I sat in one of the easy chairs. I reached for the
key. I pushed the red button. A year later I watched TV in horrified fascination as my
country technologically dismembered Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands. Since then there
have been many wars … It haunts me. The sheer weight of war’s materiality and the
violence of the inscription on the body politic, as well as my own body, force me to seek an
explanation for the strange danse macabre of our age, war. (Gray 7)
Gray’s work is variously enabling when considering Links, as he gestures

towards the complex relations between conflict, representation and a resistant
attention to corporeal materiality so central to Farah’s novelistic vision (Gray
160). Peterson’s study can be used to extend these overlaps further. In his
account, a Somali fighter makes explicit reference to an insurgent forerunner:
“looking up while a US reconnaissance plane passed overhead, he defined the
American predicament: ‘We can fight like the Viet Cong,’ he said. ‘How can
that airplane stay in the air without fuel and without money? But I can stay
here forever’” (Peterson 111). Whilst, perhaps surprisingly, referring to Mark
12
See Gourevitch and Morris.
13
For an effective juxtaposition of the first Gulf War and Operation Restore Hope, see
Robinson 46.
Bowden’s partisan account in his author’s note, Farah has one of his fictional
combatants deliver a critique of the “infidel” invaders in similar terms: “as
fighters, there was a major flaw in their character. […] They thought less of
us, and that was ultimately the cause of their downfall” (Links 268).
This provocative notion of “downfall” can be re-appropriated in relation
to some of the debates considered above. At one level, Farah’s novel is
concerned with how a seemingly postmodern conflict is brought back down
to a level of materiality which, so the official discourse goes, technological
“progress” could and should have allowed it to overcome. In literal and
figurative senses, the U.S. soldier’s mutilated figure haunts Jeebleh and the
global viewing-public, providing abject evidence of an all-too contested
corporeality. For Farah, in terms of the prescient discourses he refers to
throughout Links, a “re-grounding” of conflict at the level of besieged bodies
remains both politically vital and vigilant. Through the figure of a diasporic
protagonist attempting to negotiate certain divides in terms of his own
Somali-American identity, Farah also obliges the reader consider the
significance of such embodied schisms at the level of representing and
engaging in militaristic conflict. This is lucidly captured by Stephen Graham,
who asserts, “to put it mildly, dreams of clinically identifying and surgically
killing only ‘fighters’ within sprawling megacities, through the agency of
autonomous computer algorithms, are dangerously deluded” (263). The body
politics motifs of earlier novels, such as Sardines and Maps, are galvanised
anew, shifting in accordance with the undulating movements of geo-political
narratives, both national and international. 14
“There must be some way out of here”

Whatever has a body can be smashed to smithereens. […] Like finance capitalism, political
terrorism is also diffuse, ubiquitous, and largely invisible. […] Yet if it deploys avant-garde
technologies, it is in order to strew the flesh of men and women on the streets. […] In this
combination of technology and body, the impalpable and the grossly carnal, global terrorism
is quintessentially postmodern.
Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror (82-83)
For many commentators, it is the innate slipperiness of the term ‘postmodern’

that is most appealing. In the sense outlined by Eagleton, therefore, Links can
14
As Barry Buzan suggests, “difficult questions arise about countries with strong structures of
tribe and clan, such as Afghanistan, Congo, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, Indonesia and Saudi
Arabia” (89).
be seen to inhabit the kind of postmodern terrain commonly associated with

Maps, as it is concerns areas of confusion and the dissolution of rigid
boundaries in terms of personal/political behaviour and affiliations. When Ali
reminisces to Jeebleh about “times […] when you knew who was bad and
who was good. Such distinctions are now blurred. We are at best good
badmen, or bad badmen” (Links 41-42) he is referring to the disorder of
things in a post-Siyad Barre power vacuum. 15 Amplified at a more
transnational level, it might also correspond with Zizek’s sobering and
politically potent deconstruction of notions of “out-there” and “back-here.”
As above, Jeebleh’s identity struggles are played out within the same fraught
zone that Farah himself roams. In the fictional sphere, Jeebleh is caught
between solipsistic notions of “me” and “we” generations:
He thought of how it was characteristic of civil wars to produce a multiplicity of pronominal

affiliations, of first-person singulars tucked away in the plural, of third-person plurals meant
to separate one group from another. The confusion pointed to the weakness of the exclusive
claims made by first-person plurals, as understood implicitly in the singled-out singular
(Links 42; emphasis added)
That this is one of Farah’s most sustained, if not convoluted, considerations

of pronominal politics cannot be divorced either from this national sense of
dissolution or the personal impact of his documentary excursion. Such
struggles are manifest as, in this globalised environment of compressed time
and space, the politics of antagonistic affiliation take on ‘trans-,’ if not
‘post-,’ national urgency. This diasporic dimension is alluded to in the final
segment of this long meditation. Jeebleh re-grounds his complex, divided
feelings at the personal and familial levels that often hold out most promise,
if not stability, in Farah’s fiction: “he was sure that he did not love Somalia
the way he used to love it many years before. […] Maybe love did not enter
into one’s relationship with one’s country? […] Can one continue to love a
land one does not recognize anymore? He had never asked himself whether
he loved America. He loved his wife and daughters, and through them, was
engaged with America” (Links 42). Whilst there are pronounced parallels
between the rhetorical strategies of both reportage and fiction, these
questions may frustrate rather than capture the reader’s imagination. For an
author preoccupied with the notion that “a country is a working hypothesis,”
such equivocations should not come as too great a surprise (Yesterday,
Tommorow 48). The text’s central tension is alluded to in the above passage,
15
As Furio Colombo suggests, “Somalia was undergoing a state of collapse. […] It is a new
and terrible situation that no longer resembles older civil wars or coups” (86-87).
with the loaded reference to a psychic-political ‘engagement’ with the U.S.

For all Links’ attendant indeterminacies, tensions and flaws, the challenge
confronting its readers is comparable with that faced by protagonists
throughout Farah’s novels, from Ebla in From a Crooked Rib to Cambara in
Knots. Complications and consequences must be lived with, however open-
ended and painful that task might be.
If, from the vantage point of 2009, Links can be seen as a quasi-successful
exploration of pertinent issues, it owes much to Farah’s reinvigorated ability
to shift between these personal and viscerally political spheres. NGO worker
Seamus is used to deliver the broadest critique of post-Cold War
imperialism: 16
‘Everything that could’ve gone wrong for the Yanks had gone wrong because they saw
everything in black and white, had no understanding of and no respect for other cultures.
[…] They were also let down by their intelligence services, arriving everywhere unprepared,
untutored in the ways of the world; he brought up the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
former Yugoslavia, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and the disintegration of several ramshackle
states in different parts of the globe.’ (Links 260-61; emphasis added)
Once again, the idea that more complex realities reside in the grey areas
between such binary designations is as central to Farah’s authorial vision as it
is to wider debates concerning the ‘War on Terror.’ Preoccupied with
remapping co-ordinates of power from Russian betrayal during the Ogaden
War of Maps to ever bloodier Western intervention in Links, Farah also
draws the reader’s attention to some longer lines of continuity:
It was from the ocean that all the major invasions of the Somali peninsula had come. The
Arabs, and after them the Persians, and after the Persians the Portuguese, and after the
Portuguese the French, the British, and the Italians, and later the Russians, and most recently
the Americans. […] In any case, all these foreigners, well-meaning or not, came from the
ocean. The invaders might be pilgrims bearing gifts, or boys dispatched to do “God’s work.”
(Links 124)
The function of historical-consciousness bearer has shifted from figures such

as Deeriye in Close Sesame and Nonno in Secrets, yet appeals to Abdulle
Hassan’s insurgent legacy continue to resonate. 17 In the historical present,
neo-imperialistic invaders still seek to inscribe their dominance in the pages
of, or with pointed reference to, certain books. References to ‘God’s work’
thus link fathers and sons in their roles as (mis)leaders of the free world:
16
See Somerville 134-69.
17
See ‘Abdi Sheik-‘Abdi.
[Jeebleh] recalled sitting in an apartment in Queens with his wife and daughters, and
watching the main event on television: Marines in combat gear, and cameras flashing as
photographers took pictures of the Americans alighting from their amphibious craft. In a
moment, several of the Marines, appearing proud, would be interviewed by one of the most
famous anchormen in America. Jeebleh’s wife turned to him to ask whether the Marines
knew what doing “God’s work” meant in a country like Somalia (Links 123-24).
As such, it becomes crucial to read this Bush-senior neologism in the context

of events surrounding the previous Gulf conflict. Seamus continues,
‘The Americans came to show the world that they could make peace-on-demand in Somalia,
in the same dramatic fashion as they had made war-on-demand in the Gulf. They came to
showcase peace here as a counterpoint to their war effort elsewhere. Iraq and Somalia had
one thing in common: both were made-for-TV shows […] the prime-time performance was
their focus all along.’ (Links 261) 18
Seamus, of course, is from Northern Ireland and so brings a convenient

amount of conflict baggage, if not reconciliatory hope, to his NGO work in
war-ravaged Somalia. 19 Whilst his introduction may seem clunky, it does
allow those interested in representations of conflicts defined in neo-
colonial/neo-ethnic terms to make some provocative links. Moynihan cites
Horowitz on tangled webs of ethnicity spun from Burundi to Belfast. His
focus on various degrees of blurring might appeal to those with a hankering
for the postmodern: “‘connections among Biafra, Bangladesh, and Burundi,
Beirut, Brussels, and Belfast were at first hesitantly made – isn’t one ‘tribal,’
one ‘linguistic,’ another ‘religious’? – but that is true no longer. Ethnicity has
fought and bled and burned its way into public and scholarly consciousness’”
(11). In an alternative, Northern Ireland-specific study, Allen Feldman asserts
that the body itself remains at the literal and figurative heart of these political
struggles and semantic contests. 20 Such broader references also refocus
attention on Links’ diasporic dimensions, elevating it beyond any monolithic
exercise in ‘America-bashing.’ Given events post 9/11, it is even more
critical to emphasise these subtler strains in Farah’s work. As the Persian
Gulf excerpt demonstrates, Jeebleh’s intellectual perspective, much like
18
“The invasion was shown live on prime-time television. It was the easiest the world had ever
seen. American soldiers landed on the beach at Mogadishu blinded by the flashlights and
floodlights of the international media. There was not a Somali in sight” (Polman 28).
19
Consider William E. DeMars, NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World
Politics, and Katarina West, Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in
Rwanda and Afghanistan.
20
“I have turned to the sociohistorical site occupied by the body in Northern Ireland in order to
approach power from its point of effect and generation – agency” (Feldman 3).
Deeriye and Nonno, is to offer a more spatially and temporally entangled

version of events. I leave the reader to consider the titular significance of
Knots (2007). Whilst the means of global hegemony may appear new, the
dominant ends exist in an ominously intertwined web from which neither
European, American, Arab nor African power players can extricate
themselves.
These geopolitical preoccupations seep into the very fabric of the text.
Whilst the author’s note is an increasingly significant feature of Farah’s later
fiction (invariably stockpiling organic and/or body metaphors), Links’
bibliographical survey is multiply revealing. 21 Whilst referring to the
Bowden account that provided the template for Ridley Scott’s vacuous
blockbuster, it is equally significant that Farah pins his allegiance to Dante.
In contrast to the intertextual eclecticism of previous works, which in
Sardines, for example, ranges from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, Links
takes all its epigraphs from The Inferno. 22 This slight detail glosses a more
nuanced engagement with the journey motif. Having left America for now
apocalyptic Mogadiscian streets, Jeebleh finds himself reliant upon a Virgil-
esque guide who emerges in the shadowy form of Af-Laawe. In this ninth
novel, Farah appears to be playing with a Dantean conception of hell. It has a
peculiarly Somali resonance that Peterson, in an alternative context, alludes
to: “defined by centuries of hard parched existence, in which the human
presence was ever but the smallest point of life struggling in the midst of an
inhospitable threatening desert, the Somali world order is delineated by a
series of concentric rings, designed to ensure survival” (Peterson 118). 23
Peterson refers to the spiralling re-emergence of political affiliation along
distorted clan lines following the implosion of authoritarian rule. Yet the
image is thoroughly Dante-esque. The very rhetoric employed here gives
grist to Farah’s comparative mill; colonial and neo-colonial continuities are
framed in strikingly similar terms. 24 In relation to the text, however, it is
21
See the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of Maps, for example.
22
Jeebleh has a doctorate in Dante.
23
Moynihan names Pandaemonium after Milton’s conception of hell (24). See “Order in the
Age of Chaos” (143-74). Somalia is, typically, depicted as an apocalyptic backwater (15-
16).
24
Gerald Hanley served in Somalia during World War II and offers the following, suitably
Conradian comments on the spate of suicides amongst fellow servicemen: “we do not know
the size and strength of our own manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the
barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness
have cast us into them. There is something huge and dark in the African world which can
chew through the defences of white men who have not been harnessed to that continent’s
significant that explicit links are made between protagonist and polity. When
Jeebleh suggests a “poet might have described Somalia as a ship caught in a
great storm without the guiding hand of a wise captain” (Links 18), the reader
is charged with directing the tempestuous comment onto the diasporic
wanderer himself. 25 Fittingly, it is Af-Laawe’s (mis)guiding voice that
disturbs Jeebleh. He offers incessant interrogations of the opaque world of
political and personal affiliations into which his charge has now stepped and
finds himself lost:
‘Some of us are of a ‘we’ generation, others a ‘me’ generation. You mix the two modes of
being, and things become awkward, unmanageable. I belong to the me generation, whereas
my clan elders belong to the we generation […] while our European counterparts belong
wholeheartedly to the me idea, you and I belong at one and the same time to the me and the
we […] You and I […] are made up of competing ways of doing things.’ (Links 139)
Reading Jeebleh’s final departure from Somalia in this light, it is his very
inability to deal with contradictions, complexities and competing ways of
doing things that results in his unbearable “pronominal confusion.”
Whilst attention to, rather than evasion of, specific class privilege has
always provoked divided reactions to Farah’s work, here it is designed to
concentrate rather than compromise the political dimensions of a text
inextricably concerned with the entanglements of globalisation. As
suggested, an enduring fascination with awkward, arguably postmodern,
blurring colours the textual fabric. A more than parodic sense of the
hegemonic reach of global culture charges an early scene in which young
militia members are depicted “standing with their backs to each other, in
imitation of what they must have seen in American movies” (Links 23). 26
Elsewhere, Jeebleh dwells on pan-African comparisons with civil wars in
Rwanda and Liberia before indulging in a speculative juxtaposition between
American ghetto and Somali shantytown. He concludes that even poverty has
its hierarchies; windows in the former context would at least be boarded up
(Links 70). A macabre Mogadiscio is envisaged where the Somali corpses
strewn across streets exist in sombre simultaneity with action movies beamed
into crumbling buildings. This has haunting resonance with Linda Polman’s
almost mindless friendship with suffering and annihilation” (Hanley 19). Peterson refers to
Hanley throughout his account.
25
The same nautical image is used in Yesterday, Tomorrow 54-55 (see above).
26
See “Media Culture, Politics and Ideology: From Reagan to Rambo,” in Douglas Kellner,
Media Cultures – Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the
Postmodern, 57-92. Also consider Adi Wimmer’s chapter, “Rambo: American Adam,
Anarchist and Archetypal American Frontier Hero,” in Vietnam Images 184-95.
account in We Did Nothing: “Down in the street one of these precious

generators starts up and a movie screen appears. The cinema has lost its roof
and the top half of its walls. From our high position we enjoy the top half of
the main feature, a tired Hollywood version of the hell that was Vietnam”
(Polman 24). Like Polman and Coetzee, Farah’s series of juxtapositions
(representation/reality, machine/body, commodity/conflict,
displacement/engagement) defines the textual action and Links’ broader
preoccupations.
In suitably postmodern terms, therefore, the novel might be framed as
occupying a territory somewhere between Dante and Ridley Scott. 27 This
holds both in relation to Links’ central fascination with a politics of pronouns
and in terms of its all-too pressing concerns with contemporary warfare.
Critically, these tensions are embodied by those who stayed and those who
left: “he thinks our reliance on blood kinship is backward and primitive. He is
saying that he has money, that his family is safe and in America, that he
belongs to the twenty-first century, while we belong to the thirteenth” (Links
30). The problematic spectres of what might be called postmodern blurring
emerge once again. Not only does this character go on to allude to the
resistant role he played in the counter-American struggle of which Jeebleh,
like Farah, was not a part, but he also adds temporal as well as spatial
dynamics to the mix. A standoff between the late twentieth and thirteenth
centuries is presented in strikingly similar terms to what, under the previous
U.S. administration, passed as informed comment on the phantom ‘War on
Terror.’ (Sontag, “One Year After” 121). It is at this juncture, however, that
Farah dangles an obvious if pointed irony before the reader. With
acknowledgement of operational and symbolic parallels with Vietnam, Links
alludes to the fact that it was the very strategies of this ‘thirteenth century’
force that defeated the military might of the twenty first century’s only
remaining superpower. Whilst such temporal and spatial tensions continue to
enliven many of the most urgent debates of our time, they also signal an
extension of the author’s enduring concern with highlighting knots of
complicity and complexity. In Links, much like Coetzee’s hauntingly
prophetic Waiting for the Barbarians, the whole binary logic underpinning
‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ is thrown into confusion. 28 As such, John Berger’s
foreword to The Algebra of Infinite Justice seems peculiarly apt: “I’m
tempted to say that the world has never been more confused. Yet this would
27
Derek Walcott, one of Farah’s epigraphical favourites, maintains “[the] antecedent of
cinema is Dante.” Interview in Fumagalli (277).
28
See, for example, Patrick Lenta’s “Waiting for the Barbarians After September 11th.”
be untrue. The world has never had to face such global confusion” (Roy
xxii).
Whilst Jeebleh transgresses international borders and timezones to make a
transient reconnection with his homeland, the blood and bones irritations that
define the imaginative terrain of Secrets become ultimately unbearable and
he departs. 29 There are, however, several additional reasons for his exit. As
Seamus, an arguably more engaged outsider, cautions him, “[my] only advice
is that if you won’t quit it, you watch out and make sure you don’t get sucked
into the vortex” (Links 215). This spiralling imagery is significant. Whilst
Peterson draws attention to the concentric structures of Somali society and
the security of being closest to the centre, here that nodal point is situated at
the darkening heart of a whirlpool. With appropriate allusions to Dante,
Jeebleh envisions himself teetering on a dystopian brink. At one significant
point, he even risks becoming the kind of gangster imagined in his family’s
Americanised portrait of this ‘savage land.’ In a reworking of Loyaan’s brush
with brutality in Sweet and Sour Milk, it is the sadistic sensation of gun
cradled in hand that, at one level, triggers his desire for transatlantic
detachment: “perhaps he wasn’t as exempt from the contagion that was of a
piece with civil wars as he had believed. […] He knew he was capable of
pulling the trigger if it came to that. His hand went to his shirt pocket, where
he had his cash and his U.S. passport” (Links 69).
As I’ve suggested throughout, Links’ broader triptych of concerns can be
seen in terms of travel, conflict and media. Yet it is the way these meta-issues
are grounded by a more concrete, class-specific and corporeally-imagined
ensemble that captures the negotiation that Farah, at his evocative best,
manages between personal and political, micrological and macrological. The
new (un)holy trinity comprises wallet, passport and gun. Typically, Farah has
his protagonist and, by extension, his reader, interrogate the impenetrability
of their moral fortresses. Like Loyaan in Sweet and Sour Milk, Jeebleh begins
to inhabit an interstitial area which confuses any rigid binaries or moral
absolutes. It is multiply revealing that he employs others to do his dirty work
when confronted with the task of disposing of warlord Caloosha. The
cathartic killing done, he seeks to wipe his hands by passing through
customs. Issues of detachment, participation and engagement thus colour
29
“Today, no one stays at rest, all is in flight. […] The habit of returning to our source, of
rediscovering our origins, our ‘identity,’ suddenly seems an absolute necessity. To
accomplish the backwards journey, to become again what we were yesterday, the regression
that leads back to the point of departure is like some parlour game” (Virilio 39).
every aspect of Links. Jeebleh’s final departure, of course, is only assured by

his material position, as represented by his wallet and even more valuable
passport. With an all-too ominous insight into the compression of moralistic
distances, it becomes imperative that even more valuable, because class-
specific, weapons are called on to put some physical space between “out-
there” and “back-home.” As he does in so many of his novels, Farah invokes
a fleshy supplement to shore up these meditations.
Jeebleh’s body betrays him in a way that recalls Coetzee’s own divided
and detached protagonist, Eugene Dawn:
[Jeebleh] was having difficulty breathing, not because the smells were new to him – they
weren’t – but because they had become even more overpowering. People living in such vile
conditions were bound to lose touch with their own humanity, he thought; you couldn’t
expect an iota of human kindness from a community coexisting daily with so much
putrefaction. Maybe this was why people were so cruel to one another, why they showed
little or no kindness to one another. (Links 200-1)
It is multiply revealing that the familiar politics of privilege are reconfigured

at an embodied level. Indeed, the idea of “losing touch” seems to encompass
concerns physical and metaphysical, political and symbolic throughout Links.
Surveying the scene on the ground, Jeebleh finds his dignified physiognomy
has let him down. Such fictive episodes appear intimately connected with
Farah’s own accounts and those of his professional interviewees in
Yesterday, Tomorrow. “The food [members of the Somali diaspora] eat is the
food the poor eat anywhere, foods eaten not to please the tongue but to fill
the stomach. I ate it, and it did damage to my constitution, not robust at the
best of times. From then on, I called at non-eating hours of the day, and still
they prepared ghee- and butter-rich meals for me, which got my stomach a-
running” (103). This interpretation aside, Farah also reworks Deeriye-esque
metaphors of moral asphyxiation to interrogate the profoundly un-Islamic
activities he has elsewhere critiqued. 30 The above incident refers to the brutal
beating of a pregnant dog. When Jeebleh chases the culprits away and attends
to the wounded creature, he is viewed with incredulity for breaking taboos
relating to human and animal conduct and contact. As in Secrets, one of
Farah’s primary objectives in Links is to disrupt such ‘taboo politics.’ 31
30
See Derek Wright’s chapter on Close Sesame “The Grandfather: Close Sesame” in The
Novels of Nuruddin Farah (90).
31
“My view is if the members of a society can do unto each other such savageries, then who
are they to remain prudish?” Farah, “How Can We Talk of Democracy,” in Wright,
Emerging Perspectives (44).
The fact that Jeebleh finds himself confronted with messy bodies, dirty
dogs and problematic kinsfolk is multiply revealing. The sanitised eye of
CNN that beamed images into his New York apartment may have provided
an unsettling sense of corporeal fracture in the establishment of the New
World Order. Yet, for all their technological advances, global media
networks have so far been unable to transmit the olfactory sensations from
“out-there” in the killing zone. 32 Jeebleh’s divided self betrays him on the
most intimate level. He ultimately returns to his transatlantic jet and then his
apartment to struggle with the spectres of detached affiliation all over again:
“after all, he was not prepared to dwell in pronominal confusion, which was
where he had been headed. He had to find out which pronoun might bring his
story to a profitable end” (Links 332). Like the supposedly definitive
revelation in Secrets and Askar’s interrogation in Maps, the reader confronts
the familiar irony that this end is no ending at all. Whilst Farah may appear to
smooth over these indeterminacies with the final plane ride home, the reader
is charged with interrogating these opacities and seemingly postmodern areas
of confusion in greater detail.
As I’ve argued throughout, the globalised and diasporic dimensions of
Farah’s novel are inextricably linked to its exploration of some of the most
urgent geopolitical debates of our time:
The final challenge – drawing on theorists as diverse as Foucault (1977), Agamben (1998),
Deleuze and Guatarri (1987), Gregory (2004) and Said (1978) – is to expose in detail the
ways in which urbanized RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) weapons programmes – and
the discourses which fuel them – embed stark biopolitical judgements about the varying
worth of human subjects, according to their location, beneath the intensifying transnational
gaze of militarized surveillance. Such a theme must be at the very core of any re-
theorizations of the links between corporeal, urban and transnational power in what Derek
Gregory has called our ‘colonial present’ (2004). (Graham 265-66; emphasis added)
Fittingly, therefore, the novel remains just as concerned with contested

relations between individual body politics and the wider body politic as Farah
has been throughout his career. As with the shadowy figure of Ahmed-Wellie
in Variations, Af-Laawe’s guide status is problematised in relation to the
wider power games being played out on Mogadiscio’s streets. Shanta, the
mother of kidnapped Raasta, delivers the following indictment:
32
“[The] Imperial War Museum […] now offers two replicated environments to visitors: from
the First World War, The Trench Experience (the Somme in 1916), a walk-through complete
with taped sounds (exploding shells, cries) but odourless (no rotting corpses, no poison gas)”
(Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 109).
‘Terrible things are done to the bodies between the time they are collected in Af-Laawe’s
van and the time they are taken to the cemetery. A detour is made to a safe house, where
surgeons on retainer are on twenty-four hour call. These surgeons remove the kidneys and
hearts of the recently dead. Once these internal organs are tested and found to be in good
working order, they are flown to hospitals in the Middle East, where they are sold and
transplanted.’ (Links 208-9)
As with so many other features of this troubling text, what at first appears a
superficial aside might be interpreted as more-than-mere sensationalism. As
Scheper-Hughes, amongst others, suggests, a truly transnational economy in
the body-as-commodity can be traced along all too familiar trade routes
(Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 5). 33 As such, debates clustered around the
global phenomena of “postmodern forms of human sacrifice” intersect with
similarly pressing concerns being raised in the name of the post-nation/post-
human fallout: “the flow of organs follows the modern routes of capital: from
South to North, from Third World to First World, from poor to rich, from
black to brown to white, and from female to male” (Scheper-Hughes 209). It
is the process of forging such links, over space and time, which remains vital
(Wilkinson).
Accordingly, speculations about the possible new directions of Farah’s
forthcoming work might heed Zizek’s comments on the spectre of bio-
terrorism. 34 Here, the body not only becomes a potential incubator for
diseases that exist off the radar; it also threatens the porous borders of all
seemingly sovereign states: “a superpower bombing a desolate desert country
and, at the same time, hostage to invisible bacteria – this, not the WTC
explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare” (Zizek 37).
Whilst those thinkers and theories most commonly associated with
postmodernism can enrich our reading of texts like Links, it remains
imperative that we consider how such novels critique and reground some of
their more indulgent excesses. This appears particularly urgent when thinking
about the ubiquity of certain discussions about the ‘post-human.’ In the
interests of vigilance, both scholarly and geo-political, it becomes
33
Scheper-Hughes maintains that this is a truly postmodern phenomenon as it blurs early
modern and post-human/post-nation discourses: “at one level […] the commodification of
the body is a new discourse linked […] [to] the spread of global capitalism. […] But on
another level [it] is continuous with earlier discourses on the desire, need and scarcity of
human bodies and body parts for religious edification, healing, dissection, recreation and
sports, and for medical experimentation and practice” (3). See Cohen’s chapter, “The Other
Kidney: Biopolitics beyond Recognition,” (9-29).
34
Guillemin notes an ironic twist in his chapter “Bioterrorism and the Threat of Proliferation.”
In this context, NBC stands for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons rather than
National Broadcasting Corporation (149).
increasingly necessary to ask where these supposedly universal templates are

coming from, who is promoting them and for what purposes. In Links, as
throughout Farah’s fictional corpus, the body takes contested centre stage. As
such, it seems fitting to recall that Fanonian impulse that appears to drive
much of his finest work: “my final prayer: O my body, make of me always a
man who questions!” (Fanon 232).
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Russell West-Pavlov
Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing: Space and

Feminine Transgression in Fanon’s Sociologie d’une
révolution and Chraibi’s La Civilisation, ma mere!
In 1961, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon diagnosed

grave problems among the nation states emerging in the wake of
independence across the African continent. He saw an increasing gap
between the erstwhile colonial bourgeoisie, now the new ruling elites, and the
people, for whom, in many cases very little had changed. He warned that
national spirit might become “an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty”
(“une forme sans contenu, fragile, grossière”). He predicted a situation in
which “the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the
state. These are the cracks in the edifice which show the process of
retrogression that is so harmful to national effort and national unity” (WE
119) (“on passe de la nation à l’éthnie, de l’état au tribu. Ce sont ces lézardes
qui rendent compte des retours en arrière, si pénibles et si préjuciables à
l’essor national, à l’unité nationale”; Les Damnés 113).
Fanon’s polemic was largely directed towards a post-colonial middle-
class elite which continued to identify with metropolitan culture and sought
its own material betterment at the cost of the rural masses. Fanon’s language
explicitly included an architectural topos – that of the “cracks in the edifice”
(“lézardes”) – which resonates with his usage elsewhere of the common
synecdoche of the nation as house or home. In his best-known work Black
Skin, White Masks (trans. 1986) (Peau noire, masques blancs; French
original 1952), he had already written that “In Europe and every country
characterized as civilized or civilizing, the family is a miniature of the nation.
[…] There is no disproportion between the life of the family and the life of
the nation” (BSWM 143) (“En Europe et dans tous les pays dits civilisés ou
civilisateurs, la famille est un morceau de la nation. […] Il n’y a pas de
disproportion entre la vie familiale et la vie nationale”; Peau noire 115-16).
The nation-family synecdoche is an odd one, sitting uneasily alongside the
more common state-citizen copula (Chakrabarty 35, 36-37) and perhaps
pointing up a certain aporetic quality in the latter. Unsurprisingly, then, like
the borders of the nation state, a legacy of the colonial period which has
continued to dog the stability of postcolonial nations, the nation-family
synecdoche may be equally problem-laden. Paradoxically, just such a use of
164 Russell West-Pavlov
the family serves to figure the national liberation struggle in the propagandist
Résistance algérienne of May 1957 quoted at length by Fanon:
What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family
and the society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society
authenticates and legitimizes the family. (DC 66)
C’est que, dans les conditions normales, un double courant doit exister entre la famille et
l’ensemble social. Le foyer fonde la vérité sociale, mais la société authentifie et légitime la
famille. (Sociologie 49)
When it occurs as an index of revolutionary action, this evocation of the

closed Maghreb domicile may provoke perplexity, to say the least. There
appears to be a disturbing continuity between colonial metropolitan uses of
the family as national synecdoche and a postcolonial reinscription of the
same fraught trope.
Anne McClintock describes the synedochic use of the image of the family
to figure the nation as seemingly natural model for reconciling the conflictual
forces of historical change. The image of the family “sanctions national
hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests” – a “‘natural’ trope for
figuring national time” (McClintock 91). Fanon employs this synecdoche in
precisely this way: “The Algerian couple rids itself of its traditional
weaknesses at the same time that the solidarity of the people becomes a part
of history. This couple is no longer an accident but something rediscovered,
willed, built” (DC 114) (“Le couple algérien se dépouille de ses faiblesses
traditionnelles dans le même temps où la cohésion du peuple s’inscrit dans
l’histoire. Ce couple n’est plus un accident mais quelque chose de repris, de
voulu, de construit”; Sociologie 100). The family and its organic continuity
becomes a guarantor of historical progress only by virtue of the rejection of
one topos of continuity (tradition as accident) for another (progress as human
agency).
In this essay, I concentrate on the family and the house as its locus
classicus, as images for the nation, which translate some of the unease
gathering around the postcolonial nation. Like the space of the nation itself,
the notion of nation as family, or the household, is a synecdoche which has
been inherited from colonialism, not without generating a considerable
number of contradictions. These contradictions parallel those identified by
those feminist critics who see Fanon as collapsing feminine experience into
that of the nation, making them a metonymy of the nation, and their
revolutionary action merely designated and auxiliary (Moore 59; Fuss 27-28;
McClintock 98). In what follows, I shall place in apposition to one another
Fanon’s remarkable observations on the role of the family and that of the
Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing 165
women within it in the Algerian revolution in A Dying Colonialism (trans.

1994) (Sociologie d’une révolution, 1959) and Chraïbi’s fiction. I shall focus
in particular upon Fanon’s fascinating discussion of the transgression of the
household boundaries undertaken by Algerian women. I shall then compare a
fictional text, Chraïbi’s Mother Comes of Age (trans. 1984, 1998) (French
original, La civilisation, ma mère!…, 1972), which explores, albeit from a
slightly different angle, parallel problems of feminine transgression in a
fictional Morrocco from the 1930s to the 1950s. Both texts share an
overwhelmingly positive perspective upon feminine transgression. Fanon’s
text supports feminine transgression of traditional boundaries because of its
propagandist role in an ongoing war of liberation, while Chraïbi’s fiction
embraces the mother’s liberation by endowing it with an ambient fairy-tale
quality. Both texts, however, at second glance, prove to engage with feminine
liberation and its spatial aspects in more complicated ways evinced primarily
by their own internal contradictions. Rather than exploring the manner in
which feminine agency exceeds the limiting framework of a patriarchal (and)
nationalist project as other critics have done (Moore 59) I focus upon other
complications and contradictions within Fanon’s text. I highlight Fanon’s
need to ascribe patriarchal oppression to colonisation so as to make room for
unexpected resurgences of spatial restriction with the narrative of political
struggle, and place this in parallel to Chraïbi’s patent unease about the
presumption of his masculine narrators as they go about the process of
engineering their mother’s spatial emancipation.
Fanon’s Women on the Street
For all the radicalism of his attitudes to racism and its manifestations in Black
Skin, White Masks, Fanon appears to be remarkably conservative when it
comes to questions of gender. In his famed discussion of Fanon, Bhabha
cautions that “There are times when [Fanon] is too quick to name the Other,
to personalise its presence in the language of colonial racism” (Bhabha 60).
The same may be true of gender representations. While he embraces a stance
of radical constructivism with regard to racial identity – “The Negro is not.
Any more than the white man” (BSWM 231) (“Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus
que le blanc”; Peau noire 187) – he appears to be caught up a number of
stereotypical assumptions about gender as it functions within the racist
differential.
In particular his claims regarding the attitudes of ‘the’ white woman
towards ‘the’ black man are remarkably essentialist and merely instances of
reverse stereotyping: “when a [white] woman lives the fantasy of a rape by a

negro, it is some way the fulfilment of a private dream, of an inner wish”
(BSWM 179) (“Quand la femme vit le fantasme de viol par un nègre, c’est en
quelque sorte la réalisation d’un rêve personnel, d’un souhait intime”; Peau
noire 145). Equally surprising, but perhaps less offensive is his simple
admission of bafflement regarding the black woman: “Those who grant our
conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we
have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her” (BSWM
179-80) (“Admettant nos conclusions sur la psychosexualité de la femme
blanche, on pourrait nous demander celles que nos proposerions pour la
femme de couleur. Nous n’en savons rien”; Peau noire 145). In the light of
these attitudes, the contrast to the Fanon’s stance a decade later at the time of
his involvement in the Algerian revolution is striking:
The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with women’s
liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algiers or
Constantine, would carry grenades or automatic rifle magazines […] this woman […] at the
same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman.
(DC 107; translation modified)
La liberté du peuple algérien s’identifie alors à la libération de la femme qui, dans les
avenues d’Alger ou Constantine transporte les grenades ou les chargeurs de fusil-mitrailleur
[…] cette femme qui […] conjointement collabore à la destruction du colonialisme et à la
naissance d’une nouvelle femme. (Sociologie 93)
The stark contrast between Fanon’s positions in these two texts is all the
more striking for the distance between the quite retrograde statements in the
former passages and the politicised awareness of gender in the latter writings.
The crucial gear change in this remarkable contrast in attitudes to gender may
be located, paradoxically, in the later assessment of conservatism, and
particularly of spatial conservatism, as part of the liberation struggle rather
than its mere opposite.
Characterisations of the Algerian woman as a secluded figure locked into
the closed sphere of domesticity, “who before the Revolution never left the
house without being accompanied by her mother or her husband” (DC 59,
n14) (“qui, avant la Révolution ne sort jamais de la maison, si elle n’est pas
accompagnée de sa mère, ou de son mari”; Sociologie 43, n1), that is, as
governed by a regime of spatial restriction, occur on several occasions in
Fanon’s account of the Algerian revolution. However, rather than they do so
in two very specific contexts: first, as part of a defensive reaction to colonial
intrusion, and second as one tactic is the terrorist battle against the military
occupiers. Spatial restriction is thus recoded, in the descriptions of the
Algerian struggle, as part of a “strategic” deployment of spatial conservatism
(see for instance Spivak, In Other Worlds 205). But before analysing that
strategic conservatism in more detail, it may be worth presenting the
background to that specifically positioned tactical deployment of spatial
regimes of seclusion, namely, the extraordinary surge of feminine liberation
unleashed by the necessities of the struggle for liberation.
In explaining the entry of women into the revolutionary war, Fanon
initially appears to be caught up in a rhetorical dilemma that mirrors a more
practical dilemma of the revolutionary leadership itself. Involving women in
the armed struggle was not simply a matter of expanding the reserve of
combatants to include the whole nation: “involving the women was not solely
a response to the desire to mobilize the entire nation” (DC 48) (“engager les
femmes ne correspond pas seulement au désir de mobiliser l’ensemble de la
Nation”; Sociologie 30). Rather, Fanon explains, it involved modifying the
very mode of revolutionary tactics. The reasons for this are not made clear.
Initially, the text appears to be complicit, in its reticence about the hurdles to
female mobilisation, with the masculist reticence about admitting women into
the public sphere of revolutionary war (“the internal resistance was massive”
[DC 50; translation modified]; “les résistances intérieures se firent massives”
[Sociologie 32]), although it is notable that these passages are placed in the
past tense (Moore 61).
Swiftly, however, the text moves to a more pragmatic plane, explaining
that women had to overcome deep-seated inhibitions about entering the world
outside the home – inhibitions so deeply internalised that they have become
part of the bodily habitus. Fanon identifies a sort of agoraphobia experienced
by the cloistered woman upon first venturing into the street : “her body did
not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of
unfolded sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into” (DC 49)
(“son corps n’acquiert pas la mobilité normale en face d’un horizon illimité
d’avenues, de trottoirs, de gens évités, heurtés”; Sociologie 31); “When the
Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of
judgement as to the exact distance to be negotiated” (DC 59) (“Quand
l’Algérienne doit traverser une rue, pendant longtemps il y a erreur de
jugement sur la distance exacte à parcourir”; Sociologie 42). The “interior
resistance” initially ascribed to the revolutionary leadership is transferred to
the women themselves, and categorised as a possible handicap in their
participation in armed struggles in the public world.
However, what Fanon then maps is a rapid double transformation of the
spatial and social status of the once-enclosed woman: “the committed
Algerian woman learns both her role as ‘a woman alone in the street’ and her
revolutionary mission instinctively” (DC 50) (“l’algérienne engagée apprend
à la fois d’instinct son rôle de ‘femme seule dans la rue’ et sa mission

révolutionnaire”; Sociologie 32). Thus, “the revolutionary character of this
decision” (DC 51) (“le caractère révolutionnaire de cette décision”;
Sociologie 33) to involve women in the war of liberation makes gender one
aspect of what Régis Debray has called a revolution within the revolution
(Debray 114-209; see also Young 209).
Fanon constantly stresses that the emergence from the closed domain of
the home is an emergence from the barriers imposed by colonialism itself.
When the liberated woman moves into the street, she is not merely escaping
from her husband, but is escaping from the patriarchal closure imposed by
colonial urban planning. Fanon underlines the Manichean structure of the
Arab town and European town: “The European town is not a prolongation of
the native town. The colonisers […] have surrounded the native city; they
have laid siege to it. Every exit from the Kasbah of Algiers opens on enemy
territory” (DC 51-52) (“La ville européenne n’est pas le prolongement de la
ville autochtone. Les colonisateurs […] ont cerné la ville autochtone, ils ont
organisé le siège. Toute sortie de la Kasbah d’Alger débouche chez
l’ennemi” ; Sociologie 34). The colonial town surrounds the colonised town,
making this former and is an essential element in the military conquest of the
colony “The native cities are deliberately caught in the conqueror’s vise”
(DC 52) (“Les villes indigènes sont, de façon concertée, prises dans l’étau du
conquérant”; Sociologie 34). When the Algerian woman revolutionary starts
to penetrate into the European town in ways hitherto impossible (Sociologie
34-35), it would seem that the penetration of a modern urban area is less a
conquest of traditional restraints than a conquest of colonial siege structures.
It is therefore within the structure of a spatial dynamic that is in the first
instance colonialist (and only secondarily patriarchal) that Fanon places the
emancipation of Algerian women.
Fanon’s polemic suggests that the notion of the patriarchal Maghreb
society cannot be understood outside the system of Orientalist knowledge
which has dominated virtually all discourse about the colonised world.
According to the fundamental dialectic of Orienatalism, to speak of the
patriarchal hierarchies of Maghreb society is to instantiate by discursive
means the modernity of the West itself. At a more empirical level, Fanon
does not deny the existence of this patriarchy, but claims that its forms have
been generated in the relationship with the coloniser. Just as Fanon claims
that “It is the white man who creates the Negro” (DC 47) (“C’est le blanc qui
crée le nègre”; Sociologie 29), so he appears to suggest that the conservative
spatial regime of feminine seclusion, though part of patriarchal rule, has been
instigated and reinforced by colonisation. Thus, he seems to be claiming,
much of the rigidity or archaism of North African patriarchy is not inherent,

but a reaction to the intrusive, penetrative action of conquest itself.
Sequestration, in this reading, is a perfectly legitimate and rational reaction to
colonial violation. Fanon documents the literal homology of military
penetration of the country at the moment of colonisation: “The history of the
French conquest of Algeria including the overrunning of the villages by the
troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of the women” (DC 45)
(“L’histoire de la conquête française en Algérie relatant l’irruption des
troupes dans les villages, la confiscation des biens et le viol des femmes”;
Sociologie 27). This is nothing other, according to Fanon, than a further
offensive in a long-running invasion: “The Algerian woman is conceived of
as the platform for Western penetration into indigenous society” (DC 42;
translation modified) (“La femme algérienne [est] conçue comme support de
la pénétration occidentale dans la société autochtone”; Sociologie 24); “If we
want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance,
we must first of all conquer the women” (DC 37-38) (“Si nous voulons
frapper la société algérienne dans sa contexture, il nous faut d’abord
conquérir les femmes…”; Sociologie 19).
The colonisers’ attempts to modernise Algerian women, above all in
removing the veil, a corporeal metonymy of their domestic sequestration, is
part and parcel of these invasive strategies: “The dominant administration
solemnly undertook to defend this woman, humiliated, sequestered,
cloistered” (DC 38) (“L’administration dominante veut défendre
solennellement la femme humiliée, mise à l’écart, cloîtrée”; Sociologie 19).
Here we have the familiar prospect of colonisation legitimising its
undertakings by mobilising a discourse of gendered philanthropy (from the
notion of white men saving brown women from brown men in the Indian
context [see Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason 284] to more recent
justifications of US intervention in Afghanistan). The priority of colonising
agency is matched by the use of the passive form in connection with the
colonial subject: “Here and there it thus happened that a woman was ‘saved’,
and symbolically unveiled” (DC 42) (“Çà et là il arrive donc que l’on ‘sauve’
une femme qui, symboliquement, est dévoilée”; Sociologie 24). In particular,
European rhetoric demands the ripping away of the veil, the sartorial
equivalent of the cloistering of Arab women: “there is in the European the
crystallisation of an aggressiveness, the strain of a kind of violence before the
Algerian woman. To unveil this woman is to reveal her beauty, it is to lay
bare her hidden secret, break her resistance, make her available for a brief
affair” (DC 43; translation modified) (“il y a chez l’Européen cristallisation
d’une agressivité, mise en tension d’une violence en face de la femme
algérienne. Dévoiler cette femme, c’est mettre en évidence la beauté, c’est

mettre à nu son secret, briser sa résistance, la faire disponible pour
l’aventure” ; Sociologie 25-26). The linkage between the spatial ‘liberation’
of Algerian women, in European rhetoric, and sexual penetration, is made
manifest in the fantasy material analysed by Fanon the psychiatrist: “The
rape of an Algerian woman in the dreams of a European [man] is always
preceded by the rending of the veil” (DC 45) (“le viol de la femme algérienne
dans un rêve d’Européen est toujours précédé de la déchirure du voile”;
Sociologie 28).
Under these conditions, the spatial seclusion of the Algerian woman is
less a sign of tradition or conservatism than of resistance. It is thus that Fanon
can quote a text from Résistance algérienne of May 1957 in which the
cloistering of the Algerian woman, paradoxically, is presented as an integral
part of the liberation movement:
The Algerian woman’s ardent love of the home is not a limitation of her universe. It is not
hatred of the sun or the street or of public events. It is not a flight from the world. […] The
Algerian woman, in imposing such a restriction on herself, in choosing a spatially restricted
form of existence, was deepening her consciousness of struggle and preparing for combat.
(DC 66; translation modified)
L’amour du foyer si ardent chez l’Algérienne n’est pas limitation de l’univers. Ce n’est pas
haine du soleil ou des rues ou des spectacles. Ce n’est pas fuite du monde. […] La femme
algérienne, en s’imposant une telle restriction, en choisissant une forme d’existence limitée
dans l’espace, approfondissait sa conscience de lutte et se préparait pour le combat.
(Sociologie 49)
This astonishing equation of tradition and restriction with revolution and

liberation makes more sense, however, if it is seen as one aspect of the way
colonisation worked to “give rise to reactionary forms of behaviour on the
part of the colonized” (DC 46) (“provoquer chez le colonisé des
comportements réactionnels”; Sociologie 29). Fanon insists that “The
phenomena of resistance observed among the colonised must be related to an
attitude of counter-assimilation, of maintenance of cultural, national
originality and identity” (DC 42) (“Les phénomènes de résistance observés
chez le colonisé doivent être rapportés à une attitude de contre-assimilation,
de maintien d’une originalité culturelle, donc nationale”; Sociologie 24). The
notion of national unity is central here (see M’Bokolo 334-41). It is worth
citing once again the synedochic relationship posited by the 1957 editorial of
La résistance algérienne:
What is true is that under normal conditions, an interaction must exist between the family
and the society at large. The home is the basis of the truth of society, but society
authenticates and legitimizes the family. The colonial structure is the very negation of this
reciprocal justification. (DC 66)
C’est que, dans les conditions normales, un double courant doit exister entre la famille et
l’ensemble social. Le foyer fonde la vérité sociale, mais la société authentifie et légitime la
famille. La structure coloniale est la négation même de cette réciproque justification.
(Sociologie 49)
The cloistered existence of the Algerian woman thus becomes a spatial image
of the consolidation of the nation-in-liberation with its stable boundaries.
Once again, Fanon quotes La résistance algérienne:
This withdrawal, this rejection of an imposed structure, this falling back upon the fertile
kernel that a restricted but coherent existence represents, constituted for a long time the
fundamental strength of the occupied. […] What was important was that the occupier should
constantly come up against a unified front. This accounts for the aspect of sclerosis that
tradition must assume. (DC 66)
Cette fermeture, ce rejet d’une structure imposée, ce repliement sur le noyau fécond qui
représente une existence rétrécie, mais cohérente, constitue pendant longtemps la force
fondamentale de l’occupé. […] L’essentiel est que l’occupant bute constamment sur un front
unifié. D’où l’allure sclérosée qui doit revêtir la tradition. (Sociologie 50)
Patriarchy thus becomes, on the one hand, something that occurs in a process
of reaction formation, moulded in a defensive impulse by the aggressive
inroads of colonisation, and on the other hand, a conscious instrument in the
struggle for liberation. It is in the latter sense, for instance, that the veil is first
put off by Algerian women, and then, several years later in the struggle, is
taken up again. Fanon notes that the veil is abandoned from 1955 by women
posing as Europeans so as to pass unnoticed into the European town – and
from 1957 it returns, together with the long gown, worn so as to afford better
concealment for the transport of money, documents or weapons – the veil or
its absence as strategic elements of the armed struggle (Sociologie 44-47; DC
61-63). If we read the veil as the sartorial metonymy of a closed-up
existence, then it is a further instance of the contingency of tradition and its
re-encoding as militaristic strategic essentialism posited by Fanon.
During the revolution, the entire nation undergoes an experience of spatial
fragmentation, orchestrated for instance by the French colonial government’s
internment of tens of thousands of Algerians and their implementation of
other forms of demographic displacement: “With the enormous
displacements of segments of the population, the whole social panorama and
the perceptual frameworks are disturbed and restructured” (DC 117;
translation modified) (“Avec les déplacements considérables de populations,
c’est le panorama social, le monde de la perception qui sont perturbés et
restructurés”; Sociologie 103). What Fanon calls “Algeria Dispersed” (DC
118) (“L’Algérie dispersée”; Sociologie 105) has its synecdochic counterpart

at the level of the family: “the family, from being homogeneous and virtually
monolithic, is broken up” (DC 99; translation modified) (“la famille,
homogène et quasi monolithique, se brise”; Sociologie 83). The spatial
fragmentation of the nation as macro-family and of the family as micro-
nation go hand in hand and are causally connected to each other.
As already pointed out above, Fanon’s text displays a number of moments
of slippage as it attempts to reconcile feminine cloistering as a form of
reactive defence mechanism or revolutionary strategic essentialism with the
patent evidence of women’s equally revolutionary enhanced mobility outside
the home. It negotiates these contradictions by making patriarchy an effect of
colonialism. Thus Fanon can say that
the colonized father at the time of the fight for liberation, gave his children the impression of
indecisiveness, or avoiding taking sides, indeed, of adopting an evasive or irresponsible
attitude. […] This experience occurs at a national level and is part of the great upheaval
which founds a new world which was felt throughout the territory. (DC 100; translation
modified)
le père colonisé, au moment de la lutte de Libération, donne à ses enfants l’impression d’être
indécis, d’éviter l’option, voire d’adopter des conduites de fuite et d’irresponsabilité. […]
Cette expérience, en effet, se déroule à l’échelon national et s’intègre à la grande secousse
fondatrice d’un monde nouveau, ressentie sur toute l’étendu du territoire. (Sociologie 84).
The difficult syntax of Fanon’s prose betrays the effort needed here to
homogenise the Algerian liberation struggle, and to engineer an isomorphism
between the disparate levels of the family and that of the nation. The
synecdoche between colonised father (in both the strong and the weak senses
of the word colonised) and the nation allows the fragmentation of the family
as micro-nation to transpire as the unification of the nation as macro-family.
What appears to be a deeply traumatic experience at the level of the family,
“loses its noxious character” (DC 141; translation modified) (“perd sa
nocivité”; Sociologie 84) and becomes a liberating experience, in Fanon’s
account, at the level of the nation. Thus the synecdoche of family and nation,
itself a legacy of colonial rule, involves a reversal of semantic valency from
micro- to macro-level. The synecdoche is explicitly spatialised at the end of
the passage quoted. The closure of the household opens up the expanse of the
national territory as the scope of this revolutionary transformation.
The oppression exercised by the father upon the family, in Fanon’s
reading, is simply a function of the oppression that he himself experiences at
the hands of the colonising power. The loss of his patriarchal status is that
symptomatic of the evaporation of the colonising power itself, and signals the
liberation of the nation as a whole: “This defeat of the father by the new
forces that were emerging could not fail to modify the traditional
relationships that had formerly prevailed in Algerian society” (DC 105)
(“Cette défaite du père par les nouvelles forces qui émergent de la Patrie ne
peut laisser intacts les rapports anciens qui ordonnaient la société
algérienne”; Sociologie 90). The paradoxical collision of two masculine
entities – father vs. Fatherland / père vs. Patrie – results in their emancipatory
decoupling, allowing the transformation of spatial fragmentation at the level
of the family to trigger the spatial coagulation of the nation as “the all-
embracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole people […] the
immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people” (WE
119) (“la cristallisation coordonée des aspirations les plus intimes de
l’ensemble du people […] le produit immediat le plus palpable de la
mobilisation populaire”; Les Damnés 113). Fanon’s vision here is patently
utopian, as “the glaring incommensurability between women’s anti-colonial
militancy and their disenfranchisement in independent Algeria” has amply
demonstrated (Moore 57). Critics have suggested that the veil as an index of
conservatism and as a metonymy of feminine spatial restriction was not
merely a reaction to a specific colonial context, but had much deeper roots in
religious prescription and entrenched patriarchal custom: “Fanon
underestimates the influence of religio-cultural determinants and tenacious,
local forms of patriarchy” (Moore 62). Such powerful substrata of
conservatism re-emerged intact after independence, with the very spatial
liberation championed by Fanon being reversed, and old restrictions being re-
established: “we had broken down all the barricades, [but] in 1962 the
barricades were put back in place again” (Baya Hocine, qtd. in Amrane-
Minne 146, translation Moore 62).
Chraïbi’s Mother on the Street
In the second part of this essay I examine another attempt to negotiate

comparable contradictions within feminine spatial liberation in Driss
Chraïbi’s 1970 novel Mother Comes of Age (La civilisation, ma mère! ...)
The novel is a sustained and affectionate evocation of a mother by her two
sons. The first part, set in 1930s Morocco, is narrated by the younger of the
two sons, “the little rascal” (“le petit loustic”), and portrays the mother’s
emergence from the strict sequestration reserved for Muslim in highly
traditional contexts:
the very intelligent man who had married her in her puberty […] had done nothing more
than apply the letter of the law. Religiously. He had closed her up in the house from the day
of their marriage until the day we had made her come outside. She had never once crossed
the threshold. She had never even thought of it. (MCA 54)
l’homme très intelligent qui l’avait épousée en pleine puberté […] n’avait fait qu’appliquer
la loi. Religieusement. L’avait enfermée dans sa maison depuis le jour des noces et jusqu’à
cet après-midi-là où nous l’en avions fait sortir. Jamais elle n’en avait franchi le seuil.
Jamais elle n’en avait eu l’idée. (La civilisation 68)
The second part is related by the elder brother, Nagib, and continues the
narrative of the mother’s emancipation as she becomes involved in the
revolutionary period of the post-war era. The dual structure of the text is
reflected in the apposition inherent in the title (an apposition with ironic
intention, if one believes the author [Bouraoui 60]), between maternity and
civilisation, terms which the text brings together on one axis (the character of
the mother), but also pulls apart on another (the split narrative structure and
differing narrative perspectives thus generated). This tension is underlined by
the spatial centrifugal dynamic accompanying the dual structure of the
narration: both the first and the second parts are closed-off by a departure.
Part one ends with the departure of “the little rascal” (“le petit loustic”) for
study in Paris; part two finishes with the mother’s isomorphic departure for
France, accompanied, at the last moment, by her son Nagib. This novel
epitomises Maghreb writing as a disaporic literary tradition. Indeed, Chraïbi
himself has termed it a “literature of departure” (Marx-Scouras 137; see also
Abdalaoui 27). Thus the mother’s spatial emancipation as portrayed by an
already fragmented text, uneasily takes its place in a larger tradition of spatial
unrest. It is thus, from the outset, and despite its won best intentions, riven by
contradictions at different scales of narrative scope (individual, male or
female, family, nation, literary culture).
In a manner roughly parallel to Fanon, the transformation of the family
goes hand in hand with anti-colonial emancipation, thus implicitly proposing
as the text’s underlying model the family or household as synecdoche for the
nation. Once again, however, the text evinces a prominent, if only implicitly
marked tension between national unity and open household, via the
centrifugal vector of departure. The openness of the household, its status as
the point of departure for demographic depletion, may threaten the integrity
of the nation as community. This threat cannot be banished by neatly making
the second departure a mission to recuperate the younger son from his
Parisian exile and cultural alienation (see Bouraoui 60) – that is, a departure
which implicitly projects a return journey. That potential return, however,
lies beyond the text’s own diegetic limits, in an as-yet-unwritten and thus
uncertain future.
That gesture of recuperation itself is indicative of the text’s own impulse
to downplay these tensions. The journey’s incompletion, however, it is
equally indicative of the text’s refusal to curtail those tensions altogether.
Initially, the metaphors used to portray their mother’s emancipation are
ostentatiously organic, suggesting an unproblematic resolution of the aporia
of liberation narratives: “She was a tree shut up in a prison courtyard, but one
that would bud and burst into blossom at the slightest breath of spring” (MCA
26) / “Elle était un arbre, cerclé dans une cour de prison, mais que le moindre
souffle de printemps pouvait faire bourgeonner et fleurir avec luxuriance”
(La civilisation 25). But the process of emancipation is sometimes portrayed
in quite different terms, as a violent process of almost catastrophic nature:
“then suddenly and all together the external world and the violence of
freedom descended before her and upon her like an equinoctial deluge. She
was frightened” (MCA 68; translation modified) (“Alors, brusquement et tous
ensemble, le monde extérieur et la violence de la liberté s’étaient abattus
devant et sur elle comme un déluge d’équinoxe, elle en avait peur”; La
civilisation 83-84). The tumultuous emotions aroused by this process of
spatial emancipation are not merely the result of apprehension, but more
acutely, of a clear knowledge of the problematic character of the syncronicity
of the asynchronous [“Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen”] (Bloch 153).
The tempo of modernity remains contiguous to the incarcerating stasis of
archaism:
“freedom is a bitter thing”, she said in a sort of whisper, “It brings suffering in its wake. […]
It does not solve the problem of loneliness. You see, I’m going to tell you something. I
wonder whether you and Nagib have done the right thing by opening the gates of my prison.
[…] I have to go back to that prison every night. Just like before.” (MCA 72-73)
– La liberté est poignante, dit-elle à mi-voix. Elle fait parfois souffrir. […] Elle ne résout
pas le problème de la solitude, tu vois, je vais te dire : je me demande si vous avez bien fait,
Nagib et toi, d’ouvrir la porte de ma prison. […] Cette prison, je suis bien obligée d’y rentrer
le soir. Comme avant… comme avant… (La civilisation 98)
In this context, emancipation is only partial, taking place in a largely

untransformed topography of ongoing sequestration.
What is most problematic is that such a liberty, forced upon the subaltern
subject by others who see themselves as the representatives of modernity, are
its manifold ambivalences. The play of various centres of agency in the
giving of liberty are significant in this context. The sons, in their own
account, “gave her a polished steel mirror so she could judge the effect
herself, but it was in our eyes that she saw herself” (MCA 50) (“lui donnâmes
un miroir en acier poli afin qu’elle pût juger de son propre effet – mais c’était
dans nos yeux qu’elle se contemplait”; La civilisation 63). The gift of self-
reflexivity installs a novel relationship of selfhood, but nevertheless appears
to maintain a relay via alterity which merely replaces one relationship of
dependence with another: the naked power of the father is replaced by the
epistemological power of the sons. Indeed, such a ‘gift’ of liberty may take
on the appearances of a form of privation, especially when it undercuts the
very sources of selfhood upon which cultural agency is based:
What I kept tenaciously in my sights were the layers of ignorance, of conditioned thinking
and of false values which held her prisoner deep inside herself. […] Day after day I
encouraged her to call her own past into question. (MCA 66-67)
Ce que je visais, tenacement, c’était la carapace d’ignorance, d’idées reçues et de fausses

valeurs qui la maintenaient prisonnière au fond d’elle-même. […] Jour après jour, je
l’amenais à remettre en cause son propre passé. (La civilisation 90)
The sons pursue the active destruction of past, of tradition, of the sources of
their mother’s identity: ostensibly in order to free her to full selfhood, but
only by freeing her from that self-same selfhood! Modernity emerges here as
a radical form of rupture which releases the self from its selfhood, into
another form of being which, far from being self-determining, may be
equally other-determined. The prison of selfhood is a metaphor which
equates selfhood and house. Release into the wider world generates the sort
of anxious vertigo documented by Fanon in his discussions of newly
independent Algerian women: “What will your father say? … No, no, no. I
can’t do it. … […] Let’s go right back into the house. … You know very well
that I’ve never been outside of it” (MCA 52-53) (“Mais que va dire votre père
… non, non, non, je ne peux pas… […] Retournons vite à la maison… Vous
savez bien que je n’en suis jamais sortie…”; La civilisation 66). The
mother’s anxiety is not merely an index of the shock of the new (“Colours are
too intense for her and have almost astigmatized her from the corner of the
street on” [MCA 53]; “Les couleurs sont trop vives pour elle et l’ont comme
astigmatisée dès le coin de la rue” [La civilisation 67]). Far more, this
anxiety betrays the manner in which the driving force of modernity tramples
rough shod over the complex networks of experience, habitus and meaning
which it aspires to transform. In so doing, it comes dangerously close to
replicating the very elision of subaltern agency which it seeks to counteract.
This is the central tension identified by Chraïbi in his narrative of feminine
emancipation.
An even more sinister facet of this aggressive pedagogical impulse is

revealed by the language of veiling used by the younger brother: “I taught her
about her body, Yes, with calm persistence. […] Taboos, modesty,
inhibitions all were stripped away veil by veil” (MCA 66) (“Je lui appris son
corps. Oui. Avec un acharnement tranquille. […] Taboues, pudeurs, hontes,
je les mettais à bas, voile après voile”; La civilisation 89). The ripping-off of
the veil is commonly associated with the penetration of the confined, hidden
enclosure of the feminine world, and in turn resonates with the invasive
action of colonisation itself. The sons thus take up a position which is that of
the coloniser within the colonised world, one which is coeval with the status
of the father.
Clearly the aporia of feminine emancipation are situated in different
locations by Fanon and Chraïbi. Fanon struggles with the ways in which
masculine power may be at the same time a function of colonial oppression,
and the manner in which the fragmentation of the household may be
reconcilable with the unity of the nation. Chraïbi, in contrast, confronts the
ways in which spatial emancipation may falls back into new forms of
feminine oppression, and new configurations of sequestration. None the less,
the rhetorical resources used to express these aporia are those of the house as
locus classicus of sequestration, but also of belonging and cultural coherence:
“Let’s go right back into the house” (MCA 53) (“retournons vite à la
maison…”; La civilisation 66).
Fanon may attempt to mitigate patriarchal power in the Maghreb,
explaining it as a reactive hypercorrection resulting from the inroads of
colonisation; no such explanatory attempt is undertaken by Chraïbi. On the
contrary, colonisation and patriarchy are collapsed into one another, making
the former a derivative of the latter. After a very early sortie into the world
outside the house, the text tells us that “a few days later the trapdoor of
colonisation closed down on her again” (MCA 26; translation modified)
(“quelques jours plus tard, retomba sur elle la trappe de la colonisation”; La
civilisation 25).
Chraïbi discretely mobilises counter-discourses. The patent presumption,
self-aggrandisement and insensibility of the two brothers’ emancipationist
education, though buffered somewhat by the book’s ambient affectionate
humour, is most effectively countered by words put in the mother’s mouth:
“I don’t need any help. […] Not from you or anyone else. I am conscious now and entirely
responsible for my own life. Do you understand that? I haven’t just freed my self from the
custody of your father in order to come asking for your protection, no matter how big you
are.” (MCA 97)
– Je n’ai pas besoin d’aide. […] Ni de toi ne de personne. Je suis à présent consciente,
entièrement responsable de ma vie, entends-tu ? Je ne suis pas en train de me libérer de la
tutelle de ton père pour venir te demander ta protection, tout grand gaillard que tu es. (La
civilisation 136-37)
But a more significant riposte is one couched in the language of maternity:

“I’m older than you are. I gave birth to you and not the other way around, if
I’m not mistaken” (MCA 43; translation modified) (“Je suis plus âgée que toi.
C’est moi qui t’ai enfanté, et non le contraire, il me semble”; La civilisation
54). The image of birthing is, after all, a spatial one. The maternal body
nurtures the foetus and then releases it into the world, just as the mother will
later release the child into the larger world beyond the nurturing home. Here
it is the mother who commands the agency to emancipate – in spatial terms –
her children: “She was far more effective at teaching me human geography
than any of my books or teachers. Without leaving the house, she had
established an intricate network of links that became more tangled with every
passing day. […] Public relations avant la lettre” (MCA 46 ; translation
modified) (“Elle était capable de m’enseigner la géographie humaine bien
mieux que ne l’avaient jamais fait mes livres ou mes professeurs. Sans quitter
la maison, elle avait établi un réseau inextricable de liens. […] Les relations
humaines avant la lettre”; La civilisation 58). The mother and the home may
be equated, but the creation of a topography of sustainable liberation, that is,
one based in a durable community of human relations, goes beyond the
boundaries of the home in a way more radical than the sons’ corrosive spatial
pedagogy. When, at the end of the novel, the leaves behind both the home
and the nation-as-home, her departure is what allows the older brother,
Nagib, also to leave – taking the family contours with her, as it were, beyond
the boundaries of the post-colonial nation.
In a sense, Chraïbi’s the text grapples with an unsaid problem, namely,
that of the split narrative consciousness of its two fraternal narrators. This
split narrative is itself an index of their own split project, exemplary as it is of
the “paradox, identified by Freud and articulated by Lacan, [of] the
manifestation of aggression at the very moment we set out to do good”
(Rutherford 10). It is also an index of the aporetic projet of spatial
emancipation, torn between the will to liberate and the will to invade. Where
Fanon is concerned to reconcile the unity of the house of the nation with the
disunity of the household, Chraïbi confronts this problem by making the
dissent latent in the very action of liberation the driving force of a diasporic
impulse across the boundaries of nation and beyond. Chraïbi harnesses the
centrifugal dynamic of modernity itself – from the closed world to the infinite
universe, in Koyré’s famous formulation (Koyré) – to spring over the
boundaries of its own brain child, the nation-state. The nation-state is the
form that emerges as the world is “disenchanted” (Weber 155), as space
undergoes a process of “emptying” (Giddens 18), generating a need to
replace the dwindling power of religious values by other forms of communal
bonding.
Yet the nation itself, as the geopolitical template handed down to
postcolonial societies on the eve of independence, is already outmoded,
outstripped by its own modernity, as it comes into force. Fanon, writing as he
did in 1959 Algeria from the midst of a struggle for a liberation not yet
achieved, still believed in the salutary and necessary role of the nation, and
was thus obliged to work to reconcile the house-nation synecdoche. By 1961,
his scepticism was growing: “The moment for a fresh national crisis is not far
off” (WE 150) (“L’heure d’une nouvelle crise nationale n’est pas loin”; Les
Damné 139). And by 1972, the year Chraïbi’s Mother Comes of Age / La
civilisation, ma mère!… was published, this scepticism had taken root deeply,
as diaspora rather than the nation appeared on the horizon as a new paradigm
of cultural identification.
Works Cited
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African Literatures 23.4 (1992): 9-33.
Amrane-Minne, Danièle Djamila. Des Femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie.
Paris: Karthala, 1994.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Bloch, Ernst. Ungleichzeitikeit und das Geschichtsbild der Moderne.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988.
Bouraoui, Hédi. “Ambivalence structuro-culturelle dans La civilisation, ma
mère!… de Chraïbi.” Modern Language Studies 10.2 (1980): 59-68.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Chraïbi, Driss. Mother Comes of Age. Trans. Hugh A. Harter. Boulder CO:
Three Continents/Lynne Riener, 1998. Trans. of La civilisation, ma
mère!… 1972. Paris: Gallimard/folio, 1980.
Debray, Régis. Révolution dans la révolution? Et autres essais. Paris:
Maspero, 1972.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markman.
London: Pluto, 1986. Trans. of Peau noire, masques blancs 1952.
Paris: Seuil/Points, 1971.
——., A Dying Colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove

Press, 1994. Trans. of Sociologie d’une révolution (L’an V de la
révolution algérienne). 1959. Paris: Maspero, 1968.
——., The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Contance Farrington.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Trans. of Les Damnés de la terre.
Paris: Maspero, 1961.
Fuss, Diana. “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of
Identification.” Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 20-42.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
Koyré, Alexander. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957.
Marx-Scouras, Danielle. “A Literature of Departure: The Cross-Cultural
Writing of Driss Chraïbi.” Research in African Literatures 23.2
(1992): 131-44.
M’Bokolo, Elikia. L’Afrique au XXe siècle: Le continent convoité. Paris:
Seuil/Points, 1985.
McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and
Nationalism.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial
Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat.
Moore, Lindsey. “The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria
Unveiled’ and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.” Kunapipi
25.2 (2003): 56-73.
Rutherford, Jennifer. The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White
Australian Fantasy. Carlton VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2000.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999.
——., In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge,
1988.
Weber, Max. Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001.
Part III
Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heterotopia

Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara
Negotiating Dislocated Identities in the Space of Post-

Colonial Chaos: Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting
Writing and Dislocation
Conflicts dominated the twentieth century, and are steadily becoming part of
the structuring forces of the twenty-first century global order. These conflicts
take the form of inter-state and inter-ethnic/civil wars and strife within states,
and military occupations of other nations. Violence has thus come to define
the contemporary world; and as its result, displacements have occurred, and
the number of the dislocated and migrants worldwide continues to increase.
Caren Kaplan points out to the need to scrutinise this trend:
As travel, changing locations, and leaving home become central experiences for more and
more people in modernity, the difference between the ways we travel, the reasons for our
movements, and the terms of our movement in this dynamic must be historically and
politically accounted for. (102)
Migrations of the displaced within, and from, violence-prone nations are thus
opening up new debates and discourses on borders and spaces; as well as on
the resultant identities that are being assumed and negotiated.
African postcolonies have been among those nations most adversely
affected by war and violence. Not long after the end of Western colonisation
of Africa in the late 1950s – 1970s, African nations started experiencing
various forms of authoritarianism perpetuated by post-independence leaders.
And partly because of the failure by the post-independence political
leaderships to establish credible institutions to ensure justice and good
equitable use of available national resources, coups, counter-coups, and
protracted civil wars became common occurrences in many African
countries.
In East Africa, and generally what is referred to as the Great Lakes region
(the geographical area that comprises Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda,
Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the effects of war and
violence have been immense, and their manifestations in socio-cultural
aspects diverse and varied. The histories of Rwanda, Uganda, and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo are the most problematised. Rwanda’s
1994 Genocide claimed the lives of an estimated one million Tutsis and
184 Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara
moderate Hutus and was attributable to, among other factors, a colonial
legacy that endowed certain groups with racial identity perceived to be
superior to others, and the failure by postcolonial governments to dismantle
such systems of differentiation (Mamdani 2002). This was a tragedy whose
ramifications in terms of displacements and trans-national migrations have
been massive. Though Rwanda itself is slowly stabilising, the eastern region
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is immersed in insurgencies
that are partly associated with the Hutu/Tutsi displacements of 1994 and the
intervening years.
In Uganda, there have been the socio-political mutations of Milton
Obote’s reductionist politics and latent authoritarianism (1962-1971; and the
period 1980-1985, referred to as Obote II); Idi Amin’s outrageous, anomic
militarism (1971-1979); various subsequent weak caretaker regimes;
Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) dispensation of “no party
democracy” (1986 to date); and the myriad brutal Northern rebellions
(Odiemo-Munara), of which the ongoing one is that being spearheaded by
Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This has since degenerated
into a war not only restricted to northern Uganda but also eastern DRC, parts
of the Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic. The violent history
has had long-lasting effects on both the socio-cultural and economic spheres
of Uganda.
The postcolony, in Achille Mbembe’s understanding of it as an entity that
“identifies specifically given historical trajectory – that of societies recently
emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the
colonial relationship, par excellence, involves” (“Provisional Notes” 3), in
East Africa emerges as a space of competing political and economic interests.
In Mbembe’s argument:
the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic, yet it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a

specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes.
It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-
reflectively […] [it] is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a
tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which identities
are multiplied, transformed and put into circulation. (3)
In the postcolony, therefore, are played various dramas of power, authority

and resistance by both the leaders and the perceived subjects.
It is postcolonial literature that captures the disillusionment, desperation,
and also resistance, by the people most vividly. In this literature, questions of
national liberation struggles and the subsequent political independence, the
emerging political elite and their connivance in the production and
Negotiating Dislocated Identities 185
perpetuation of narrow exclusivist, most times ethnic, nationalisms, find

space for interrogation. Indeed, as Francoise Lionett has argued:
Literature as a discursive practice that encodes and transmits as well as creates ideology, is a
mediating force in society: it structures our sense of the world since narrative stylistic
conventions and plot resolutions serve to either sanction and perpetuate cultural myths, or to
create new mythologies that allow the writer and the reader to engage in constructive re-
writing of their social contexts. (205)
Thus, in postcolonial literature, there emerges a sustained critical

interrogation of the African (post)colonial crisis and what Frederick Cooper
has called:
a simultaneous awareness of how colonial regimes exercised power and the limits of that
power, an appreciation of the intensity with which that power was confronted and the
diversity of futures that people sought for themselves, an understanding of how and why
some of those futures were excluded from the realm of the politically feasible, and an
openness to possibilities for the future that can be imagined today. (40)
Such a tendency is part of a vast tradition. Starting with the Iliad, it is

literature, in its various forms, that has most consistently and effectively
performed the crucial task of meditating the most extreme and deadly
realities of human experience. Thus European literature has continued to
wrestle with the difficult meanings of the violent 20th century history of its
homeland: The Balkan wars, two world wars, the racial anti-Semitism that
led to the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” the genocide of minority
peoples, and a constellation of civil wars. The list of books written with these
events weighing on the mind is long and unending. Paul Fussel, in his
unparallelled The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), brilliantly
evaluated the overwhelming literature on the First World War in particular.
Outside Europe, the Vietnam conflict, for example, has given rise to an
“immense body of memoirs, histories, analyses, novels and other responses”
(Shippey 19). In an appendix to his The Perfect War (1986), James William
Gibson provides a brief survey of that literature. All in all, writing that strives
to represent war has become an art sui generis, and one that is constantly
evolving, in its search to convey messages that are both freshly revealing and
convincing.
In the course of some half a century, war writing has proliferated in
African literature too, with some of the most startling recent examples
coming from young writers. Similarly, the study of that writing has started in
earnest. During the 2006 Modern Language Association Convention in
Philadelphia, at least three of the arranged programs, comprising paper
presentations and discussions, focused on the most “burning” issues: The

Rhetoric of Genocide; African Writers in Exile; and Writing about War [in
Africa] (Program 1900; 1941; 1958).
Uganda’s post-independence literature, to a large degree, has been
concerned with the examination of the violation of the socio-cultural spheres
of that country. Robert Serumaga’s Return to the Shadows (1969), intricately
burrows into the causes of post-independence conflicts in Uganda. It narrates
the 1966 event in Uganda in which Milton Obote, then Prime Minister,
violently confronted the forces of the Kabaka of Buganda, eventually
establishing himself as the President of the Ugandan Republic. In a way,
Obote had sanctioned violence as a means of “resolving” conflicts. S. R.
Karugire comments that the “period between May 1966 and January 1971
was a very uneasy one […] in Uganda for then the country had a civilian
administration which employed military methods and means to implement
whatever policies they chose” (177).
Other texts that capture the violence of the Ugandan state at various
points in time include, among others, Grace Ibingira’s Bitter Harvest (1980),
John Nagenda’s The Seasons of Thomas Tebo (1986), John Ruganda’s The
Floods (1980), Magala-Nyago’s The Rape of the Pearl (1985), Alex
Mukulu’s Thirty Years of Bananas (1993), Arthur Gakwandi’s Kosiya Kifefe
(1997), and Moses Isegawa’s The Abyssinian Chronicles (2000). These
writers lament the “desecration” of the Ugandan independence dream and the
dehumanisation of the country’s people through subjection to brutalities of
power.
Peter Nazareth best depicts issues concerning the strained racial relations
in Uganda in his In a Brown Mantle (1972) and its sequel The General is Up
(1991). In these texts, Nazareth, in part, bemoans the cruelty and inhumanity
unleashed on the East African Asian community because of narrow
perceptions of identity, culture and belonging by the post-independent East
African political establishments. Nazareth also critiques the creation of
unnecessary, otherising ambivalences by the Asian people.
Mary Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil (1998) takes a wide-ranging view of
the annihilistic nature of the different regimes in Uganda’s independence
history, and shows how they managed to construct the Ugandan postcolony.
Okurut particularly focuses on the violation of the national morality and
ethos, and the tough circumstances that subalternised groups such as women,
children and the elderly find themselves in. However, these
“underprivileged” groups, especially the women, are shown to be in perpetual
struggle to create a society ruled by justice and moral orderliness. This is an
important undertaking on the part of Ugandan writers who seek particularly

to encentre women in Ugandan history. As Mahmood Mamdani argues:
The regime [of Idi Amin] tried to use the mantle of morality to mask policies and practices
that were destructive to women physically and psychologically. It created an atmosphere
that caused women to be perceived as the enemy of national morality, and this paved the
way for groups and individuals to inflict violence on women. (Imperialism and Fascism 54-
55)
It is in this corpus of writing endeavouring to see the debilitating effects of

war and violence in the East African society, and Uganda in particular, that
Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War (2007, hereafter
referred to as Waiting) is situated. This novel stands out in the way it visions
human interactions and relationships in times of suffering.
Kyomuhendo occupies a central space in Uganda’s postcolonial literature.
She is an essayist, children’s storywriter, short-story writer, and novelist. Her
first published work, The First Daughter (1996), is a story about temptations
of growing up for a teen-age high school girl. The girl becomes pregnant and
is rejected by her father. However, this rejection does not diminish her hopes.
She develops a strong resilience that enables her struggle through her
education to obtain a law degree.
It is, however, in Secrets No More (1999) that Kyomuhendo demonstrates
her creative growth as a novelist capable of exploring labyrinthined socio-
cultural and political issues emerging in the East African society. In this
novel:
Public and private history are inextricably intertwined to create a strong woman figure who
goes through a series of harrowing experiences but devises such emotional, psychological
and moral ways of dealing with them, that she overcomes their traumatic effect to become a
steady and complete person as well as a dependable member of society. (Ilieva and Odiemo-
Munara, “Strategies” 260-61)
Waiting is the object of our discussion in this article. Its depiction of the
horrors of war and violence in contemporary Africa forms the basis of our
examination of the various ways in which chaos necessitates rethinking of
stable ethnic/national notions of belonging, migration, language, and social
interaction. We argue that experiences of war and violence bring forth
sustained identity negotiations and constructions.
Waiting: An Emerging Community
In Waiting, Kyomuhendo’s focus is on a small village group that on the

surface seems peripherally defined, powerless and subjugated. But as Michel
Foucault has argued, “[p]ower must be analysed as something which
circulates, or as something which only functions in the form of a chain. […]
Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. […]
Individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application”
(Power/Knowledge 98). Thus in this small group, we see various enactions of
power and resistance to it; in the process of which members of the group
create their own desirable world where they “continuously renew and
maintain power relations” (Mills 52). In as much as the state plays a
somewhat prominent role, and in this case a violent one, in the exercising of
power, relations of power play surpass it
because the state, for the omnipotence of its apparatuses, is far from being able to occupy
the whole field of actual power relations, and further because the state can only operate on
the basis of other, already existing power relations. The state is superstructural in relation to
a whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship,
knowledge, technology, and so forth. (Foucault, The Foucault Reader 64)
Kyomuhendo’s is a mosaic community that is invariably taking a new shape

with the continued enactment of Amin’s violent politics and in its own
re/negotiation of different power networks. It is in this sense that this
community is seen as an emerging, an ever evolving one in accordance with
the prevailing circumstances and conditions.
Mbembe (2007) delineates the philosophy of “Afropolitanism” as
Awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the
here and vice versa, the relativisation of primary roots and memberships and the way of
embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness and remoteness, the
ability to recognise one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of
remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar, to work with what seem to be
opposites. (28)
This formulation is useful in the reading of Waiting and the strategies it

employs in depicting war and violence, and how human beings who find
themselves in such situations resist subjugation by mapping new paradigms
to re/define their lives.
Abasi Kiyimba holds that “[f]or the literary character of Uganda, the
Amin experience was a significant turning point, because it inspired large
volumes of literature” (124). Waiting is part of this literary inspiration. It
delves into the last year of Idi Amin’s despotic militarist regime. The allied
exiled Ugandan and Tanzanian forces are advancing and Amin’s army can no
longer put up significant resistance. The soldiers are thus on the run towards
the northern parts of Uganda, in a bid to escape the advancing “liberating”
forces. And as they frantically make their way to the north, they mete out
horror and terror on innocent civilians.
The soldiers are engaged in a frenzied destruction as they use the local
highway to escape. They engage in delirious orgies of rape, murder and other
bestialities. The dehumanised soldiers callously confess to being interested in
nothing else but “food, women and money” (37). The people, at the
individual, communal and national level, are left hanging in an unpredictable
season of “waiting,” unsure of what is to befall them.
Waiting employs the narrative voice of a thirteen-year old girl, Alinda.
This is an important strategy that is used to advance the novel’s concern with
possibilities open to a people in times of violence, especially those of
negotiating and constructing new identities. In Madelaine Hron’s argument,
“[t]he space of childhood is a space of hybridity, possibility and, most
importantly, resistance” (29). Hron views childhood as representing “a
particularly resistant space, of complex, on-going negotiation and articulation
of difference that is perhaps not as readily accessible in the stable, socially
constructed world of adults” (30). In her use of Alinda as the narrator,
therefore, Kyomuhendo develops fluidity in the narrative; the space is open
for one to continue re/thinking issues of transformation – individual,
communal, and national.
The novel starts with the unsettling, destabilising sense of the not exactly
specific but inevitable horror and terror approaching:
It was Saturday evening. Tendo was perched high up on one of the inner branches of the big
mango tree, which threw hazy shadows over the large compound. Its leaves trembled despite
the lack of wind, and one wafted slowly down from the branch and fell before us. (3)
Tendo, Alinda’s elder brother, is acting as sentry to watch out for the
impending danger posed by the fleeing soldiers. The others have to be ready
to run once this “danger” is identified. Kaaka, the elder woman in this
emerging community, reminds Alinda’s mother, who is expecting a baby:
“you must finish that food. […] You’ll need energy to push out that child
[…] to run” (3). The life to be lived here is that of running, and these people
are uncertain of when the running will commence.
Thus, apart from Kaaka, they have to sleep away from their houses, in a
place where, together, and shielded away in the thicket by the banana
plantations, they feel a sense of security:
Darkness was gathering. Kaaka had already gone to her house. […] Maya came out carrying
Mother’s sleeping things: a mat and two blankets folded together and tied with a sisal string.
Father walked ahead. He had tucked the heavy coat under his arm. Tendo held the spear
while I carried the sleeping blanket that I would share with Maya. (5)
Kaaka, who rejects “running” herself, because “[a]t my age, what I have
seen, I have seen. What I have eaten, I have eaten” (4), falls victim later on
when the soldiers eventually “visit” and she is brutally murdered. This
murder scene at once demonstrates her defiance and the “subversive
recodifications of power relations” (Foucault, The Foucault Reader 64); and
brings out the banal nature of the Amin military:
Kaaka slowly managed to sit up. The soldier who had assaulted her muttered something, and
the other soldiers laughed as if they were drunk. Kaaka spoke again, “Go you beasts! I have
to attend to a woman giving birth to a baby who will be more useful than you. How can you
beat a woman old enough to be your great-grandmother?” (38)
In reading the concept of banality of power, Mbembe (1992) gives us useful

insights into elements of the obscene and the grotesque that constitute
banality. He speaks of the madness that power manufactures in the society, in
a way privileging vulgarity and wrongdoing, making them appear as normal
ways of life in the postcolonial nations. The Amin regime, to be sure, thrived
on the utilisation of the obscene and the grotesque; thus to these soldiers, the
perpetuation of the bizarre is a means of affirming their “power.” The soldier
who kills her does it in a way to illustrate she is a subordinate who should not
be allowed to “subvert” the power he deems he wields:
The soldier whom she had addressed pointed his gun at her and fired. Then he fired again,
aiming at her stomach. The other soldiers had walked away; the one who seemed to be their
leader shouted at him to follow them. The soldier kicked Kaaka once more and she
screamed loudly. Then he turned around and began to walk away. The sound of their
footsteps beat loudly on the dry earth. (38)
The soldiers, with their strong links to state power, “invent entire
constellations of ideas [and] adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and
powerfully evocative concepts [and also] resort […] to the systematic
application of pain” (Mbembe, “Provisional Notes” 4).
Because, and with this kind, of collective violence, the people in this
community at once establish new forms of solidarity, and, in their own small
ways, seek to subvert the dominant powers. Others, like Kaaka, succumb to
the brutality and die, yet those who remain consistently seek ways of creating
their lives anew. Mildred Barya (2008) rightly argues that the characters in
Waiting manage to “give each other support and keep re-inventing

themselves and their community […] [and] are solid and stable with a sense
of purpose and dignity […] [so that] when one character fades, another slips
in naturally and becomes a part of the community.”
The community in Waiting, to use Sanya Osha’s words, “through their
very own transformative will, through their own deliberate mode of
aesthetisation and principles of construction” (161), are able to negotiate –
through war and violence – and imagine new identities. Violence and its
effects make it possible for the members of this community to come to the
awareness of their predicament. They discover that one of the ways out, and
perhaps the most feasible, at least for the moment, is to transform themselves
into a new identity that does not often recourse to the indigenous/outsider
binary. In a way, they aspire to Mamdani’s argument to “reconsider the
colonial legacy that each of us is either a native or a settler, and that it is with
that compass in mind that we must fashion our political world” (“Identity and
National Governance” 278-79).
Therefore, in their coming to the realisation of how their lives and
circumstances are interconnected, they establish necessary and useful
grounds for the formation of a community that would accept multiplicity and
the reality of the interrelatedness of the human universe. Waiting thus affirms
hope in human co-existence, and shows that this can only come with a close
reflection on the various problematised conditions in the postcolonial setting.
Negotiating New Identities in Waiting
In this novel, the negotiation of new identities happens at different levels of

the individual, the community, as well as the national and the transnational;
the latter in the sense that there emerge in this community in Waiting “forms
of organization and identity which are not constrained by national
boundaries” (Kearney 121). In the small emerging community of people that
Kyomuhendo focuses on, every individual has his/her own story that in
essence influences the defining of their present identity and world-view.
Nevertheless, the commonality of the experience of the dominant violence in
the larger society, and the fact that its impact cuts across community/ethnic
and national borders, is apparent. Hence, the importance of the formation of
collective identities that makes the re-configuration of individual identity
possible.
By examining the lives of individual characters we witness determined
negotiations of new identities. Both male and female characters in the novel
evolve new identities; they travel, re-locate, re/marry, and engage in trade to
come to terms with their present realities. The female characters, for
example, Kaaka, Nyinabarongo, and the Lendu woman, are in a state of
perpetual migration. According to a local myth, Kaaka, as a teen-age girl:
came across two snakes making love in the fields where she had gone to collect food. She
placed her kanga close to where they were rolling, intertwined, and soon it was wrapped
around their bodies. This way, the fluids from their mating gave the kanga permanent
medicinal value. (60)
As owner of this specially endowed kanga, she is destined not to be married

in her life. Not to be married means that she has to stay in her village. But
then she gets pregnant and marriage becomes a necessity. Her mother thus
decides to take her to “a strong medicine man who will make the pregnancy
invisible so that when you do marry, no one will suspect that you were
already pregnant” (61). Once married, Kaaka fails to deliver the baby, and
because the medicine man had long died, she ends up carrying “a child of the
spirits”, one that cannot be born. Kaaka decides to leave her husband, whom
“she used to beat […] mercilessly whenever he accused her of having failed
to deliver their baby” (61), and settles with the family of her nephew,
Alinda’s father. In this movement, she becomes part of a new community.
The other woman in the novel, Nyinabarongo (“the mother of twins”),
abandons her marriage to live with her mother after her husband’s family
drive her away because of the failure of her impoverished people to
undertake certain expected rituals. Initially she is rejected by the people but
with time they realise that if they are to survive as a community they need to
form new relationships that transcend gender and other cultural stereotypes.
As well as Nyinabarongo, the community rejects the Lendu woman
because they suspect her to be a witch (50). However, the story of her
experiences in Zaire, and her witness account of the turmoil following the
assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1971, helps to bring into light the
interconnectedness of political violence in the Great Lakes region. Indeed,
when “the Liberators” have restored a sense of order and security in Uganda,
the Lendu woman “ask[s] them to go and liberate Zaire too” (78).
The distrust with which the Lendu woman is held within this community
dissipates when it becomes clear that her knowledge of traditional herbal
medicine is useful for their well-being. Circumstances, therefore, transform
her into an invaluable member of the emerging community, and her
“outsider” identity ceases to be a major defining trait.
Within these women characters, and others who die in the course of the
narrative, for instance, Kaaka, and Alinda’s mother, Kyomuhendo, like other
postcolonial women writers, manages to accomplish what Elleke Boehmer

(1995) has called “retriev[ing] suppressed oral traditions, half-forgotten
histories, unrecorded private languages, moments of understated or
unrecognised women’s resistance” (227).
Of the male characters, Uncle Kembo, Alinda’s paternal uncle,
graphically conveys the fluidity in identity negotiation. He reflects Mbembe’s
reading of subjects in the postcolony who “have also had to have a marked
ability to manage not just a single identity for themselves, but several, which
are flexible enough for them to negotiate as and when required” (“Provisional
Notes” 5). Initially, Uncle Kembo is a night watchman in an Indian owned
sawmill, but he loses his job when, in 1972, President Idi Amin decides to
expel the Indians. He seizes what he recognises as an opportunity and,
defying threats of rejection by his family, embraces the dictator’s
Islamisation rhetoric by converting to Islam and even changing his name to
Abdulla. He is then given a shop “full of free merchandise that had once
belonged to the Indian businessman who had been chased away” (58). But
just like other Ugandan beneficiaries of this dubious gesture:
He became generous and allowed his wives’ relatives and their friends to take goods on
credit, but they never paid him back. Eventually, the stock dried up, and he did not have
enough money to replace it, so the shop collapsed. His two Muslim wives left him. He sold
the cars and came back to live with his first wife in the village. He said he had become a
Christian again and even started going to church. He and Father were reconciled. (58-59)
Uncle Kembo’s story brings out the fluidity of identity showing how human
beings are always evolving new outlooks in order to situate themselves in
spaces of comfort. It matters little to them even if such spaces are bound to be
short-lived, as “in their desire for a certain majesty, [they] join in the
madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power so as to produce
its epistemology” (Mbembe, “Provisional Notes” 29).
Like Uncle Kembo, “the old man”, who had murdered his wife and was
serving a life sentence, converts to Islam when Amin takes power. He is
subsequently pardoned, but, fearing reprisals, he does not return to his native
village and instead settles in the community. Though the community believes
there is a curse on him (75), the ravages of war make it possible to
accommodate him.
“The old man” graphically highlights the suffering and violence to which
the civilians are exposed. When he steps on the landmine planted on the
village path, the horror of this violence emerges:
We walked to the scene of explosion. The old man was lying in the shrubs, a few meters
away from the footpath that led from his house to ours. The grass was crimson with his
blood, and his right leg was dangling by a fragile piece of skin at the knee. Words were
bubbling from his mouth. (66)
The only way of saving his life is by cutting off his mutilated leg without any
form of anaesthesia. His protestations capture the community’s sense of
desperation: “Don’t cut off my leg. I came into this world whole, I want to
leave it whole” (68).
This scene, and the image of the damaged old man, remind us of Ugandan
artist Francis Nnaggenda’s larger-than-life sculpture “War Victim” (created
1983-1986), which is permanently installed in the Main Library of Makerere
University. In Carol Sicherman’s sensitive description:
It depicts a finely carved, highly polished, headless torso in subtle colorations of brown
suggestive of human skin; one leg is cleanly amputated, one arm deformed and the other
missing. Yet for all the deformity and mutilation, the torso is muscular, tough, powerful,
even triumphant. (189)
However, in contrast, there is no trace of triumph in the wailing figure of

Waiting. He is certainly not a character from a patriotically inspired wartime
narrative of valour and sacrifice. Kyomuhendo’s interest is not in the clear
ideas and ideals of heroism; rather, she implicitly questions them, and
exposes the long-term effects of war on those who have remained away from
the battlefields.
This scene also demonstrates the interchanging of gender roles in this
society. The women, led by the Lendu woman, try to save the old man while
the men only watch in fright. Louise Vincent’s observation, “in conflict and
post-war situations gender relationships are challenged [and] both women
and men struggle to identify and consolidate new identities and roles” (25),
explains these circumstances.
Jungu, Alinda’s schoolmate and friend, underlines the complexity of race
in the novel, and in particular the Asian/African relationships. We are
reminded that “[h]er real name was not Jungu, but she was called that
because she had mixed blood. She was half Indian and half black” (19).
When she was born, her mother, out of frustration and fear of stigmatisation
in a society that still disapproved of inter-racial sexual relationships, had tried
to kill her:
Jungu’s mother delivered two or three months after the Indians had left. No one saw her give
birth. […] People just saw her at the stream where she had gone to wash her blood-soaked
clothes. When they asked her after the baby, she said that it had died. The police came a
week later, looking for a woman who had been pregnant. They took her away. She had left
the baby in a garden and covered it with a big clod of earth, but some one had discovered it
that same day. She was not put in prison, but released so she could nurse her baby. She
never lived in our village after that. Instead, she went to town, where she started selling
vegetables in the market. (20)
With this kind of problematised identity, Jungu had to find her “location” on
her own in the emerging Ugandan society.
Therefore, the community in Waiting is becoming hybridised, “living on
the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender,” and
hence it is “in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind
of solidarity” (Bhabha 170). It gradually disrupts the nativistic logic of the
autochthons and non-natives. Waiting shows a people determined to forge
new identities in order to survive socio-political upheavals. The violence of
the present and the uncertainty of the future help collapse rigidity in the
characterisation of national and ethnic spaces and identities.
Interstices/Border-Spaces in Waiting
In its lucid depiction of the effects of war and violence, Waiting illustrates the
complexities of displacement and migrancy. It shows the challenges and
alternating definitions of individual identities and societal/national cultures in
Uganda and how these circulate in the Great Lakes region.
The Lendu woman “crosses” over from Zaire with her fish-trading
husband, who operates between the two countries: fish is caught from the
Lakes in Zaire but sold in the Ugandan village market, known as Center.
When she feels abandoned by her husband who has, in the meantime,
returned to Zaire and ostensibly to his first wife, she “marries” Uncle Kembo.
Her life attests to the argument that the “negotiation of borders includes both
the practical negotiations involved in cross-border transfers of people and
goods, as well as the more abstract negotiations over meaning to which these
activities, among others, give rise” (Wilson and Donnan 21).
Earlier in the text, on their arrival in the village, it is “the old man,” an
outsider/stranger in the view of the villagers, who sells them land. Alinda’s
mother is disturbed by the transaction and she attempts to offer resistance:
After we had eaten breakfast, people gathered in our homestead. In addition to

Nyinabarongo and her child, there were Uncle Kembo, the Lendu woman, and the old man,
who only came to our house when Father was around. Mother did not like him. One reason
was that they had quarelled over the piece of land he had given to the Lendu woman and her
husband. Mother had said that she did not want to have foreigners, whose ways she did not
know, as neighbours. But the old man had argued that the Lendu people were useful because
they had rid the village of monkeys by eating them. Previously, people had woken up to find
their potatoes uprooted and eaten by the monkeys. (25).
Although Alinda’s mother “never changed her attitude” (25), especially

towards the old man, a “foreigner” in the village, the others had agreed with
the old man’s logic, and had, in effect, given other “foreigners” space in the
community. In Edward Said’s argument:
Moving beyond nativism does not mean abandoning nationality, but it does mean thinking
of local identity as not exhaustive, and therefore not being anxious to confine oneself to
one’s own sphere, with its own ceremonies of belonging, its built-in chauvinism, and its
limiting sense of security. (277)
Indeed, most of the “indigenes” of the community realise this “limiting sense
of security”, and hence the temporal necessity to reach out to the Other. They
aspire to Mbembe’s “specific form of domestication and mobilisation of
space and resources: the form that consists in producing boundaries, whether
by moving already existing ones, or by doing away with them, fragmenting
them, decentring or differentiating them” (“At the Age of the World” 261).
They, in turn, de-accentuate the distinction between the “autochthonous
peoples and foreigners [and the] ethnoracial principle serving increasingly as
the basis for citizenship and as the condition of access to land, resources, and
elective positions of responsibilities” (267).
Bahati, a member of the Tanzanian army who participates in the
“liberation,” decides to remain and become a member of the community.
From the beginning, he impresses the community as a desirable individual
from whom they can learn multiple aspects of Tanzanian cultures including
the Swahili language. Once again this demonstrates how migrancy
oppositionally interrogates the dominant views of nationality and borders. As
Andrew Smith notes:
Whatever older formations of identity were based in – ancestry, passport, or geography – it

is their apparent fixity that migrancy calls into question. If there is a space left for unity and
political action it is an awkward one in which what we share is, as it were, a strangeness, the
common fact of having little definite in common. (249)
The East African Asian/African question remains contentious in this region.

The East African Asians often find themselves in an in-between space; and
hence highly vulnerable when politicians turn on them as scapegoats over the
postcolony’s economic and other social malpractice. This was most manifest
in the infamous Asian expulsion from Uganda by Idi Amin. Amin expelled
close to 50,000 Ugandan Asians, in what he described as an “economic war”

on a foreign group that sought to dominate Uganda’s trade and
manufacturing sectors, and to occupy the civil service (Ilieva and Odiemo-
Munara, “Idi Amin” 4). Subsequently, Amin dished out the Asians’ property
to friends and loyalists. Mbembe argues:
Localities and internal divisions, some historical and others institutional or even cultural and
territorial, are superimposed on the space of the state. Each locality is subject to different
jurisdictions: state jurisdiction, traditional jurisdiction, religious jurisdiction. Different
orders coexist within an interlacing of “homelands” and “communities”. The coexistence of
these different orders is disturbed by a multiplicity of local conflicts. Most of these conflicts
are expressed in the form of an opposition between autochthonous populations and
strangers. Citizenship is conceived in ethnic and territorial terms, and individual’s
enjoyment of civil rights depends on his appurtenance to an ethnic group or locality. (“At
the Age of the World” 279-80)
This, in a way, reads into the Asian question in East Africa. For the reason
that they have geographic and socio-cultural limitations in identifying with
East Africa as a “homeland,” the locals raise strong opposition to any of their
claims to insider status.
East African Asians, therefore, aware of their construing as provisional
citizens by the “indigenous” East Africans, have in turn constructed
provisional and migrant spaces of operation. Peter Kalliney in his evaluation
of Moyez Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, a book that in the most penetrating
manner captures the Asian people’s search for identity in the sub-region,
argues that it “offers a narrative of perpetual motion”; and that it is “a
narrative of packing and unpacking, of making do in situations that offer few
easy choices.” Concerning the metaphor of “the gunny sack,” he reads it as
“a signpost for the family’s resourcefulness, and […] their participation in
transnational systems of migration” (8). This, to a large degree, is also the
non-textual and non-fictional narrative of the Asian person’s space in the
East African society.
Jungu, a child begotten of the “shameful” African woman, finds herself in
an in-between world until she gets the company and acceptance of Alinda
and her family. However, prejudices about her mixed-race identity still
abound. For example, Alinda is told by her mother that “people of mixed
blood [are] short-tempered and could easily commit suicide” (20).
Peter Simatei has argued that the Asians’ feeling of racial superiority,
together with the notion of exclusion, so ingrained in their caste-centred
social organisation, militate against social/sexual relations between them and
the Africans (74). This, coupled with the history of colonialism, in its racist
and exclusivist senses; and the awareness by the Asians of their perceived
provisional status, enhance the Otherness of the East African Asians.

Therefore, as a child close to this “provisionality”, Jungu’s decision to follow
“the Liberators” is, metaphorically, a continuing discovery of the Others
beyond borders and spaces. Hers is a strong determination to cross
geographical, cultural, linguistic, national and other borders. She
demonstrates the difficulty of closure of such border-spaces in contemporary
Eastern Africa.
Identity Form(ul)ation and the Space of Language in Waiting
Inter-ethnic and transnational migrations in East Africa have called for the
rethinking of the narrow conceptualisation of languages and their importance.
A failure in knowledge of the “dominant” language(s) of the new
geographical/social space one occupies, temporarily or permanently, could
easily be viewed as either an inability or lack of willingness to integrate or a
tendency towards racial/ethnic isolationism.
While Swahili has been seen as the language capable of facilitating
transnational and inter-communal dialogues in this region, Ruth Mukama
argues that Uganda “stands out distinctly in East and Central Africa as a
country without grassroots language for mass inter-ethnic communication”
(335). Therefore, she holds that the country needs to deliberately appropriate
Swahili “not only for mass inter-ethnic communication but also for regional
harmony” (348).
In the usage of Kiswahili in the military in East Africa, Mazrui and
Mazrui (1995) argue:
Throughout the colonial period, recruitment for the armed forces drew mainly from that
large section of the African population that had little or no educational training, and whose
linguistic competence was limited to non-European languages. Kiswahili became virtually
the only possible medium of inter-ethnic communication for this population. […] Kiswahili
in the armed forces of colonial East Africa facilitated not only inter-ethnic communication,
sometimes across national boundaries, but also inter-racial communication. The army had
thus served as a crucible within which the role of Kiswahili in expanding the social horizons
of African officers had assumed a trans-continental dimension. (7)
Idi Amin was part of this colonial military arrangement, having joined the
King’s African Rifles (KAR) in 1946 and served in Burma, Somalia, Kenya,
and his own country, Uganda (Ilieva and Odiemo-Munara, “Idi Amin” 4).
Limited in the use of English, Amin set on the advancement of the use of
Kiswahili among the military in Uganda both as Chief-of-staff and
subsequently as President. Mazrui and Mazrui note of the “potential danger

of Kiswahili being hated by Ugandans due to its association with Amin’s
tyranny” (6). Indeed, in Waiting, it gains notoriety as “a language mainly
spoken by Amin soldiers” (30). And because the soldiers represent
oppression and cruelty, Kiswahili is resented. It is the language used by the
escaping soldiers as they brutally confront the old woman, Kaaka, demanding
for women, food and money. Alinda’s encounter with the language is
horrifying because it reminds her of the violence that caused the death of
Kaaka as well as her mother. She is weary as she recollects, “[t]heir loud
voices sounded ugly as they echoed across the empty yard” (38).
However, another perspective of Swahili is brought in with the arrival of
the “liberating” forces. In its use by “the Liberators” like the Tanzanian
Bahati, it comes across as a language of peace and liberation. Therefore,
“[t]he association of Kiswahili with the tradition of post-colonial liberation in
Uganda’s military history […] increase[s] its potential contribution towards
various aspects of the process of ‘detribalisation’” (Mazrui and Mazrui 6).
Jungu, who has started to understand Swahili, informs Alinda that she
knows only a few words, “but it’s not difficult. Most of the words are derived
from the Bantu languages and are similar to our own” (82). She is taught by
Bahati, who is “keen for [her] to learn it” (82), and in turn she teaches him
English and the local language. This interaction not only fosters wider socio-
cultural dialogue but it disrupts socio-cultural barriers, making it possible for
Jungu and Bahati to aspire to a married life in Tanzania after the conflict.
Alinda, on her part, asks questions about Tanzania’s other languages,
“their own languages […] the languages of their tribes” (82). The fact that in
Tanzania Swahili is both national and official language, spoken by everyone,
makes her reflect on aspects of tribe, nation, language and identity. Hence,
“[the] transnational linguistic exchanges are the novel’s greatest sign of hope
for the future […] a hope relevant to the present circumstances in Uganda as
well as to the fiction’s historical context” (Daymond 125).
Mazrui and Tidy have argued that in Africa “Kiswahili is not associated
with any particular ethnic community numerically, politically or
economically to arouse the linguistic jealousies of other groups” (300).
Contestable as this may be, we agree with Daymond that the discussion of
and keen interest in language by the young people in Waiting offer “[a]
penetrating glimpse of the reshaping of identities and the re-drawing of
regional maps that come about through the transnational aspect of war”
(125).
New Insights, Multi-cultural Futures
As “the Liberators” leave for northern Uganda in pursuit of Amin’s soldiers,

there is a heavy thunderstorm that apparently “cleans” away the violence
from the village, and by extension from the Ugandan nation. Nyinabarongo
declares: “now we have nothing left to remind us of that painful era” (107).
However, the knowledge and memory of this past is necessary, partly as a
possible deterrent to such historical occurrences in the future. Also, the fact
that Bahati, a participant in the “liberation” war, has remained behind; and
Tendo and Jungu have translocated with “the Liberators,” signifies that the
past remains to be negotiated through; “it must remain open to a process of
rectification, and not be closed off in the assertion of a phantasised ‘authentic
community’” (Venn 114).
As the text closes, the acceptance of diversity is evident. Nyinabarongo,
the Lendu woman, and Bahati, are now part of the Alinda extended family. A
new community has emerged and is certain to continue expanding and/or
shrinking depending on the various instances that call for negotiations of
identities in the East African post-colonial space. In this acceptance,
hostilities have obviously mellowed. As for Alinda’s father (the most visible
male representative of this community), “there was noticeable laughter in his
voice” (110). In addition, as they are escorting him to board a vehicle to the
city, the openness of possibilities of human journeying become apparent:
We had to remain standing near the junction of the three roads. One led to Zaire, via Lake
Albert, the same road Amin’s soldiers had used as their exit route. The second led to the
city, while the third led to the big tea plantation, which used to be owned by the Indians.
(110)
Said’s argument becomes illuminating as we vision these roads and the

possibilities of voyaging in and out in the contemporary global order:
No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national
languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to
keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was all
about. (408)
Waiting is an important text in the re-evaluation of national/ethnic and other

identities. As we have argued, as a result of postcolonial chaos, various
identities are re/negotiated and border-spaces re/crossed whenever socio-
cultural and economic conditions necessitate. Waiting clearly envisages the
emergence of an Afropolitan community that is determined to interrogate and

re-order the autochthon/foreigner dichotomy in contemporary Eastern Africa.
Works Cited
Barya, Mildred C. Rev. of Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War, by Goretti

Kyomuhendo. Pambazuka Online 1 Feb. 2008. 5 Feb. 2009
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/45850>.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge,
1994.
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors.
Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Cooper, Frederick. “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African
History.” The Decolonisation Reader. Ed. J. D. Le Sueur. New York
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Nalini Iyer
No Place to Call Home: Citizenship and Belonging in

M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Indo-Kenyan Canadian writer M.G.Vassanji’s fiction documents the

predicament of the Indian diaspora in East Africa – a people who inhabit
multiple geographic spaces and for whom citizenship and belonging are
constantly negotiated and reformed. His novel, The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall published in 2003, explores and theorises through fiction the
very same question that Achille Mbembe pursues in his writings on Africa.
Mbembe notes in the introduction to the 2004 special issue of Public Culture
that “To write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world, or as a
fragment thereof, is a compelling and perplexing task” (“Writing the World”
348). Mbembe has noted elsewhere that it is important to recognise that
population movements and cultural flows have always been a part of the
continent’s history (“Afropolitanism”).
Mbembe writes of a new form of identity and belonging for contemporary
Africa which he terms “Afropolitanism.” For him, Afropolitanism is a
transnational sensibility that is not built on victimhood but on an
interweaving of “here and elsewhere” and as the “primary way to embrace
[…] knowingly the strange, foreign and distant” (“Afropolitanism”).
Mbembe’s idea of Afropolitanism blurs the distinction between diasporic and
native subject and recognises that the idea of Africa is formed as much on the
continent as it is in the world beyond it. Vassanji’s fictional works from The
Gunny Sack to The In-Between World of Vikram Lall have been engaged with
the interrogation, description, and creative expression of the cultural and
population flows of Indians to and from East Africa. In his engagement of the
here and elsewhere, of the relationship between India and Africa and how
each has formed the other, Vassanji might be described as an Afropolitan
writer, but his conceptualisation of this Afropolitanism is different from that
of Mbembe. 1 Not only does Vassanji’s fiction compel South Asian literary
scholars to rethink what role the diaspora plays in the formation of national
and cultural identities in South Asia, it also compels those engaged in African
literary studies to ask how diasporic cultural texts shape individual, cultural,
1
Vassanji does not comment on Mbembe nor use the term “Afropolitanism” but his fictional
rendition of Africa with questions of African identity, the role of diaporic subjects, and the
emphasis on urban settings suggest that he has similar concerns as Mbembe.
206 Nalini Iyer
and national identities. 2 By telling the multi-generational story of the Lall

family and that of several characters’ engagement with and creation of
individual and collective identity, Vassanji’s In-Between World of Vikram
Lall recognises that there is no master narrative of belonging or citizenship.
The novel demonstrates that cultural and national identities are fluid,
individually negotiated, occasionally transgressive, historically contingent,
and often underpinned by economic realities. Mbembe and Nuttall’s essay on
Africa in Public Culture notes that
the ways in which societies compose and invent themselves in the present (the creativity of
practice) is always ahead of the knowledge produced about them. In addition, these
compositional acts always move in multiple and unforeseen directions. What binds societies,
made up of multiple assemblages and disjunctive syntheses, is some kind of artifice they
come to believe in. They have, thus, the capacity to continually produce something new and
singular, as yet unthought, which cannot always be accommodated within established
conceptual systems and languages. (348-49)
Vassanji’s novel, as a cultural artefact, shows how people continually invent

and reinvent themselves while simultaneously producing knowledge about
themselves. 3 Mbembe and Nuttall’s conceptualisation of this “new and
singular” is celebratory whereas Vassanji’s narrator, Vikram Lall, has a more
dismal view of belonging and even the existence of what Mbembe and
Nuttall identify as “the kind of artifice they come to believe in” (348). After
all, Vikram Lall tells most of his story when isolated in a remote snow-bound
Canadian town while living in a fake African style house and finding himself
having to rebuild his life once again. A closer examination of the novel
demonstrates how home, belonging, citizenship, and identity are negotiated
by different generations of Indian migrants to and from Kenya.
The first generation of Indian immigrants is represented by Vikram Lall’s
grandfather who had come as a Railway worker and had helped lay the
railroad tracks for the East African Railways from Mombasa to Kampala.
Anand Lal Peshawari had been an indentured labourer from Punjab who
came in 1897 with fellow Punjabi labourers (Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh) and
once the indenture was completed, he and his fellow Punjabis stayed on in
Kenya to build a life there. At the beginning of Vic Lall’s narrative, the
2
Academics have also in recent times been engaged in the analysis of the Indian diaspora in
Africa. Notable recent books inlcude John Hawley’s Africa in India, Indian in Africa and
Pallavi Rastogi’s Afrindian Fictions.
3
While Mbembe and Nuttall focus on scholarship on Africa and how it produces knowledge
about Africa, I suggest that novels are both creative expression and theorization of
knowledge production.
No Place to Call Home 207
extended family lives in Nakuru running a small store and leading a close
knit community life in which they served British consumer needs and
engaged the Africans, especially Kikuyu, as servants. For Anand Lall’s
generation, assimiliation in Africa comes from having earned their position
through work. As the narrator tells us,
Our people had sweated on it, had died on it: they had been carried away in their weary
sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed
under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of whites by angry
Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria, sleeping sickness, elephentiasis,
cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions, snakes and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights
with each other. (Vassanji 16-17)
Even as working the land not as an agricultural labourer but as a construction

worker transforming the African landscape for the British master enables
Anand Lal to carve out a political identity as British colonial subject, it is
also important to note that a subtle shift occurs in the naming. He drops the
“Peshawari” which means of “of Peshawar” and which identifies him with a
native land and becomes Anand Lall, one unmoored from a place but whose
ties to his ancestral land are through daily practice and cultural life. As
indentured British subjects in imperial territory, he and his peers negotiate a
tenuous economic space in Kenya once they complete their indentures – they
open small shops that cater to the needs of the Africans and occasionally to
the exotic needs of the British settlers. Their social life is limited to their
Indian friends and extended family, and they focus on preserving their
cultural traditions in the new land while pursuing prosperity and stability in
their economic lives. Because much of Anand Lall’s story is retold by the
young Vikram Lall, the narrative only hints at the undercurrents of racism
and ethnocentrism (British, Indian, and African) that form this close knit
community.
Anand Lall married a Punjabi woman from another immigrant family and
established a life in Kenya. His friend, Juma Molabux, a Punjabi Muslim and
also former indentured labourer married a Maasai woman, Sakina, and
through this marriage cemented his ties to Africa. The child, Vikram Lall, is
surprised to discover that Sakina Dadi was a Maasai because she spoke fluent
Punjabi and made authentic Punjabi food. However, as the Sakina-Juma story
is narrated, we learn that Sakina has had to forego her Maasai roots and
completely embrace Punjabi diasporic culture. One of her sons rebels, returns
to his Maasai heritage and when trouble comes during the Mau Mau uprising,
another of the Molabux sons is arrested and taken away by the British police
whose suspicion of him is based on his biracial heritage. Even as the child
208 Nalini Iyer
narrator, Vic Lall, views the multiracial world of Nakuru as an Edenic place
with racial harmony, the undercurrents of violence and the compelled cultural
and religious conversions of Sakina tell a different story.
Anand Lall’s son, Vikram’s father, although raised in Kenya has cultural
ties to Punjab. When time comes for him to marry, he returns to his father’s
home town, Peshawar, meets a beautiful college girl, the daughter of a police
inspector in the colonial government of India, and marries her in 1944. The
Partition of India forces the Hindu Verma family to migrate from Peshawar,
now in Pakistan, to Hindu India, and Vikram’s maternal uncle, Mahesh,
moves to Kenya. Vikram’s parents’ story examines how the place of birth
and ancestry gain significance even as governmental and state forces compel
separation from the land. As the Vermas become refugees after the Partition
and the Lalls migrate to another place as indentured labourers, their ties to
Punjab are more symbolic than physical. For Vikram and his sister, Deepa,
who represent the third generation in Kenya, the connections to India are
mostly mythical and represented by family recollections and reworkings of
the Ramayana epic as part of the children’s play. While the children speak
and understand Punjabi, celebrate Hindu holidays like Rakhi and Diwali, and
eat gulab jamuns and pakodas, they also speak Swahili, become more
engaged in local cultural and political life, and eat ugali and spinach with as
much relish as they do chappatis. For the first generation, Indian identity was
distinctly connected to birth and to Punjab as land and culture. For the second
generation of Lalls, Punjab is mostly symbolic either because of distance as
in the case of the father or by forcible loss and distance as in the case of the
mother. For the third generation of Lalls, however, the tie to ancestral land
and culture is still symbolic but ethnic identity as Punjabi seems to matter
very little. “Indian” identity as one that is trans-linguistic and trans-ethnic
supplants particularities of being Punjabi. (Vikram Lall’s narration of life in
Dar es Salaam during his college years amongst Gujarati migrants nuances
the understanding of “Indian” in East Africa. While the Africans see them as
“Asians” or muhindi, as inside cultural informant, Vikram Lall presents the
myriad differences that morph into “Indian” in East Africa.) Deepa marries a
third generation Punjabi man while Vic marries a Gujarati – what matters is
that their spouses are Indian and Hindu and it is assumed that their common
understanding of their identities as tied to a far away land and daily practice
is what matters.
In an essay on Indians in East Africa, Savita Nair notes that
many of the movements of the people overseas that constitute diaspora demographically do
not constitute it culturally because the homeland is never actually left behind but rather is
extended and attached to regions of social life that extend over space without alienation or
stark separation; and because the homeland is not an imagined place of origin but rather a
living land of family life. (89)
Nair’s description is particularly true of the first and second generation of

Lalls, but the coming of age of the third generation of Lalls coincides with
the independence of Kenya. Just as the different Kenyan ethnic groups
(Kikuyu, Luo, Maasai to name a few) are striving to articulate a common
national identity, the third generation of Lalls is attempting to craft a place for
themselves in this newly formed nation. As students Vic and Deepa, who are
raised in Nakuru and then Nairobi, discover that education, childhood ties to
people (British and Kikuyu in particular) make for a bi-cultural life in which
they are able to manage both the living of daily life within the diasporic
community and yet being able to embrace and imagine a cross-racial
relationship with the Kikuyu. For Vic his brotherly relationship with Njoroge
and his childhood love for Annie, the murdered British child, represent the
possibility of creating a Kenyan identity for himself that will allow him
equality in this country he considers his own. For Deepa, her forbidden and
passionate love for Njoroge renders her Indianness unimportant. Her single-
minded pursuit of her love for Njoroge is the most transgressive of the
relationships in the novel and unlike the Juma-Sakina relationship where the
woman had to abandon her culture completely, Njoroge and Deepa mutually
accept each other’s cultural paradigm and seek to create something new. This
tenuous hybrid Indo-Kikuyu culture is depicted in Deepa’s breaking of class
and race boundaries and his easy navigation of Indian cultural practices.
However, cultural expectations from the Lall family and their rigid need to
maintain cultural purity and the fundamental distrust of Indians in the new
Kenya as British collaborators and middle-men make a marriage impossible.
Vic and Deepa, each in his/her own way begins to recognise that no matter
how trans-racial their personal philosophies might be, the social and political
realities of being Indian in Kenya would determine much of their adult lives.
While Deepa acquiesces to marriage and motherhood the Indian way, Vic
continues to push against the political realities of Kenya.
Marriage and kinship networks are critical to the East African Indian
community in this novel to maintain not just cultural identity but also
economic power and political authority and influence. Deepa’s forbidden
love threatens the very idea of difference upon which this postcolonial
society is built. Even as “native” African identity is fragmented by the push
for ethnic solidarity and the political process in the country is fraught with
negotiated alliances, corruption, and betrayal, Deepa and Njoroge’s
relationship threatens the very idea of difference that is the foundation of new
210 Nalini Iyer
political power and influence. The detailed descriptions of the Kenyatta

government, the place of Kikuyu identity, the betrayal of the Mau Mau
fighters, the corruption of the inner circle of politicians all undergird the
precariousness of the place of Indians who are the eternal foreigners and the
feared colonial collaborators who are reviled in postcolonial Kenya. If
Njoroge wants to rise in the world of politics, he is better served by marrying
a Kikuyu; if Deepa’s family is to retain the support of its community in times
of trouble, it is necessary that she marry an Indian. The shadow of Uganda’s
expulsion of the Indians haunts the fortunes of the Indian community in
Kenya and many Indians in this novel leave Kenya for fear of retaliation
using previously acquired British passports. The Lalls are unusual in that they
refuse to consider departure and had acquired Kenyan citizenship prior to
independence. Yet, the Lalls prosper in Nairobi when Vic’s father’s real-
estate business eventually profits from the community’s exodus. Deepa’s in-
laws thrive economically in post-colonial Kenya by expanding their jewelry
and pharmaceutical business and bartering political influence through Vic.
The economic and political power of the Indian community is writ on the
bodies and desires of the women whether it is Sakina who fully Indianises
herself or Deepa who loses her love.
The choice of many Indians in Kenya to claim British passports and
eventually either migrate permanently to England or to maintain homes in
multiple places so as to facilitate a quick exit is a survival strategy for a
community that has been unmoored from place and for whom place is
contingent on who rules the land at any given time. The Indo-Kenyans
exercise what Aihwa Ong has called “flexible citizenship” (Ong 449). 4 While
“flexible citizenship” is practical and allows for opportunistic mobility, it
does not transform substantially the diasporic subjects’ transnational
sensibility and allegiance to multiple national and communal identities.
Although the novel focuses mostly on Punjabis in Kenya, Vassanji is familiar
with the diversity of the Indian community in East Africa including Gujarati
Ismailis. The Punjabi experience and the Gujarati Ismaili experience
regarding cultural and national identity were a little different. As Rose
Kadende-Kaiser and Paul Kaiser note of the Ismailis in Tanzania, the
community exercises a hierarchy of citizenship identities which allow it to
simultaneously claim Tanzanian citizenship and also participate as citizens in
the transnational Ismaili community with its own system of governance. The
4
Ong defines flexible citizenship as follows: “‘Flexible Citizenship’ refers to the cultural
logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond
fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (449).
Ismailis pay allegiance to the Aga Khan as their supreme leader and no
matter what particular nation-state or states they claim citizenship in, their
allegiance to the Aga Khan allows them to negotiate a dual citizenship that
transcends the nation-state. While the Ismaili community offers support and
safety to its members and thus facilitates their flexible citizenship, the Hindu
Punjabis like the Lalls do not have such a tangible transnational government
structure. They have to rely more on an informal transnational kinship and
friendship structure. So the choice of some Indians in Kenya to leave and of
others to stay is determined not just by what passports they hold, but also
what transnational networks they can rely on to facilitate their exit. The Lalls
decision to claim Kenyan citizenship while presented by Vikram Lall as
proof of his family’s commitment to Kenya was also perhaps a very
pragmatic decision based on the need to articulate said commitment through
legal state structures. The Lalls had only emotional ties to India and were not
deeply networked with an expatriate Punjabi community in Englad or
Canada. Therefore, declaring a Kenyan citizenship was their best alternative.
Vikram’s Mahesh Uncle’s story is another case of what happens to
Indians who do not have powerful transnational networks. When Mahesh
Uncle rises to power as the ally of Okello Okello, a powerful Luo politician,
his fall from grace and subsequent inability to re-enter Kenya are connected
to the power struggles between Kenyatta and his political rivals. Mahesh is
exiled in India (a land to which he has legal claim but no emotional ties
because of the expulsion of his family from Peshawar during Partition) and
he manages a return to Kenya because of Vic’s influence with Mzee
Kenyatta. However, upon his return (dramatically staged with kissing the
earth at the airport), he returns to India permanently with his wife and
children to a life as an educator in an elite school. His support of anti-colonial
struggles, his political work with Kenyan politicians, his many years of stay
in Kenya amount to nothing. Economic and political opportunities are no
longer available to him, and Mahesh staunchly returns to South Asia and
determines to live amongst his own people. Unlike the many Indo-Kenyans
with flexible citizenship who migrated to other countries in the West, Mahesh
returns to India and disavows the migrant life.
The novel demonstrates that aside from sentiment and idealism, the
diasporic Indian community in East Africa manages to stay influential
through corruption and by pandering to the needs of the ruling elite. If
Vikram’s parents sold smelly cheese, English whisky and other luxury items
to the British and extended credit to them to maintain their lavish lifestyles,
their son pursues a similar strategy but on a much larger scale. Vikram Lall
has very little scruples and is the perfect flunky for the ruling elite – he
212 Nalini Iyer
unquestioningly does the bidding of those in power. In his negotiation with

an Italian company bidding on a railway contract, he flamboyantly displays
his patriotism and ideals only to be naively dragged into a web of corruption.
However, once he recognises the power of this corrupt network and what
proximity to Jomo Kenyatta’s inner circle can bring, he actively creates a
shadow banking and money-laundering scheme that helps the ruling elite. He
arranges through his Indian business connections for foreign aid to be
siphoned to personal accounts of politicians and uses his in-laws’ jewelry
empire to personally win favours from Kenyatta himself. When he is made a
scapegoat by the corrupt Minister Paul Nderi because the government’s
dealings with the white Rhodesian government come to light, he joins his in-
laws’ business and facilitates private support for his relatives. When his
father’s business is arbitrarily claimed by a small-time politician who wants
to Africanise it and when Kenyatta’s mistress tries to take over his brother-in-
law’s pharmaceutical empire, he seeks the help of Mzee to thwart such
moves. In a country where corruption rules and the legal system offers no
protection to minorities or citizens, Vikram Lall becomes the purveyor of
personal favours. He is derided as a dalal, a middleman, but he creates for
himself a lucrative and powerful position.
Vikram Lall’s story of corruption and violence underscores that for the
Indian diasporic community in Kenya, citizenship and belonging are not just
sentimental or legal but also about appropriating a strategic political position
based on economic power and influence. Vikram’s position is contrasted by
Njoroge who is idealistic about land reform. As an orphan child who lost his
parents and grandfather to the violence that accompanied colonialism and the
Mau Mau uprising, Njoroge seeks to restore land rights to the poor. His
alignment with leftist politicians who threaten the power of Kenyatta’s inner
circle and his affair with Deepa lead to his murder. In telling us Njoroge’s
story and also the story of Mahesh Uncle’s disillusionment, Vikram Lall
articulates a very dark vision about the emerging African sensibility.
Eventually, Vikram Lall is compelled to leave Kenya as his role in money
laundering schemes is uncovered by an investigative body. He is a top
criminal on a “List of Shame” and exiles himself to Canada. This novel is
written as the memoir of an exiled corrupt Indo-Kenyan who believes that he
needs to tell his story. In his preface, he writes that he has no need to confess
or seek redemption. He just wants to talk about his ordinary life lived in
extraordinary times. He is accompanied in his exile by a young man, Joseph,
who is the son of Njoroge. Joseph is angry and in exile because his anti-
government activities fueled by idealism and anger have made him a target
for the government. While he rails against the genocide of his people, he
connects with other patriots of the MuKenya group through the internet.
While Vikram seems to seek Joseph’s forgiveness and love, Joseph rejects
him for what he represents. Joseph’s vision of a new Kenya is nascently
Afropolitan – it blurs the boundary between local and transnational and uses
contemporary technology to forge a sense of belonging between the two.
However, Joseph is young, his future is uncertain because he returns to
Kenya only to be imprisoned. Thus, the nascent Afropolitanism is threatened
even before it can fulfill its goals.
Vikram Lall eventually returns to Kenya at great risk to his life so he can
come clean to the investigative commission about his corruption. His return
threatens the safety of the many African politicians who had relied on his
network to amass their private fortunes. At the end of the novel, he is living
in a poor neighbourhood in Nairobi in the home of Ebrahim, an Indian
Muslim married to a Luo woman. Vikram’s widowed father is now living
with an African woman and he awkwardly confesses the relationship to his
son. These cross-racial relationships mark the possibility of a new Kenyan
identity – one that might be considered Afropolitan. Like Mbembe’s
Afropolis, Johannesburg, 5 Nairobi is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and the old
rigid social boundaries are breaking down amongst the urban populace.
However, as the novel ends with an arson aimed at killing Vikram Lall and
the uncertainty of his even surviving this fire, we recognise that the emerging
Afropolitan culture of Nairobi threatens the power structure of corruption in
the country. However, the arson that ends the novel gives the ruling corrupt
elite more power than the Afropolitan urban community.
While Mbembe celebrates the burgeoning Afropolis, Johannesburg, in his
writings and sees that as the evidence of a different African sensibility,
Vassanji’s novel has a much more dismal view. Although the novel
underscores the need for a new vision for Kenya, the history of the nation
from indenture and colonialism to Mau Mau and neo-colonialism told from
the perspective of a culturally marginal yet socially powerful group suggests
that history casts a very long and dark shadow over Kenya’s future. While
Vikram succeeds in telling his story and believes that the telling of such
stories would make people in Kenya a much happier and less nervous people,
there is no resounding celebration of what might be emerging as the future.
From an Indian diasporic perspective, many questions remain: Will Kenya
accept its immigrant minorities as Kenyan? Will the Indo-Kenyans always
remain opportunistic “flexible citizens?” If the different Kenyan ethnic
groups articulate an Afropolitan identity, will there be room in it for the Indo-
5
For greater discussion of Johannesburg, see Mbembe and Nuttall’s “Afropolis.”
214 Nalini Iyer
Kenyans despite their troubled history in East Africa? Ultimately, we have to

ask, is Mbembe’s vision yet another idealistic one like previous philosophies
of Pan-Africanism or Negritude, the articulation of which emerges from a
particular moment in global African history and has the power to mobilise
some but eventually is destined to fade. Vassanji articulates no master theory
that will be the solution, he acts as the diagnostician of the problem.
Works Cited
Hawley, John, ed. India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean

Cosmopolitanisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Africultures 26 Dec. 2005. 11 Feb. 2009
<http://www.africultures.com/>.
Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall. “Writing the World from an African
Metropolis.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 347-72.
Nair, Savita. “Shops and Stations: Rethinking Power and Privilege in
British/Indian East Africa.” India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian
Ocean Cosmopoliltanisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008. 77-94.
Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe. “Afropolis: From Johannesburg.”
PMLA 122.1 (2007): 281-88.
Ong, Aihwa. “Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.”
The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. Ed.
Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt. New York: Routledge, 2008.
446-50.
Rastogi, Pallavi. Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in
South Africa. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008.
Vassanji, M. G. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. New York: Knopf,
2003.
Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha
Weaving Exilic Narratives: Homodiegetic Narration

and Postcolonial Translocation in Abdulrazak
Gurnah’s Admiring Silence
Introduction
The telling of stories is so commonplace an aspect of our environment that

we sometimes forget stories provide the initial and continuing means for
shaping and sharing our experiences. Stories are the repository of our
collective wisdom about the world of social/cultural behaviour; they are the
key mediating structures for our encounters with reality. One of the important
contemporary East African story-tellers using the English language and the
novel as medium and mode of expression respectively is Abdulrazak Gurnah
from Tanzania. In most of his fiction, the novelist has distinguished his
accomplishment as a postcolonial writer of fiction by consistently helping us
understand the complex nature of dislocation and exile in the post-colonial
world. He counterpoints the anguish of migrant existence with the clever
recognition that life is itself a story and can perhaps be better understood
when the mechanics of the story-telling process and the situation of the
narrator together with his authority are perceived as part of a creative
process. This chapter therefore examines how aspects of narrative design –
narration, narrative situation and focalisation – are used to present the themes
of quest for self-identity and postcolonial translocation in his fifth, and highly
sophisticated, novel Admiring Silence (1996).
The novel features a man (unnamed narrator) who escapes from his native
Zanzibar to England in the early years of Tanzanian independence. His
furtive departure makes it unlikely that he will ever return, but he and his
family agree a bright future lies ahead. He meets an English woman, Emma
and they build a life together. She is writing a thesis on narrative theory; he
becomes a teacher in a cramped London School. His cathartic release is to
weave stories, often fictional, for her and her comfortably suburban parents.
These are romantic and reassuring tales of post-colonial Africa, of the
scented terrace in Old Town, Zanzibar, where he would sit and listen to his
mother’s lyrical voice as a child. However, for all these nostalgic narratives
of warmth and hospitality, the man has not heard from his family since his
departure, nor has he written to tell them of his new secular life with a white
216 Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha
wife. Later in the novel, the barriers come down and he is able finally to
return for a visit. He finds a different Zanzibar, more degenerated than he had
ever imagined or remembered, a country that allows him to see his life with a
new clarity as a “returnee.” It is out of this homecoming and the subsequent
rememberings that he comes to understand the transformations that have
befallen him since his departure. Through a twisting many-layered narrative
the novel explores many themes, such as race and betrayal, translocation and
homecoming with a heavily satirical sense of purpose. The story is told by a
first-person narrator. Besides Admiring Silence, Gurnah is also the author of
six other novels. These other novels are: Memory of Departure (1987),
Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradise (1994) – for which he was
nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, – By the Sea (2001) and
Desertion (2005).
Gurnah and the Craft of Post-colonial Fiction in Tanzania
Tanzanian novelists have made significant contributions to modern African

literature, especially in the indigenous language tradition. Novelists such as
Mohamed Said Abdullah, Said Ahmed Mohamed, Euphrase Kezilahabi, S. A.
Shafi, S. O. S. Baalawy, Abdallah S. Farsy, Shabaan Robert, Mohamed Bin
Suleiman, David E. Diva, Ebrahim Hussein, and S. A. Abdullah using
Kiswahili as their literary language have been the subject of numerous
studies that have sought to explore, interrogate and assess their literary
achievements (Bertoncini-Zubkova, Gromov, Khamis and Wamitila 2008;
Murimi 1998; Njogu 1997; Mbughuni 1978, among others).
The focus on the much smaller population of Anglophone Tanzanian
writers such as Gabriel Ruhumbika, Peter Palangyo, Ismael Mbise, W.E.
Mkufya, Hamza Ssoko, Sikeena Karmali, Jules Damji, Yasmin Ladha,
Elieshi Lema, M. G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah and their individual works
remains quite a neglected area of literary study. By looking at a prominent
novel of perhaps the most prolific writer from this group, Gurnah, this study
makes a modest attempt at addressing this paucity and contributes to the
research interest in post-colonial literature in English from Tanzania. Two
notable early accounts deserve mention – Dawthorne (1974) and Cook
(1977).
In his survey of African literature in the twentieth century, O. R.
Dawthorne discusses at length the sole novel of Gabriel Ruhumbika, A
Village in Uhuru (1969). This novel is arguably the first Tanzanian novel to
be written in English. The novel details the drama between traditionalism and
Weaving Exilic Narratives 217
modernity as experienced by the immediate post-independence African

society in an imaginary African context that closely mirrors Tanzania.
Although Dawthorne does not go to an in-depth analysis of the novel to
include stylistic or thematic exegesis for instance, the very fact that he
mentioned it in his survey volume gave recognition to the existence of writers
in Tanzania using English as their literary medium. Ruhumbika later
abandoned the medium for Kiswahili thus joining the dominant trend in the
country. Cook (1977), in a stimulating chapter wholly dedicated to Peter
Palangyo’s Dying in the Sun (1970) gives an in-depth analysis of this early
Tanzanian novel in English leading to the conclusion its accomplishment was
Dostoevskian in proportion. The two early novels, which are out of print,
remain in the penumbra of Anglophone literary studies in the region. Other
works of the period such as Ismael Mbise’s Blood on our Land (1973) and
even the critical essay by the same writer entitled “Writings in English from
Tanzania” in Killam (54-69) further attests to this marginality vis a vis
Anglophone works from Kenya and Uganda that are synonymous with East
African literature. This could be the same fate that awaits a recent novel,
Parched Earth – A Love Story (2001) by the Tanzanian woman writer Elieshi
Lema.
A ray of hope has however been offered by developments in cultural
theory and literary criticism within the field of postcolonial studies. The
impact of postcolonial theories of language and literature over the past two
decades as well as their steady dissemination from Western universities to the
academies in the postcolonies is beginning to emerge. A new generation of
critics as well as writers is slowly taking the centre-stage in East African
literature in English. Most of these critics are academics who have pursued
their postgraduate work abroad and imbibed the ideas of Edward Said and
Homi K. Bhabha among others. Their intellectual fascination with
postcolonial writers in East Africa goes beyond those located in the national
spaces of their homelands to authors writing about these spaces from the
various diasporas that have arisen out of post-independence migrations to the
West. This new critical school include academics such Evan Maina Mwangi,
Daniel Ojwang, J. K. S. Makokha, Godwin Siundu and Peter Simatei from
Kenya and Danson Kahyana from Uganda. Mikhail Gromov and Eliah S.
Mwaifuge have shed new insights into Anglophone Tanzanian fiction.
Journal articles, book chapters and entries in encyclopaedia by scholars
abroad focusing on aspects of Tanzanian postcolonial literature in English is
also aiding the unfolding visibility on Anglophone Tanzanian writers in the
diaspora and their works. Works, for example, devoted to the study of
Gurnah’s fiction include, inter alia, Helff (2009), Olaussen (2009), Farrier
(2008), Nasta (2004), Griffiths (2000), Lindfors (2000), Bardolph (1998),

Schwerdt (1997) and Maslen (1996). Most of these academic studies dwell
on Gurnah’s famous novel Paradise (1994) and his more recent By the Sea
(2001). This article makes a contribution to the outlined critical trends by
treating yet another significant though understudied novel by Gurnah,
Admiring Silence (1991).
The concerns of this article are theoretically located at the intersection of
the afore-mentioned recent gains out of postcolonial theories and discourses
on identity and texts arising out of post-colonial diasporas as well as the more
textual-based theories of literary criticism normally associated with
structuralism. Narratology is specifically used as the basis of literary
criticism guiding us to the ultimate goal of moving beyond a taxonomy of
formal elements that combine to produce the selected novel to an
understanding of how these elements are arranged in actual narratives,
fictional and non-fictional. Our discussion does not just stop at the
identification of narratological aspects of the narrative design in Gurnah’s
selected novel, but further explores how these narrative elements work to
articulate certain important post-colonial themes. The intellectual tradition
out of which narratology grew began with the linguistic work of Ferdinand de
Saussure. By distinguishing between parole (specific instances of spoken
language) and langue (the idealised abstract grammar relating the entire
specific instances of speech) Roman Jakobson and the Russian Formalists
also influenced the study of narrative, revealing how literary language differs
from ordinary language. Structuralism was further shaped by French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who concluded that myths found in
various cultures can be interpreted in terms of their repetitive structures
(Jahn, Narratology). Equally important is rhetoric as broached by Aristotle.
He conceived of it as the art dealing with the discovery and use of all the
available means of persuasion in any given case. The old-styled rhetoric still
has some pertinence to the social and political purposes of our age and stands
to gain from a study of the new strategies of persuasion that have been
developed.
Thematic Significance of the First-Person Narrator Strategy
Admiring Silence is a typical homodiegetic narrative because the nameless

narrator tells an autobiographical story in retrospect about a set of seemingly
disparate but finally interconnected past experiences that evidently shaped
and changed his life and made him into what he is today. The narrator,
unnamed, escapes from his native Zanzibar to England where he gets a

teaching job and a white woman, Emma, with whom he builds a life. He
weaves stories to his partner and her parents. The stories are a recollection of
his past. He then travels home and reels more of these stories to his mother
and relatives. When he returns to the UK, his wife deserts him, leaving him a
shell of hopelessness.
The story presented in Gurnah’s Admiring Silence is purposely many-
layered as our hero begins with meeting his partner’s parents and then shifts
attention to his heart ailment – the reader is not sure how ill the narrator
really is. One wonders whether it is a metaphor for loss of home and family
or a mere disillusion of the new millennium. From then on the pace changes.
The narrative sweeps us back and forth between our hero’s relationship with
Emma, and his daughter Amelia, and his family without his father in what is
identifiably Zanzibar. The time sequence and flashbacks are woven adeptly
into the fabric of the text, and some adroit writing takes place. Much of the
text is narrative, as opposed to dialogue; as a result, the focus of attention is
maintained throughout.
Tales within tales arise when a character in a story begins to tell a story of
his own, creating a narrative within a narrative. The original narrative now
becomes, narratologically, a matrix narrative and the story told by the
narrating character become the hyponarrative in the sense propagated by
Mieke Bal in Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts In Literary and Cultural
Studies (2004). Ordinarily the transition to hyponarrative, its termination and
the return to the matrix narrative are explicitly signalled in a text;
occasionally, however, a text closes on a hyponarrative without explicitly
resuming the matrix narrative. Admiring Silence leaps through various
hyponarratives before resuming the matrix narrative with the narrator
weighed down with loss of family – both his wife (Emma) and daughter
(Amelia) have deserted him in quick succession.
Hyponarratives can be analysed at several levels: A first degree narrative
(a narrative that is not embedded in any other narrative); a second degree
narrative (a narrative that is embedded in a first degree narrative); a third
degree narrative (one that is embedded in a second degree narrative); and so
on. A first degree narrator, by analogy, is the narrator of a first degree
narrative; a second degree narrator is the narrator of a second degree
narrative, and so on in exact correspondence. Through hyponarratives the
narrator in Admiring Silence sustains suspense in so far as his ailment, his
relationship with Emma and his family in Zanzibar are concerned. The
narratives help to enrich and develop the theme of suffering in exile. The
embedded narrative about the narrator’s journey back to the UK on a plane,
perhaps, prepares us for a foul ending of betrayal when the narrator’s wife,
Emma, deserts him effectively ending their marriage.
The matrix narrative in this novel is the story of the hero’s family which
takes place as a long lie recounted to the partner, and then is recounted in
“fact” by the hero as he returns to his home island. This reads with the
authenticity of an autobiography; the manner in which the hero gently dupes
his partner feels totally accurate, and one can only feel that the partner gets
her revenge in the end as she tells the hero of her own duplicity. Even the
minor characters in the plot, chance encounters on the aeroplane as the
narrator returns to the UK, have a place in the metaphoric scheme of things.
The farting fellow-passenger seems like an archetype of bad things to come,
significantly in the polluted seas between the two countries, into which our
(anti-)hero has got himself without a paddle. The farting is a metaphor,
perhaps, for late twentieth century decay. This metaphor coupled with the
narrator’s personal experience with the farting incident, builds up the
suspense which in turn develops the theme of loss which the narrator finally
suffers when Emma deserts him.
The novel is based on homodiegetic narration. In this type of narrative,
the story is told by a homodiegetic narrator who is also one of the story’s
acting characters. A text is homodiegetic if among its story-related action
sentences, there are some that contain first person pronouns (When I first met
Mr and Mrs Willoughby, Emma and I were both students) indicating that the
narrator was at least a witness to the events depicted. In order to assess the
typical implications of such a scenario, and put them to work in an
interpretation, we will also consider that a homodiegetic narrator always tells
a story of personal experience.
Like other typical homodiegetic narrators, the narrator is restricted to a
personal and subjective point of view; he has no direct access to (or authority
on) events he did not witness in person; he can’t be in two places at the same
time, and he has no way of knowing for certain what went on in the minds of
other characters. Let us sample the excerpt below:
Perhaps Hussein had sworn his admirers to secrecy until he was safely away, or perhaps in
the manner of scandals, the details take a little time to be whispered around, or perhaps
some of them are only interventions. (160; emphasis added)
It is obvious that a narrator’s handling of these limitations, and a text’s

relative closeness to or distance from such default conditions can tell us a lot
about the attitude of the narrative voice as well as the motives for telling the
story. The narrator in Admiring Silence attempts to concretise his stories by
repeating the stories from time to time. He also evokes sympathy from his
narratee by letting other characters such as his mother tell the stories in order
to establish facts. Telling as a narrative strategy is adequate in presenting the
sub-theme of self identity, especially when the historical background of the
narrator has to be told by someone more mature than the narrator himself.
The use of repetition and silence are strategies common in the African oral
forms. They are used to emphasise particular themes, appeal and attract
sympathy.
A narrator who is the speaker or “voice” of the narrative discourse is the
agent who establishes communicative contact with an addressee (the
“narratee”), who manages the exposition, who decides what is to be told, how
it is to be told (especially, from what point of view, and in what sequence),
and what is to be left out. The narrator in Admiring Silence, however, leaves
his stories wide-open and uses physical and emotional flight as a metaphor
for insoluble internal shuttling between national and personal affiliations. For
analysis, we will simply repeat the text’s incipit (beginning), inserting some
analytical annotations:
I [self-reference of an overt narrator] have found myself leaning heavily on this pain [looks
like a story of personal experience]. At first [chronological order of events] I tried to silence
it, thinking it would go and leave me to my agitated content [narrator’s main activity is
silencing and thinking]. That it would linger for a season, a firm reminder of the disquiet
that lurks and coils below the surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our [=my
and your… the narrator acknowledges an addressee and provides the first illustration to the
foregoing generalisation] lives. Far from going, it became more clear, more precisely
located, concrete, an object that occupied space within me, cockroachy, dark and intimate,
emitting thick, stinking fumes that reeked of loneliness and terror [narrator’s self-evaluation
of the nature of the pain]. When I woke up in the morning [setting of events], I groped for it,
then sighed with plunging recognition as I felt it stirring inside me, alive and well [further
evaluation of the pain]. Emma [character exposition] said it was indigestion or something
similar, but I could see [self-characterisation] from the surprised anxiety in her eyes that she
did not believe that. For a few weeks she persuaded [block characterisation] me to try a
variety of powders and tablets, and she began to read about special diets, and acidity and
roughage and vitamins [further characterisation]. Emma was like that with problems
[further characterisation of Emma]. She gave them her careful attention, at least for a while.
In the foregoing excerpt, the narrator presents Emma in an exposition that

develops the theme of love, and subsequent loss that the narrator encounters
as an exile. This is clearly an overt narratorial voice engaged in giving
concise and reader-conscious expository information on the main
character(s). The paragraphs that follow present additional background
information on the narrator and Emma. The narrator introduces himself with
an ailment and Emma with her virtues. Some of the character traits attributed
to Emma are obviously wholly conventional; others strike one as slightly
unexpected, perhaps deserving careful attention (and intonation!). We may

observe the projected tone of voice in “Emma was like that with
problems…,” for instance. Clearly, this is a judgemental voice that gives
Emma positive attributes and whatever else may be entailed by the summary
characterisation of Emma is, therefore, not an entirely negative one. All
narration, whether it is oral or written, whether it recounts real or mythical
events, whether it tells a story or relates a simple sequence of action in time,
presupposes not only (at least) one narrator but also (at least) one narratee,
the narratee being someone whom the narrator addresses. The narrator does
this in Admiring Silence in order to solicit for the narratee’s sympathy and
develop the theme of exile and loss.
The excerpt has plenty of emotional and subjective expressions –
expressions like “found myself leaning heavily on this pain,” “I tried
silence,” “surface of the stubbornly self-gratifying vision of our lives,” “it
became more clear, more precisely located, concrete, an object that occupied
space within me” and so on. Since these are strong voice markers they
suggest a highly overt rather than neutrally overt voice then this must be a
homodiegetic overt narration. Depending on how the presence of a narrator is
signalled in the text, one distinguishes between “overt” and “covert”
narrators. An overt narrator is one who refers to himself in the first-person
(“I,” “we” etc.), one who directly or indirectly addresses the narratee, one
who offers reader-friendly exposition whenever it is needed (using the
“conative” or “appellative” discourse function), one who exhibits a
“discoursal stance” toward characters and events, especially in his use of
rhetorical figures, imagery, evaluative phrases and emotive or subjective
expressions.
One of the stylistic effects of homodiegetic narration in Admiring Silence
is the creation of irony. Irony is always the result of a disparity of
understanding. In any situation in which one person knows or perceives more
– or less – than another, irony must be either actually or potentially present.
In any example of narrative art there are, broadly speaking, three points of
view – those of the characters, the narrators and the audience. As a narrative
becomes more sophisticated, a fourth point of view is added by the
development of a clear distinction between the narrator and the author.
Scholes and Kellogg (240) observe that narrative irony is a function of
disparity among these three or four view points. Stories appeal primarily
because they offer a simulacrum of life which enables an audience to
participate in events without being involved in the consequences which
events in the actual world inevitably carry with them. Our pleasure in
narrative literature itself, then, can be seen as a function of disparity of point
of view or irony. Because we are not involved in the action represented, we

always enjoy certain superiority over the characters who are. When Gurnah
allows us to know that the unnamed narrator (in Admiring Silence) is
deceiving Emma – or is unreliably telling the story of his background which
the reader confirms when the narrator goes back to Zanzibar – then the
operation of the simple irony adds to our pleasure or displeasure in the
narrative. Our sympathy for Emma is heightened, but we also make our
emotional preparations for the narrator’s downfall or defeat when he suffers
loss of family and home. The control of irony is a principal function of point
of view. There are predictable moments of this downfall, for instance:
So back to holy matrimony. The joke about that was that Emma and I were not married but
had been living in increasingly fractious sin for the last donkey’s years. (17)
This points to lack of commitment that is so pertinent in the call of marriage,

at least from the point of view of the Zanzibari. But the racial difference
between the narrator and Emma perhaps is the greatest stumbling block to the
realisation of this union within its context. In telling the story personally, the
“I” narrator hopes to elicit sympathy from the narratee and by so doing,
brings to the fore the themes of disjointedness in exile as a result of racism.
Admiring Silence deals with lives woven out of complex links between
Arab-African culture in a former colony of the British Empire and a
contemporary British suburbia. What Gurnah offers us is a unique
perspective, built out of his own life experience, of a story of borders and
their transgression that is reproduced across the modern world in various
ways as a result of contemporary human migration patterns. The sense of
dislocation post-colonial migrants feel in the contemporary world, what they
leave behind or, rather, carry within them after translocation offer the fabric
from which the complex narrative design of his fiction is woven. It is for this
reason that Admiring Silence makes a captivating reading to audiences of
diverse yet similar backgrounds whose lives, though perhaps lived in
particular locales, share the modern sense of dislocation either at the temporal
or spatial dimension. The protagonist’s predicament highlights the latter
dimension while that of his wife Emma is a case of the former. Both readers
from the metropole as well as its peripheries in the form of ex-colonies find
their experiences articulated by one of these two characters. This is what
makes much of what Gurnah refers to in his spinning narrative ring true to
human experiences of dislocation in the postcolonial world. The novelist cuts
through to the various layers of the culture and geography one leaves behind
and those that one adapts shedding light on the influence of the two locales in
the formation of the characters of in the novel. The novelist describes through
his fiction the confusion that arises with the transgression of cultural and
geographical boundaries especially when the transgressor seeks adjustment to
the new environment, as is the case of the main character, an African from
Zanzibar trying to find fulfillment in post-colonial Britain.
A sophisticated writer, Gurnah examines the reinvention of the past and
its roles in the making of the present moment through building his fiction on
deceptively simple tales of exile or translocation. It is the treatment of exile
as a source of stories and narratives that motors his literary oeuvre, as is
evident in the novel under study here. The central character opens the main
story in Admiring Silence, with the need to understand the exilic present by
crossing the borders of time in order to find meaning in a past lost or rather
fallen apart. The novel is therefore a reinvention of the past in order to make
the present meaningful as much as a remembrance of things past that makes
the present what it is. It appears, therefore, that the narrator in Admiring
Silence is trapped in some sort of limbo between here and there or now and
then, apparently unable to avoid the confusion that comes with such a locus
of in-betweeness. After a twenty year life in England and absence from his
natal home, Zanzibar, during which he has severed links with his Zanzibar
family through silence to the extent that they do not even know of his
marriage with an English woman or their child, on return to Zanzibar the
narrator finds himself caught up in marriage negotiations which he cannot
possibly honour but which he is too embarrassed to put an end to as a “lost”
past comes back to haunt his “concealed” present.
Gurnah’s re-examination of geography as a location of self-identification
in relation to the quests for self-identity embraced by his protagonist is
brilliant. As the first sentence of the final section of Admiring Silence hints,
the narrator can only be ever in flight “from home” (177) – the impossibility
of all his domestic situations has set him in a state of perpetual flight. On his
flight “home” to that “secretest” most real part of him in Battersea, Emma
brusquely terminates their marriage by explaining that she has found
someone else and finds her husband’s presence “unbearable” (210). The
novel ends with the narrator rejected by his English wife, and rejecting his
Zanzibari family’s renewed pleas to “come home” because “it wasn’t home
any more and I had no way of retrieving that seductive idea except through
more lies” (217). No longer able to affiliate himself nationally or
domestically he floats the possibility of an attachment to his female travel
companion on the flight from Zanzibar to London.
This woman, Ira, like the narrator, is another interesting native of East
Africa with an ambivalent identity; born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, to
Indian parents, she had experienced a traumatic removal to England in the

late 60s when her Indianness – which up till then in Kenya had been an
effective marker of her privileged “British” high social status that most
Kenyan Europeans and Kenyan Indians enjoy – got her racially labelled as
“wog, coon, Paki bitch” (204). Let down by England (to which she had been
brought up us a child to view as a partner to her Indianness in Africa), Ira is
later let down also by an English husband when they end up in divorce. The
failure of that marriage foreshadows the narrator’s soon-to-end marriage to
Emma and frames their shared disillusionment as colonial migrants around
the idea of “disappointed love” characteristic of the relationship between the
ex-colonial centre and its margins (205). The sense of rootlessness which
links Ira and the narrator produces a postcolonial African subjectivity rather
different from the more familiar hybrid protagonists of Achebe or Ngugi. The
figures of Gurnah’s fiction form both a dual identity evident in the likes of
Obi Okwonko and Njoroge as well as a non-identity located in the
ambivalence at the centre of multiple worlds, African, Arab/Asian and
European, which renders their various flights ever away from old homes yet
never towards (or sometimes caught in between) new homes.
In his efforts to present the meditations and mediations about exilic
identities and the implicit as well as explicit post-colonial issues involved, the
nameless narrator at times becomes quite extravagant with his seemingly
endless tales and affection for detail. In his comparison of the sophistication
of the metropolis where he currently lives with the squalor of his former life
in the third world, he reflects on the injustices meted out to Africans by
British colonialists. For instance, he uses in great detail his visit to a personal
doctor to bring out the difference between home and diaspora and touches on
one of the motivations that make people, like himself, relocate. Whereas in
the UK it is common to have a general-practitioner, it is not so in the third
world countries which the narrator metaphorically refers to as “darker corners
of the world” (4). The narrator attributes this disparity to the unequal
economic power relations between the two brought about by exploitation of
one by the other during the long period of slavery and colonialism:
Then let your eyes wander farther a field, and there are the factories and warehouses and
mechanized farms and model towns and chapels, and museums bursting with booty from
other people’s broken histories and libraries sprawling with books congregated over
centuries. (4; emphasis added)
Here, the I-narrator strategy helps the protagonist addresses the narratee
directly, to solicit for the reader’s sympathy and appeal to the conscience
about the ills meted out to Africa by the west. It is through this mediational
strategy of comparative narration that the themes of prejudice and cultural

difference, common in most fiction of border-crossings or postcolonial
relocation, are developed in Admiring Silence. The narrator’s doctor makes
racial utterances to the narrator based on their cultural differences and origins
of the protagonist. He addresses the narrator who is an Arab-African by
referring to his colour and apparent resemblance to the multiracial people of
the West Indies as “Afro-Caribbean people” (9). The narrator reveals to his
readers that the term is a euphemism or synonym for “darkies, hubshis, abids,
bongo-bongos […] victims of starvation and tyranny and disease and
unregulated lusts and history, etc.” (10). The “I” narrator is adequate in
presenting this theme because racism involves personal experiences which
can be best narrated from first-hand experience.
Formal Significance of Rhetoric as a Narrative Strategy
If we conceive of rhetoric as Aristotle conceived of it – namely, as the art

dealing with the discovery and use of “all the available means of persuasion
in any given case” – the old-style rhetoric still has some pertinence to the
social and political purposes of our age and, of course, stands to gain from a
study of the new strategies of persuasion that have been developed. Although
increasing attention will indubitably be paid to those emotional, psycho-
physical springs that trigger men’s responses and actions, it does not seem
likely that men will entirely abandon the strategy of appealing to the
rationality, the reasonableness, of their fellow men.
One of the most salutary lessons that has come down to us from the Greek
rhetoricians and philosophers is that unless we treat man as an integrated
complex of intellect, will, passions, and physicality, we shall not produce
whole men. Aristotle, the forerunner thinker of rhetoric did not sit in his
cubicle and dream up a set of principles for convincing other men. Rather, he
observed the practice of effective orators, analysed their strategies, and from
that observation and analysis codified a body of precepts to guide others in
the exercise of the persuasive art. He believed, as did every other rhetorician
who composed a treatise on the persuasive art, that what men did
instinctively they could do more effectively if they consciously schooled
themselves in the art of that activity. Rhetoric then is an inescapable activity
in our lives. Of the four conventional forms of spoken or written discourse –
exposition, argumentation, description, and narration – that we get involved
in, argumentation is most often. Everyone living in community with other
men is a rhetorician.
One of the chief values of rhetoric, conceived as a system of gathering,

arranging and expressing our material, is that it represents a positive
approach to the problems of writing. Students have too often been inhibited
in their writing by the negative approach to composition – don’t do this,
beware of that. Fiction rhetoric too has had its negative prescriptions, but, in
the main, it offers positive advice to help the student in the composition of a
specific kind of discourse directed to a definite audience for a particular
purpose. Rhetoric cannot, of course, tell the student what he must do in any
and every situation. At least it can provide the student with a set of
procedures and criteria that can guide him in making strategic decisions in
the composition process.
Rhetorical approach can be used to study irony and satire in Admiring
Silence. Satire is essentially an exercise in rhetoric – rhetoric in the fictional
sense of persuasive discourse. The satirist is engaged either in deliberative
rhetoric or in ceremonial rhetoric: either the satirist is seeking to influence the
attitude of his audience, often with the ultimate purpose of moving his
audience to do something, or he is seeking, through the medium of praise or
blame, to induce his audience to accept or reject some person or group of
persons.
Gurnah’s Admiring Silence is a display of deliberative rhetoric. The
novel’s outrage at the “petty hardships” of Africa and its satire on obscenely
self-serving leaders is uncompromising. Yet Gurnah is acutely aware of the
hazards of raging against post-colonial Africa – the “overcharged ironies” in
labelling those in charge “cannibal louts.” His hero’s pandering fictions to the
Willoughbys reflect the dilemma of the writer coming from what he terms
with irony as “darker corners of the world” (4) to play up to expectations of
the “exotic” with anodyne nostalgia, or risk confirming bigotry through harsh
realism. The author’s own choice is clear: “We keep silent and nod. For fear
of our lives – while bloated tyrants fart and stamp on us for their petty
gratification.” It is tyrants who commend muteness in their subjects, like the
ayatollah with fatwa – “another admirer of silence.” But the hero’s stories
also have a self-protective function. They shield him from guilt and
recrimination and from the wounding power of words. However, his
traumatic visit home banishes fearful silences within himself and his family,
as he overcomes the obtuse resentments of childhood.
Despite its biting humour, Admiring Silence is in some ways a muted
novel, an anguished mediation on home and loss that refuses the comfort of
resolution. While it eloquently charts the cumulative changes wrought by
geographical displacement, it also reveals the loss of love as a kind of exile.
In other words, satire helps to bring out the themes of loss and self-identity.
The narrator in Admiring Silence invokes the assistance of other narrators

such as his mother and the prime minister to develop the theme of both self
and national identity. The temporal and psychological distance between the
narrating I and the experiencing I is known as narrative distance. Usually, the
narrating I is older and wiser than the experiencing I. Example:
I wish I could have said that I taught neurology at University College London and in my
spare time took a clinic at Guys Hospital, and at times appeared on TV when one of my
cases caught the public imagination. Perhaps then I wouldn’t have got the disconcertingly
crestfallen smile she gave me. This would have been the moment to say something about the
kind of school I taught in, and the barbarians who were my students. And then perhaps
towards the end of this description I could slip in that the work was so crushing that I had
suffered a heart attack (God forbid). (Gurnah, Admiring Silence 164)
This is a block characterisation of the experiencing I, from the point of view

of the narrating I. The first-person/homodiegetic narration aims at presenting
an experience that shaped or changed his life and made him into what he is
today. A first-person narrator is an important witness offering an otherwise
inaccessible account of historical or fictional events. Typical sub-genres of
first-person narration are fictional autobiographies, initiation stories, and skaz
narratives.
The use of a first-person narration is adequate as it is more reliable
because the narrator speaks from first-hand experience. However, we cannot
trust “I” to recollect all his childhood happenings vividly. The failure to
remember his childhood is what leads the narrator in Admiring Silence to
give an adult’s view to things that occurred when he was a child vividly.
Indeed, at certain points the “I” candidly confesses that he is not sure about
certain things. Let us sample the excerpt below:
The only time he ever hit me was when a bicycle barged into Akbar when he was playing in
the road and I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him, and my attention had wandered or
Akbar had been reckless. I don’t remember… (117)
Such confessions reduce the narrator’s reliability to articulate the themes of

identity and loss.
Gurnah uses many internal focalisers in order to bring out the irony of
fact that underlies the narrative. It is because of several internal focalisers
who see what happens in the story that the narrator’s unreliability is brought
out. The narrator embroiders romanticised childhood tales to woo a fellow
student, Emma Willoughby, and baits her father with indecorously parodic
“Empire stories.” His biggest lie paves the way for abject farce. The
experiencing “I” is used as internal focaliser when he visits his home in
Zanzibar and asks his mother to “Tell me about my father” (123). It is

through his mother’s narratives that he discovers the facts. He has told the
Willoughbys a lie – his mother’s stories contradict his own knowledge about
the same stories. The presentation of different episodes of the story as seen
through the eyes of several focalisers helps to give the story authenticity and
let the reader make his own judgement. The stories help develop the theme of
self-identity and explore the effects of dislocation.
The patient organisation of rhetorical detail in Admiring Silence is post-
colonial in its devotion to brilliant outward design. Even more striking,
however, is the post-colonial quality of the way in which the work is
meaningful. Rather than referring to medieval types of actuality, its images
carry allegorical meanings. When the allegorical significance is not culturally
stipulated, that is, not traditional, it is a private significance attached to
Gurnah himself. To study Admiring Silence is to study all the books Gurnah
read, or by some even less legitimate method stole from, as well as all the
meaningful elements in his private life. Not even the ideal reader with the
ideal insomnia will penetrate to the heart of Admiring Silence without
studying the novelist. For at the heart of Admiring Silence is the inarticulate
underside of the novelist himself, casting up out of the deepest recesses of
being, on a Zanzibar-UK trajectory, all the images ever dreamed by himself.
The silence between the narrator in the UK and his family in Zanzibar
could be an allegory: an allegory of detachment, absence, nostalgia,
migration whose import is grim, not admirable! In the narrator’s silence is the
jerky information about his own identity, he does not have facts about his
own father and that is why, perhaps, he is nameless; in the same silence is the
allegory of the farting man on the plane to symbolise a foul relationship
between Africa and Europe. Through silence the narrator’s marriage to
Emma Willoughby is not guaranteed. Here, perhaps, Gurnah urges us to stir
our conscience and route for cultural identity as a basis for our own survival.
As earlier observed, Gurnah’s novel is a fictional autobiography. The
narrator is a mature man who looks back on his past life. Although he is only
forty two at the time of writing the story, he feels his life is all but over,
“Now that she’s gone, I find myself living in England for reasons I no longer
know” (215-16). Like many first-person narrators, he has now become not
only older but also wiser. Looking back on his life, he realises that he made
many mistakes, especially in his detachment from his father: “I meditate on
my father Abbas. I like saying his name to myself. I meditate on the
callousness, or the panic, or the stupidity that could have made him act with
such cruelty. Is he perhaps living two streets away from me. [...] I imagine
him in his sixties, sitting alone with his silences” (216). The story’s first-
person narrative situation is uniquely suited for presenting the narrator’s

insights about his wasted life, effectively developing the theme of loss and
nostalgia.
The story is told in a straight-forwardly chronological manner, and its
timeline can be established quite accurately. The story’s action begins with
the narrator’s acquaintance with Emma Willoughby. He is now forty-two
years old and has been away from his Zanzibar home for twenty years: “I did
not want another twenty-year silence” (217). So the narrator must have left
Zanzibar at the age of twenty two years old only. The narrator’s daughter,
Amelia, is nineteen which means she was born one year after the narrator’s
entry into the UK. The long period the narrator has been away from home
helps develop the themes of nostalgia and home-coming. The narratee
sympathises with the narrator when the latter tells lies about himself due to
ignorance occasioned by a long period of detachment from home. We also
sympathise with the narrator because of the persuasive strategies he uses such
as repetition of certain incidents, silence and the rhetorical questions.
The story’s action episodes focus on the narrator, his “buggered” heart,
acquaintance with the Willoughbys, marriage to Emma, visit to Zanzibar,
flight back to UK and the subsequent bolting of Emma from the marriage.
The story ends on a note of loss and despair. The only thing the narrator can
do is obsessively review his past. In the final retrospective epiphany, he
realises two things with devastating clarity: that Emma’s estrangement from
the marriage robbed him of a purpose in life and; that had he known his
father he probably would have leaned back on him in such trying moments.
The sub-theme of self-identity is treated well in a first-person narrative
situation. Unlike the well-spoken omniscient narrator, who cannot himself be
present as a character in the story, the narrator’s voice and diction are
functional and characteristic features in Admiring Silence. His self-
consciousness in telling the story – “Age breeds aches. I could have told her
ages ago – that my father was Abbas and he left my mother before I was
born, that he probably came to England” (215) – and his involvement in the
story support the development of theme of self-identity. Whereas the
narrator’s story is an account of personal experience, an omniscient narrator
knows everything from the beginning and cannot normally undergo any
personal development (unless this is caused by the act of telling itself).
The major theme of translocation and recollection that runs through Gurnah’s
story would, however, be well manageable in a figural narrative situation, in
which the narrator could serve as a third person character (an internal
focaliser, a reflector figure) in the act of recollecting his past. A figural story
tends to focus on merely a scenic view of life. Admiring Silence spans a
story-time of at least twenty-two years. In fact the narrator’s telling of his

own story helps him think about his life and clarify his own thoughts and
judgements. A reflector-figure, in contrast, is not a narrator and cannot
address a narratee. It is important to the narrator in Admiring Silence to tell
his story to a known audience but in a sense also, most importantly in our
view, to himself.
Conclusion
In this study, close reading and the method of detailed analysis have been
applied to Gurnah’s Admiring Silence (1996) in order to draw conclusions
about his narrative skills in the depiction of the condition of exile and
concomitant quests of identity in the post-colonial world. The theme of
migration from the former colonial society of Zanzibar to metropolitan
Britain, and the problems associated with experience of homecoming as
narrated through the consciousness and conscience of the narrators, was the
central topic of discussion in the article. Invoking the theory of narrative, we
borrowed the interpretative framework with which to tease out meanings in
the novel from rhetoric narratology – the art of talking to persuade the
audience. Rhetorical narratology deals with the use of discourse, either
spoken or written to inform or persuade or move an audience, whether that
audience is made up of a single person or a group of persons – rhetoric seems
to comprehend every kind of verbal expression that man engages in so as to
achieve an end.
We conclude from the foregoing discussion that – the tools provided by
the theory of narrative – namely, narration, narrative situation and
focalisation have been adequately used to present the predicament of the
transitional character of the nameless protagonist of, Admiring Silence.
Through this brilliant novel, Gurnah ably asserts his position as a
cosmopolitan African writer who helps us through narrative fiction and the
English language as medium and mode of post-colonial expressions to
grapple with one of the challenges of a changing Africa – translocation.
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Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira
Between Diasporic Identity and Agency:

Versions of the Pastoral in Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way and
Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker
The authoritative, compelling image of the empire, which crept into and overtook so many
procedures of intellectual mastery that are central in modern culture, finds its opposite in the
renewable, almost sporty discontinuities of intellectual and secular impurities – mixed
genres, unexpected combinations of tradition and novelty, political experiences based on
communities of effort and interpretation.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
(335)
Introduction: The Postcolonial Version of the Pastoral Novel
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way (1988) and Jamal Mahjoub’s Navigation

of a Rainmaker (1989) revise the characteristics of the post-romantic
pastoral, thus exemplifying a late twentieth-century trend in the pastoral
tradition. Following Paul Alpers’s reading of the pastoral tradition as a
history of reversals of previous versions of the pastoral, post-colonial
pastoralism tests the limits of pre-established traditional oppositions such as
the country-city binary. The post-colonial pastoral text proposes a range of
alternatives to such dialectical categories. Thus, these novels foreground
images of reconciliation of extremes; they focus on the tension between and
on the mutual influence of the two ends of the oppositions; they find
alternative cosmologies that do not read the world as a system of binaries; or
they highlight the subjective and the individual perception as strategies that
counter a systemic ordering of the world. In doing this, these post-colonial
novels reject the highly oppositional features of post-romantic pastoralism,
and they seek inspiration instead in the romantic revolutionary version of the
pastoral.
William Wordsworth is invoked as the poet who “shatter[ed] the
continuity” of the pastoral (Sambrook 133), and his The Prelude is read as
the work that took “us out of the woods of Arden and into the world of the
modern shepherd and, perhaps, of a modern pastoral” (Alpers 21). The most
influential of the romantics in this regard, Wordsworth reformed the pastoral
as he reconciled pastoral elements that were traditionally separate or even
236 Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira
dialectically opposed. He merged the mythical and the personal, the general
and the particular. “Wordsworth’s lyrics,” writes Harold E. Toliver, “unite
spiritual elevation with anecdotes of time, place, and common experience in a
new way that reconceives their relationship and radically reconceives
pastoral” (258). Likewise, Michael Squires feels that “Wordsworth is not
writing as a traditional pastoralist. Nor is he literal […] in interpreting
humble and rustic life. Put simply,” Squires concludes, Wordsworth
“alternates between realism and idealisation in his treatment of rural life”
(47). In his reinterpretation of the pastoral, “[t]he golden past and the pleasant
place become a personal time and a personal landscape and yet retain the
equivalent of mythic dimensions” (Toliver 258). 1
For Renato Poggioli, the revolutionary reversal of the pastoral tradition
brought about by the romantics and the historical circumstances that
surrounded it ended the pastoral tradition. Thus, Poggioli considers that four
different forces came together during the advent of romanticism that,
“[w]hile creating quasi-pastoral utopias, […] destroyed the conventional and
traditional pastoral.” These four “cultural trends” he lists as “the
humanitarian outlook, the idea of material progress, the scientific spirit, and
artistic realism” (31). The scientific spirit and the coming of romanticism
coincided, Poggioli holds, in the repudiation of the “conventional and the
fanciful” and in the development of a “new spirit of ‘truth’ that inspired
modern Western culture even in the artistic field” (32). The new imagination
promoted by the romantics “expanded nature into a boundless realm, which
replaced the meadows and groves, as well as the orchards and gardens, of
traditional poetry.” As a consequence of the convergence of these historical
factors, Poggioli claims that “pastoral poetry finally died, and disappeared
from sight” (33). Nevertheless, Poggioli readily admits that, although he feels
that pastoral poetry died with the romantics, “the pastoral ideal survived”
(33; emphasis added). This ideal emerges in non-literary forms such as “‘the
back to nature’ movement […] [or] the cult of the primitive.” As for modern
literary pastorals, Poggioli finds that most of them are written in prose. These
prose pastorals are “devitalised and unrecognisable,” and they “break all
1
Other romantic poets attempted also this “union of passion, simplicity, and truth”
(Sambrook 132) in a variety of groundbreaking ways. Coleridge, for instance, rejected the
established separation between the retreat in nature and the life of the court and he
endeavored to “achieve communion […] through the imagination […] with the total body
politic.” Likewise, Shelley understood his role as the channel through which “what the west
wind and the skylark offer” may reach society. Finally, Keats, too, regarded poetry as a
means of political and social improvement by “its offering of realisable dreams” (Toliver
263).
Between Diasporic Identity and Agency 237
traditional patterns and attitudes.” As examples of these radical departures, he

mentions extravagant new settings and characters. Pastorals set in urban
settings, or even indoors, or during the winter, replace country and rural
pastorals, while “plebeians and urban outcasts fill the role once played by
countrymen and villagers” (33).
In What Is Pastoral? Alpers reviews the pastoral as a history of critiques
of the previous version of the tradition. Based on a similar assumption about
the dialectical progression of the pastoral, Toliver writes that the romantics in
general and Wordsworth in particular respond to (and to an extent react
against) previous tenets of the tradition, and that the post-romantics re-assert
some of the values that the romantics had deconstructed. As we saw, the
romantic pastoralists’ view of the locus amoenus reconciled the realistic and
the symbolic, the transcendental and the personal. Toliver holds that the
realistic inclination of the romantics informs the post-romantics’ view of the
opposition of country to city. Thus, he explains that post-romantic pastoral
consists also in a “[failed] attempt to find a means to unite them – or at least
minimise the impact of their separation” (210). Because their effort does not
succeed, the post-romantics re-assert the distance between the real and the
ideal, the industrial city and the pastoral country that the romantics had
attempted to reconcile. Furthermore, this seemingly irresolvable separation
between fiction and reality engenders in the post-romantics a “sceptical view
of the pastoral tradition.” This scepticism leads modern versions of pastoral
to “suggest that the distance between fictional idylls and the daily world
precludes any genuine transformation of reality except an imagined one”
(Toliver 14).
In The Pastoral Novel, Michael Squires examines the evolution of the
post-romantic pastoral. He shares Poggioli’s and Toliver’s opinions about the
diversification of this literary mode’s post-romantic versions as well as about
this new pastoral’s inclination towards the personal and the realistic, but he
does not see these as indicative of the end of the pastoral. Further, he does
not consider the novel as a “devitalised” (Poggioli 33) contemporary
manifestation of the pastoral ideal, and thus goes on to elaborate a definition
of the pastoral novel to cover its diverse manifestations, and he lists the
motifs that were passed on from earlier moments of the pastoral:
the pastoral novel […] [is] the subgenre of the novel, developing out of the pastoral
tradition, which idealises country life by using many of the elements and techniques of
traditional pastoral – principally, the contrast between city and country; the re-creation of
rural life from both urban and rural viewpoints; the implied withdrawal from complexity to
simplicity; the nostalgia for a Golden-Age past of peace and satisfaction; the implied
criticism of modern life; and the creation of a circumscribed and remote pastoral world. This
remote pastoral world features harmony between man and nature, idyllic contentment, and a
sympathetic realism which combines elements of idealisation and realism and by means of
which country life, stripped of its coarsest features, is made palatable to urban society. (18)
Summing up, Poggioli, Toliver, Alpers, and Squires highlight some

important main features in the post-romantic pastoral in general and in the
pastoral novel that flourished after the romantics in particular. The post-
romantic pastoral novel is, then, indebted to the romantics for their turn
towards the realistic and for their valorisation of the personal and the
subjective. As a reaction to the romantic pastoral, however, the pastoral novel
re-establishes the separation between traditionally opposed terms such as the
country-city and the ideal-real binary. Finally, this separation leads pastoral
novelists to adopt a sceptical view of the actual possibilities of influence of
the "ideal" (i.e., both the pastoral novel itself within historical context and the
pastoral moment within a literary work) on the “real” (i.e., the material
circumstances surrounding the production of the novel and the “city” in the
pastoral novel).
My contention is that Pilgrims Way and Navigation of a Rainmaker, as
examples of late twentieth-century post-colonial pastoral novels, react against
systemic binaries that relegate the multifaceted histories and backgrounds of
the formerly colonial worlds to pre-established categories of otherness,
darkness, primitivism, or unrealistic paradises. These post-colonial pastoral
novels propose instead a reconciliation of or an alternative to traditionally
opposed binary terms, and they restore the attention to the subjective and the
individual. In this, as in its underlying realism, these post-colonial pastoral
novels are indebted to the romantic revolutionary mutation of the pastoral.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Pilgrims Way: Paradise Reconstructed by

the Serpent
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
[…] “Because you have done this, cursed are you more than all cattle […] He shall bruise
you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel.
Genesis 3, 1-15
Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrims Way tells the story of the Tanzanian

immigrant Daud, who has been living in Canterbury, in the “heart of the
evangelical centre,” for five years. Daud’s life in England is dominated by
the fear of and the contempt for those who look at him with an “imperial
grin,” a mask showing racist hatred that is worn by many English citizens.
Contempt has led to violent feelings of rejection and prejudice on Daud’s

part, while fear has rendered him incapable of any action beyond haughty
detachment. Pilgrims Way shows the process through which Daud comes to
realise that this initial attitude buys directly into the racist discourse that
promotes the rigid opposition of white to black and British to alien that he
meant to counter in the first place. In this process, Daud searches for the
origins of his defeatist life philosophy and he finds them in the racial and
religious confrontations that victimised him in his homeland after
decolonisation. As he connects his current condition in England with his past
experiences in Tanzania, his binary distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is
ruptured and Daud is pushed out of his present condition of paralysis into one
where he can accept the possibility of change outside the racist discourses by
which he has been othered. He further realises that it was in his homeland
that his complicit involvement in the process of othering began, as he himself
used to reenact narratives of conquest over the land that had been previously
subjected to colonialism. With this realisation Daud finds the possibility to
rethink, first, his ancestral home as something other than a territory for
narratives of conquest and dreams of pastoral primitiveness and, second, his
migrancy as a site of agency and power. In a strategy that parallels Daud’s
effort to find alternatives to the existing racist categories and their loaded
entailments, Pilgrims Way makes use of the pastoral tripartite motif of flight
from the city/ retreat into the country/ return to the city to describe Daud’s
return to agency. This appropriation revises the pastoral tradition in that the
location for a pastoral retreat – the site of the discovery of empowering
agency – is found in the acceptance of a hybrid city, constantly renewed by
the incorporation to its life and identity of components like the post-colonial
migrant.
Named after David, the child who had to meet the Philistine giant Goliath
in unequal combat (40), Daud conceives of life around him in terms of
disadvantageous oppositions, a direct legacy from colonialism. All
confrontations are symptomatic of the central confrontation between
coloniser and colonised, and all encounters between a British white and a
black alien re-enact the colonial encounter. The opening scene of the novel
exemplifies Daud’s perspective of the world. At a bar, he suspiciously
observes the barman chatting with an old man; he then sees how they chuckle
to themselves and how they turn to look at him. As the old man grins, Daud
thinks of the grin “as the one that won an empire. […] It had traveled the
seven seas, flashing at unsuspecting wogs the world over” (5). The grin as a
racist mask, as a facade hiding xenophobia and racial prejudice, is thus
introduced in the first pages of the novel. Its acknowledgment marks the
initial stage in Daud’s process of identity transformation as it identifies the

position from which Daud evolves in the novel. His evolution will take him
to find ways to fight what the grin represents, to recognise his own prejudiced
grins, and to accept the possibility of two individual people facing each other
without grinning.
Through the novel Daud is subjected to numerous instances of blatant
racism as well as of hypocritical egalitarianism. Walking in the streets, he
often encounters unnamed citizens who think it their duty to make him feel
unwelcome among them. On one such occasion, Daud sees a man walking
his dog “start to grin.” Recognising the sign, he “threw dignity to the winds
and fled, the [man’s] dog panting and leaping behind him. He heard the man
laugh” (9). Still, Daud is particularly critical of members of the English
society who flaunt their liberalism while remaining fundamentally
prejudiced. He realises that to his young and educated English neighbours,
Susan and Tony, Daud is public proof of their open-mindedness, which they
are intent on demonstrating publicly by establishing physical contact with
him. Out driving, Susan perches behind him in the car, “her arm on his
shoulder and her plump breasts leaning against him.” At another gathering,
Tony tells Daud about his experiences working in South Africa and about
how pleasantly surprised he had been at “the amount of contact between
black and white […] multi-racial parties, children playing together.” When
conversation warms up, it reveals that “the best-loved character in the office
[where Tony worked] […] was Amos the black messenger […] [who] kept
everybody in tucks with his antics.” To culminate the string of racial slurs,
Tony explains how his nephew had been nursed by a black woman. “Christ,”
he declares, “how far can you go to show that you don’t have any racial
prejudices? To let your own child be suckled by a black woman!” (93).
Constant persecution has made Daud as paranoid as he appears at the
beginning of the novel, when he explains that he feels “exposed when he
[sits] […] in a pub alone” (6). To cope with the grins and the racism, Daud
has devised his own strategies, but none of them take the form of open
confrontation or direct opposition. He vents his frustration by writing letters,
in an elevated tone and full of irony, to those whom he suspects are
prejudiced against him. When a young white girl he has been observing
returns his gaze, he mentally composes an imaginary letter addressed to her:
“Dear Pale Face,” he starts, “Did you think I was studying you with desire
throbbing through my veins? Is that why you looked so amused? Black Boy
Lusts After White Flesh” (26). He also sublimates his anger by transferring it
to the sport of cricket. He follows the progress of the English team as it faces
teams from former colonies (Australia, West Indies) and he perceives these
matches, which he describes with war metaphors, as contests for colonial

supremacy: “It was as if they were the last two Englishmen on the walls of
Khartoum or the beaches of Dunkirk. […] They were demonstrating their
moral superiority over their torturers. Britons nevernevernever shall be
slaves” (88). This two-fold, bloodless sublimation proves self-castrating on
two counts. On the one hand, it invokes essentialised categories that were
established in colonial times and it reinforces the validity of such divisions
made on racial terms primarily. On the other hand, venting actual racial
frustration through a vicarious confrontation on a cricket field denies Daud
the agency and courage that his namesake, the heroic David, flaunted in face
of a seemingly hopeless combat. It further reveals Daud's fundamental self-
positioning as the weakest of the two ends of the binary. As Stuart Hall
explains, during colonialism, “not only […] were we constructed as different
and other within the categories of knowledge of the West,” but the colonial
empires “had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’”
(394-95).
Describing the main character’s dissatisfaction in and alienation from a
city that defiles his soul constitutes also the prerequisite for the tripartite
structural motif of flight/retreat/return of the pastoral tradition. Pilgrims Way
alludes to this traditional pastoral retreat in its reference to the island off the
coast of Daud’s native city in Tanzania. Daud’s reflections on his life in
Canterbury, in which he feels victimised by prejudice, trigger memories of a
boat-trip with his friend Rashid (Bossy) to an island, memories that are
framed by recollections of a city also full of abuse and violence (Gurnah 164-
66). From the reality of the present, as from the memories of the city on the
Tanzanian mainland in the past, Daud escapes to the island. He recalls how,
on one December afternoon, he and his friend had “sailed serenely on [as]
[…] Rashid began to sing” (171). The adventure, however, soon turns into a
re-enactment of the journeys of exploration and conquest that had in the past
brought the British Empire to those shores. For the Royal Naval officer who
had first “discovered” the island by being “the first European to stumble on
it,” the island had constituted the retreat of the pastoral tradition: “Exhausted
by […] [the] courageous act” of bombing the city across the island, the
officer “had sought to soothe his shattered nerves by going rambling on the
green, off-shore island that was unmarked on his map.” Furthermore, when
the naval officer set foot on the island, “he roamed its gentle hills” and saw
the enclosure of the site as a possibility for archeological and military
exploitation. Pilgrims Way implies that this act of colonialist “discovery” and
exploitation shattered the pastoral possibilities of the colonies as represented
by this city and its off-shore island.
Decades after the Royal Naval officer had walked there, Rashid and Daud
escape to the island, but it is full of mementos of the colonial presence and its
pastoral beauty has turned into decay: the “grove of palms” is “choked with
weeds and wild tomatoes,” the ground is covered with “pungent leaf-mould
and rotting humus,” and even “the haven of the waterfall” is circled with
“slimy rocks […] covered with slime” (173-74). The transformation observed
in this island after its “discovery” by the imperial officer suggests that the
imposition of a pastoral tradition on the colonial space goes hand in hand
with the political domination exercised by imperialism as they both cause
equal destruction. As a consequence of the visit of the Naval officer and of
the reenactment of his example by Daud and Rashid, there is no invigoration
of self for either one of them in that afternoon escapade. 2 The return to the
city does not bring a fuller understanding of self and a stronger notion of
social action, as a fatal squall ends Rashid’s life and violent racial and
religious riots overwhelm a defenceless Daud.
In this way, the presentation of the island as a retreat in the “country” for
the imperial officer invokes the traditional pastoral and highlights the relation
of power/powerlessness implicit in the city/country binary when it is
relocated, essentialised and untested, on colonial grounds. The novel shows
ways in which the pastoral city/country divide can be problematised and
proposes an alternative that leaves the binary opposition and its potentially
discriminatory characteristics aside. In this process, the novel as a whole and
the identity quest of its protagonist follow a similar progression: both move
away from the invocation (and its implicit restatement) of existing
essentialising binaries and carve out alternative spaces from which they
generate their narrative pastoral images and personal identity, respectively.
2
Squires holds that the pastoral novel often deals with the issue of personal identity: “the
pastoral novel seeks to create a feeling of wholeness in those whose lives have been
fragmented in the urban centres” (11). To this purpose, the novel usually adopts the
following tripartite structure: “a withdrawal to a place apart that offers a perspective on
sophisticated life, a reassessment of values and a reorientation toward society, followed by a
return to the complex and active world” (9-10). David Young insists on the need for the
third stage to take place: “to be a credit to art, […] pastoral had to avoid the limited
accomplishments of escape” (32) and Richard Hardin argues that, “if the work advocates an
escape instead of an invigorating retreat leading to a return to the city, the work is an
example of ‘flawed pastoral’” (2). For a detailed study of the different forms this three-stage
motif has taken through time, see Toliver (1971: passim), Young (20), and Poggioli (155-
57).
In his work, Homi K. Bhabha has studied the psychological implications

of the colonial encounter in depth. 3 He explains how, in order to be able to
conceptualise the new worlds and the new worldviews of the colonies, the
colonisers created stereotypical images of the colonised. At stake was the
colonisers' own identity, since they defined who they were by opposition to
the stereotype of the colonised, who functioned – in this psychological
process of identity formation – as the other to the colonisers (and vice versa,
as the colonised were forced to assume their condition as “other,” thus
inextricably linking their identity formation to that of the colonisers’
stereotype). Bhabha holds, however, that there is a fundamental ambivalence
in the invocation of such stereotypes (i.e., they are by definition fixed, but
they are renewed and renovated every time they are invoked) and that in such
ambivalence resides the possibility of resistance and power for the colonised.
Since the identity of each group depends on that of their “other,” the
perception that the latter does not stay contained by the limits of their
stereotypes ruptures the identity of the former. In the novels which frame
such identity reconsideration processes within the pastoral tripartite motif, the
encounter triggering such a rupture is located in the second stage of the
process, “retreat into nature.” In Pilgrims Way, the “colonial” encounter is
represented by the relationship between Daud and the white, high-middle
class English nurse Catherine Mason.
When Daud meets Catherine at the hospital where he is an orderly, he
measures her by the standards he applies to the rest of society. When, in
desperation, a novice Catherine rushes out of the operations theatre asking
where the “protractors” are, Daud ignores her plea for help on the grounds
that “he had had to force himself to start off for work at all, let alone be civil
to some heartless, mindless colonel’s daughter who was demanding a
protractor from him like he was the club punkah-wallah” (15). Catherine
consistently reacts by challenging Daud’s prejudices, which in turn triggers
an effort on his part to reconsider. The step that follows in the process –
asking Catherine out – demonstrates his openness to be questioned and to
find a respite away from the grimness of his racism-dictated life. This
moment is also the first time the novel pays any significant attention to the
natural surroundings in which the action takes place:
3
For a full explanation of the theories here summarised, see Bhabha’s “Remembering Fanon:
Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition” and “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of
Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.”
‘Have dinner with me tonight,’ he said.

In the silence he heard the breath wheeze out of him. The light was gentle, the sun having
disappeared behind a cloud. A sudden burst of bird song reached him across the glade. The
sedge swayed along the margins of the lake. The sound of water rippling over rocks was
hushed by the fragrant bushes that surrounded the pavilion: lavender and jasmine and sweet
oleander. In the distance, he heard the sound of bells pealing the hours, joyous and lifting.
(50)
In this passage all the classic characteristics of the locus amoenus are present:
a bright and positive nature that mirrors the protagonist’s feelings at this
moment; sensory imagery with special emphasis on the sound and odours of
nature and its creatures.
Pilgrims Way, however, does not present sudden and radical conversions
of characters, and Daud’s self-transformation takes time. Even before
Catherine turns down this first invitation, the lines that follow the passage
quoted above indicate that Daud has not radically abandoned his perspective
of life: “He struggled to prevent a grin of triumph from breaking across his
face. […] He had beached and laid low all her defences. He could already see
the acclaim his conquest would bring. His landlord would grin […]. Karta
would see it as a victory for black humanism” (50). The process will progress
as Catherine’s individuality continues to defy Daud’s essentialised notion of
the “British.” For instance, when she does accept a later invitation, she
openly reflects on the racial component of their relationship: “Am I crazy,
going to spend a weekend with this man I hardly know? A black man. […]
Part of me was ashamed of […] us. As if it was a kind of failure. […]
Everybody will think there’s something wrong with me” (107). As the
conversation goes on, Catherine gains a larger and larger understanding of
her own motives and her own prejudices. At the end, she comments how
“what [she] […] should’ve said [was] that [she] […] was going to spend the
weekend with this poverty-stricken black man who is a Muslim as well”
(109). In contrast to her first description of Daud as a “black man,” her new
more complete portrayal highlights the recognition of the essentialist and
racist assumptions underlying her first impression of Daud.
The first real step in Daud's transformation takes place when Daud
experiences moments of harmony with nature in the middle stage of the
tripartite pastoral process of flight/retreat/return. When Catherine accepts
Daud’s second invitation, the classical pastoral feature of seclusion in nature
is highlighted again. This time, they are sitting “under a chestnut tree in the
garden that led off from the common room but was enclosed from the road by
a hedge.” Daud and Catherine talk “comfortably and easily together,”
washing away the “awfulness of the ward.” In this atmosphere of natural
seclusion and ease, Daud suggests “get[ting] away from the hospital regime”
and she accepts. “Just like that!” Daud feels. In contrast to previous
instances, when he gets home, his thoughts of war-like efforts are not
connected to the conquest of Catherine, but they are directed against the
tangible grime in his life, represented here by “the slimy shower floor, […]
spongy with rot” (67). Targeting the dirty floor that he had simply taken for
granted up to this point constitutes a symbolic divergence from Daud’s initial
policy of detachment and non-involvement.
From this point on the novel incorporates numerous instances in which
Daud demonstrates a progressive reconsideration of his life-philosophy.
Instead of simply noticing everybody else's racism, he remembers instances
in which he himself behaved with racial prejudice (137-38). Also, as he
watches a cricket match, he admits the courage of the English captain (207).
His recollection of the afternoon he spent with his friend Bossy at the island
constitutes, however, the most meaningful instance of the change Daud is
undergoing. He remembers now how, after the riots, the streets showed the
traces of the events. “There were signs of looting everywhere but no signs of
fighting,” he recalls. “Nobody had stood up and said you can’t do this to us.
We’d allowed ourselves to be treated like contemptible bloodless parasites, to
be brushed off as if we truly did not belong there” (180-81). The lack of
resistance of the groups under attack offered a lesson to Daud that had gone
unexamined until now. Up to that point, the pastoral retreat had not yet ended
in a stronger grasp of self identity and social responsibility, as is common in
the pastoral tradition, because, as Bossy and Daud bought directly into the
dialectic of absolutist categories, the retreat had turned into an opportunity
for the reenactment of colonial conquest. That afternoon, Bossy died, and it
took Daud eleven years to gain a fuller understanding of himself and to
comprehend the lesson implicit in the retreat.
The form of Daud’s fuller involvement with society that marks his “return
to the city” remains unclear at the end. He is fully aware that his resistance to
the processes that still position him on the weakest end of Manichean
oppositions cannot be a quixotic and individual fight – just like single-
handedly confronting the rioting mobs after his trip to the island would not
have improved his situation. A term-by-term reversal of binaries that came
into existence during colonial times is equally unfruitful, since these reversals
restate as they invoke former situations of inequality. The end of the novel
presents a Daud that is taking strides forward in his attempt to understand his
position in society outside of the two possibilities (colonised/coloniser) he
recognised up to that point. One evening Catherine rushes in from the street,
after a man had tried to sexually assault her in a telephone booth: “He had
managed to get an arm in and kept trying to reach her, saying I want to fuck
you, I want to fuck you.” Daud interprets the incident by relating it to his
own experiences. When “he had been spat at, threatened, pissed on for being
in a call box,” he had assumed that the reason was entirely race-related. Now
he recognises that “perhaps the matter was more complex than that” (209).
As he realises that prejudice is not necessarily restricted to the experience of
colonialism, and as he accepts that one of the “others,” a British citisen,
might be subjected to a position of disadvantage in certain specific
circumstances, Daud is admitting the inadequacy of his rigid binaries and
beginning to devise strategies to conceptualise the world from a position
outside the limits of these categories.
In the last scene of the novel, Daud reaches an awareness of what his
position in society needs to be. He feels that “he had come, carrying a living
past, a source of strength and reassurance, but it had taken him so long to
understand that what he had brought could no longer reach its sources” (231).
Daud realises that, because of his fixation with the past, the past “became a
thing, maggoty and deformed, a thing of torture […]. And he began to think
of himself as a battered and bloated body washed up on a beach, naked
among strangers. Like Bossy in the end” (231). Daud’s final “return” to the
city, his engagement with social action, occurs when he no longer aligns
himself with individuals who allow things to happen to them and consider it a
victory. As he visits the Canterbury cathedral for the first time, he realises
that his place in the English society where he has been living for five years is
the same of earlier foreigners whose presence had transformed the
environment they entered. He finds the key to his survival as a migrant as he
discovers “how newness enters the world,” and how the “entering” by a
foreign cultural component of a “recipient” culture destroys the latter’s
nativist dreams of “supremacy” not as it negates it but as it negotiates its
temporal manifestations (Bhabha 227-28). In the cathedral Daud feels that he
“had come for the same kinds of reasons that had made barbarian wolf-man
build that stone monument, part of the same dubious struggle of the human
psyche to break out of its neurosis and fears.” The ultimate motivation, Daud
realises now, “wasn’t about God. It was about the resourcefulness to create
something huge and beautiful, a monstrous monument to the suffering and
pain that we travel thousands of miles to lay at some banal shrine. And it’s
been going on all the time” (231-32). And this process that had been
happening “all the time” entails, in this case, the transformation of the British
culture by displaced foreigners who gave birth to the “heart of the evangelical
centre,” so intrinsic to the British culture.
Daud’s epiphany at the cathedral leads to his selection of a new image to

substitute for the life philosophy of non-involvement. Daud promises
Catherine that, “when he had had a rest, […] he would release the bunched
python of his coiled psyche on an unsuspecting world” (232). The metaphor
of the serpent is influenced by the different lessons Daud has learnt all along
and it pushes the cathedral’s epiphany even further: the constant proof of the
racist society where he lives cannot be ignored, but neither can the possibility
of happiness and pastoral harmony with others and with nature in the city
where Daud lives. Daud does not forget the very real power of the
mainstream white culture, the shallow liberals and the outright racists and
xenophobes who will continue to wish to subject him to the position of the
‘other,’ but he has now carved out for himself a place in that society that can
hold the agency and the power to transform the world. Overall, Daud’s image
of himself as the python ready to uncoil suggests that he has shed his
defeatist compliance with the roles to which he had been subjected and that,
from his position of marginality, he reclaims the authority and flaunts the
energy of a being that, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, changed the course of
history. 4
The serpent-Daud that closes Pilgrims Way is meaningfully located in
paradise. This metaphor, together with the legend of the secluded orchard
that Daud tells Catherine close to the end, offers a final commentary on the
trajectory that the pastoral motif of the locus amoenus has developed in the
novel. Earlier, Daud had invoked the traditional image of the homeland as a
territory of exoticism and pastoral primitivism, only to denounce the process
of conceptualisation as a colonialist technique. In the legend of the orchard,
Daud indicates how the danger of essentialisms is possible in other contexts.
Thus, one summer afternoon, he and Catherine “hired a boat and drifted
lazily under the old arches[,] […] [and] tied up their boat beneath an
overhanging oak” (208-09). From this stereotypically pastoral secluded spot,
they can observe an enclosed orchard, and Daud recalls the legend of a young
rich local girl and a vagrant boy with “dark looks” whom the girl’s father
hires out of pity. Because, out of prejudice, the boy is treated poorly (by all
but the girl), he decides to run away, but not before “he lured [her] […] into
4
Although the novel calls attention to the Christian tradition in its references to the
“evangelical center” of England and to the Canterbury cathedral, it is undeniable that the
image of the powerful serpent has to be put in the context of the religious background of the
protagonist. In the Islam, the serpent is considered a mighty and powerful being. This, of
course, emphasises the reading of the novel proposed here, in its understanding of how the
British culture and its traditional Christian heritage are being modified by the newness of the
migrants arriving from different cultural and religious backgrounds.
the orchard and slaughtered her, mutilating her sex to show his contempt for
her.” Apparently, “years later,” the legend continues, “his body was found
there on the river bank, where he had returned to die” (209). Telling the story
of these unfortunate lovers while he sits on a boat with Catherine, as he had
years earlier with his friend Bossy, Daud demonstrates his newly-acquired
understanding of the dynamics of prejudice. Had Daud not learnt the reality
of his own racism, the legend indicates, he would be eternally connected to
the “maggoty and deformed” past, and even after death would he be unable to
move entirely forward. Thus, Pilgrims Way proposes that there is power and
agency in positions between and outside the Manichean categories inherited
from colonialism, and that invoking these binaries – even in an attempt to
fully oppose them – actually revitalises the demons of the past in the present.
The novel proposes that the characteristics of categories such as coloniser
and colonised, white and black, country and city are rigid only when each
individual invokes them as fixed. The legend and the memory of the island
illustrate how pastoral retreats are not dependent on external stereotypical
locations such as exotic isles or secluded orchards by the river. Instead, the
novel shows redeeming possibilities and pastoral retreats next to prejudice in
a metropolitan centre, locus amoenus that could turn destructive from an
imperialistic outlook, and as the central metaphor of it all, paradise
deconstructed and reconstructed by the serpent.
Jamal Mahjoub’s Navigation of a Rainmaker: Wastelands and

Pastoral Retreats
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
[…]
a flash of lighting. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
T. S. Eliot, ‘What the Thunder Said,’ The Waste Land (lns 322-394)
Jamal Mahjoub's Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989) inscribes its

protagonist’s process of identity reconsideration within the pastoral tripartite
motif of flight from the city / retreat into the country / return to the city. Its
young protagonist, Tanner, finds his identity destabilised by circumstances
generated by post-colonial migration. Not only does he occupy a position of
marginality in the formerly colonial urban centre where he lives as the novel
opens, but the experience of migrancy itself produces rupture and instability
at the core of his self. As Tanner’s pastoral process progresses, he abandons
the rigid binaries by which he was operating (metropolis vs. colony, British
vs. post-colonial, first vs. third world) and he redefines the relationship
between the two extremes of these oppositions as one of interpenetration.
Subsequently, he realises that one of the manifestations of this
interpenetration between “first” and “third” worlds is ecological
neoimperialism orchestrated from the metropolitan centres. In this connection
of contemporary social issues such as environmental responsibilities and the
search of identity, the novel revitalises the pastoral tripartite motif of the
tradition. This traditional motif becomes then an adequate frame for the
achievement of the “new critical consciousness” that Said calls for in order to
fight the main conflicts of the neocolonial world, conflicts which he
summarises as “the struggle of nationalities or […] the problems of
deforestation and global warming, the interactions between individual
identities […] and the general framework” (330).
In the novel, Tanner reformulates the terms along which he defines his
identity crisis – terms of post-colonialism and migrancy, terms of national
frontiers and political domination. Because he originally interpreted his
personal apathy as the consequence of the imperial disruption of his paternal
ancestors’ Sudan, Tanner feels that, by reversing the journey and “returning”
to a Sudan he has never been to, he will find the missing piece in the puzzle
of his life and identity. Tanner is thus conjuring up an ancestral home, an
“imagined community,” 5 that would immediately return his essential self to
him. His expectation, however, is not satisfied because it aligns itself with
nativist and essentialist concepts of identity that, although seemingly
different, buy directly into the dynamics of the othering processes they mean
to defy. These nativist efforts rest on the notion that it is possible to recover
the wholeness of the colonised people as it existed before it was disrupted
and othered by colonialism. This essentialist nativism “offer[s] a way of
5
This term is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections
on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. In it, Anderson explains the processes through
which incipient nationalisms found inspiration in imagining the nation as a “community” (5-
6). As he attempts to define his identity, the protagonist of this novel of the diaspora also
imagines this essentialised notion of a community.
imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and

fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas” (Hall 394).
These nativist discourses also idealise the images of the ancestral
communities, but from the position of the displaced subject in a post-colonial
and neo-colonial context, these idealised locations are always found in
“other” places in the world. Furthermore, since these nativist discourses
intertwine place and identity, they also relegate the possibility of achieving a
unified notion of self to other locations. The images of these distant
communities feed for their literary description on traditions such as the
pastoral, which speaks of alternative havens of harmony with nature and
people in spots of simple beauty that counter the effects of colonial
metropolitan centres corrupted by progress.
Tanner’s journey does not work in the manner that he anticipates because
going back in space does not imply going back in time also. Tanner
essentialises the Sudan as England’s other and imagines an instant
communion with the formerly colonised “Land of Blacks” (49). In this
communion with “the land of his origin,” he envisions the solution to the
“listless[ness]” and “deject[ion]” he feels. Because of his hybrid racial
identity Tanner has been stigmatised as an outsider in England. Also, as he
has been subjected to the knowledge of his own otherness (Hall 395), Tanner
has been confronted with “inequalities [,][…] poverty[,] and […] racism”
(Mahjoub 66). After four years in Khartoum, however, the process of self-
degeneration initiated in England has actually been intensified. Instead of
instant personal enlightenment, Tanner has found corruption, legions of
homeless and poor, and a young and privileged generation that embraces the
commodity-life of the “first” world and neo-colonial acculturation (50).
Although unsure of where the root of his error lays, he feels that “there was a
sense in which he had betrayed his own beliefs. He had come here to start a
new life, to find out if he had a home here. Yet here he was isolated and
alone” (69).
The same erroneous instinct that guides Tanner to leave England as the
answer to his apathy leads him now to escape from the place that has not
fulfilled his expectations: “He would always be a tourist here, a foreigner
anyway. […] If he was a foreigner both here and in Britain, then he would be
a foreigner wherever he went” (105). In his inclination to travel from place
to place as a citizen of the world, Tanner is close to the ideal position of
Victor St. Hugo’s “perfect man” or “emigrant intellectual,” from which a
critical perspective of a neo-colonial world could be retained, according to
Edward Said. 6 Tanner, however, misunderstands the quality of personal

involvement Said hopes for at the end of Culture and Imperialism. “The
‘perfect’ person,” Said explains, “achieves independence and detachment by
working through attachments, not by rejecting them” (336). Tanner’s
progress in the novel can be described as the evolution from the disoriented
lack of involvement he displays at the beginning to the achievement of the
kind of attachment that would make him a “perfect man.”
The popular pastoral tripartite motif of flight / retreat / return rests, as
seen above, on the assumption that a commitment to the workings of society
similar to Said’s assertion will be achieved by the character who completes
the three stages of the process. In Navigation, Tanner initially seeks escape
from his life of disillusionment in Khartoum as he once had left England by
travelling to the Sudan. Thus, as he is offered a chance to leave the capital
for a few days on a road trip further South into the desert, he readily accepts
because he “realise[s] […] that he had needed to get away.” fHe obtains “a
6
According to Said, “the time-honored conventions of art, history, and philosophy do not
seem well suited” (330) to tackle the controversies and problems brought about by the “new
overall pattern of domination developed during an era of mass societies commanded at the
top by a powerfully centralising culture and a complex incorporative economy” (326). As a
result, he feels the need to theorise a “new critical consciousness” from which to approach
“the interactions between individual identity […] and the general framework” (330). In
order to conjure up this new critical positioning from which the challenge of the world of
post-colonialism and neo-colonialism can be met, Said recalls French urban sociologist Paul
Virilio’s invocation of “people whose current status is the consequence either of
decolonisation […] or of major demographic and political shifts” as the “real alternative” to
state authority. According to this view, migrant workers, refugees, immigrants, and urban
squatters, among others, “inhabit the normally uninhabitable” (326) and their situation could
be understood as a metaphorical positionality of resistance.
Likewise, in his search for a new critical position, Said finds Marxist philosopher Theodor
Adorno’s understanding of the “unanswerability” of the immigrant within the host society as
a site of resistance useful. According to Said, together with the obvious “disabling”
entailments of the immigrant’s marginality, “there is also the positive benefit of challenging
the system, describing it in language unavailable to those it has already subdued” (333).
Finally, Said recalls a haunting passage by the Saxon monk Hugo of St. Victor who, in the
twelfth century, anticipated the independence and fertile productivity of the eternally
nomadic immigrant, whom he conceived of as “the perfect man.” “The tender soul,” he
describes, “has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his
love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his” (qtd. in Said 335). Said explains that
it is Hugo’s notion of “working through attachments” as a way to achieve “independence
and detachment” that he finds compelling. It is that love-based independent detachment that
Said predicates as the location of the new critical perspective that could effect a critical
reading of the hybrid nature of “cultures and identities on a global scale” (336), free of
liberation-inspired nationalisms that could in fact contribute to a repetition of the imperialist
experience (331).
sense of freedom out here in the open” and, speaking like a character from a
tradidional pastoral work, he explains that “it was a relief to be away from
the hollow walls of the city” (104-05).
This second trip will eventually lead to Tanner’s willing involvement
with the world and, therefore, unlike his first escapade, this trip will turn into
a complete three-stage pastoral process of identity reconfiguration. The
transition in Tanner’s attitude towards his role in the trip and in society is
framed by more and more frequent discussions of a political nature. In the
past, he noted conversations at the office and in the streets about the
redemption of the country by one individual. He has often questioned
whether it could be as simple as some people around him seemed to protest:
“How could anyone believe that one man could save the world?” (43).
Furthermore, the street conversations never lead any of the people voicing
their opinions to take any sort of action, as if the political and the private
were completely unrelated spheres. The novel compares these attitudes to
Tanner’s evasionist escape South and it offers, then, a critique of this
perspective in Tanner’s transformation. Further, Tanner’s eventual death
resulting from his engagement in social action will be given heroic and
legendary dimensions as it is contrasted to the choices of his co-workers
(154).
Tanner realises what his action needs to be, the specific form his “return-
to-the-city” commitment takes, as he gets closer to the heart of the desert.
Since his arrival at the geological camp in the desert with his charge, the
American “seismic expert” Charles Gilmour, Tanner has the same dream on
several occasions. This dream recreates a feeling of choking fear, but in it he
finds himself “more relaxed and comfortable than he could remember in
months.” Besides, Tanner feels that in his dream he is heading towards a
concrete destination and that this place is clearly connected to some kind of
action, to something is “about to happen” (116). Equally important in the
sense of foreshadowing are the premonitory feelings that Tanner has about
how his trip away from the city will defy his expectations. The trip is meant
to give him the opportunity to enjoy a “few days of peace and quiet down
here” and, in his non-committal, escapist frame of mind, Tanner would have
liked to dwell solely on “the feeling of living back in the land; the country for
the city” (121). There is evidence all around him, however, of the latest
violent encounter of rival factions, “the charred remains of rig and possibly
men,” give him the certainty that “things were not to be taken for granted,”
and that there just might not be a way to escape his personal involvement in
the conflict (121).
The dream sequence also adds a new element to Tanner’s progression: the
connection between the individual and the natural surroundings. His dream
describes how “the wind hummed in anticipation, the lightning flickered
expectantly and the thunder rumbled” (115). The attention paid to the
weather developing in the background of the action emphasises the continual
search for life-bringing water. In this sense, Navigation invokes T. S. Eliot’s
classic modernist poem The Waste Land. 7 Eliot’s poem progresses from the
description of a post-war sterile land breeding only death, corruption,
loveless relationships, and madness to a final image in which the rain drops
begin to fall and there is a slim promise of redemption, even if it is expressed
in words that are set apart from the rest of the poem by their foreignness.
Through this poem, there are recurrent images of thunder rolling as the
messenger of rain. Likewise, Navigation emphasises the presence of thunder
and the lack of the life-generating rain until the very end. Thus, the opening
image of the novel invokes a nomadic tribe travelling through the desert.
“The desert,” the man whose perspective the narrator adopts in this scene
describes, “is a broken place where the wind and the sand and the stars live.
[…] Further to the west […] the rains had come and turned the land green
[…]; life could go on” (3). This aridity seems to be the condition of most of
the territory: “Everyone they met told the same story. The land was drying
up, shrivelling like a leaf in front of their eyes” (4). The novel refers
repeatedly to the absence of rain (35, 85) that has transformed the land into a
“wasteland of cactus and green puffball plants” (37) and to the increasingly
heraldic presence of thunder (115). However, unlike in The Waste Land, in
which the rain belongs to a natural cycle that is indifferent to human kind, the
rain will appear in Navigation only after Tanner commits himself to fighting
the actions of Charles Gilmour, who has been harming the environment. The
scepticism and despair of the modernist poem is thus revised in the novel by
a connection between the human and the environmental spheres in a manner
typical of the “return” stage that follows a retreat from the city in the pastoral
tradition.
The dream that links Tanner to images of place, rain, thunder, and action
represents a progression from the first step of the tripartite pastoral process,
flight from the city, into the second, retreat into nature. Tanner goes into this
7
The novel integrates other references to Eliot’s poem. Tanner’s involvement with the
prostitute recalls the affair between “the young man carbuncular” and the typist; also, the
figure of the Prophet that visits Tanner during his visions resembles the figure of Tiresias,
who claims to “have foresuffered all” (243); the sunken boat as a premonition of Tanner's
death recalls that of Phlebas the Phoenician, foreshadowed by Madame Sosotris (55), and
which is described in “Death by Water.”
second stage with an increased interest in the topic of social responsibility

and action. He has begun to question Gilmour’s actions and, because he fears
the repercussions of those actions in the country, he has tried to get him to
change his secret plans: “This is their life and their land, it’s not for you to
decide what’s best for them” (133). To Tanner’s argument, Gilmour replies
with prophetic words. “In this day and age,” he explains, “there’s no such
thing as a domestic argument. […] You can’t turn your back on things for
ever Tanner – sooner or later things come round to look you in the eye”
(133). Tanner begins to understand the need to abandon the models of
identity that have subjected him to a feeling of his own otherness. Now he
sees the need to replace them with a new cosmology emphasising individual
responsibility and the hybridity of a world that challenges the imperialistic
categories.
The second stage in Tanner’s identity reconsideration occurs in a highly
symbolic enclosed location in which the protagonist faces a life-turning
metaphorical representation of his attachment to society. Tanner and Gilmour
meet a young man named Daniel as they drive through a desert settlement.
For Tanner, Daniel represents the antithesis of the young nouveau riche of
the country who are educated in the “first” world and cannot wait to leave
that “dump” of the Sudan (66). Daniel is involved with the specific needs of
his country, as he studies for a degree, Agriculture, that “seemed to make
some kind of sense,” unlike those college “graduates sitting around
unemployed in the capital because they were too highly qualified to fit into
the job market” (131). Daniel, who reconciles also the two “opposites” city
and country in Tanner’s eyes, takes him to the mud pyramid built by the
mysterious “Rainmaker.” Tanner is struck by the atmosphere inside the
construction, which had “the pulse of a temple” and which made it resemble
“a religious place” (137). On the walls, which are covered with drawings,
Tanner sees “figures painted in various shades of red and brown, heavy
shading in charcoal,” depicting “tall people […] [and] outlines of birds in full
flight” (136). The drawings cover the walls in mural-like fashion,
representing “a mixture of traditional scenes of life on the cattle stations
among the tribes.” The pictures wall represent, thus, an image of a bygone
time that has been influenced by a nostalgic view of the past. The positive
connotation of the birds in flight anticipates the pastoral mood that envelops
the next drawing that catches Tanner’s attention: “a figure in a green
landscape.” The figure is “drawn slightly larger than most of the others […]
the moon rested in his palm. The left hand was held up, palm open towards
the sky. From the cupped palm, water flowed through the fingers.” In this
drawing that incorporates some of the traditional components of a pastoral
setting (idealised nature, water – doubly idealised in the context of the desert,
– birds, and humans in harmony with it all), Tanner sees a prophetic
recreation of life mission: “a dusty echo of […] [his] life and perhaps also a
hint towards the premonition that drove him on” (137).
In the enclosed space of this mud pyramid Tanner sees the representation
of the communion that he would like to have with the world. In this pastoral
image, Tanner witnesses the antithesis of the world he has been living in and
of the way he has been living in it. In what becomes a progressively clearer
projection of Tanner himself onto the mythical level of the story, Daniel
explains that the artist of the pyramid “wasn’t from this tribe originally,” that
he had simply “appeared one day from nowhere” and that he was “just an
ordinary man” (137). The day after he disappeared, as this man had
prophesied, “the heaviest rains ever arrived” (138). When put next to the
foreboding dream Tanner has had repeatedly during this trip, the story of the
Rainmaker acquires prophetic dimensions for Tanner, and it once again
connects whatever action he feels he has to take to the natural cycle of
drought and rain in the desert.
As he leaves the mud pyramid behind, Tanner demonstrates the lesson
learnt at this pastoral retreat when he abandons the apathy that has
characterised him from the beginning of the novel in order to commit himself
personally and socially. As Gilmour’s intentions to “instil confusion” become
more and more obvious (168), Tanner confronts him and he is injured in the
car accident that follows the struggle. While unconscious, a mythical figure
alike the Rainmaker visits him to confirm and, rather superfluously, to
explain Tanner’s actions to the reader and to Tanner, and to propose the
novel’s premise for the salvation of a more and more hybrid world. “This
war,” the Prophet tells Tanner, “is the same war all over again” (159). The
only hope for this ever-in-conflict world, alleges the Prophet, lies on in-
between figures that incarnate the reality of a world that breaks boundaries
and defies absolutism – figures like Tanner: “you and I are similar in that we
were born out of opposites, the coming together of differences. We are both
born of integration. That is the only solution” (162).
In a later and final confrontation, Tanner resolutely kills Gilmour, and
subsequently “the thunder rumble[s] across the troubled sky” (171)
announcing the arrival of life-bringing water and the end of Tanner’s pastoral
progression towards self-identity. Agonising on a stranger’s bed, Tanner
reflects that he “had acted finally and in doing so he had killed a man, but he
had also released himself from the years of frustration and lack of direction”
(181). With this self-fulfillment and social involvement, Tanner’s personal
identity quest ends with the quasi-mythical repercussions of his actions. As
has been anticipated by the dreams, by the Prophet, and by the legend of the
Rainmaker, Tanner’s actions bring water to the land:
The ground was coming to life below his feet. […] The water flowed down from the high
ground that lay to the west and the east of his bowl, and from the big rivers. The swamps
would expand. […] The reeds and the floating grass would flourish and everything would
turn green. […] The children dance in the cascade of tears, singing and laughing with all the
innocence of joy. […] In the city the cars gleam in their shiny new coats, washed clean by
the storm. (173-76)
In this way, the novel ends by replying with a definite “yes” to the question
repeatedly asked in previous sections: can a man strong enough to give his
own life in the process change the world? In fact, such an action can turn a
world devastated by war, a waste land, into a paradise.
The novel’s final scenes of pastoral bliss extending from the desert into
the cities offer a final commentary on the traditional notion of the locus
amoenus. The pastoral pleasant place is represented not as an essentially
harmonious secluded spot in which one may find untroubled refuge from the
vices of the city. Likewise, the novel suggests that corruption is not naturally
contained within the boundaries of urban settlements. The locus amoenus
becomes intimately intertwined with the life of the city: what happens in one
of them has a life-and-death bearing on the other. In this, Navigation
reinterprets the traditional understanding of the connection between country
and city. At best, in previous pastoral works, an invigorated pastoral initiate
would return to the city and effect some changes in his immediate circle of
influence. When the country/city divide is relocated on a neocolonial setting,
the novel seems to argue, issues such as the destruction of the natural
environment resulting from commercial enterprises ordered by the urban
centres give this connection a new dimension and the pastoral is revised as a
consequence. Furthermore, the destruction of the environment is presented in
Navigation of a Rainmaker as the contemporary version of the effects of an
imperialistic vision of the world. In order to fight these contemporary crimes
that are turning nature into barren territories, this novel agrees with Said that
“a new critical consciousness is needed” (330). This consciousness partakes
of the marginal positionality of the migrant who, first, has not yet been
absorbed by the foster society’s homogenising apparatuses and who, second,
is able to feel the attachment to the land that has become a new home. Such a
critical position is required for those who would be able to see the pastoral
possibilities of a neo-colonial world that is, at present, in danger of becoming
another wasteland.
Works Cited
Alpers, Paul. What Is Pastoral? Chicago & London: University of Chicago

Press, 1996.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.
Bhabha, Homi K. “How Newness Enters the World.” The Location of
Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 212-35.
——., “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition.”
Introduction. Black Skins, White Masks. Franz Fanon. London: Pluto
Press, 1986. vii-xxvi. Rpt. in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 112-23.
——., “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority
Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985):
144-65. Rpt. in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London and New York: Routledge,
1995. 29-35.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Pilgrims Way. London: St Edmundsbury Press, 1988.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-
Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 392-403.
Hardin, Richard F. “The Pastoral Moment.” Survivals of Pastoral. Ed.
Richard F. Hardin. Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications,
1979. 1-17.
Mahjoub, Jamal. Navigation of a Rainmaker. Oxford: Heinemann, 1989.
Poggioli, Renato. “The Oaten Flute.” Harvard Library Bulletin 11 (1957):
147-84. Rpt. in The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the
Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Sambrook, James. English Pastoral Poetry. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Squires, Michael. The Pastoral Novel. Studies in George Eliot, Thomas
Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1974.
Toliver, Harold E. Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1815: Authoritative Texts,
Context, and Reception, Recent Critical Essays. New York: Norton,
1979.
Young, David. The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.
Godwin Siundu
Locating Cultural Ambivalence and Afropolitanism:

Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam as Heterotopia in the
Fiction of Dawood and Vassanji
In this article, we seek to examine how the cities of Nairobi and Dar-es-
Salaam are literarily represented as heterotopias in a novel each by Moyez
Vassanji – The Gunny Sack – and Yusuf Dawood – Water Under the Bridge
– both being East African writers of Asian extraction. Specifically, we
examine the places/spaces of different racial categories within the cities
against the backdrop of dichotomies of rooted/rootless,
indigenous/immigrants et cetera, as they have been used to describe
indigenous African and Asian inhabitants of East Africa, to argue that
present-day East African Asians resident in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam can
no longer be viewed as a marginal community. The article is influenced to
some degree by Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, which are seen as
real places as opposed to utopias, and which provide a canvass for contests
and inversions. 1 Reading urbanisation and its epistemic forms through the
novel form differs significantly from using other disciplines for the reason
that, as Roger Kurtz notes, “the novel as a form lends itself quite easily to the
hybridity that characterises the postcolonial city and consequently makes a
useful literary vehicle for exploring urbanization” (76).
Guided by a conflation of historical, political and cultural theoretical
constructs within the wider postcolonial discourse, we seek to advance two
positions: one, that both Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, as indeed many
contemporary cities in Africa, have through history invited ambivalent
attitudes from nationals of the respective countries, whether these nationals
are of the African, European and or Asian provenance. This ambivalence
arises out of the simultaneous promises and threats that are enfolded in the
trappings of modernities that only the cities offer, in particular possibilities of
upward social mobility that creates a sense of sophistication among the
urbane members of society, but also the unhingement from social support
structures and exposure to risks related to crime, social degeneration, and
work-related uncertainties. Our second argument, which arises from the first,
is that different groups appropriate specific city spaces as forms of exercising
1
For details of Foucault’s arguments on heterotopias, see “Text/Context of Other Space.”
260 Godwin Siundu
agency or securing their own senses of stability within the matrix of racial,
economic and social contests. A subsidiary argument is that Nairobi and Dar-
es-Salaam as re-imagined in the novelistic discourses subvert, and therefore
transcend, the metonymic role quite often conferred on them by scholars on
the city in its relation to the nation. Put differently, we argue that the cities do
not provide a chance to imagine the notion of unitary nations along nation-
state borders: on the contrary, they provide occasions for strengthening
loyalties to sub-nations of ethnic or tribal dispensations. Such ambivalence
towards cities is also with regard to the inhabitants of the cities themselves: it
is ambivalence towards the various groups that inhabit the cities – whites,
Asians and Africans – partly due to the roles played by some of the groups’
forbearers in the histories of slavery, colonialism and, later, post-
independence politics of ethnic/racial affirmation.
As was with colonial times, the post-independence Dar-es-Salaam and
Nairobi were affected by a systematic play on and use of stereotypes as
instruments of group and society control. Although most of the stereotypes –
especially at tribal level – were constructed and applied by colonialists in
pursuit of their divide and rule style of governance, the full weight of
stereotypes was more potent in the post-colonial times, when the African
political elite assumed leadership of the African countries. We are aware that
stereotypes and prejudices may obscure important “truths” about groups, but
we also acknowledge that such preconceptions are constructed and
propagated on the basis of some “truths,” and that they are not absolutely
abstract. Indeed, stereotypes quite often mask given communal ideological
objectives and may in themselves yield important information about group
interactions. This argument is inspired to a degree by Nyairo and Ogude’s
view that “[i]t is crucial to interrogate the makers and purveyors of the
stereotypes in terms of their ideological objectives and their socio-political
impact” (392). In this instance, stereotypes come in handy when imagining
forms of identity that not only ensure secure claims to spaces within the
cities, but also mark out some claimants as positively different from their
competitors. This may well be the point in Nyairo and Ogude’s assertion that
“since individual identity is, in part, created through differentiating oneself
from others […] in the same way communities – ethnic groups, nations and
races – understand themselves in part by stating the differences between them
and other communities” (389).
The invocation of stereotypes in negotiating belonging to the city spaces
is seen in the perceived and actual roles of various groups in the histories of
Kenya and Tanzania we mentioned earlier. More urgent to this essay, the
dynamics of roles in the late colonial and early post-colonial times witnessed
Locating Cultural Ambivalence and Afropolitanism 261
a phenomenon where the increasing numbers of indigenous Africans in the

urban centres was a cause for concern among the resident whites as well as
the Asians who had come in to assist in laying the colonial foundations in
Africa. Like their indigenous African neighbours, the whites and Asians also
experienced a degree of ambivalence towards the cities they lived in. The
ambivalence was seen in the simultaneous perceived risk of the repercussions
of mixing with the Africans in their estates and the need to accommodate
them in order to tap their labour, as now a semblance of market forces that
grounded the exchange of labour on some willingness by concerned parties
was in operation. Put in other words, the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam of
immediate pre- and post-independence period were characterised by a remarkable
sucking into the white and Asian dominated economies of Africans who went
there in search of jobs at a time when the political climate had bestowed
power on the black majorities. This called for an act of balancing their
interests in a manner that both whites and Asians were strange to. Although
such acts of balancing had been instituted at the beginning of colonialism, the
boundaries that were set at the same time were now disturbed by the massive
incursions of Africans in the urban areas. The one thing that such incursions
led to was the perpetuation and mapping of social attitudes carried by
indigenous Africans and other racial groups into the various zones that had
been prepared to at one level protect the same patronising attitudes in as far
as they served the politically and socially dominant whites and Asians and, at
another level, make some of the attributes of the dominant groups admirable
by the dominated blacks. At the end of the day then, the design of the cities
of Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi was done in a manner that relayed the social
attitudes that were prevalent at the time. In the post-independence period, the
same attitudes persisted in their exclusionary nature to communicate societal
tensions, and they have found representation in most of the novels that have
emerged so far. 2
2
Indeed Roger Kurtz avers that the East African novel is by and large an urban novel, going
by the numerous novelistic works that use the city as the canvass for articulating their
respective issues. In fact Kurtz goes ahead to suggest that even the novels that do not use the
city as their setting all the same foreground the essence of the city via its absence. See his
Urban Obsessions Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel.
262 Godwin Siundu
Historical Emergence of East African Cities
The emergence of contemporary East African cities can largely be attributed

to the process of colonisation that began from the end of the 19th and ended
roughly in the mid 20th centuries. Although in itself a short-lived
phenomenon, the effects of colonialism were far-reaching in practically all
aspects of life for the majority of indigenous Africans who were to remain on
the continent even after the process of formal colonisation had come to an
end. The significance of colonialism in the emergence of contemporary
African cities is seen in the way in which, through the introduction of the
Althusserian apparati, colonialism expedited the entry into the continent of
new possibilities of modernities. Socially, culturally, politically and
materially, old forms of thinking gave way to occidental influences that now
facilitated movement and relocation – with the attendant dislocation –
lifestyles that refashioned hitherto unknown forms of vertical differentiation
within groups as between them. This scenario also extended to new forms of
subjectivities to different and sometimes state-backed loci of power. In a
sentence, groups began interacting on new terms by new means. These new
dynamics naturally led to intra- and inter-group social, economic and
political contests that culminated in the attainment of political independence
at the beginning of 1960s. All along, the people were controlled by a
conflation of raw weaponry as they were by ideologies of knowledge and
power that were exercised and experienced through occupying different
spaces within the same regions. Related to this, Foucault is of the view that
understanding spatiality is a way to understanding the relationships between
power and knowledge: “[o]nce knowledge can be analysed in terms of
region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to
capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and
disseminates the effects of power” (69). Deriving from Foucault’s views, we
hold that part of the reasons why studies on immigrants continue to yield new
debates is because of the weight in the spatial metaphors like displacement,
which in their turn evoke images of how the powerful exercise their power on
the powerless directly or otherwise.
Kurtz writes that modern day Nairobi can be said to have begun in May
1899, when the Uganda Railway reached what was called enkare Nairobi, or
place of cold waters, by the Maasai people (77). Because of its relative
centrality vis-à-vis Mombasa and Kisumu, Nairobi was significant both to the
colonial administrators as well as to the traders who had been around much
earlier. Soon, settlements sprouted around the railhead, and the situation was
intensified two years later when railway administrative headquarters was
moved to the site. Kurtz writes that Nairobi offered a perfect opportunity for
colonial authorities to experiment with urban planning. He says:
Nairobi’s design was the result of two predominant and not necessarily conflicting
imperatives: on the one hand to create a model of a Garden City, a concept that was
becoming important in British urban planning at the end of the nineteenth century; and on the
other hand to create an essentially European city in the African setting, based on the South African model.
(77)
Through architectural zoning and legislation – pass laws – the colonialist

British then embarked on a process that would later ensure that they had
almost total control of the city in terms of who did or did not inhabit it. This
decision of policing inclusion/exclusion was based on quasi-legal
commissions that recommended racially based segregation of housing quarters
that yielded distinctly separate housing for the minority whites who occupied
the north and west of the city, followed by Asians (in the Indian bazaar) and
then Africans (behind the railway quarters). 3 So right from the beginning, the
Asians’ residential area served as a buffer zone between the very few whites
and the densely populated indigenous Africans. Whites and Africans were
two groups that had inversely related economic power and whose interests
clashed the most. This, as it would later emerge, put the Asians in a precarious
position that invited mistrust and contempt from their African neighbours.
In terms of housing amenities, the colonial administrators initially felt that
providing permanent structures would attract more Africans into the city,
which was something they did not want. So Africans were only allowed to
erect haphazard and temporary structures to house the increasing number of
their lot who were migrating into Nairobi. The colonialists’ assumption that
Africans were temporary inhabitants of the city did not factor in the
determination of the latter to partake in what was deemed as the trappings of
Western modernities that were enviable to the majority of peasant Africans.
Nor did they consider the possibility of an emerging class of African sub-
elites whom, by virtue of either working for the white men in the city or
being marginally educated, alienated themselves from their kith back in the
rural areas. The point is that as early as the 1920s when the generation of
Harry Thuku internalised sporadic aspects of Western lifestyles, a new crop
of urbane Africans was emerging, and it would be nearly impossible to have
them return to the rural areas. Instead, the same would attract further
emigration to the cities because they led lifestyles that were socially,
3
Kurtz mentions some of the commissions as the Williams Report of 1907, the Simpson
Report of 1913, and the Feedham Report of 1926. See Kurtz 78.
264 Godwin Siundu
economically and even politically better or admirable than those of the

majority of their kith.
Hence, as Kurtz writes, the unwillingness by the colonialist administrators
to build more decent or durable housing for their African subjects did little to
deter the Africans from flocking into the city. Instead, the greater discrepancy
in terms of housing quality for whites and Africans only embittered the latter
who saw it as unacceptable to have foreign whites living well while the
Africans lived in hovels. Indeed the issue of housing would later find a
permanent slot on the agenda of the political activists among African leaders,
while in the meantime poor and jobless Africans in the city would find
criminal activities directed towards whites and Asians in the city an option for
survival. For the whites and Asians then, the continued migration of Africans
into the city – attracted as they were by the city’s promises – constituted a risk
to their wealth, health and power, and it was dealt with through what Kurtz
summarises as “the government policy of neglect and containment” (79).
Later on, the colonial government changed its policy on racial housing in
Nairobi and, as Kurtz writes, shed the easier policy of “neglect and
containment” in preference to that of “government paternalism” (79).
Beginning in 1939, the colonial government began “to make provisions for
workers to live there with their families, thus creating [...] the first housing
estate projects for Africans in Ziwani, Kaloleni, and Pumwani. Others
followed in the 1940s in Ofafa, Maringo, Makadara, and Jericho” (80). That
the colonial administrators had revised their approach in controlling the city
space of Nairobi was seen when, as Joseph Slaughter writes, “two town
planners and a sociologist were commissioned by the British government to
produce a ‘Master Plan of a Colonial Capital’ that would provide a blueprint
for the projected development of Nairobi” (37).
Nguluma writes that present-day Dar-es-Salaam started in 1860 when
Sultan Seyyid Majid Bin Said established his administrative centre there. Its
quick development saw the German colonial government shift its capital
from Bagamoyo to Da-es-Salaam in 1891 (14). Nguluma adds that “[t]he
present land use structure for Dar-es-Salaam and house types in the city
centre have been much influenced by early colonial planning” (14). The
sociological reading of the racialised zoning of housing in Nairobi as
conducted by Kurtz, and the same as is re-produced by Nguluma and Lupala
all indicate that as early as the colonial period, the two cities had within them
disparate racial, social and economic communities whose knowledge of their
neighbouring communities was scanty, based on prejudicial fears and
anxieties, and designed by colonialists to remain as such. And this fits in well
with Robert Park’s view, as read in Kasinitz, that “[t]he process of
segregation establish[es] moral distances which make the city a mosaic of

little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate”(163). This situation is
quite different from what would emerge in the early post-independence
period where some inhabitants of the cities would try and reach out to places
beyond those they had known for a long time, making these cities spaces that
Pratt calls “‘contact zones’ [which are] social spaces where disparate cultures
meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical
relations of domination and subordination – like colonialism, slavery, or their
aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today” (4). Indeed one can
argue that it is the skewed distribution of economic and political power that
makes the city spaces of Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam attractive to some
people and scary to others. The fears of such characters as Judson in
Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, as we shall demonstrate in a moment,
arise out of an awareness of their privileged positions during late colonialism
and early post independence, which positions are exposed in the latter
periods, hence precipitating the anxieties they live with.
To the extent that the city spaces do allow pockets of various racial
categories to exist side-by-side without necessarily mixing indeed lends a lie
to the common view of the city – generally seen as cosmopolitan – as
metonymic of the ideal of a wider multicultural nation. Our view is that on
the contrary, it is within the city spaces that forms of identities that had
hitherto been seen as backward – tribal or ethnic for instance – are re-
invented and invoked to justify perceptions of difference and sameness, and
that these are some of the ideas that filter to the rural areas. This is not to
suggest that inhabitants of the rural areas are not capable of forming their
own ideas of what differentiates them from others or for that matter, what
makes them the same. Our point however is that such ideas as coming from
rural areas have for a long time been “accepted” and even “expected.” It is in
the contemporary African city spaces where people fashion or aspire to some
form of “civility” supposedly absent in the rural areas; people who are
viewed as having transcended their ethnic or tribal instincts and therefore
representing the most desirable in the imagination of post-colonial
nationhoods, where the lie of a homogenous nation is most brutally told.
Independence, the City and its Allures
The coming of independence in the early 1960s and the subsequent lifting of
the existing migration restrictions led to a further migration to the city,
leading to a drastic population increase that saw the demand by far
266 Godwin Siundu
outstripping supply for amenities within the cities of Nairobi and Dar-es-
Salaam. At the same time, unemployment in the formal sector saw the
emergence of informal occupations, or jua kali, as a way of earning a living.
Hence, the centrality of the cities as sources of social and economic amenities
such as employment and housing was disturbed at a fairly early stage because
there sprouted some nodal centres offering services that were hitherto a
preserve of the main cities. Indeed this is in line with Robert Beauregard’s
reading of the distinguishing aspects of the contemporary city in general,
where he says “[o]ne of the most frequently mentioned spatial components of
the contemporary urban scene is ‘edge cities’, the nodes of office activities,
retail stores and apartment buildings that now dot metropolitan areas” (27).
What this means then is that at the time of independence, and owing to the
post-independence realities of limited resources, the cities of Nairobi and
Dar-es-Salaam adopted some aspects that would make the two fit within the
definition of postmodern cities – they were fragmented in terms of social and
economic inequities and racial partitioning.
To that extent then, the two cities can be deemed contemporary cities
because they represent new urban forms that reflect social attitudes that have
been fashioned by the exigencies of migration, senses of minority versus
majority groups and the attendant dynamics of 20th Century realities of
migration and hybridity against the backdrop of growing global capitalism
that increases the pace of life. This is coupled with the resurgence of old forms
of nationalism that harp on notions of purity, marginality and other related
categories to define inclusion/exclusion and lend weight to their respective
claims over social, economic and political spaces. Edge cities, apart from
capturing the marginality suggested in the phrase, also point to the shift in
focus of the gaze from what is central to what is seen as peripheral and
examining the contributions made by the marginal to the daily operations of the
cities. The position of this paper is that the edges of these cities, or residential
and shopping centres in the Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam case, do point to the
plight of that group of Asians who are loosely described as immigrants in
countries where most of them have found homes, and where a majority of
their ancestors actually introduced money economy at the turn of the 20th
Century by venturing deep into the hinterlands where they opened trading
outposts. This indeed is the crisis of interracial relations in the two countries
as imagined by Dawood and Vassanji.
The Asians in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam at this moment continue to
battle with the vicissitudes of numerical marginality and a complex of ethno-
cultural as well as historical baggage – claims of insularity and their
perceptions of superiority over indigenous Africans are examples. By
assuming the buffer status that we alluded to earlier, the business class of
Asians in the two countries tended to benefit economically, socially and
politically during late colonialism, and were therefore viewed with suspicion
by indigenous Africans in the post-independence era. The reversal of roles
that independence brought about witnessed a near-collapse of the business
empires that had been built under the patronage of British colonialists, and
which continued to marginalise Africans. With independence, elite classes
among the African communities rose to assume positions of power and thus
further moved to the centres of the two cities. Metaphorically then, Asians
still occupied the margins of the cities as they literally did during colonialism
(this is because although Asians were allowed chances to amass wealth, their
“seniority” was only second to that of Whites, and the latter still harboured
feelings of superiority over the former).
Yet, it is precisely their position as secondary to Whites during
colonialism that renders the position of Asians as marginal problematic. If
they had occupied the margins of the city space during colonialism –
therefore being on the literal margins – they had at the same time availed
themselves of opportunities of making economic fortunes. For the Asians, the
coming of independence had two major impacts on their position in the area:
first, it affirmed their position as largely forming the economic elite and,
secondly, the increased rural-urban migration of indigenous Africans
displaced them as occupants of geographical margins in the city spaces. To
bare it all, the coming of independence and the subsequent relocations
exposed the East African Asians’ ruse of dislocation to show them as more
rooted geographically and economically than the indigenous Africans who
left their rural villages – derogatively called Native Reserves by British
Colonialists – to wedge themselves to modernised city spaces. The position
of East African Asians as “rootless immigrants” is hence only sustainable
when looked at from the vantage point of global immigrancy and Asian
diasporic communities the world over. In light of this, we argue here that the
continued projection of East African Asians as a rootless minority – even
subaltern community – is done with the end of a convenient removal from
sight of particular pasts and futures that would impact on social interactions
with non-Asians. We shall elaborate in a moment.
268 Godwin Siundu
Baghdad and New York in East Africa: Novelistic Re-imagining

of the Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi
In a somewhat different context, Sarah Nuttal argues that there is a

relationship of racial, class and spatial intersection in the context of the city,
which “becomes a key archive from which to read these configurations” (15).
An important point in these dynamics is how the cultural specificities
regarding the city space provoke and sustain varying imaginaries of
individual and group identities, which are understood and experienced in the
framework of the different meanings of the city. Although she writes in the
historical context of post-apartheid South Africa, Nuttal’s theorisation of the
nature of the city space is relevant to our chapter here, especially in her
assertion that “[t]his is the world, too, of migrants – and the city becomes a
metaphor of motion, mutability and metamorphosis” (19). All these are
indeed captured in the novels we read for this chapter, where the cities of Dar
es Salaam and Nairobi are perceived as a canvas upon which experiences in
other cities – Baghdad and New York for instance – could be imagined:
[t]here were three dreams in this town that aspired to Baghdad once and New York
afterwards. The European dream stayed near the seashore. Everything beyond Ingles Street
up to the ocean in the north and east was Uzunguni, ‘where the Europeans live’.
Whitewashed, tree-lined, breezy: dreamlike. Huddled behind the Europeans, crowded, came
the Indian quarter, with its dukas [shops] of groceries, produce and cloth: gutters
overflowing and smelling at street corners, rotten potatoes and onions smelling outside the
produce shops, open garbage smelling in the alleys. Then came a breathing space from the
European and Asian […] the Mnazi Moja ground, uninhabited, uncultivated, a sandy desert:
and beyond this, in the interior, was Kariakoo, formerly home of the German Carrier Corps,
the beginning of the African quarter. Only a few streets ventured, from the Indian quarter,
into the African quarter, but once inside, got lost in the maze of crisscrossing, unpaved
streets lined with African huts. (The Gunny Sack 85)
The presentation of Dar-es-Salaam in Vassanji’s novel is in pattern with

Nguluma’s assertion that “[t]he housing programmes that were implemented
following the colonial housing policy were based on ideas of racial
segregation. There were separate housing schemes for Europeans [Kurasini
and Oysterbay], Indians [Upanga and Chang’ombe] and Africans [which
were carried out in four phases, depending on whether the African was a
government employee or not]” (17). As expected, the British houses in
Oyster Bay were “located along the Indian Ocean” (19) for the breeze to
moderate the high humidity of Dar-es-Salaam, then followed by those of the
Indians and Africans respectively.
The presentation of these housing inequities in the two novels is laden

with suggestions that post-independence government housing strategies that
meant to demolish walls of racial segregation through zoning also led to the
degeneration of the cities. Hence in their novels, Dawood and Vassanji tend
to portray Asians as victims of malice and envy at their business astuteness,
while at the same time portraying Africans as lacking in patience, disposed
towards extravagance and as unreliable business partners. This is particularly
evident in Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, where the city of Dar-es-Salaam
supposedly glitters with shops owned by Asian businessmen, but start
decaying with time especially in the post-independence period when many of
the Asians are emigrating to Europe and North America. It is significant that
this period also coincides with the ideology of Nyerere’s Socialism where
competitive capitalism is frowned upon and actually discouraged at the
national policy level. Another instance is seen in Dawood’s Water Under the
Bridge, where the character of Charles Oloo is representative of the economic
and political elite that emerged immediately after political independence and
rose in the ranks to achieve feats that were unimaginable only a few years
earlier. Born in the backwaters of a provincial village in western Kenya, Oloo
works as a junior fishmonger under the patronage of an Asian called Jaffer.
This occupation enables him to move on to Kisumu, a town on the shores of
Lake Victoria where the fish is caught and prepared for sale in other parts of
Kenya.
A play of ill fortunes on Jaffer’s part and ambition on Oloo’s sees the
latter acquire the shop. This allows him some economic power with which he
negotiates entry into the main city, Nairobi, where he sets out to pursue
further economic and later political ambitions. Along the way he is spotted
by the Desais, an Asian family that incorporates him in a rather unconvincing
way to a matchbox company they are starting, where Oloo’s role is primarily
to act as a front in borrowing money from lenders, and also in beating what is
seen as the system’s desire to Africanise major business enterprises.4 One
can establish a pattern in Oloo’s lifestyle: from the safety of his village of
birth, Oloo moves on to Kisumu where he earns a modest living; he is then
4
However, I need to state here that Africanisation was never adopted as an official
government policy in Kenya, although many books on Kenya’s immediate post-
independence era may seem to suggest so. Neither did this policy benefit all or even the
majority of Africans. Only a few elites benefited after using the masses to legitimise their
own pursuits. On the other hand, the Tanzanian case was that of Ujamaa, socialism, which
meant that the government repossessed properties from individuals who had more than one.
Given that the colonial matrix had allowed Asians to amass more wealth than their
neighbours, the Ujamaa enterprise would then on prima facie basis appear to target Asians.
270 Godwin Siundu
tempted to move on to Nairobi where though he registers some success, the

city ultimately destroys him. Hence from the periphery towards the centre,
Oloo’s life becomes materially better but socially and emotionally worse.
Reading the plight of Oloo in relation to that of other characters, one may be
forgiven for concluding that the city, for the African elite, has some
destructive elements. The failure of Oloo is read as the failure of the larger
crop of African political and economic elite whose impatience and errors of
judgment lead to their downfall. The city for the characters then carries these
elements of potential destruction especially for those who do not have the
attributes of patience and hard work.
Moyez Vassanji has written other novels that also portray the Africans in
a similar vein. In The Gunny Sack for instance, the novel reverts to the ideas
of centre and marginality, Self and Other, et cetera, to present the picture of
Asians in East Africa. Borrowing from aspects of the epic, the novel traces the
origin of Asians in the region, showing the sacrifices that earlier immigrants
made in order to achieve the economic power that they now enjoy. As in his
other novels like The Book of Secrets and Amriika, Vassanji in The Gunny
Sack is concerned with the historical origins and presence of Asians in the
region especially as far as the histories affect or are affected by the present.
And unlike Dawood who looks at the Asians’ place in the region starting
from the time of political independence, Vassanji starts off from the close of
the 19th Century when the earliest Asian immigrants came to the region as
petty traders or servants in the then budding colonialist enterprise. The novel
then points out what the author deems as the silences of the existing variants
of history, especially with regard to the role Asians played in opening up the
interior for administrative and capital economic activities. In the end, there is
a suggestion that what the Asians own as individuals and as a community is
what they worked for, and that policies such as Ujamaa in actual fact rob
them of their sweat. Unlike Dawood, Vassanji extensively invokes the trope
of migration to and from East African cities as one of the ways in which the
Asians confront the “injustices” of post-independence African leaderships,
where Asians emigrate from Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi to the metropolises
in the United Kingdom, Canada and America. As we have indicated before,
this emigration is in part justified by the suggested decadence of the city of
Dar-es-Salaam under the Nyerere government, which has apparently resulted
to a malfunctioning economy that pushes the Asians to other places.
But a closer reading of the novels reveals that while the cities and the
countries at large fail to meet the economic expectations of their citizenry,
this failure only provides a convenient ruse for the East African Asians’ own
desire for an arrangement that would place them above indigenous Africans
in the groups (racial, if you may) hierarchy. At the same time it provides
them with protection from business competition against the merging crop of
indigenous African entrepreneurs. As the indigenous Africans continue to
migrate to the city spaces, they exert pressure on the limited amenities the
implications of which are experienced by all. Considering that the colonial
laws that guarded against “unnecessary” presence of Africans in the cities
(vagrancy, loitering with intent) have been repealed, the spatial and
economic security that such protectionism offered is no longer available,
meaning that the East African Asians have to compete for business and
spatial resources just like their indigenous African neighbours. It is this
competition, in my view, that evokes nostalgia of the good times gone by,
where Asian investors in African quarters were certain not to face any
competition. Because of the movements by indigenous Africans to and from
the city, there is need for imaginative investments that target African
clientele, meaning economic survival becomes increasingly hard. Those who
can stay on, while those who cannot live with the competition emigrate
further to other places beyond Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.
Ultimately, our argument is that these migrations and dislocations
underscore the fluidity of the city space as one in perpetual flux both in its
own growth as in the people there. It also conforms with Kurtz’s view that
the African “city is where the hinterlands meet the metropoles” (7) to various
degrees: locals coming to the cities, some city dwellers migrating to the
metropolises of Europe and back to Nairobi or Dar-es-Salaam. The point that
can be condensed from the foregoing reading of the novels is that for the two
writers, both Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam invite multiple layers of
ambivalence: towards other people, towards the places, towards history and
even towards their own projects. This ambivalence is born out of the seeming
motive of the authors to advance the commonly held view that Asians in the
region, and particularly in the two cities, have been deliberately marginalised
from central political spaces by the powers that be. In other words, affecting
the novelistic imagineering of the two cities to a large extent is the idea of
positionality that colours the perception of the realities of a postcolonial
region. Hence, a careful play on prejudices and stereotypes becomes handy in
re-reading the common history, and instead attempting to seal the fissures by
providing alternative versions of what are still contesting and contestable
histories. It is to this that we now turn my attention.
272 Godwin Siundu
Fear in the Cities: A Play on Stereotypes in Mapping Groups
As we indicated earlier in this chapter, the novels under study have instances
where characters are put in types of groups, a process which we read as an
attempt to deal with the uncertainties and seductions accorded by the cities in
changing times. In Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge, some characters harp
on the fears of the departing colonialists to play on the concerns of the whites
who choose to remain. As Judson, a character in the novel says, “[t]he
situation in the Congo has clearly shown what can happen. It will be worse
here. There will be rivers of blood in the streets of Nairobi. The Congo in
comparison, will look like a Sunday afternoon picnic” (9). Here, the character
exhibits a significant lack of understanding of the complexities of the Congo
debacle – a simplification shown in his juxtaposition of cliché images of
“rivers of blood” and “Sunday afternoon picnic” – and his incomprehension
leads him to a conclusion that the same could happen in Nairobi, despite the
extremely different political dynamics in the two cities. Earlier on another
character, Archer, has told a new arrivant from Britain that “[w]hy do you
think we are here [Nairobi]? [...] Life is still very comfy for our people, but
don’t ask me how long it will last” (8). In the first quotation, the speaker is
worried about what will happen to the city of Nairobi after what has
happened in the Congo. Perhaps one should remember that the time setting
for this part of the novel is at the beginning of independence, in the early
years of 1960s, when the Congo sank into a civil war barely after
independence from Belgium. With this inspiration, Judson imagines that such
internecine strife is either infectious, or is a “rite of passage” for all African
countries attaining independence. One can say, perhaps in Judson’s defence,
that Dawood presents him in this instance with a bit of irony, especially in
the character’s use of clichés. But even such a concession still raises two
issues: one, the use of irony still defers the moment of engagement with the
issue at hand and, secondly, clichés so used are neither completely abstract
nor devoid of any “truth.” Indeed as Chabal and Daloz assert, “[c]liches are
always the resort of the analytical feeble, but they are not always wrong,
based as they are on some distorted perception of actual events, on some
kernel of truth, and that is why they deserve to be taken seriously, even (or
particularly) by scholars” (xv-xvi). The appropriation of these clichés as done
by Judson in actual fact reflects – albeit in a twisted way – the events in
Congo and Kenya, but they also reflect historical fears of a given community
of people at a particular moment in the history of these countries. Judson’s
fears indeed fit in what Chabal and Daloz further state regarding the
behaviour of an individual as a member of a broader community: “individual

rationality is essentially based on communal logic” (156).
In the second quotation, the dichotomy of Self and Other is operational, even
if subconsciously, because the speaker looks at the little good that is still left
in Nairobi as making life comfortable for “our” people. But in both quotations,
the spread of fear is effectively managed by an invocation of what is deemed as
latent evil in some groups. Without saying it in so many words, one is left
without a doubt that the Whites are easy targets for any acts of violence that
are likely to be visited upon them by their neighbours. But the prophesied doom
for the white population in Nairobi is still not a good reason for them to leave
the city as yet, since life “is still very comfy for our people.” In the same
quotations, two points are bare: the radiance of the city is not sufficient
enough to undo the current idea in cultural studies that emphasise the
unknowability of the Other – who invariably cause fear – and, two, the
layered meaning of life in the city remain obscured to a majority of city
dwellers who seem stuck in their own groves of misconceptions – Africans
are dirty, violent, they want sex with Asian girls, African leadership is
decadent, Gikuyus are dangerous, et cetera, views that are amply littered in
the novels under study, on occasion without any redeeming counter-images.
We should, however, remind all that this employment of stereotypes in
actual fact was in line with the colonial objectives of mapping subjects who
at once respected colonial authority as they accepted their place in the
hierarchy of racial categories. Indeed Harry Garuba argues that “[c]olonial
mapping represented landscapes of mobility for the coloniser, but for the
colonised it presented a circumscribed landscape of constraint” (96) where
entire groups were tethered within given geographic spaces to deliberately
stop them from moving to other places, and acquiring new forms of
knowledge of other people, or even uniting to conceive a formidable group
that would resist colonialism. This colonial mapping, Garuba continues, was
important to them because “maps became instruments for the production of
colonial and postcolonial subjectivities by constituting and constraining what
should be enunciated within their discursive space” (90).
In Water Under the Bridge, this divide and rule strategy is seen in
instances where tribal prejudices are summoned to articulate the general
ambivalence of Nairobi and its markers of modernities. The character of
Oloo, a Luo from western Kenya, for a long time lives with a pathological
mistrust of the Gikuyu people. In one of his business conversations with his
Asian partners, Oloo notices that there is a boy around whom he mistrusts:
“‘Is that boy a Kikuyu?’ He asked Kanti.” When the latter answers in the
affirmative, Oloo finishes off thus: “‘Just that I don’t trust people from that
274 Godwin Siundu
community. They think they are too clever and chaps like us from Nyanza are
supposed to be chini kabisa [very low]’ Oloo explained” (68). Indeed one
may argue that the use of this particular ethnic prejudice has a historical
background in the power politics between Kenya’s first president Jomo
Kenyatta and first vice-president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. The two came to
a disagreement that reached its peak in 1966, when Odinga resigned in a huff
to found an opposition party to Kenyatta’s government. Happening as it did
at a time when the country was still heavily polarised along ethnic lines, the
incident resuscitated the latent sentiments of mistrust that had been created
and propagated by the colonialists in pursuit of their divide and rule
administration of the country. A clearer explanation of this history is
necessary.
Because Nairobi was situated in the heart of Gikuyu land, the subsequent
colonisation of the country affected them much more and much earlier than it
did the rest of the peoples of Kenya. The Gikuyu were dispossessed of their
lands earlier; they had to carry passbooks earlier; and, ironically, they were
also introduced to money economy and formal education much earlier. When
colonised Kenyans began struggling for independence, the Gikuyu people
were much more active because of the aforementioned reasons. They were
more educated; they were wealthier, more visible and, in any case, had
suffered the brunt of colonialism much longer and from a closer range. The
colonialists’ responses to rising waves of Gikuyu insurgence was typical of
their divide and rule strategy, which in this case included creating and
propagating damaging stereotypes about them being money minded,
untrustworthy and disposed towards betraying even their most dependable of
friends. These are stereotypes that even Vassanji’s characters in The Gunny
Sack seem to subscribe to, as they use them to explain their refusal to hide a
Gikuyu young man at the height of Mau Mau rebellion (78). Although the
motive of the colonialists was to isolate the Gikuyu in their struggle for
independence, the stereotypes they developed about them would remain as
serious impediments to harmonious ethnic co-existence in independence day
Kenya. The historical fall-out between Kenyatta and Odinga in 1966 went a long
way in “confirming” what the people had always “known”: that the Gikuyu
are unreliable, and they would do anything they can to push out anyone who
stood in their way of money and power. The Luo people have particularly
been suspicious of the Gikuyu, which is what we find in the novel as Oloo
seriously mistrusts Ndegwa despite not knowing him at all. What emerges from
this kind of treatment is a situation whereby Oloo, suffering some anxieties
after coming newly to the centre of economic and political power, mistrusts
one who has been there before. His fear of not fitting in the new place that he
has chosen is expressed in an obviously weak displacement to a person he

knows nothing about. Stereotypes against whole ethnic groups then become
one of the ways in which some characters manage their own fear of the
unknown and rationalise their actions by falling back on received notions
about the evil inherent in other people who do not belong in the same groups
as they do.
Fear in The Gunny Sack is manifested at various levels: there is fear that
given groups’ authority is likely to be lessened; fear that their economic fortunes
are about to be seized; and fear that the purity of the community is about to be
adulterated or, generally put, contaminated. For the Asians particularly, the
fear of sexual contamination is so deep-seated that they go to great lengths to
control the sexuality of their members. In The Gunny Sack for instance, the
pioneer immigrants are forced by an outcry from India – “[o]ur [Asian] sons
are keeping golis, black slaves in Africa. And there are children, half-castes
littering the coast from Mozambique to Karachi” (11) – to abandon their
African wives or mistresses, and to neglect any children who may have issued out
of such unions. Dhanji Govindji, the Asian patriarch in The Gunny Sack for
instance had sexual liaisons with a slave woman, Bibi Taratibu, with whom
they had a son, Huseni. When he can no longer ignore the wishes of his people
to “marry properly,” Govindji abandons the woman and sends her to the fringes
of community, where she eventually disappears into the unknown hinterlands.
Govindji and his new wife mistreat the half-caste son to a point where he
escapes from home into the unknown that is Africa. Juma, a third generation
descendant of Govindji, still battles with the baggage of his hybridity:
“[k]nowledge of Juma’s pedigree followed him to the capital. And so Juma,
because even the big house was packed, and to avoid his associating with her
sons, was given a room in the courtyard, next to the servants’ quarters and the
outhouse” (63). Prejudices against Africans and blackness in the novel assume
the magnitude of pathological fear, such that unions between the two
communities are highly discouraged for fear of spreading contamination to
what is deemed a superior race. Kulsum’s theory of creation is perhaps what
captures best the stereotypes associated with the various groups:
When God was well and ready after all his exertions finally to create mankind, he sat himself
beside a red-hot oven with a plate of dough. From this he fashioned three identical dolls. He put
the first doll into the oven to finish it, but, alas, brought it out too soon: it came out white and
undone. In this was born the white race. With this lesson learnt, the Almighty put the second doll into
the oven, but this time he kept it in for too long. It came out burnt and black. Thus the black race.
Finally the One and Only put the last doll inside the oven, and brought it out at just the right
time. It came out golden brown, the Asian, simply perfect. (73)
276 Godwin Siundu
The jingoism in the foregoing quotation is hard to miss. The stereotypes in

the same quotation are used to camouflage Kulsum’s own anxiety with purity
and superiority of her race, as she is worried of “disappearing” in darkness
should her community fail to preserve their numbers and purity. They
imagine their superiority as a race to rationalise their conservative attitudes
towards sexuality, intermarriages and other forms cultural blending. Hence
they hang onto such notions as communal shame and pride, networking in
social and economic terms to maintain their social, economic and cultural
position in Dar-es-Salaam.
There is a distinct difference between Vassanji and Dawood in the ways
in which they project their characters’ handling of stereotypes as a way of
confronting their fears. While Vassanji would present a homogenous picture
of Africans, Dawood goes ahead to deal with some of the differences within
the wider group of Africans by pointing to the long known suspicions and
stereotypes against specific ethnic groups in the country. This difference can
again be explained by understanding the respective positions that the two
authors occupy. While Vassanji conforms to the postcolonial trend of writing
about Africa from the metropolises of the west, Dawood reverses the same to
live and write from Nairobi. It is possible then that Dawood has a clearer view
of the issues that affect the various groups resident in the country he writes
about. Also, Vassanji, by writing from afar – and is it above? – could well be
demonising the decadence of Dar-es-Salaam in order to create what George
in a different context calls a “joyous international homelessness” (8) in
Toronto and other metropolises. Whether this is true or not is, of course,
beyond the ambit of this chapter.
By problematising the relationship between African characters, Dawood
on his part undermines the commonly held view that urbane Africans are
detribalised. This can only be true outside the matrix of economic and
political power contests – meaning it is a rarity. Both writers are however not
innocent when it comes to presenting some homogenised groups especially
when it fits well in their scheme of presenting the Asians as a victimised lot.
In other words, while Dawood makes an effort of avoiding any erasures
where the Africans are concerned, he does not in the same vein recognise the
differences that exist within the wider group that we refer to as Asians. For
him Indians, Goans, Pakistanis and other related communities pass for
“Asians” while for Vassanji, all pass for Shamsis. This can be read as a way
through which the two writers, and possibly the people they write for,
improvise communal identities to present a united front where none would
otherwise exist. As Bensman and Vidich argue, the expression of communal
solidarity through social and other forms of networking among ethnic and
other related communities are influenced remarkably by the political

dispensation in which the communities exist (196-203). The persistence of
community among Asians in an environment where other racial groups are
assumed to be adopting more individualistic approach to modern life is
almost certainly informed by a sense of risk, and the desire to spread the
same, with regard to the dynamics of life outside the very same community.
This is one strategy that enables them to compete for limited economic and
political opportunities. In fact the guiding rationale behind such strategies is
founded on the need to secure some reliable space within the economic,
social and political dynamics of the two countries within a specific historical
period. The Asians then end up forming, in the words Kasinitz uses in
another context, “[a] community of limited liability, [where] both physical
and social boundaries are as much a creation of political structures, voluntary
organisations and local institutions as a reflection of the patterns of face-to-
face interaction of the residents” (165). Indeed these are some of the
similarities that bind African cities like Dar-es- Salaam and Nairobi to the
metropolises of America such as New York and Chicago during the mid-
twentieth century, which coincides with the time many African countries
attain their political independence.
Conclusion
The origins, growth and development of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, as

indeed many African cities, was a process that was externally influenced by
changing economic and political interests of Europe in its bigger scheme of
dominating Africa. Writing on the city of Johannesburg, Achille Mbembe
states that “[l]ike every colonial town, it found it hard to resist the temptation
of mimicry, that is, of imagining itself as an English town and a pale
reflection of forms born elsewhere” (375; emphasis in original). Hence, the
colonial race ideology informed not just the physical planning of the cities,
but the racial, social and even cultural mapping of the urban spaces with a
view to reflecting mimicking what existed in the European metropolises.
Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, to be specific, mimicked values of Englishness
that, with the coming of independence, left behind a legacy of regret,
nostalgia, and well entrenched notions of racial difference between Asians
and Africans who survived colonialism, with the overall effect of widespread
uncertainty.
Reading the two novels in this chapter reveals that the post-independence
period is one with many uncertainties for almost everybody, but probably
278 Godwin Siundu
more challenging for the Asians whose role in the historical paths of the
country, and their very existence in the countries is surrounded by what one
would describe as a crisis of visibility. This visibility is both in terms of their
sheer presence as well as their seeming success in amassing wealth in
economies that are largely malfunctional. For the Asians, succeeding in
business is not just a challenge; it is also a dilemma because it is precisely
their success in business that makes their presence in the countries
controversial. The dilemma is also that in as much as the cities expose them
to visibility and risks, it is possibly the only places where they can rationalise
their continued stay in the countries. Their continued inhabitation of the city
space is rationalised, and indeed sustained, by massive capital investments
whose returns can only be possible in concentrated markets that are provided
by the many Africans who inhabit the same cities. The cities, by providing
huge markets with disposable incomes, allow the Asians to exercise agency
that is denied them on the political front where their numerical inferiority
means they fall victims to notions of majority rule. Of course, when looked at
from the viewpoint of national demographics, no single community – Asian
or otherwise – is not numerically inferior. But there has been a tendency to
look at Asians as a “different” ethnic community that is undeniably weak in
numbers, the underlying assumption being that they are unable to close ranks
with any other community in order to influence political decisions at the
national level or, inversely, that the other communities will naturally ally
with each other to exact such influence. But going back to the point of
markets and business, especially the way such business bequeaths influence
upon people seen as numerically marginal, one sees the way in which the city
spaces enables a renegotiation of ascribed positions.
That is what one notices in Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge where
factory Kiberiti Limited is located in the city involving millions of shillings
in capital and equally huge sums of money in returns as profits. It is indeed
the huge profits that Asians earn which enable them to bargain for influence
through employment of Africans – which means Africans would have some
interest in the Asians’ business by depending on them – and supporting some of
them financially to run for political positions, as the Desai family supports Oloo
in Dawood's novel. In Water Under the Bridge, the employment of Africans is
also informed by a desire to forestall any future problems. In fact when old
Man Desai advises his son to employ their cook’s son as a shop assistant, he
says: “[h]e [Ndegwa] could do a holiday job and earn both money and
practical experience. [...] That way they will not look at us with avaricious
eyes” (62). From the foregoing quotation, the Asians in Nairobi presented by
Dawood use their investments to negotiate for acceptance among the wider
African community, and therefore subvert their position as a marginalised

group. The whole economic interaction between Oloo on the Desai family on
the one hand, and that of the Desai family and Ndegwa on the other, brings
out AbdouMaliq Simone’s idea of “people as infrastructure, which
emphasises economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalised
and immeserated by urban life” (407). It is a plea for simultaneous or shared
occupation of a premium space that demands an increased level of
negotiation about the terms of racial and socio-economic engagements.
Works Cited
Beauregard, Robert. “The Unavoidable Continuities of the City.” Globalizing

Cities: A New Spatial Order? Ed. Peter Marcuse and Ronald Van Kempen.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 22 -36.
Bensman, Joseph, and Arthur Vidich. “Race, Ethnicity and New Forms of Urban
Community.” Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times. Ed.
Philip Kasinitz. London: Macmillan, 1995. 196-203.
Chabal, Patrick, and J. Jean-Pascal Daloz. Africa Works: Disorder as
Political Instrument. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.
Dawood, Yusuf K. Water Under the Bridge. Nairobi: Longhorn Kenya, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972 – 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York & London: The Harvester
Press, 1980.
——., “Text/Context of Other Space.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.
Garuba, Harry. “Mapping the Land/Body/Subject: Colonial and Postcolonial
Geographies in African Narrative.” Alternation 9.1 (2002): 87-116.
George, Rosemary M. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and
Twentieth Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
Kasinitz, Philip, ed. Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times. London:
Macmillan, 1995.
Kurtz, Roger J. Urban Fears Urban Obsessions: The Postcolonial Kenyan
Novel. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998.
Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004):
373-405.
Nutall, Sarah. “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa.” Journal
of Southern African Studies 30.4 (2004): 731-48.
Simone, AbdouMaliq. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in
Johannesburg.” Public Culture 16.3 (2004): 407 – 429.
280 Godwin Siundu
Vassanji, Moyez. Amriika. Toronto; Ontario: McLelland & Stewart, 1999.

——., The Book of Secrets. London: Picador, 1996.
——., The Gunny Sack. Oxford: Heinemann International, 1989.
Part IV
Language, Borders, Spaces

Mikhail Gromov
Across the Language Border:

The Case of Bilingual Writers in Tanzania
Creative writing in Tanzania has been strongly associated with the language
of Swahili, which still functions as the main linguistic medium in the country,
putting English in secondary position. In fact, English was almost completely
“wiped out” of the literary map of Tanzania, at least in the eyes of the outside
world – which partially happened due to over-hastened opinions of some
literary scholars; for example, Rajmund Ohly (1990) once wrote: “While
literature in Swahili flourishes both in Kenya and Tanzania, literature in
English does not exist in the latter” (105). Paying all due respect to the
memory of the well-known researcher, I dare state, however, that such an
opinion seems to be at least slightly inaccurate, and English has been holding
a much more tangible position in Tanzanian literature even from its very first
days. Suffice it to recall just a few facts: novel writing in Tanzania started
with English books – Dying in the Sun by Peter Palangyo and Village in
Uhuru by Gabriel Ruhumbika, both published in 1969, by their artistic
qualities by far surpassed any other literary attempt existing in Tanzanian
literature at that time, either in English or Swahili. It is also known that many
outstanding Swahili authors of Tanzania – among them, for example, the
doyen of modern Swahili writing Euphrase Kezilahabi 1 – made their first
attempts in creative writing also in English. Moreover, since 1970s
Tanzanian literature features small, but artistically accomplished group of
English medium authors. Some of them, like Peter Palangyo, Hamza Sokko,
Ismael Mbise, Barnabas Katigula, Osija Mwambungu (who also published
his works under the pen-name Prince Kagwema), Joel Lawi, Tengio Urrio
and some other authors, chose English as a sole medium of literary
expression. Others later made a considerable contribution to creative writing
in Swahili, thus serving two major strata of Tanzanian imaginative literature
and, eventually, becoming bilingual writers. Creative work of this latter
group of writers will be discussed in this article.
The problem of being a bilingual – and even more so, English-language –
writer in Tanzania at least initially seemed to be rather different compared to
many other parts of the world. First of all it should be borne in mind that
1
I am particularly referring to Kezilahabi’s early poems in English, published in Darlite
journal in the late 1960s (some of them were later translated into Swahili by the author).
284 Mikhail Gromov
literary bilingualism in Tanzania in the ujamaa 2 times was not quite in line
with the official policy. English was not very much encouraged in
Tanganyika even in colonial times, its place as a medium being already then
largely taken by Swahili. After independence, impressive effort was put into
developing and promoting Swahili in every possible way – especially as the
language of newly-born Tanzanian literature. The attitude to English
(popularly referred to as kimombo – a derogatory word, which could be
translated as something like “mumbling”) was semi-officially expressed by
the slogan “Kimombo zii!” – “Down with kimombo!” Thus, the attempts to
write in kimombo were by definition not very much welcomed. In other
words, already in the first decade of independence a very tangible border was
drawn in Tanzanian literature: what was written in English, even by the local
writers, was “not ours,” it was nearly foreign, and the attempts to use the
language were not taken as positively as the efforts to write in Swahili –
which, in fact, led to the emergence in the following decade of a large body
of indigenous Swahili writing.
Hence, the most likely reason why the Tanzanian writers attempted to
write in English as early as 1960s was that at that time new creative writing,
especially prose, in Swahili was making only the first humble steps – no
matter how great was the encouragement from the government, learning to
use the language with new literary forms definitely required some time.
Many writers, therefore, were still cautious about the abilities of Swahili to
serve the needs of modern genres, and turned to English, following the
example of many other African writers who already have attained
considerable fame for their works in the “language of Shakespeare.”
Speaking about the two above-mentioned groups of Anglophone
Tanzanian authors, one can notice an interesting thing: the “English-only”
Tanzanian writers mostly published one, at best two books (the sole
exception is Osija Mwambungu, who authored four novels in English),
whereas the prolificacy of bilingual authors is much more impressive. This
may be caused by the fact that the “English-only” authors were reluctant to
cross the above-mentioned language border, thus confining themselves to a
rather limited audience of those Tanzanians who were fluent in English, 3
2
Ujamaa – the concept that formed the basis of Julius Nyerere's social and economic
development policies in independent Tanzania, based on the Marxist-Leninist model of one-
party rule.
3
It could be assumed that the “English-only” Tanzanian writers were also targeting the
readers outside Tanzania and even Africa – but, bearing in mind the fact that Tanzania’s
links with the outside world during the ujamaa times were rather limited (for example, the
Across the Language Border 285
whereas the latter, after making some attempts of using English, opted for
wider audience and “added up” Swahili, the major language of the country, to
their arsenal of artistic means – in most of the cases, successfully. The
practical usefulness of this bilingualism was confirmed in an interview, taken
in 1995, by the director of Tanzania Publishing House, the country’s leading
publisher, Primus Karugendo:
MG: I happen to know that here in Tanzania there is a number of writers who write novels
in English – and not children’s books or school books, but books for adult readers. These are
people like Agoro Anduru, like Prince Kagwema, and Henry Muhanika, and Hamza Sokko,
and Mkufya. […] In your view, what kind of readers do they write for?
PG: If we take the book by Mkufya, which he wrote more than fifteen years ago – this was
for ordinary people, who read about these girls and city life… he wrote about city life for
everyone – the young and the old, without discrimination. Agoro Anduru – he tried to write
for a person who came to town from the rural areas and the matters that he encounters
there… Prince Kagwema – he writes about politics, about love, he writes, say, about post-
independence time and the way those with power – bureaucrats – tried to live, and their
conflicts. But I can not say that, for example, this Prince Kagwema – I myself read three of
his books – is read widely… I mean that people do not know this writer, his books are not
very popular, like, for instance, the books by Agoro Anduru… I saw people buying books
by Prince Kagwema – like Chausiku’s Dozen and others – and those were people with
education higher than secondary school level, those who understood English (Mazungumzo
28-29; all the translations from Swahili are mine - MG).
Here we see that the books by an “English-only” writer Prince Kagwema

were much less popular than those written by the bilingual writer Agoro
Anduru, who is known and reputable for both parts of the audience – and
thus those familiar with his English books would buy his Swahili one, and
vice versa. This scheme seems to work for most of the bilingual writers in
Tanzania, who by crossing the language border appeal to both parts of the
country’s reading public.
There is another notable trait in the creativity of bilingual Tanzanian
writers. Their earlier works, being written in English, obviously were
influenced by certain writers, literary schools or trends in world Anglophone
literature. This influence allowed them to adapt the artistic achievements of
their “literary mentors” into their own works – and later, when they shifted to
Swahili as the main medium, the “artistic heights” that they conquered were
fluently incorporated into their Swahili works. Below we will illustrate this
observation with some examples.
books by these authors could hardly be found even in the libraries of neighbouring East
African countries), this intention, even if existing, was hardly feasible.
286 Mikhail Gromov
Chronologically, the first bilingual writer to emerge in Tanzanian

literature is Gabriel Ruhumbika (born 1938). His novel Village in uhuru
(1969) was the first specimen of social-critical novel in Tanzania, its stylistic
features and creative method reminding of such major figures in Africa’s
social novel as Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and South African Jack Cope.
The story of the village chief Musilanga, whose life is ruined by his son
Balinde, a party functionary who is bound to move his father and other
people of his village to an ujamaa camp, is narrated in seemingly
“indifferent,” impartial manner of describing the characters and events,
slowly but firmly involving the reader into the peripeteias of the plot. This
manner was later developed by Ruhumbika in his first Swahili novel Miradi
bubu ya wazalendo (The invisible enterprises of the patriots, 1992), which in
a similarly dispassionate manner tells about the bitter disappointment of the
ordinary citizens of the country in the policy of ujamaa in the early 1980s.
Ruhumbika’s thorough acquaintance with Western literature also shows in
his brilliant attempt to combine African orality, post-modern methods and
dystopia in his latest-to-date novel Jangwa sugu la wazawa (Everlasting
doom for the children of the land, 2002).
William Mkufya (born in 1953) seems to be the most prolific bilingual
writer in Tanzania. Elena Bertoncini, internationally known scholar of
Swahili literature, describes him as “a well-read author who builds up his
literary background on a great many African, Anglo-American, French,
German, Greek and other novelists, poets and philosophers” (“William E.
Mkufya’s Latest Novel” 3). Mkufya’s debut novel The Wicked Walk (1977) –
the story of slum areas life in Dar es Salaam – bears distinct traits of
influence of many outstanding figures of social critical method in literature,
from Charles Dickens to Meja Mwangi. Mkufya also initiated in Tanzanian
literature the practice of self-translation, which was later adopted by other
Tanzanian writers – Swahili translation of The Wicked Walk, titled Kizazi
Hiki (This generation), was made by Mkufya in 1980. The practice of
transferring into Swahili the artistic achievements of the English text
apparently considerably heightened Mkufya’s own creative abilities in
Swahili, which he applied with brilliance in his first Swahili novel Ziraili na
Zirani (Azrail and Zirani, 1999). This allegorical dystopian novel ingeniously
combines various stylistic elements from both Swahili and English literature
– from the works of Shaaban Robert, the founder of modern Swahili writing,
and the late post-modernistic novels of Euphrase Kezilahabi, to the influence
of John Milton, Ayi Kwei Armah and Christopher Okigbo (see Diegner 27).
Mkufya returned to social criticism in his English novel The Dilemma (1982)
and Swahili novel Ua la Faraja (Flower of consolation, 2004).
Agoro Anduru (1948-1992) became known as the pioneer of English

short story in Tanzania – in the early 1980s he authored two collections of
short stories and a novelette in English. What is notable is that again his
writing manner was later transferred by him to his only Swahili work – a
short novel Kukosa Radhi (Without blessing, 1983), the tragic love story of a
Christian boy Jonathan and a Muslim girl Mwanaidi, who married against the
will of their parents and ended in failure. As Elena Bertoncini puts it,
The best developed character is Mwanaidi; depraved as she is at the beginning, she redeems
herself and becomes an affectionate and attentive wife who courageously endures all the
blows until she is sure of her husband’s love. When Jonathan abandons her, however, she
rebels and stabs the wicked Anna. […] Mwanaidi is sentenced only to a term of three years,
hence the author in fact does not condemn her. He seems to be torn with two opposite
forces: his duty to illustrate on a moralistic story that the children must obey their parents at
all costs, and his sympathy for his heroine. (Outline of Swahili Literature 106).
This state of being “torn with two opposite forces: his duty to illustrate on a
moralistic story” and the sympathy for the characters, victims of
unfavourable social circumstances, permeates the English stories by Anduru,
making his writing style unique and equally appealing to his English and
Swahili readers.
In 1980s and 1990s there emerged a number of other writers, who also
bridge their English and Swahili works in less elaborate, but no less
illustrative way. A notable fact about these authors is that, unlike the ones
discussed above, they made their first writing attempts in Swahili, “adding
up” English at a later stage of their literary careers. The possible reason was
formulated in an interview by popular writer Ben Mtobwa. Being once asked
about his future plans, he answered: “Plans for the future are, in fact, to
expand […] and to find other language that would be [even] more fitting that
the one I have been using for writing” (Mazungumzo 35).
Apparently the language meant by the grandmaster of Swahili action
novel was English, since he himself by the time this interview was taken
(1995) successfully translated three of his Swahili novels into English.
Unfortunately, Ben did not have the time to “add up” English as his another
writing language – he untimely passed away in November 2008. However,
the very fact that the translations of his novels were published in the late
1980s in prestigious international series Pacesetters, printed by Macmillan
and distributed all over Africa and even beyond, showed that most of these
writers were pursuing the same aim – to expand, to reach to the wider
audience, in other words, again to cross the language border. But while their
colleagues in the seventies and early nineteen-eighties were crossing the
288 Mikhail Gromov
language border within the country by adding up Swahili as their language of

writing, the writers after 1982 were adding up English as a writing medium in
order to cross the language border not only within the country, but the
country’s borders as well. It was caused to a great extent by the fact that after
1982 and especially during the subsequent reforms of Ali Hassan Mwinyi the
attitude to English considerably “warmed up,” the borders of Tanzania were
opened, and the urge to internationalise among the members of Tanzanian
literary community appeared to be more than natural.
Bernard Mapalala (born in 1957), who currently is mostly known for his
historical novel Kwaheri Iselamagazi (Goodbye Iselamagazi, 1992),
previously authored two Swahili novelettes – Cheo dhamana (Precious
position, 1976) and Salome maskini (Poor Salome, 1992), in which he also
developed a recognisable writing manner: in a simple, appealing, but not a
didactic, rather thought-provoking way he was telling the readers about cause
and effect of various social ills of contemporary Tanzanian society, such as
corruption, nepotism, economic difficulties, hardships of city life –all of
which are overcome in the end by virtuous and sensible main character.
Similar traits are preserved in his English novelette Death Factory (1996),
where a virtuous village girl Asabea discloses the schemes of unscrupulous
“industrialists” who, pretending that they want to develop a remote village in
Kilimanjaro region, build there a factory producing dangerous pesticides. The
fact that the novelette was printed not by a local publisher, but appeared in
prestigious Junior African Writers Series printed in UK by Heinemann, also
testifies that the writer was successfully targeting a pan-African audience,
since the problems discussed in the book are typical and urgent and
understood all over the continent.
It must be noted that even in the early 1980s the “warming up” of the
attitude to English caused a considerable increase of the potential English-
reading audience, thus some Swahili writers added up English in order to
target the local reading public. Henry Muhanika (born in 1949) became
known as the author of Swahili play Njia Panda (Crossroads, 1981), where
he focused on the theme of family relationship. Similar topic dominates his
two collections of short stories in English – Killer drink and other stories
(1982) and My dear bachelor and other stories (1985), where he deals with
the themes of friendship, marriage, human relationship, using readily
recognisable local context. In a similar way, Hammie Rajab (born 1940), one
of the masters of Swahili thriller, after authoring about a dozen books in
Swahili published in 1982 the English novel Rest in peace, dear mother,
where he inventively combines elements of “hard-boiled” Western detective
and Swahili “maisha” – biographical appraisal. Emmanuel Makaidi in his
novelettes The Namanga Diary and The serpent-hearted politician (both

1981) condemns the misuse of power in Tanzanian political structures.
There are some other bilingual writers who appeared on Tanzanian
literary scene within the last ten or fifteen years, such as Elieshi Lema, who
after producing a number of works for children and adolescent readers in
Swahili shook African and international literary community with the English
novel Parched Earth (2001) – a moving life story of a young rural woman;
there are some other names that could be mentioned. What brings all these
writers together is their choice to cross the language border between English
and Swahili, to avoid the label of “Swahili writer” or “Tanzanian English
writer.” As English poet and critic Adam Donaldson Powell (2006) once
wrote: “What strikes me about my own disposition towards bilingual
literature is that it affords me an extra set of wings on which to soar... high
above the limitations that both I and others set for myself. I […] find that
multilingual writing gives me the opportunity to reach out to persons from
many cultures on their turf […] thus the act of multilingual writing becomes
a statement and a form of expression in itself” (3). This seems to be exactly
the case with bilingual Tanzanian writers – literary bilingualism was indeed
“a statement by itself,” showing their commitment to explore the creative
abilities of another language (and this statement was even more daring at the
initial stage, bearing in mind the language policy of the government);
bilingualism enabled them to expand their artistic horizons and present a
different artistic view of the country’s social reality. Moreover, by using the
two languages these writers have expanded their existing audience and
created new, bi-lingual reading public, thus redefining the place of Tanzania
on the literary map of sub-Saharan Africa not as a realm of solely Swahili
writing, but a country with bilingual literature.
Of course, speaking about the re-definition of Tanzania’s place on the
literary map of sub-Saharan Africa, one can hardly forget about such writers
as Moyez Vassanji and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are the authors of
international fame; both are East Africans by birth and upbringing – Vassanji,
an Indian, was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania; Gurnah, a native
Zanzibari, was born and raised on Zanzibar; both opted later for living far
from their native East Africa (Vassanji is currently living in Canada, Gurnah
– in the United Kingdom); both chose English as their sole medium of
writing; and, since East Africa is almost the only topic of their books, both
demonstrate in their writing amazingly strong reliance on East African
culture, history, and therefore – language (needless to say that for both
authors Swahili is near-native or just native language). Though these writers
can not be deemed as properly bilingual (although Gurnah is said to have
290 Mikhail Gromov
made some earlier attempts of writing in Swahili), they might have made
more than anyone else for the world popularisation of East African and,
specifically, Tanzanian history and culture. And language, Swahili language,
serves here as a major “conductor” of this culture; I would give only one
example – both writers in their books, otherwise written in immaculate
“Queen’s English,” abundantly use the glossae for the denotation of cultural
realities specific to east Africa – for instance, mbuyu instead of “baobab,”
vitumbua instead of “rice cakes” (see, e.g., Vassanji 42) as well as words like
sharifu (Muslim elder), and others. In my opinion, here we also encounter
with a specific case of “latent bilingualism” – very much the same one as was
used by Chinua Achebe in his efforts to “Africanise” English. Same as
Achebe, Vassanji (as well as Abdulrazak Gurnah in many of his novels)
enters the Swahili lexemes without immediate translation, thus hitting the
double goal – for the East African audience (which, in my opinion, the novels
are also addressing) these glossae serve as an unmistakable sign of the
author’s “East Africanness”; for the audience outside East Africa, these
words give the author’s language this very much needed local flavour – once
having referred to a meaning explained in the glossary at the end of the book,
a foreign reader is able to follow the narration uninterruptedly, thus doing
themselves this “code switching” which the authors designed as one of his
main devices to attain the “Africanness” of the language itself.
As for the inevitable question “is Vassanji a Tanzanian writer,” I dare
quote an opinion posed once by a distinguished Tanzanian author and scholar
of Swahili literature Mugyabuso Mulokozi, who, discussing the first and
arguably still the most famous Vassanji’s novel The Gunny Sack, said: “If he
speaks about Tanzanian problems, that is, he gets his impetus from
Tanzanian life, which he experienced before he went abroad – he will still
remain a Tanzanian author. If he abandons Tanzanian matters and starts to
discuss American or other matters – here, maybe he will have extracted
himself. But concerning The Gunny Sack, – in fact it is a novel about
Tanzania to a very large extent. You can not detach it from Tanzania and
proclaim it to be an Indian or European novel” (Mazungumzo 90).
For the conclusion, I would allow myself a pleasure to speak of the
foreseeable future – and, in my opinion, it is rather evident that in the
foreseeable future English, as I noted in an earlier published article, will
remain the alternative medium of expression for Tanzanian writers (Gromov,
“Lingustic Situation” 269), allowing them to expand both artistically and
geographically; at the same time, with the resurrection and expanding of East
African Community Swahili also acquires growing importance – it has
currently been adopted as an official language in five countries and is rapidly
spreading. Thus, under the imperatives of today literary bilingualism in East

African literature ceases to be only a daring attempt and “statement in itself,”
but becomes a first-rate necessity, since the two languages have become to a
varied extent international, and for a literary person crossing the language
border becomes, in fact, the main way to survive. It can be confirmed by the
example of many Kenyan writers, who either were bilingual throughout the
literary career (example of playwright David Mulwa), or turned to Swahili
after writing for a long time in English (Henry Ole Kulet), or vice versa
(Kyallo Wadi Wamitila). Thus I dare assume, that literary bilingualism,
favoured by East Africa possessing two languages of international
importance, either regionally or world-wise, will attain growing importance
in the regional literature.
Works Cited
Bertoncini-Zubkova, Elena. “William E. Mkufya’s Latest Novel Ua la Faraja:

A Commitment to the Fight Against HIV/AIDS.” Swahili Forum 15
(2005): 3-13.
Bertoncini-Zubkova, Elena, et al. Outline of Swahili Literature. Prose Fiction
and Drama. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Diegner, Lutz. “Intertextuality in the Contemporary Swahili Novel: Euphrase
Kezilahabi’s Nagona and William E. Mkufya’s Ziraili na Zirani”.
Swahili Forum 15 (2005): 25–35.
Gromov, Mikhail D. “Linguistic Situation and the Rise of Anglophone
Literature in Tanzania.” New English Literatures: Defining New
Idioms of Expression. Ed. Eckhard Breitinger. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1996. 265-69.
——., ed. Mazungumzo ya fasihi. Mahojiano na waandishi, wahakiki na
wachapishaji wa Tanzania. Yamekusanywa na yametayarishwa na
Mikhail D. Gromov. Moscow: Humanities Publishing, 2001.
Mkufya, William Eliezer. “Mazungumzo na Lutz Diegner juu ya riwaya ya
Ziraili na Zirani.” Swahili Forum 15 (2005): 37-62.
Ohly, Rajmund. Zanzibarian challenge: Swahili prose in the years 1975-
1981. Windhoek: Academia, 1990
Powell, Adam Donaldson. The Dilemma of Modern Bilingual Poetry.
<http://www.adamdonaldsonpowell.com/>.
Vassanji, Moyez. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann, 1988
Alina N. Rinkanya
Sheng Literature in Kenya:

Socio-Linguistic Borders and Spaces in Popular Poetry
Since late 1960s Kenyan literature has been known as one of the largest,
richest and fastest developing literary systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Dozens
of books and hundreds of articles have been written about the works of
various Kenyan authors, different trends and periods in Kenyan writing.
However, very few of these scholarly books – if any – paid special attention
to social aspects of Kenyan writing, namely, the “division” of the entire
corpus of Kenyan writing depending on the audience or, rather, social groups
that the writers were allegedly addressing. J. Roger Kurtz in his seminal
monograph Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: the Postcolonial Kenyan Novel
(1998) states that “one could discuss the Kenyan novel thematically. […]
Alternatively, it would be possible to discuss the works on the basis of
geographical or ethnic categories” (20). As we see, social dimension of
Kenyan literature – be it Kenyan novel, short story, drama or poetry – has
never been in the focus of scholars’ attention. Meanwhile, in order to
understand at least some recent developments in Kenyan writing it seems
important to tackle the issues of “social addressees” or specific audience
targeted by different trends in Kenyan literature. In our opinion, very rough
picture might look as follows:
Since the very first years of its existence, Kenyan literature was divided
into two major trends – “serious” and “popular” literature (these terms in
relation to Kenyan writing are used, for example, in Kurtz’ study above, as
well as by other authors, such as Angela Smith and Tirop Simatei).
“Serious,” or “high-breed” writing, represented by such well-known authors
as novel writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Meja Mwangi, poets Jared Angira,
Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye, playwrights Francis Imbuga and Kenneth
Watene, was frequently called “elitist.” 1 This name may be ascribed to the
fact that these writers have always been targeting the upper-middle-class
1
In this brief survey of Kenyan “elitist” writers we deliberately do not mention any Kenyan
authors writing in Swahili. The reason is that until 1990s Kenyan Swahili writing was
pronouncedly “school-oriented,” and the number of titles was rather scarce. Only in the late
1990s and the first decade of the twenty first century Kenyan literary scene saw the real
outbreak of Swahili fiction, with the emergence of such “high-breed” writers as Kyallo
Wadi Wamitila, Ken Walibora, Kithaka wa Mberia, Mwenda Mbatiah, and others.
294 Alina N. Rinkanya
readers – well-educated, well-off, well-acquainted with creative writing as

such and well-conversant with the urgent problems of the society.
Oddly enough, that part of literature that was usually labelled as popular
(the authors are numerous, and, as Kurtz puts it, these texts “continue to
dominate the Kenyan market” [Kurtz 19]) could, in our opinion, be qualified
as no less “elitist” than the “serious” writing – for popular novels target the
same middle-class (probably lower-middle class) readers.
The factors that confine these two trends to predominantly middle-class
audience are numerous, among them the crucial ones being those of
education (the possession of “reading habits”) and economic wealth (only the
middle-class readers can merely afford buying fictional books). Because of
this, lower social groups – rural population (the rich farmers, being a part of
middle class, do not fall into this category) and the inhabitants of lower-cost
city areas, e.g. slums– in other words, the majority of the country’s
population is simply and completely “excluded” from the consumers of
Kenyan creative writing. As regards the rural dwellers, the reasons are
multiple – for example, it is no secret that even the distribution of school
books in Kenya’s rural areas remains a major problem, thus it looks like that
the coverage of the country’s rural population with fiction reading even in
schools belongs to not-so-foreseeable future. Thus, creative writing in all its
forms still remains the privilege of urban dwellers – we would state that this
observation applies to the majority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. But,
returning to Kenya, does it also mean that it remains the privilege of middle
class? Has there been no form of creative expression that was commonly
acceptable and commonly needed for both upper and lower strata of urban
population in Kenya?
A glance along the historical perspective of Kenyan literature’s existence
would tell us that since the early years of independence creative writing was
serving mostly – if not only – the aesthetic demands of upper social groups.
We can even assume that lower-class urban dwellers – the inhabitants of
slums, “ghettoes” and “lower-cost” residential areas – did not have any kind
of “their own” literature that could be likened, for example, to Onitsha
market publishing in Nigeria. Even the “cheaper” publishers in Kenya, like
Spear Books, later appropriated by one of the country’s largest publishers, or
Comb Books once run by a prominent Kenyan writer David Maillu, were
basically targeting the middle-class readers. The reasons were the same –
educational and economic: the poorly educated lower groups of urban
population (whose educational facilities and therefore standards are very low
even now) were not able to afford buying books, their economic priorities
being bound to the needs of daily survival.
Sheng Literature in Kenya 295
To put it short, Kenyan literature from its very beginning until recently
seems to have been bound by very strict and hardly breakable borders –
primarily social (being confined to the middle class as the only consumer of
fictional books), which in turn posed other restrictions (or borders) – stylistic
(readership demanded certain stylistic standards, such as the use of standard
literary English), thematic (as Kurtz testifies, almost all the Kenyan novels
are to this or that extent dealing with city life [Kurtz 5]). The poorer urban
folk was merely “thrown overboard”: first, there was no common medium of
writing –standard English, habitual among the middle-class readers, was
hardly used by the poor; secondly, there was no common form of expression
– a book, which was an everyday life item for the middle class, for the poor
was a rare, expensive and largely unnecessary commodity.
It could be argued that in fact a common medium was there – everyone
knows that English is not the most wide-spread and ever-understandable
language in Kenya, for the country’s most important language is Swahili –
the lingua franca of Eastern Africa. But it should be remembered that until
recently Swahili, being understood and used by all Kenyans, was almost
totally neglected by the governmental programs and even ignored in schools
– it was introduced as a compulsory subject (and not as a medium of
instruction) only in 1985! Therefore, for the middle class it was almost a
jargon, which they used almost solely to communicate with their compatriots
from lower classes – to whom, on the contrary, English was at best the
language of their meagre schooling, rarely used after the school-leaving day,
while Swahili was the language of everyday communication. It should also
be noted that both upper and lower strata of Kenyan urban population were
using a very specific, grammatically and lexically poor version of Swahili
heavily mixed with English unlike Tanzania, where the governmental
backing of refined and standardised Swahili led very soon to the outburst of
creative writing in the language. This brings to light another serious border
dividing the lower and upper groups of Kenyan urban population – the
language border, and this alone made the existence of any kind of verbal art
common for both upper and lower classes hardly possible. Indigenous
languages of various Kenyan communities as a medium were even more out
of question, for their usage was mainly confined to the rural areas. In the
cities, Swahili and English were the two common languages, the tribal ones
being used only in corresponding neighbourhoods. Local creative writing in
English and even Swahili was for the richer; for the poor – there was none. 2
2
It is quite possible that in the period under description there existed a certain kind of “urban
slum oral literature” – but such a phenomenon is quite beyond the scope of this article.
And there was not a single form of literature – or any other form of verbal art
– that was able to cross the above-mentioned borders.
The situation changed only recently – and this change was even more
drastic as unexpected. A new culture bridging the aesthetic demands of the
well-off and the poor dwellers (especially the youth) of Kenyan cities seems
to have emerged – a culture of sheng.
What is sheng? We would like to start with one serious reservation: not
being linguists, we will not to discuss this phenomenon of sheng from the
linguistic point of view. We would first of all note (as we did elsewhere, see
Rinkanya 2005, 2008), that various types of ‘synthetic’ or ‘hybrid’
languages, based on mixture of European and African languages and being
generated and practiced principally in urban areas, characterised by mixing of
different ethnic, social and professional groups of local population, are
common all over the continent of Africa – suffice it to recall camfranglais in
Cameroon, nouchi in Abidjan, tsotsitaal in South Africa, various forms of
pidgin in Nigeria, krio in Sierra-Leone, creolho in Cabo Verde, etc. (see
Kiessling and Mous 1). Some of these languages have recently acquired
wider status and now serve as languages of inter-ethnic communication for
vast groups of urban population in major cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, where
the mixture of different ethnic communities and social strata is extremely
high. For many city dwellers these “urban languages” serve as the first and
sometimes the only tongue – for the languages of their own ethnic
communities are practiced basically on the family level, and, due to the
insufficient (although not always absent) formal education these people lack
the fluency in a European (or sometimes local) language which otherwise
meets the purposes of inter-ethnic communication in their country.
The above described situation applies perfectly to Kenya, where the most
common – and most likely the only – “urban language” is exactly what is
called sheng. The name sheng is, to one of the versions, derived from the
mixture of the words Swahili and English (see Mbaabu and Nzuga), although
there are other etymologies. Sheng as a medium of interethnic and social
communication has been used in Kenya since the late colonial times. It is
characterised by mixing of lexical and grammatical units from Swahili,
English and local languages. The versions of sheng could vary from city to
city (in Nairobi – even from area to area), and also different social groups use
different versions of sheng. In order to give the reader an idea what sheng is,
we will quote here an example from the article by Roland Kiessling and
Maarten Mous, where the authors cite the following phrase:
“kuthora madoo za mathee” to steal mother’s money

In [this example], ku-thora ‘to steal’ is from Kikuyu; ma-doo is a truncated Swahili slang
word donge ‘amount of money’[…]; mathee is from English ‘mother’, with the last syllable
replaced by [i:]. (9) 3
Socially, sheng has traditionally been the language of urban youth – and,
moreover, youth belonging to lower, poorly educated groups of Kenyan
society. Naomi Shitemi confirms that “sheng is also stigmatized as the
idiolect of the urban illiterate. […] The linguistic behaviour of the sheng
locutor is still frowned upon by various people in the social hierarchy” (14).
Nevertheless, the present tendency is that the use of sheng becomes
characteristic to other social groups, e.g. high school, college and university
students – we will detail the reasons later.
However stigmatised could it be, the spread of sheng became so
prominent already by the 1970s, that even since that time it has been widely
employed by Kenyan writers – mainly to bedeck the urban characters both in
English and Swahili books, to render an unmistakable “urban flavour” to the
speech of these characters. Moreover, in the late 1980s attempts were made
to write full-length literary pieces in sheng – namely, by one of the most
prolific writers of Kenya, David Maillu, who produced in 1988 a hundred-
page novelette titled Without Kiinua Mgongo (kiinua mgongo – in literal
translation from Swahili “back straightener” – is a sheng term for bribe),
which was followed by Anayekukeep (He who keeps you, 1989).
However, these attempts were reluctantly accepted by Kenyan reading
public, since sheng, like many other urban languages over the continent,
lacked in Kenya any status which brought it anywhere closer to official
recognition. Sheng was used by many and was nevertheless frowned on by at
least higher social groups. That is why Maillu's works were perceived by the
readers more like a funny curio than the serious attempt to use an alternative
medium in literature. The writer's attempt was met with apparent, although
maybe friendly, perplexity – to write literature in well-used, but equally well-
despised urban, “market” language, obviously seemed irrelevant at that time.
The situation seems to have changed rather drastically in the 1990s and the
3
Naomi Shitemi in her article cited in this paper describes all those features in detail. She also
observes that “some locutors, particularly from the affluent parts of the city, have a sheng
version which is heavily based on English (so-called engsh) with no infusions of Swahili or
mother tongue hence being a form of English slang” (7). In our opinion, the main
distinguishing feature of engsh is that it is characterised exactly by no or very few infusions
of mother tongue, English and Swahili being the two components. And since Naomi Shitemi
herself acknowledges that engsh is in fact a version of sheng, we will use the word sheng as
an umbrella term for both versions.
first decade of the twenty first century, the period characterised by major
social change in Kenya – namely in the sphere of democratic rights, of which
the freedom of speech has come to the extent previously unheard of in the
country’s history. Democratic reforms, initiated “slowly by slowly” by
Daniel arap Moi in 1990s and gaining momentum in the “post-Moi era” after
2002, stimulated the emergence – or, rather, “unearthing” – of underground
youth culture, of which sheng is undoubtedly the main medium. It all started
with popular music – Kenyan version of rap, hip hop and other demanded
popular trends came to life in abundance; all of a sudden, radio broadcasts
were filled with the songs of Kenyan musicians sung almost exclusively in
sheng. Most of the musicians who authored these songs were from the lowest
social groups, mainly slum dwellers from Kenya’s major cities; however –
and this is the most remarkable thing – these songs immediately became
understandable and popular with literally all groups of urban youth, from
slum kids to university students (to our knowledge, sheng culture has even
more far-reaching effect, capturing even the adult population and spreading
into rural areas). The reason was obvious: these musicians were singing (or
rapping) in commonly understandable language – sheng – about commonly
understandable problems of contemporary Kenyan life, addressing not only
the specific problems of Kenyan youth, but the ailments common to the
entire Kenyan society – social, political, ethnic, etc. The popularity of these
songs and their authors has become so immense, that in a very short while
sheng became the language of all the social groups of urban youth in Kenya,
from the highest to the lowest; nowadays, sheng has become almost the
“official language” of Kenyan youth culture.
The question that now arises is: sheng as the language of urban youth
music is well understood, but what does it have to do with literature?
Literature in sheng emerged soon after the outbreak of popularity of
sheng popular music. And, surprisingly enough, it was not the “home-made”
editions printed in slums on a discarded equipment; on the contrary, the first
specimen of sheng writing were published in a reputable almanac, sponsored
by – of all organisations – no less a grantor than Ford Foundation. The reason
why sheng writing became part and parcel of this edition is that the almanac
was put up as an outlet of “youth literature,” of new writing culture, largely
opposed to the already existing, “official” culture of letters. As the founders
of the almanac put it themselves, “what we have found is that the literary
intelligentsia, together with African publishers and founders of literary
projects have lost touch with a new generation of Africans who are sick of
being talked down to; who are seeking to understand the bewildering world
around them – to be validated in print” (Kwani?). Therefore, the almanac “is
a serious publication – over 300 pages of new journalism and fiction of

experimental writing, poetry, cartoons photographs, literary travel writing,
creative non-fiction” (Kwani?).
We are referring to Kwani? – the most daring and, eventually, the most
popular almanac of “new writing” in Kenya. Founded in 2003, with the
support of Ford Foundation, the almanac, whose title is a reduced version of
a Swahili phrase Kwa nini? (why?), has been published in four subsequent
issues from 2003 to 2008 (Kwani? 1,2,3,4). As the editorial board proclaims
on the almanac’s web site, “in three years, we have sold over 5000 copies of
the journal, and have gotten a new generation of Kenyans reading. All
together 30, 000 Kenyans have read Kwani? and we continue to grow”
(Kwani?). The figures, which have increased recently, are really impressive
for a non-school book in Kenya; it should also be mentioned that the almanac
has its own book-publishing series, currently featuring over a dozen titles.
Writing in sheng has from the very beginning become, as we noted
earlier, part and parcel of Kwani? editions. In fact, the attitude to sheng has
even been formulated on Kwani? official website:
Language: We recognise that English and Kiswahili are the languages that Kenyans are
literate in at this level; we aim to encourage work from other languages that we shall
translate and present to a Kenyan audience.
Achieved so far: Kwani? issue 02 has thirty pages dedicated to oral stories and rap and
poetry in Sheng.
(Kwani?)
In real sense, not only the second volume of Kwani? has a sizeable part
devoted to sheng literature – it has been featured in all the issues since the
very first one. What seems to us important in the above quotation is that
speaking about Swahili and English, the editors automatically refer to sheng
– as the medium bringing the two languages together and thus, probably,
becoming more “Kenyan” than even the two official languages of the
country.
The first place here apparently belongs to poetry, since so far it has been
the most prominent (but by no means sole) type of sheng writing. Poems in
sheng were impressively represented in all the four issues of Kwani?. It could
be stated, that these poems are in fact song lyrics – for their authors are the
musicians and DJs popular in Kenyan scene. However, we venture to state
that the editors of Kwani? did not pursue the simple target of increasing the
almanac’s popularity by merely publishing the lyrics of popular songs. Their
goal seems to be much deeper. First, these writings (which in fact even their
authors position not as lyrics, but as poems – we will see it later) are written
in a medium which is really “native” to urban youth regardless of their social

background. Second, the contents of these songs corresponds fully with
Kwani?’s vision of committed poetry – for the very essence of sheng poetry
is very sharp and impartial social comments. Third, by publishing these
“poems-cum-lyrics” in a reputable almanac, read and demanded in even the
highest social circles, the editors of Kwani? elevate the sheng poems to the
level of “high-breed” literature, transforming them from “suburban hip-hop”
into the kind of alternative poetry, which developed a huge following in
Kenya. All the three factors seem to be equally important. Language-wise,
sheng literature appeals to all the groups of Kenyan urban (and increasingly
rural) population, regardless of their ethnic origin and social and educational
stand. In terms of content, the problems discussed in the poems are
understood by all Kenyans and, moreover, are acknowledged as urgent (it
should be noted that some of the poems were published in Kwani? also
because the radio stations refused to rotate them in song forms for the reason
of “too biting” social criticism). And it definitely pleases all the readers and
listeners that this literature, which they consider part and parcel of their lives,
is in fact represented in an edition with international reputation and high
literary quality.
In terms of artistic qualities, sheng poems possess two main features: they
use simple, but expressive language and leave no sacred cows as far as the
targets of their criticism are concerned. Below we will give a few examples.
Whereas, as we mentioned, even the very first issue of Kwani? features
some impressive examples of sheng poetry, Kwani? 2 (2004) contained more
numerous and complicated works in sheng – short stories, poems, and a
commentary on the present state of urban languages in Kenya by the
members of popular collective Mashifta (Mashifta 286-96). Most of these
young penmen still preferred to hide behind pen-names – sometimes almost
gruesome ones, like Jambazi Fulani (“A Certain Criminal”), who delivered to
this next issue of Kwani? two sketches of everyday life of Nairobi youth
(Jambazi Fulani 57-58, 127-29). However, the pen-names of most of the
authors – McKah, G-wiji, etc. – are readily known to the audience, because
they are popular DJs and musicians. Their poems have many common traits,
the most important one, in our opinion, being their contents – the mostly
address the urgent social problems of Kenyan society, the continent of Africa
and, on wider scale, the whole world. “Money, alcohol, politics and women”
– “pesa, pombe, siasa na wanawake” – this is the title of poem by G-wiji,
whose real name is Moseti Kamanda (G-wiji 284). And this is how the author
with a pen-name MC Kah (a.k.a. Samuel Kang'ethe Ngigi) presents his
visions of the future in his poem Ndoto Za Future (“Dreams of the Future”):
Hakuna cha labda (1) There is nothing that may be (1)

Hakuna cha kuweza (2) there is nothing that can be (2)
Nikufanya kujua(3) I will make you know (3)
Kawaida miujiza (4) Usually miracles (4)
ghetto maisha kukaza (5) [only] tighten the ghetto life (5)
Sikitu kwetu si mabratha (6) it does not matter for us, for are we not
Tunatangaza ufalme wa sanaa za brothers (6)
kuangaza(7) We are declaring the kingdom of the
kwanza kabisa, kufufua masoldier wote enlightening art (7)
(8) first of all, revive all the soldiers (8)
Walo kufa vitani, freedom fighters That perished in the war, freedom
jangwani (9) fighters in the desert(9)
Nuru gizani, ukoloni mambo leo, giza Light in the darkness, neocolonialism,
nuruni, (10) darkness in the light, (10)
screams in the slums, madness in town
nduru mitaani, mbulu mjini. (11) (11)
(McKah 285)
The “stylistic patchwork” even in this short excerpt is rather elaborate – here
we see the mocking allusions to a popular evangelistic slogan “kuna nuru
gizani” – “there is light in the darkness,” which the poet mockingly turns into
“giza nuruni” – “darkness in the light,” using this metaphor to describe the
ever-dark life of the slum dwellers. A possible meaning of the call to “revive
all the soldiers that perished in the war, freedom fighters in the desert” is to
restore the rights of all the common wananchi, whose grandparents gave their
lives for the freedom, and their descendants got nothing. It should be noted
that this is the recurrent image and common idea even in “high-breed”
Kenyan literature – from the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o to the plays of
Kenneth Watene and David Mulwa.
It seems that speaking about sanaa ya kuangaza na kuungaza as it was
called in a later version of the poem – the art of enlightening and uniting –
the poet first of all refers about sheng poetry, which really enlightens – in
term of its social content – and, moreover, unites young and not-so-young
people of different social backgrounds, from slum dwellers and jua kali
workers to university students and white-collar-job occupants, speaking
about the issues that most of them consider as important and relevant, thus
this poetry in real sense works across borders.
The third issue of Kwani? 4 features even more elaborate and colourful
use of sheng. There again are poems by well-known Kenyan rap and hip-hop
stars. A good example is a poem by Kenyan rapper Kama, member of the
4
It is indicated on the date-line page that the collection was published in 2003, whereas in
real sense Kwani? 3 appeared not earlier than 2005.
crew named Kalamashaka, “the pioneers of Kenyan Swahili rap.” The poem
is titled Zana za vita nashika (“I am holding the weapons”):
Vifaa vya vita nashika (1) I am holding the weapons (1)

Ambazo ni kalamu karatasi, haya Which are the pen and the paper, and I
mashairi naandika (2) write these poems (2)
National archive, next na ya Jomo At the National archive, next to Jomo
Kenyatta (3) Kenyatta avenue (3)
Utayapata hata after tashaukata (4) You will get them even after you are
refused [to be given] (4)
Kalamashaka ni ka shada (5) Kalamashaka are like drugs (5)
Pombe, ukuro (6) Alcohol, addiction (6)
International tuko (7) We are international (7)
Ningekua mnyama fuko (8) I would become a beast like the mole
Creep toka under, alafu baadaye thunder, (8)
mlipuko (9) Creep from under, then suddenly
afterwards a thunder, explosion, (9)
Alfa, Omega (10) Alfa, Omega, (10)
Masikio tega (11) Listen attentively (11)
Naficha makucha (12) I am hiding claws (12)
Sura zichonge jiwe confuse hizi dreadie [Those] stone-faced confuse my
zangu na (13) dreadlocks for the (13)
Nyoka za medusa (14) Snakes of medusa, (14)
Past, present na future (15) Past, present and future (15)
Reincarnation wathii (16) Reincarnation [of] people (16)
Life yangu ya last nilikuwa Kimathi (17) In my last life I was Kimathi (17)
Before hiyo nilikuwa Mugo wa Kibiro Before that I was Mugo wa Kibiru (18)
basi (18)
Na kabla ya hiyo nilikuwa… nafasi (19) And before that I was… it could well
Patia pharaoh, kamau, na utie zii be (19)
kunionyesha Madharau (20) That I was a pharaoh, man, and don’t
you dare to show contempt for me (20)
Knowledge kuwakumbusha msisahau Let knowledge remind you all – do not
kule mmetoka (21) forget where you came from (21)
(Kama 30)
It is worthwhile to notice that he poet refers to his writings exactly as

mashairi - “poems,” and not as “song lyrics” or otherwise. Although
preserving the main device of rap song-writing – the non-elaborate end
rhymes, the poem contains the message which, as we presume, would be
more difficult to grasp while listening to it then while reading. The message
is in fact a monologue of a young Kenyan, who is determined to obtain his
own place under the sun, and thus he is warning those “stone-faced” who
may stand in his way – and those are many on all social levels, thus “Alfa,
Omega”; this also could contain a satirical reference to Bible. He is warning
them that to achieve that he “would become a beast,” that he is “hiding

claws” and “don’t you dare to show contempt for me.” This message is
apparently understandable and relevant to all the young Kenyans, regardless
of their various backgrounds. And obviously the author, being also “flesh and
kin” of Nairobi slum areas, in this poem puts his message “across the
audiences.” Apparently he addresses the audience of higher social stand – it
could be judged by such words as “snakes of Medusa,” “Alfa-Omega,”
“reincarnation,” which are not a part of everyday language of lower social
circles. Meanwhile, he uses the references which are clear and dear to all
Kenyans – names of Dedan Kimathi, the leader of Mau Mau movement in
1950s and Kenya’s national hero, and Mugo wa Kibiro, a legendary prophet
who foretold the coming of the colonisers. The name of Pharaoh is used here
not in the biblical sense, as a symbol of oppression, but on the contrary – as a
symbol of the grandeur of Africa’s ancient civilisations. By using these
names, Kama appeals to all Kenyans with a call to realise that they are the
inheritors of the country’s and the continent’s glorious past, and thus they
deserve their place under the sun, no matter which part of the society they
belong to. He also warns that the messages sent by him and his crew
Kalamashaka will spread in space and endure in time – “we are international,
like drugs, alcohol or bhang,” and the readers will be able to get these poems
even if they refuse to be given them at the National archives; the latter
assertion seems also to be mocking the system – if the poems are not
obtainable from the “official” sources, the audience will still get them
because of their high popularity.
There is a number of other poems, also authored by people known as
musicians as well as contributors to the previous editions of Kwani?, such as
McKah, G-wiji, and Kitu Sewer a.k.a. Paul Mboya – these poems are even
gathered in Kwani? 3 in the separate section titled “Sheng’speare” (sic!). In
our opinion, this title itself shows that the authors consider their verses as not
songs, but primarily poetry (be it for reading or performing). Another
example which we would like to give is another poem by MC Kah, titled,
Ukombozi wa ki akili (“Liberation of the Mind”):
UKOMBOZI WA KI AKILI: PART I LIBERATION OF THE MIND: PART I
Wanasiasa wa plot (1) The politicians plot (1)

Vile wata grab ma plot (2) So that they will grab the plots (2)
Pahali pangetengenezwa industries, Where would be built industries, schools
mashule (3) (3)
pangetengenezwa jela na hospitali ka Where would be built prisons and
mathare (4) hospitals like Mathare (4)
Wasee wali wazimika na shika nare (5) People went insane and became furious
Nilikuweko titanic ikigonga iceberg (6) (5)
Politicians waki brag vile walitoa pesa I was on the Titanic when it hit the
kwa harambee (7) iceberg (6)
Wanasiasa pamoja na wenzao ma pastor Politicians bragging that they give
kwa kanisa (8) money for self-help initiative (7)
Sadaka kudaiwa ni kaa za kiasari (9) Politicians together with their friends –
Politician kuchukulia civilian, alien kwa pastors in church (8)
uwanja wa haki na ukweli (10) [Give] charcoal with honey for
Hatari ikiongezeka ma revolutionary demanded alms (9)
tayari (11) Politician is fooling a civilian, an alien in
Vijana wa mtaa, sambamba na sanaa the field of justice and truth, (10)
(12) If the danger increases, the
Sanaa kutumwagikia ka manna kwa revolutionaries are ready (11)
sana (13) The youth of the slums, parallel with art,
Kwa danger zone tu reason kama (12)
mababu (14) Art will pour upon us a lot of manna,
Meditation za revolution zifikie African (13)
population (15) In the danger zone reason like our
Mwisho wa struggle (16) forefathers, (14)
Let meditations of revolution reach the
African population (15)
End of the struggle (16)
UKOMBOZI WA KI AKILI: PART II LIBERATION OF THE MIND: PART

II
Wazaliwa mtaa, nightmare na ka ni Nightmares of the slum-born (1)

ndoto (1) Are the dreams of those who will get
Ni za vile watawaipata gold mines (2) them in gold mines (2)
Kabla wa grow old, vanity souls za Before they grow old, vanity souls of the
vijana kuwa sold, (3) youth [are] to be sold, (3)
Wakuu wa Africa kuvunjika guu, (4) Leaders of Africa break their legs, (4)
Casualty majuto mjukuu, political Casualty – repentance later, political
Africa kuruka (5) Africa jumps (5)
Kwa election bila liberation, (6) To the election without liberation, (6)
Ma squatter wana vote, (7) Squatters vote, (7)
Ma squatter wanaendelea ku squat (8) [But] squatters continue squatting (8)
Philosophy hunipiga kofi (9) Philosophy usually gives me a slap (9)
Asubuhi kabla coffee, (10) In the morning before coffee, (10)
Niamke nirudishe Afrika usafi (11) Let me wake up and give purity back to
Ule ulikuwa kabla walafi wa magharibi Africa? (11)
wafe (12) That was (there) before the gluttons of
Namaanisha wale watakasirika sana the West died (12)
(13) I mean those who’ll be very angry (13)
(McKah 168)
This poem in fact could be called a “brief encyclopaedia” of modern Kenyan

cultural references as well as social ills. Even the title itself would
immediately invoke in the memory of a reader, well-conversant with Kenyan
“high-breed” literature, the famous slogan “decolonising the mind,” posed in
1980s by Kenyan classic Ngugi wa Thiongo. The author speaks about
politicians grabbing for their needs the public land, where the industries,
schools and hospitals for the common wananchi could have been build
(again, here the name of Mathare – a well known psychiatric clinic in Nairobi
– is rhymed with nare, a sheng word for fury, indicating that in fact the
hospitals are needed for the common people who go mad being infuriated
with the present situation). Meanwhile, these politicians brag (notice how the
poet uses the consonance in grab and brag) that they give money for
harambee (an exclamatory word in Swahili, used in Kenya to denote public
self-help initiatives) whereas in real sense they and their friends, who are
pastors (church being a profiteering business in Kenya) give only “charcoal
with honey” for alms. Ordinary citizen, fooled by the politicians (notice the
constant repetition of the word, both in English and Swahili – thus the enemy
is indicated), are only “aliens in the field of truth and justice,” and hence
revolution is needed, and meditations about it should be carried to African
population by “youth of the slums.” It seems that here the author talks mostly
about sheng poets like himself, who through their art (which will “pour upon
us a lot of manna” – again a biblical image) will bring the “revolution of the
mind” (this, in our opinion, is the kind of revolution the author talks about) to
the people, whose state he compares to the state of Titanic passengers after
ship hitting the iceberg (images from international pop culture also comprise
an important source for sheng poetry).
In the second part of the poem, the stylistic allusions are even more
complicated and at the same time understandable to the widest audience.
Speaking about the politicians, the author quotes well-known Swahili proverb
asiyesikia la mkuu huvunjika guu – “who does not listen to the elders breaks
the leg,” implying that African politicians do not have the traditional – or any
other kind of – wisdom. He also quotes a common Swahili expression majuto
ni mjukuu – “repentance comes later,” meaning that the politicians would not
care about the casualties since their own aims are achieved. The author again
addresses hot social issues – land squatting (poor people illegally planning
their small fields on huge areas of land, belonging to rich families but unused
by the owners), hopeless future of the young, election being used as a tool of
manipulation by the politicians. He daringly rhymes Swahili word kofi – a
slap – with coffee, confessing that his spiritual reflections slap him every
morning and urge him to wake up and give back to Africa the purity that
allegedly was there before colonialism. This idea of “going back to the roots”
(see also “reason like our forefathers” in the first part of the poem) also has
been widely contemplated in “high-breed” Kenyan literature, from poems by
Jared Angira to the novels of Meja Mwangi, and is somewhat dear to the
heart of many Kenyan intellectuals.
In Kwani? Volume 4 (2007) Sheng poetry is represented to a lesser extent
than in the previous two editions, but the poems are no less expressive and
colourful. We will give two examples; first, again a poem by MC Kah (alias
Kang'ethe Ngigi) Hatua – “A step”:
Mwafrika imani mlimani tengeneza altar African, on the mountain build an altar
(1) of faith, (1)
Punguza majeneza, magerezani (2) Reduce the [number of] coffins and
prisons, (2)
Omba jah jah Malcom X (3) Ask from Jah and Malcolm X (3)
Custom za ethias, bomb Gomora na Ethical customs, bomb Gomorra and
Sodom (4) Sodom (4)
Burn burn ma sheriff wa town (5) Burn burn the town sheriffs (5)
Ma clown wenye crown za gold (6) The clowns wearing crowns of gold (6)
Bila wisdom ya old (7) Without wisdom of old (7)
Namuomba Mungu, mumba earth na I pray the God, create [anew] earth and
mbingu (8) heaven (8)
Nauliza mbona minyororo za chuma I ask why there are no more chains of
hamna (9) iron (9)
Na bado tabu? (10) But the misery is still there? (10)
Ananijibu ukoloni mambo leo tangu (11) He answers me neo-colonialism
Uafrica kukosekana, kwa vitabu za persists (11)
kizungu (12) Africanness is missing in the European
books (12)
Na share hili jibu na ma intellect (13) And share this answer with intellectuals
(13)
Wa university (14) Of university (14)
Wanao jali economy, technology (15) Who care for economy, technology
(15)
Zaidi ya humanity, (16) More than humanity, (16)
acha niwakumbushe humility (17) let me remind them of humility (17)
Karibu mau-mau university (18) Welcome to Mau-Mau university, (18)
Elewa wisdom ya mababu (19) Understand the wisdom of the
forefathers, (19)
Freedom kujivunia mila bila aibu (20) Freedom of being proud of traditions
without shame (20)
Ku-realise kujitegemea culture-wise (21) Realise self-reliance culture-wise (21)
Kujitengenezea black man paradise (22) To create for yourselves black man’s
paradise (22)
(McKah 136)
Here the author addresses primarily “ma-intellect wa university,” urging

them to raise their eyes from “European books,” which mostly neglect
Africa, and start to care about “Africanness” and humanity more than
economic interests. Again the reader encounters with “back to the roots”
standpoint – “intellectuals” are compelled to enter the “Mau-Mau university”
(referring to the ideals of the liberation struggle), “understand the wisdom of
the forefathers” and take pride in the traditional past. We again see the
recognisable images of politicians – “the clowns wearing crowns of gold
without wisdom of old” and their servants – “the town sheriffs” (corrupt
policemen). The author again uses commonly understandable images, uniting
the dislikeable features of present day Africa under the image of “Gomorra
and Sodom” and putting the figure of Malcolm X on the level with the divine
figures of Jah, the god of the Rasta, and Mungu – a Swahili word for the
Supreme Being. In other words, we again see that the contents and the form
of the poem appeal to most of the compatriots of the author, regardless of
their backgrounds and even age.
A similar example is found in the poem “C.C.T.V” by Paul Mboya, a
musician more known under the pseudonym Kitu Sewer (“something from
the sewer”). Also born in Nairobi slums, Mboya is currently one of the
outstanding figures in Kenyan music scene (which he confirms referring to
his writings as rather “lyrics” than poems). Using as a title the popular
abbreviation for the video surveillance camera, the author, like his fellow
artists, addresses the burning issues of today’s reality.
Watu huniambia (1) People tell me (1)

Kitu sewer shampoo (2) Sewer stuff (stage name) [you are like]
a shampoo (2)
Lyrics zako na-gospel kama bamboo (3) Your lyrics and gospel are like
Utadhani rap ni nywele na studio ni bafu bamboo (3)
(4) You would think rap is hair and studio
is a bathroom (4)
Ni kuchafu (5) And [here] it is dirty (5)
Mpaka siafu zinabuy viatu (6) To the extent when even ants buy
shoes (6)
Pwaguzi na pwagu waargue kuhusu lyrics Small and big thieves argue about my
zangu (7) lyrics (7)
C.C.T.V camera zinazoom katikati ya C.C.T.V cameras are zooming in the
town (8) town centre (8)
Nikawanyama kuwa zoo (9) Watching them like animals in a zoo

(9)
Kwa bush watu wanakufa Darfur na njaa In the bush people die [of] Darfurs and
(10) hunger (10)
Ye na G-8 wametuma shuttle kwa Yes and G-8 have send a shuttle to the
moon(11) moon (11)
Wametoka tour ya kuokota diamonds (12) They returned from the tour of picking
diamonds (12)
Sierra leonne ndi ndio akicompose In Sierra Leone, so that if one [of
wimbo (13) them] composes a new song (13)
Mapya akue na bling za ku floss (14) He has jewelry to floss (flaunt) (14)
Iyo song inaitwa world war four (15) This song is called world war four
(15)
Iko sure kukuweka on toes super powers It is sure to put on toes super powers
wana try kufight fyucha (16) they try to fight the future (16)
Gavaa inahide huduma (17) Government hides services (17)
Shahidi wako shy kutoa ushuhuda (18) Witnesses are shying to give out
testimony (18)
Juu fine wawalitoleana judge unasikia Up there judges fine them [until] you
(19) hear (19)
[One of them] hangs himself like
Kujinyonga ka judas (20) Judas (20)
Mind inachukua muda kuelewa (21) It takes mind time to understand (21)
Shetani ka hawakimbizi (22) If they do not run away from Satan
(22)
Amewamark masura (23) He has marked their faces (23)
(Paul Mboya 388)
The metaphors are powerful but simple – Kitu sewer, the author, compares
himself to a shampoo who uses rap music (and not gospel mostly sung in
pure Swahili ad English) as hair and studio as a bathroom to wash away all
the dirt of modern Kenya and, on a wider scale, the whole modern capitalist
world run by super powers. The manifestations of this dirt are multiple –
from the magnates of G-8 countries, spending money on “shuttles to the
moon” and “tours to pick diamonds” and trying “to fight the future,” to the
local government “hiding services,” authorities scaring witnesses so that they
are “shying” to testify in courts, corrupt judges, etc., etc. Again, we see the
use of biblical images (Judas), allusions to recent political developments in
the region (Darfur), use of commonly known Swahili expressions (a proverb
pwagu hupata pwaguzi – a thief will always meet a greater thief).
In our opinion, the cited poems demonstrate a remarkable ability of sheng
poetry to cross borders – for, being conceived in slums and targeting mainly
the domestic audience, by being published in the prestigious and reputable
almanac these poems are automatically addressing the higher social circles;
and, as shown by the brief analysis of the poems above, they are understood
on all social levels. The reasons are clear – the language is more common and
dearer to the hearts of the audience than even “official” Swahili and English,
the problems discussed are equally understandable and disturbing to all
Kenyans, and even the stylistic devices that the authors use make the poems
understood by everyone.
Of course, sheng literature, as we mentioned above, is not exhausted with
poetry. In the four issues of Kwani? there are also short stories – like the one
by Roger Akena, characterised in a short biographical sketch as a “cartoonist
and Kenya’s No 1 Matrix fan” who presented on six pages a love story in
SMS messages written in sheng, titled “Machoco, maSMS, Hanyaring na
Kompe” (which could be translated as “Chocolates, SMS, Chasing About,
and Rubbish” – Akena 100-05). Martin Mbugua Kimani in his feature article
“Blood and 100% Human Hair,” depicting the life in the barbershops in
Nairobi markets and slum areas, uses sheng more or less in a way it was used
before in Kenyan creative writing – to decorate the speech of his characters.
The passages he chooses are so colourful that sheng surpasses the role of a
mere decoration and becomes a full-fledged hero of the text; and some more
names could be mentioned. In the above-quoted article Naomi Shitemi wrote,
At start, the language identified as sheng was frowned upon and seen as a lack of linguistic
competence. With time, however, it became stylistic and was thought fashionable by the
youth. […] Sheng is therefore a form of new outlet for the expression of various cultures,
especially the metamorphosed cultures resulting from the co-existence of various cultures
and linguistic forms. It is therefore a lucid vision of the development of a new African
language. (Shitemi 11)
We fully agree with the observation about the importance of sheng as the
medium of alternative, youth inter-ethnic and inter-class culture, the
existence of which enhances such important social processes as
detribalisation and the creation of new multicultural identity. Sheng has been
“officialised” by the new Kenyan popular culture, having deeply penetrated
the popular music (especially), radio broadcasting (to a slightly lesser extent),
some TV shows (like the immensely popular “Redykyulass” and “Red kona”
where sheng is used as the main medium). We state that today more than 80
percent of urban youth, regardless of their social background, are to various
extents sharing the sheng culture. And it is rather symptomatic that sheng has
soon afterwards received another “officialisation” on behalf of the “high-
breed” writing, sheng literature being published in such a reputable edition as
Kwani?, presented at the literary festivals, critiqued and researched by
scholars.
In editorial to Kwani? Volume 4, Billy Kahora, the assistant editor,

talking about the stories that he heard from his fellow Kenyans all over the
country, wrote,
As different as all these narratives were I could relate to them as they were essentially
Kenyan. Though these didn’t make it into these pages they remain the reason why we at
Kwani? do what we do; we recognise that in these stories we share a common identity and,
perhaps more importantly, tell others about who we are. (Kwani? 4, ii-iii)
In our opinion, these words are even more applicable to sheng texts that did
make it to the pages of Kwani?. These texts, being written in the language
that many readers, especially the young, consider “more native” than
“bookish” English, “standard” Swahili or even the rarely-used mother
tongues, and dealing with problems that are acknowledges as urgent and
essential by the young Kenyans, provide them with the sense of identity
which crosses all the possible borders – ethnic, social, language, etc. This
brings the young people together in a feeling of “Kenyanness,” creating
awareness of the present-day situation and urging them to care about their
future – and doing it in much more convincing and appealing way then
“high-breed” literature, school programs and even mass-media.
Conclusion
In conclusion, sheng literature and, in my view, especially poetry presently

seems to be the only kind of verbal art in Kenya with an ability to cross
multiple borders – generic and textual (creating a certain kind of synthetic
genres such as “poem-cum-song” or “short story-monologue-diary”),
stylistic (since the imagery and references used by the authors are commonly
understood by many Kenyans), language, ethnic and cultural (since the
medium, which brings together the two national languages of Kenya, is
understood by many groups of population regardless of their ethnic origin),
and finally social, providing Kenyan youth (and, presumably, even the people
who have already) not only with the form of expression alternative to already
existing and “elitist” kinds of verbal arts, but with a new common view of the
country’s social reality, new inter-ethnic and multi-cultural consciousness –
and the means to express this consciousness in a clear, appealing and
convincing way.
Works Cited
Akena, Roger. “Machoco, maSMS, Hanyaring na Kompe.” Kwani? 03

(200x): 100-05.
G-wiji. “Pesa Pombe Siasa na Wanawake.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 284.
Jambazi Fulani. “Nairobi Reloaded.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 127-29.
——., “Nyof Nyof.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 56-57.
Kama. “Zana za Vita Nashika.” Kwani? 03 (2005): 30.
Kiessling, Roland, and Maarten Mous. “Urban Youth Languages in Africa.”
Anthropological Linguistics 46.3 (2004): 1-39.
Kimani, Martin Mbugua. “Blood and 100% Human Hair.” Kwani? 03
(2005): 221-29.
Kurtz, J. Roger. Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: the Postcolonial Kenyan
Novel. Oxford: James Currey; Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998.
Kwani? <http://www.kwani.org/>.
Maillu, David. Without Kiinua Mgongo. Nairobi: Maillu Publishing House,
1989.
Mashifta, Crew. “On Sheng.” Kwani? 02 (2004): 286-96.
Mbaabu, Ireri, and Kibande Nzuga. Sheng-English Dictionary. Dar es
Salaam: Institute of Kiswahili Research, 2003.
McKah. “Ndoto za Future.” Kwani? 02 (2004):285.
Mwas. “Captured.” Kwani? 03 (2005): 378-83.
Rinkanya, Alina. “Sheng Literature in Kenya: A Revival?” The Nairobi
Journal of Literature 3 (2005): 41-45.
——., “Some Notes on Sheng Literature in Kenya.” Creative Writing in
African Languages: Production, Mediation, Reception. Eds. Anja Oed
and Uta Reuster-Jahn. Köln: Rudiger Köppe, 2009.
Shitemi, Naomi L. “Pidginization: Sheng, the Melting Pot of Kenyan
Languages and an Anti-Babel Development.” Kiswahili 64 (2001): 1-
16.
Mbugua wa Mungai
“Na Hawa Watu Lazima Wakuwe Serious!”: 1 FM

Radio Spaces and Folkloric Performance of
Consmopolitan Identities in Kenya
In 2000, then president Daniel Arap Moi threatened to ban Kameme FM, a
Gikuyu-language radio station that was then only a few years old, allegedly
because they could be used to fan what he called “anarchy and genocide” as
had happened in Rwanda (“President Moi”). He is quoted as having further
stated: “I am not against people promoting their culture, but vernacular
stations like Kameme must be transparent first.” A similar ban-drama played
out in 2005 president Mwai Kibaki’s government shut down briefly KASS
FM, a radio station serving Kalenjin-language speakers, ostensibly for airing
what was called “inflammatory content” during the referendum campaigns.
In 2008 the Minister for Information and Broadcasting threatened to shut
down the station for airing what he alleged was inciting content. In the case
of both Kameme FM and KASS FM it has not helped matters that the two
presidents come from ethnic groups that are perceived to be “enemies”: Moi
is Tugen (a Kalenjin sub-group) and Kibaki is Gikuyu thereby causing the
citizenry to interprete, rightly or wrongly, the hand of government as being
aimed at undercutting the influence of particular ethnic groups. It appears that
in making his claims Moi was alluding to the significant cultural and
ideological power radio wields amongst audiences not just in Kenya but also
in other parts of Africa where situations of acute social injustice prevail (see
Gunner). In post-independent Kenya radio – as expressive space – has over
time become both a critical space upon which specific questions are
“debated” and a platform upon which citizens contest relations between
themselves and the state.
This ability of radio to subvert government agenda is arguably one of the
key fears that informed the thinking of authorities in the incidents alluded to
above. Some of radio’s negative power might be seen for instance in the role
of broadcasting during the Rwanda genocide (see Dallaire) and as such there
can be no doubt about the existence of immense potential for such abuse
1
“These people need to get serious” is Mwalimu King’ang’i’s signature response when he
doesn’t agree with either the callers or Maina Kageni, his co-host on the Classic FM
breakfast show.
314 Mbugua wa Mungai
elsewhere. Whether this is a plausible reading of the role KASS FM played in

the violence that was experienced in Kenya’s Rift Valley province before and
after the disputed general election of December 2007 largely depends on
one’s ability to read and understand the nuances of the Kalenjin language in
which it broadcasts. Indeed the same is true about other vernacular radio
stations which have proliferated beginning in the early 1990s when the
government eased the stranglehold on broadcasting that it had maintained
since the founding of radio broadcasting in Kenya in 1928. The country has
83 licensed broadcasters who between them offer service on 247 different
stations. Before this liberalisation of the airwaves the country only had Kenya
Broadcasting Corporation – the public radio and TV broadcaster – which
now has to compete with privately-owned radio and TV stations for
audiences eager to escape what they see as the tyranny of the government
mouthpiece. 2 The call-in show is one of the more visible traditions to have
emerged forcefully out of this rearrangement of the electronic broadcast field.
The numerous vernacular FM radio stations are sites for the active
summoning of folklore and emically-situated local knowledge and its
deployment in othering different ethnic communities as has happened during
some of the country’s recent political crises. These interactions that take the
format of call-in shows usually have insider-outsider boundaries; language,
ethnicity and subcultural identity are some of the facets that determine
participation. 3 What all this boils down to is the fact that over the last decade,
because it is interactive in a way that state-controlled KBC previously was
not, FM radio has evolved into a powerful tool with which presenters can
engage with their audiences. The performative space thus availed by
electronic media, and how citizens use it to constitute a popular culture that
appropriates heavily from folklore as well as other modes of expression, is
what this paper seeks to examine. Popular culture is used here in a liberatory
sense to refer to creative expressive acts constituted upon media that are
utilised not because participants have no alternatives but because they choose
them. At any rate given that many citizens do not fall properly within strictly
defined social classes, economic stratification is a rather tenuous measure
upon which to describe popular culture; appeal, access and function, rather
than a high/low-brow dichotomisation, define Kenyan popular culture.
This paper begins by setting out its problematic within Kenyan
folkloristics praxis and then broadens out to explore FM radio shows as
2
See http://www.cck.go.ke/radio_and_tv_stations/ for a complete list of licensed broadcasters
and radio and TV stations currently available in Kenya.
3
This observation is based on discussions with listeners of various vernacular broadcast
stations in the six months to, and four months after, the December 2007 elections.
“Na Hawa Watu Lazima Wakuwe Serious!” 315
folkloric performance. Especially in the closing years of the 20th century

electronic media have become a key avenue through which folklore is
mediated to larger audiences necessitating an interrogation of specific
relationships that obtain between radio audiences and the material that is
aired for them. A key assumption in this paper is that electronic media play a
role in the transformation of performances and the spaces in which they are
performed. Proceeding from the conception of verbal arts as performance
(see Bauman), this paper seeks to examine ways in which “narrative”
performances on Kenyan FM radio – a practice that has become prevalent in
urban East Africa since the early 1990s – enable a translation of traditional
artistic practice(s) into contemporary media spaces and certain theoretical
challenges this phenomenon might raise in thinking about aspects of local
folklore. We seek to interrogate a related set of questions; first, in what ways
does radio – if we accept electronic modes of communication as narrative
agency – affect creative texts and, secondly, what forms of cultural
translation obtain in such a situation? A critical thrust in this study will be an
interrogation of some of the theoretical assumptions in Kenyan folkloristics
that are often treated as a binding especially as they relate to the authority of
performers, the supposedly “stable” nature of folklore material and the
“predictable” character of their audiences. How do these performances
challenge, for instance, the characterisation of post-colonial Kenyan cultures
as “orate”? What exactly does contemporary FM radio narrative adapt from
the “global ecumene,” after Hannerz (1996), and how does it work vis-à-vis
“tradition”? Aware of the crucial ways in which the “mediascape,” pace
Appadurai (1997), affects forms and arenas of cultural expression, the paper
attempts an interrogation of performance on Kenyan FM radio as a means to
assessing how ideas on identities, and by extension the culture(s) upon which
they are forged, are continually (re)deployed in ways that challenge the
borders that seek to define them. Primary material for analysis is drawn from
Kenyan FM radio as well as direct interviews. First some broad questions
related to the study of folklore in Kenya are examined immediately below in
order to set the basis for undertaking analysing FM radio presentations as
folkloric performance.
Whereas in theory it should not be difficult to cut an independent path in
any discipline in practice one finds that the contrary is often true especially
when the ground has been mapped by scholars who cast their gigantic
imprints upon the discipline so firmly and broadly that those who come after
them tend to assume that “everything has been covered.” 4 As such it might
happen that one of the most difficult things for successive scholars to do is to
try and advance meaningfully the dominant terms of a discipline’s discourse
as set by its pioneers. Certainly this seems to be the case with Kenyan oral
literature studies that began in the 1970s. 5 Thus for instance whereas
generally Finnegan’s seminal Oral Literature in Africa (1970) has had a
phenomenal influence on at least a generation of Kenyan scholars, it is
curious that the work remains by and large the major reference text in the
local folklore curriculum. While there is nothing wrong in referring to this
pioneering work, an unfortunate assumption has developed amongst folklore
students that there is little if any need to either re-examine the issues
Finnegan raised – even if for no other reason to see how else the material
might be understood – or even to move forward from where she left nearly
four decades ago. One of the unfortunate outcomes of this stasis then has
been that efforts of scholars like Okpewho (1992) who has suggested that
folkloristics ought to broaden out both spatially (fieldwork) and in terms of
genre to include emergent sites and forms of cultural production in order to
examine the synthesis that takes place in contemporary cultural practices
have gone largely unheeded in Kenya. Incidentally, even where a useful text
like Teaching Oral Literature (Masinjila and Okoth-Okombo, 1994) has
raised important theoretical and methodological issues that should have
formed a key re-orientation moment for Kenyan folkloristics much in the
manner that Paredes and Bauman’s Toward New Perspectives in Folklore
(1972) did for American folklore study, little work has appeared to build
upon the foundation laid by this important text. The net result is that much
material that ought to form a rich field for study has over the years been left
4
The main data for this paper are derived from interactions with students and their lecture hall
responses during folklore courses that I have been teaching at Kenyatta University’s
Literature Department over the last twelve years, as well as from regular conversations with
other researchers of popular culture and listeners to the various FM radio stations especially
since 2004. To the extent possible narratives are presented in informants’ voices in order to
enable an understanding of how listeners read them. I am grateful to Becky, Beth, Cathy,
George, Kaburu, Mariga, Michael, Muthoni, Njuguna, Odyssee, Shailja, Wambui as well as
the others who wished to remain anonymous for permission to use their feedback on the
radio narratives. Two sources were in their mid-20s while the rest ranged in age between 31
and 46 years.
5
Folklore does not exist as an independent discipline in the Kenyan school curriculum. As the
term oral literature suggests, it is treated as a subset of literature, thus severely limiting the
space for its deeper interrogation at either undergraduate or post-graduate levels. For reasons
that have already been explored elsewhere (see Wa Mungai, “Nothing but ogre tales”) –
amongst them that the term oral literature invites us to view non-literary material according
to literary lenses – the term folklore will be used throughout.
unattended to. The irony of this situation in relation to Kenya is that whereas
Finnegan is emphatic about the absolute need for fieldwork as a basis for
folkloristics – after all her 1970 opus was the product of such extensive work
– visits to the field are no longer a core requirement for the study of folklore,
at least not in the literature departments with which I am familiar where the
curriculum policy is set by the department, not the course lecturer. Even in
situations where students are taken out for ‘fieldwork,’ resource allocations
to academic departments in all Kenyan public universities hardly allow for a
trip lasting more than a few days. This begs the question of whether such
brief excursions to a village or an outpost like the Gedi ruins in Malindi serve
any real purpose in terms of either creating familiarity with the field data or,
even more crucially, imparting skills about ethnographic method. This raises
a tragic contradiction in which students of folklore adeptly describe in classic
terms the material of their sub-discipline – at least in all Kenyan university
literature departments in terms of disciplinary placement folklore is
subsumed into literature – but fail to recognise the same or similar things
when and where they appear in contemporary everyday environments. In this
manner as sites of folkloric encounter and production urban social set-ups are
a much neglected field.
One of the explanations for the messy state of affairs in which students of
folklore find themselves might be found in the way the subject is
conceptualised, analysed and taught. In this regard a number of issues stand
out clearly. First, in school texts folkore is still presented as ‘communal lore’
even where the evidence suggests that the definition of a community as
necessarily ‘rooted,’ ‘rural’ and ‘homogeneous’ that would have been
accurate in the 1950s no longer applies given the social changes that have
taken place; the word tribe (users happily ignore the racist underpinning of
the term in descriptions of Africans, particularly in colonial anthropology) is
often used to stand for community, an equivalence that no longer makes
sense. Increasingly people have left their once-small rural countryside
communities for urban centres in huge numbers, thus sundering earlier
understandings of a ‘folk’ as a group of people that are rooted to some
geographical space. At any rate even within rural spaces people from
different ethnic groups have moved to settle amongst others, resulting in
highly complex inter-ethnic kinship networks that in turn lead to a
commingling of diverse folklore. Kenya’s vast Rift Valley province largely
testifies to this fact as intermarriages and general every day interaction
amongst the Kalenjin, Luhya, Gikuyu, Maasai, Kisii and Luo demonstrate. In
effect most Kenyans now have a multiplicity of identities which they move in
and out of contingent to particular needs.
The above issue leads to a second related problem: the question of

folklore’s authenticity, which is usually another way for people to disguise
their thoughts about the troubling state called modernity, an assumed
counterpoint to the term traditional, not just as an adjective but more
importantly as a state of being pristine in the romantic folklorists’ sense.
These supposedly authentic folk are then thought to be the legitimate cultural
authorities and that anyone else is a pretender. Thus for instance a ‘Maasai
dancer’ – for non-Maasai also dress up as such and then trade in that identity
– performing at local tourist sites is assumed to be less of a real Maasai than
his colleagues herding and selling cattle in the Rift Valley plains but who
incidentally happen to be wearing watches, carrying transistor radios around,
displaying expensive cell phones and retiring in the evening to pricey
guesthouses in urban centres rather than traditional huts, manyatta. But as
will be shown further below, the reality of cultural production in Kenya is
such that individuals have over time appropriated the authority to create their
own lore, and that increasingly we have fewer performers who rely solely on
some notion of traditional authority to legitimise their work. Without doubt
voices of folk performers who are deemed to be carriers of tradition in the
older sense still exist, but they co-exist with other emergent cadres of
practitioners whose authority is derived solely from their own creativity and
their audiences’ approval as we see in the case of FM radio culture and the
closely-related sphere of urban youth music.
The above issues might be crystallised by drawing on two examples from
my classroom experience. By the time undergraduate students come to
folkore classes, their minds are already set firmly on the notion that there
exist authentic folk (i.e. ‘uncontaminated by modernity’) who are creators of
‘genuine folklore.’ Of course these are located in the rural country side,
students repeatedly state in classic folk theory fashion. Nevertheless it is
usually possible to dissuade them from this mode of thinking by posing the
question: “Do we have folklore forms in the immediate university
environment?” Gradually, most are able to reconcile themselves to the fact
that lecture theatres, residential halls, playing grounds, police road blocks
where roadside negotiations for bribes take place daily, commuter vans
(matatu), cheap eateries at KM1 (Kilometre one) – a sprawling shanty in the
university neighbourhood – beer lounges and dance halls amongst other
spaces are legitimate folklore sites. The tension normally is between the
received wisdom that some folklore is genuine while another kind is fake, a
notion that “new perspectives” in folklore research has long since debunked
by showing that folk groups and communities are always being created, and
with them shared traditions from which ‘new’ folklore is fashioned (see for
instance Dundes, The Study of Folklore; Paredes and Bauman, Toward New
Perspectives in Folklore). In any event, logically the idea of change and the
much-touted maxim that ‘culture is dynamic’ ought by now to have
sufficiently prepared anyone inquiring into folklore to anticipate the idea that
human creativity and increasing connectedness occasioned by a diverse range
of human occupations renders inoperable and irrelevant the notion of cultural
purity and, consequently, that of genuine performances. Folklore by nature is
improvisational, not unmediated mimicry.
The issues raised above – where either the field evolves in
unapprehendable ways or it where it moves so far ahead of the analytical
prisms deployed in its critique – are what are referred to here as traditional
apparatuses. As such they do not meaningfully anticipate changed social-
economic realities that are vastly different from those that obtained three or
four decades ago when folklore was in its infancy in the Kenyan academy.
For instance, some commonly-used reference texts treat folklore as a
bounded, stable category representing a set of immutable values and
identities, a medium for “going back to our cultural roots” (Akivaga and
Odaga 2. See also Kabira and Mutahi, “Introduction”; Kipury,
“Introduction”). Indeed, one of the most popular injunctions issued when
teachers need to summon their students to the fieldwork task, at least in
theory, is a popular quotation from Nandwa and Bukenya to the effect that
the collection of field data is an urgent task “before the old people who are
granaries of knowledge die off with it” (39). Be that as it may, this has
unfortunately led students to the conclusion that younger people may not be
taken as legitimate bearers of folkloric knowledge, and since there are few
really old people in urban centres, it has been mistakenly assumed that the
only true bearers of folk knowledge are to be found in rural villages. The
realities of modern existence have forced some radical social mutations and
now for instance village story tellers rarely have audiences given that their
children and grandchildren have moved out to urban centres or to rural
dwellings elsewhere. Even work-related folklore has been affected by the
vagaries of commerce: when for instance young women or men are invited to
help cultivate a farm often they turn up depending on if and how well they
will be compensated financially; they may or may not be in the mood to
perform work songs. Thus it is necessary to consider the changes that have
occurred in socio-economic settings and the implications of these on
performance and traditional academic conceptions and descriptions of it.
The kinds of lapses suggested in the discussion immediately above might
be illustrated more pointedly by the following two examples set apart by
about a quarter of a century. A colleague who was born and raised in Nairobi
reports that as undergraduate students in a Literature Department at a local

university she and her classmates were required to submit examples of ‘oral
literature’ forms from their communities: “I promptly went and recorded the
cheering songs that we had at rugby matches all over and happily submitted
my work. It was promptly tossed out with a terse admonition—‘Go and get
real oral literature!’” 6 The second illustration is an incident that happened at
a dinner table conversation during a conference in Italy in November 2008.
An African lecturer of African Art at a notable West African university
seated across the table inquired what my field of research is, to which I
promptly stated “urban folklore/popular culture.” “Is there then such a thing
as folklore in urban centers?” she inquired, puzzled by what to her must have
sounded like a most scandalous claim. An American historian working on
traditional healing practices in Kenya and South Africa who was seated with
us, perhaps correctly deciphering the shock in the manner of my facial
expression, gently and helpfully interjected: “Surely, when people migrate to
cities they form communities and groups as urban centers become their
homes, permanent or transient. For those who are born in the city this
becomes their ‘urban village’ – if we insist on dragging the village along –
the spring from which they then create ‘new’ folklore sometimes by
refashioning the old and at other times by inventing new forms contingent to
the urban context.” “Amen!” I exclaimed inwardly.
This response that would have been so apt for the folklore lecturer who
rejected “rugby songs” as “fake” lore so many years ago as well as the
context (a multicultural research team working on different areas of African
cultures) served to point out the vast gaps that still need to be filled, the
paradigms that need to be reconceptualised and accommodations that have to
be made if especially Kenyan folkloristics is to formulate relevant approaches
to the study of the field. Home, village and city/town are key terms in the life
of any Kenyan – and Africans generally – and it is not clear why local
folklore scholarship keeps treating them as if they are irreconcilable with
each other. As will be shown in subsequent discussion, the opposition set
between these three spaces is deeply flawed, especially given the reach of
technology, particularly the broadcast media that will form a key plank for
the discussion in this paper. Such oppositions between home as either village
or city, because they invite essentialising, often result in the setting up of
untenable assumptions such as those made by my West African colleague. As
has been pointed out above, “new directions in folkloristics” work has been
6
Personal communication, 2008. The informant’s occupational placement does not allow
name citation.
addressing these kinds of claims for some time now. Accordingly, where
terms like community and group meant rooted entities in the 19th Century
when William Thom was trying to fix a definition to the term folklore it is
obvious that this term must today necessarily mean differently given the
kinds of changes that have occurred to societies all over the world, as shown
in the work of Degh (1994 and 1999), Howard (2008) and Ben-Amos (1982)
amongst others which utilises the insights of network theory as well as the
notion of “imagined communities” (Anderson) to apprehend the nature of
complex social-political entities in which folklore thrives.
This paper is not suggesting in any way that local scholarship is not up to
the task of interrogating folklore but rather that the approaches used in
folkloristics locally need to be updated to accommodate a radically altered
field and forms of lore that have morphed into shapes that might not be
immediately recognisable as folkloric. In this regard there have been efforts
to rethink the subject; Miruka (1999) has attempted a theorisation of it while
Kabira (1983) has insisted that the performer, and therefore fieldwork, must
be brought back to the core of folkloristics. Interdisciplinary scholarship is
also increasingly pointing to the ways in which folklore is embedded into
Kenyan popular culture, the latter itself being a broad lens with which to
view the everyday (see among others Githinji, 2008; Nyairo, 2007;
Odhiambo, 2007; Odhiambo, 2008; Wa Mungai and Samper, 2006; Wa
Mutonya, 2007). Combining a range of interdisciplinary methods (mainly
from music, anthropology, folklore, literature and linguistics) the cultural
studies approach that is seen in this work, and which this paper advocates,
has opened up possibilities that enable the probing of emergent forms of
cultural practice that do not sit neatly within the traditional genres of
scholarship. In this case, folklore straddles many fields, and an investigation
of it needs to be attentive to this fact. This is the context within which will be
interrogated FM radio performances not just in order to show that the cultural
ground has shifted but most crucially in order to encourage discussions about
cultural forms that do not fall within the doxa of Kenyan folkloristics.
‘New’ Narrative Spaces: New Voices at the Urban ‘Hearth’
A critical issue that one has to confront especially when thinking about
questions of cultural representation in Kenya is generational competition, in
our case especially because the matter of (self-)authorisation has already
been raised. In this regard, it is necessary to note that one of the issues
requiring reconceptualisation is the notion of performance spaces given that
the definition of a folklore performer as ‘traditional’ has become largely

blurred given the many shifts in social organisations that have occurred in
contemporary society. However, this is precisely the condition of cultural
destabilisation that enterprising individuals have seized upon to launch their
innovative performances. In other words, the context of social change has
meant that where traditional processes have been destabilised new forms of
agency have arisen – in these circumstances, concepts like ‘original folklore’
can at best only mean hazily as they do not convincingly describe any of the
material that might still be seen even in rural villages. This is especially so in
urban settings where through appropriated forms of music that combine local
and ‘foreign’ styles, themes and languages such as we see in urban popular
culture, residents have forged new spaces of performance. The dance hall and
FM radio are illustrations of this new cultural space not just because they
traffic the same commodity but even more interestingly given that the
expressive forms in both sites are mutually reinforcing. What is more, the
moral economies that emerge within these urban musical forms are quickly,
perhaps even simultaneously, disseminated throughout the three East African
countries, meaning that technology has come to have an impact over the lives
of people in ways that might not be immediately evident from a casual look.
This discussion will centre on FM radio ‘narratives’ as folkloric
performances and the agency of technology in a bid to demonstrate how new
voices and forms of folk expression work in contemporary Kenya. At the
very least a case will be made that instead of insisting on orateness as the
distinguishing mark of local folklore analysing the interpellations between
orality and technology is a more viable mode of thinking about the
complexities of contemporary cultural production. This might then allow a
contemplation of folklore, not in terms of its homogenised characteristics but,
more productively, in terms of its disjunctures which in turn may shed light
on how creativity is shaping ‘new’ folklore forms and the spaces of its
performance. After all, if the axiom that folklore is in some way tied to
identity holds, then it is also true that we are likely to learn more about modes
of being that contemporary Kenyans craft for themselves by paying attention
to the ‘breaks’ between their ‘pasts’ and ‘presents.
The radio in Kenya has a long history; from shanty towns in urban centres
to remote villages in the countryside it is one of modernity’s most widely
circulated goods. The need by the colonial government to communicate its
policies to the ‘natives’ led to the introduction in 1953 of broadcasts in the
major local languages by the settler radio service that had hitherto since its
inception in 1928 only been broadcasting in English, and briefly to the
African “native” population whose opinion about the Second World War the
British wanted to court. The government took over the radio station at
independence in 1964 and it became a critical mouthpiece for communicating
to citizens the ‘development’ and nationalist agenda of the new government
and, most visibly during Moi’s authoritarian reign (1978-2002), it was critical
to spreading propaganda (see Ligaga 55). For our purposes, the importance of
the politics of radio broadcasting lies in the fact that previously the radio was
a whites-only commodity. This might be seen in terms of what Burke has
called, in his study of the consumption of toiletries in Zimbabwe under
English colonialism, “‘the biography’ of a commodity […] ‘its prior
meanings that […] give[s] various goods their rich individuality within a
specific place and time’” (6). Despite the fact that most indigenous Kenyans
reviled colonialism, still they loved the radio – amongst other English
commodities – because it was understood as an indicator of the owner’s
“modernity.” This might then explain radio’s remarkably high penetration
rate of 95% in Kenya (Obonyo), making it by now one of the most relied-
upon traditional forms of communication. This then allows for the quick flow
of cultural expressions even into far flung areas of rural Kenya and in the
absence of other forms of quick communication radio is an important means
for keeping informed about the outside world.
However, FM radio has now radically changed the way people keep
abreast of their social world. Whereas it is true therefore that Kenya
Broadcasting Corporation radio is known more for studied adherence to
broadcasting in “correct language” – which FM radio stations have
overthrown (Christopher J. Odhiambo 153) – it is also necessary to point out
that KBC radio and TV have historically been at the core of the
technologisation of folklore practices in Kenya. For instance, the Kiswahili
program Je, huu ni ungwana? (“Is this civilised behavior?”), presented by
Leonard Mambo Mbotela since 1966, is arguably one of the centrepieces of
this process and draws wide listenership on Sundays when it is aired; a
television version has recently been launched in recent years. The program
offers short verbal snaps of mainly life in the city. Typically, Mbotela
presents to his audience a simple plot, ‘characters’ and a dilemma about
social decorum. After the problem has been posed, he will then dissect it to
show why some things are socially unacceptable. And even though the
lessons drawn from these mini-narratives apply more to urban living, their
thematic breadth makes it possible for anyone in Kenya to deduce from them
some social skills. Even if these radio presentations are not fully-fledged
narratives within the conventional understanding of the term as the
presentation of a story through action unfolding over time, they have
sufficient characteristics to qualify them as mini-narratives: a narrator,
setting, participants, structured action recounted creatively and a resolution

which comes in terms of a moral. Within KBC General Service radio,
Elizabeth Omollo’s Saturday morning program Hello Children might also be
cited as another crucial example of how folklore has been brought adapted to
technology. While the fact of narrating on radio is not in itself sufficient
radically transform folklore, the point is that the mass media in Kenya –
particularly KBC radio – has played a critical role in keeping folk traditions
alive, a fact that is hardly acknowledged. At present we see privately-owned
TV stations like Kenya Television Network (KTN) attracting large
viewership for the popular children’s program Klub Kiboko in which story-
telling features prominently.
Overall, my argument is that though they may now be said to be amongst
the more visible and, perhaps, most popular spaces of expression FM radio
stations that emerged in the 1990s did not necessarily introduce a new radio
genre per se; rather they have built upon and extended the space created by
the mode of radio narration that was pioneered by Mbotela and Omollo
among others. What might be considered new is the subversive nature of FM
radio program format, for instance their undermining the established
linguistic order in which the official languages, Kiswahili and English, are
overthrown by Sheng (at least in the city) 7 and by other local languages on
various radio stations. 8 Further, FM radio call-in shows are carried on in
linguistically uninhibited terms i.e. verbal excess is a core characteristic. The
significance of this aspect lies in the fact that the verbal transgressions
presage and enact a contest over matters of taste, and to this extent the FM
radio phenomenon might be deemed to be playing an overt politics of
subversion (see Christopher J. Odhiambo; and Wa Mungai, “Pale Pale”). The
significance of these performances is worth underscoring on two specific
counts.
First the complex nature of FM radio narratives, as opposed to the
simplicity of the earlier narratives carried on KBC radio, might be taken as a
function of the convoluted nature of social lives in contemporary post-
7
A sociolect that works by combining words from different languages based on a Kiswahili
stem and sometimes by giving new meanings to old words or inventing new ones altogether.
Initially an urban hybrid for youth solidarity, it is now used extensively for various functions
in different social contexts in many parts of Kenya. For an extended discussion of Sheng see
among others Samper (2002), Githiora (2002), Wa Mungai (2004), Githinji (2006, 2007 and
2008) and Mutonya (2008).
8
Whereas most radio stations have at least one Kiswahili channel, they will also have other
channels broadcasting in local languages targeting particular communities. For instance
Royal Media Services which owns Citizen Radio has nine such ‘vernacular’ FM channels.
colonial Kenya. In other words, when the earlier narrators began their work
the social dilemmas in question were addressed within a clearly-understood
moral framework in which people adhered more or less to the same codes of
conduct given that they were only recently emerged from tightly-knit
communities. The consequence of this is that people who have stayed longer
in urban centres for instance have developed ‘new’ codes by which they
conduct their lives. For example, modernity’s emphasis on an individual’s
achievement as a basis for achieving social recognition – and hence the
general shift away from an emphasis on community to society – has been
instrumental in encouraging individual creativity and, in regard to folklore,
thereby sundering the requirement that before one can become a performer
they need to have traditional/communal authorisation. People in the city are
largely anonymous (see Hannerz, Exploring the City), a situation that
conduces for uninhibited expression. This anonymity means that even the
most private ‘problems’ can be shared with anonymous audiences over radio
and audiences can call in without fear that their identities might be
unmasked. Such interaction demonstrates the idea of a virtual community – a
loose transient ‘group’ comprised of not faces but voices and which in this
case is brought ‘together’ by nothing other than the radio experience. This
faceless communication, as might be correctly assumed, is the perfect cover
for excess but it is also useful to our understanding of narrative process and
its transformation because now we have a series of anonymous virtual
performers – we might even more meaningfully call them voices – with each
chipping in to fill in bits and pieces into the larger story.
The second point derives directly from the first. As postcolonial Kenyan
society has become inexorably more complex, so have individual’s sense of
being and their enactment; older identities are never discarded as has been
assumed, rather they have been layered over and incorporated to ‘modern
identities’ to create a palimpsest. As a consequence, people have had to
innovate new modes of self-expression that both capture the reality of their
social conditions as well as produce identities suited to these circumstance;
whether or not the identities so-produced are in tandem with socially-
accepted values becomes a significant point of the mainstream culture’s
angst. Thus for instance where pioneer radio narrators like Mbotela would be
concerned with ‘mundane’ issues like neighbours who come conveniently
call everyday only at meal times, or gossip amongst neighbours, FM
presenters are preoccupied with issues that make Jee Huu ni Ungwana?
appear terribly dated. Sexuality (and violations like rape and incest), the
pursuit of vast riches, the kinds of cars a ‘real man’ should drive, whether the
president – and by extension Kenyan men – is hen-pecked or not, which
politician has been sighted in Nairobi or another town’s red-light district

amongst others are some ‘issues’ around which a radio narrative might
revolve. In this manner, some of these topics enable listeners to imagine
themselves in particular states of being, with the result that some might
actually take these narratives, for instance about material wealth, as charters
around which to create their identities and aspirations. Each generation sees
things differently, a matter that in turn shapes the narratives that are (re-)told
on FM radio. In this case, the observation that FM radio stations have helped
subversion of the “‘monologization’ of communication” (Christopher J.
Odhiambo 154) is apt because it speaks both to the overthrow of the
autocracy of the state, of which KBC is a monumental index, and to the
emergence of contestatory generational worldviews.
Thus within the context of their knowledge of the past, listeners often use
FM radio narratives to often to fantasise and perform diverse social scenarios
– for as informant consensus indicates most of these presentations are
apparently staged – but ultimately the studio presenter shapes the story in a
preferred direction. In a sense these radio shows enable not merely the
contestation of the present realities but also allow listeners to grapple with
probable scenarios and what the attendant dramas might portend for those
involved in them. For instance the stories always entail a shock element, as
we shall see further below, which is a useful narrative strategy that
performers use to jolt listeners to various configurations of contemporary
realities. It has been argued that these FM radio stations “encourage Euro-
American cultures which are not always in tandem with local cultures […] [a
process which ends up] developing urban subcultures which are usually
deemed to be antagonistic to the master culture of society […] sometimes the
whole show degenerates into pornography” (Tom Odhiambo 164-65;
emphasis added), where that master culture is specified as being “the adult
culture in Kenya” (Tom Odhiambo 164; emphasis added). There are three
problems with this proposition, an examination of which might enable a
slightly different understanding of the role of FM radio. First, to the extent
that FM radio is a consequence of the early 1990s struggle for greater
expressive space in various spheres, then its “rebellious” character is
naturally a reflection of the heritage that led to the ousting of the state – or
any other centre – from the authority of claiming to speak for everyone. At
any rate, the author has already indicated that “intervention, inversion,
subversion and dialogic interaction” (Tom Odhiambo 153) are some of the
strategies at work in FM radio, modalities which logically suggest an
agonistic stance between these stations and “the master culture of society.”
As such it is unclear why these stations should be expected to shoulder the

burden of carrying the values of the master that KBC performs rather well.
Secondly, aware of the ways in which cultural contact, however unequal,
creates fluid identities and if we consider Kenyans’ jubilation over the
demise of single-party autocracy in 1991 and consequently their eager
acceptance of participation in the global communication economy, it is rather
late to bemoan the foreignness of the cultures that the mediascape throws up
into people’s lives. In any case, Kenyans’ having sought out the radio as a
consumer commodity implies that they are ready to withstand the contact
between their values and those from other cultures, the latter’s characteristics
notwithstanding. Lastly, it is not necessarily the case that “the” adult culture
in Kenya is homological in its values, or that it automatically shies away
from the verbal excess characteristic of FM radio culture. Recent studies on
Mugithi 9 and Matatu 10 subculture demonstrate the untenability of a
dichotomisation of Kenyans into morally-austere and singularly debased
factions; adults and the youth, church goers and secularists participate in the
ribald entertainment culture in equally zealous terms (see particularly Wa
Mutonya, 2007; Mutongi, 2006; Wa Mungai, 2004). A lot of cultural
exchanges take place in between the extremes of expression suggested above
and Kenyans effortlessly slip on one mask or the other as need arises. Thus
for example listeners are hardly shocked with the sleaze on FM radio because
they already are acquainted with it through the ribaldry of Mugithi. The
adoptions of trickster disguises, a common enough practice locally, enables
individuals to participate in multiple cultural spaces. Contemporary radio
practice has made the process of slipping on masks much easier as seen in the
case of late Saturday night ‘religious’ and ‘family’ call-in shows such as
Kameme FM’s Hutia Mundu – Gikuyu literally for ‘touch someone’ but
which in fact is an euphemism for ‘having sex’ – whose aim is ‘counseling’
but which almost always end up as narratives of heterosexuality. Under the
mask of a radio show, listeners call in to talk about salacious things whose
reference to they will shun on Sunday morning as they troop to church.
9
The Gikuyu name for train, this term refers to a type of dance in which a lone guitarist
“corrupts” the lyrics of a well-known tune by inserting his own words into a song. Beer
lounge patrons stomp around the floor in train formation, holding onto the shoulders or waist
of the dancer ahead. A lot of folklore goes into the creation of mugithi’s lyrics. For a
detailed discussion of the dynamics of mugithi see among others Wa Mungai (2004), Wa
Mutonya (2005 and 2007) and Githiora (2008).
10
Privately-owned commuter vans and minibuses that are known for their masculine
subculture of excess – verbal, embodied, musical as well as visual iconography.
On the whole it is possible to understand the FM radio representational

styles if we place them alongside other mass media practices from which they
seem to have developed or which they might have appropriated. For instance
the banter that is a key aspect of these presentations has a long tradition in
Kenyan mass media. This might be seen for instance in TV comedy which
has been one of local popular culture’s most enduring genres. Farces like the
Kiswahili Vitimbi and Plot 10 on KBC have for decades now captured
lightheartedly the vagaries of urban life, and even though the setting is in the
city, the situations they present might apply in most parts of Kenya. In a
sense, today’s FM radio talk-show hosts might be seen as following along the
path of lighthearted social critique that was cut by such 1980s KBC TV
entertainers like Amka Twende, Othorong’ong’o Danger, Mzee Tamaa Bin
Tamaa, Ojwang Hatari and Mama Kayai amongst others. In the late 1990s
stand-up comedians KJ, Tony Njuguna and Walter Nyambane took the
modality of presentation established by their predecessors, refined it and hit
the airwaves through Nation TV’s Reddykyulass and later Intrukalas;
Nyambane subsequently showed up on Kiss FM’s breakfast show as Baby J
Nyambs, where he played the role of a city “greenhorn” (Raban). Elsewhere,
a team of beer hall comedians under the leadership of Kihenjo has over the
last five years produced on VCD numerous Gikuyu farces which poke fun at
individuals who are unable to cope with the vast social changes taking place
around them. Kihenjo’s male actors clearly seem to have adopted the
presentation style popularised by Cameroon’s Zangalewa Dancers: cane-
swinging, potbellied white-haired ‘old men’ in shorts, military jackets and
round-brim colonial style hats stomping around the stage. They cut the air of
buffoons, which is an interesting contradiction given that universally in local
cultures old men are ordinarily expected to be have dignified deportment.
Gikuyu popular musicians have increasingly been making use of Zangalewa-
pose dancers, meaning that the comic as a character has over time become a
permanent and recognisable feature of Kenyan popular culture.
The comic also features on the Gikuyu language radio Kameme FM.
While it lasted the 5 p.m. presentation Mataaro na Mathekania ma
Githingithia (Githingithia’s advice and jokes) perhaps came closest to
rendering the traditional oral narrative performance on contemporary FM
radio. For matatu travelers going home, 5 pm on Kameme was an
appointment with the contemporary storyteller, which informants explained
was a useful way of filling the void “now that in the city we no longer have
story-telling sessions like we used to.” The improvising narrator Domenico
Githingithia would take on the persona of a worldly-wise city dandy and
humorously narrate the foibles and naivety of others less versed than himself
in ways of the city and life generally. He had one studio listener, Njaramba,
who would make an old woman’s ‘noises’ and interjections of surprise at the
twists and turns in Githingithia’s tales. Unlike contemporary presentations on
other FM stations where single topics are presented for ‘discussion,’ most of
Githingithia’s narratives were episodic, giving the impression of a
continually-unfolding plot. Njaramba’s equal on Kameme’s early morning
show was Cucu Nyakairu (African grandmother), Baby J Nyambs on KISS
100 and Filgoneus on Classic 105. These are all stock provincial characters –
metonymically captured in various Dholuo, Ekegusii, Gikuyu and Kikamba
accents – whose quaint perspective on the baffling ways of modernity
occasion mirthful reflection amongst listeners.
A critical point to note about these radio presentations is that informants
are clear that whether one is thinking about TV comedy or FM radio shows
they are often deemed to be (creative) approximations of life situations, to be
taken as an alternative to other forms of creative self expression. In other
words, the staginess of it all is clear such that perceptive listeners approach
the presentations fully aware that the artifice involved is second-order reality.
The staging begins when a pattern of ‘special callers’ whereby particular
individuals will always get through to the studio; the phenomenon is
prevalent even on vernacular radio stations and used to be on one of the
prominent TV stations during Daniel Moi’s dictatorship. Indeed some
informants report that they or their relatives have been called up and
instructed on particular lines of argument or an angle that they are to present
when they call in. Nevertheless, because FM presenters are real people
talking to others, the listening audiences’ degree of credulity is much higher
than is the case when reading a novel; the places mentioned are readily
identifiable, and sometimes the experiences narrated on these radio forums
sound like they could just be happening round the corner. Thus, whether or
not people believe the things they hear on FM radio, the immediateness of it
all as callers update the narratives in real time – as opposed to the fixed
nature of TV programs for example – might be one way of explaining their
vast appeal. There is also the thrill that individuals experience as they hear
their voices or those of their friends on air, enunciating the concept of self-
voicing for people who would otherwise never get to be heard by anyone
beyond their immediate circle of friends. In this regard an informant stated:
“one can always tell that house maids – their speech being distinctly marked
by poor grammar and enunciation – are having a field day by the excitement
in their voices as they call in to these shows between when their employers
are at work!” If this characterisation of the audience is correct, then these
shows might be said to be a space where even those barely surviving on the
social margins participate. Below are examined two ‘cases’ featured on Easy
FM’s Busted show and several mini-narratives from Classic FM – which a
majority of informants indicated listening to – in order to demonstrate the
nature of these staged narrative performances. The Busted presentations are
accusatory in nature and often elicit confessions and hence the
characterisation of them as cases; they seem geared more to accusers’
emotional relief rather than achieving a ‘reasonable’ resolution. An informant
stated that Busted might even be taken as a downgraded radio version of the
USA’s Jerry Springer TV Show. Informant responses have been used as a
means to establishing how multiple narration works in the construction of
these FM radio performances.
The agonised exclamation “Na hawa watu lazima wakuwe serious. Ai,
we” indexes the ‘provincialism’ of Mwalimu King’ang’i, a city greenhorn
who is constantly perplexed by the ways of the city as indicated by his
signature ‘village’ interjection ‘Ai we!’ But it is also necessary to note that
his bemused injunction for listeners to get serious is also a “key” (Goffman)
offered to guide audience interaction; he lets listeners know that he does not
take them, and by extension their “talk” too seriously. The possibility that
nothing on this show is to be taken too seriously is raised by the irony raised
by King’ang’i’s first name Mwalimu—Kiswahili title for ‘teacher’—even
though his opinions almost always sound thoroughly unschooled. This irony
and the general playfulness of King’ang’i and Maina’s conversation set the
ground for the staged euphemistically-coded verbal free-for all that follows
on the show. Linguistic excess (insults, obscenity and general lack of taste)
and the laughter that this often occasions is both a function of and a condition
for grotesquerie 11 – of which vulgarity, such as is heard on Classic FM, is
part—and this in turn enables the disinhibition of individuals. Once this
modus operandi has been established it becomes apparent to listeners that the
show is open to fantasy, and this might explain why, even though they are
crafted around probable happenings, the narratives are also largely taken as
hyperboles about life.
That listeners suspect these performances to be staged is illustrated by the
following informant response:
My favorite call-in show is Busted which seeks to catch cheating partners with their pants
down, literally. It follows the same script where a distressed woman suspects that her
husband or boyfriend is cheating on her and wants him busted [exposed] calls the radio
station. Ciku [the presenter] calls the culprit, pretends to have some ‘hot’ date for the man
and his chick which usually he falls for. When the partner who has been listening in
11
See Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World for a discussion of grotesque as social commentary.
interrupts, and confronts him, he is remorseful etc. I will not pick any particular incident.
What has struck me about these Busted sessions is that for the past 3 years, the script is
always the same, where men are ever being busted and they seem to have no clue. Oh, yeah,
and no matter how enraged the woman is, she always takes the man back later. The question
is, are Kenyan men so foolishly clueless and women so vulnerable and hopelessly naïve as
to keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Or is it the case of a carefully
scripted talk show as I am tempted to think? That is what jazzes [fascinates] me. (Emphasis
added)
According to this informant these confrontational narratives, part confession

and part accusation, follow a pattern; it does not much matter what the
specifics of the one that is aired are as the results are predictably the same.
Men are “clueless culprits” and women the persecuted “victims”; there is
never a variation from this villain-victim pairing. The suspicion that these are
normally staged performances is seen from another informant’s response
about the Classic FM show: “a couple of staged Classic workers are usually
called (rather than them calling in) to air already-agreed upon ridiculous
views.” Indeed, if a caller offers a story that sticks to the normative and does
not veer off towards aberrance, they will be dismissed by Maina’s telling icy
monotone: “Ok,” “Let’s hear from another caller” or simply “thank you.” On
the other hand, if the story has a salacious angle, he will interject by
exclaiming excitedly in various languages; “O-o-h m-y-y G-o-d!”, “Ati!”
(Gikuyu), “Haki ya mungu!” (Kiswahili). Thus over time listeners have
become aware of the staged element, and no matter the gravity of what they
have to say they know that lighthearted, uninhibited talk is the key to
participation in these shows.
There is also a general consensus amongst informants that these shows
are age-targeted, with the “sleazy” morning shows attracting the youth:
I don’t know of a serious 35-70 year old who bothers to call in to the breakfast
social/lifestyle call-in shows. In any event most of those in that group are too busy earning
their keep to bother ringing pseudo-psychologists with their views of our social malaise. On
the other hand the political talk shows in the evenings are the preserve of retirees. Everyone
else is unwinding from the rigors of the day, doing homework with kids, cooking, having a
beer with buddies or reading the paper as they wait for dinner/to fall asleep.
If this age categorisation is correct then these shows are a lens with which
might be viewed a critical social dynamic which is the cause of much anxiety
in Kenya; the vast numbers of jobless youth who, on account of the fact that
they have neither meaningful occupations nor incomes, are unable to either
play social roles like parenting or even partake of the mundane pleasures of
everyday life like buying a newspaper or sitting down for a drink with
friends. Instead for such youth the radio talk show becomes their virtual
communion point. And given that the presenters are aware of or they can at
least surmise the sociological characteristics of their listeners, it seems hardly
surprising that, in the words of an informant who listens to Classic FM radio
on his way to and from work, “they tend to concentrate too much on the
lower parts of the body morphology about which they make sorts of weird
discussions.” Indeed, out of twenty one responses in which informants had
been asked to recall a presentation from their favourite shows, only two
respondents cited examples from Busted while the rest referred to Classic but
without exception, all of their responses were about a sex/sexuality topic.
Whereas sexuality has always been a concern in society, in the past it has
been a taboo topic on radio and the fact that it is now being talked about more
openly might be taken not necessarily as a moment of disinhibition but more
critically as recognition that gender power is intricately woven into sexuality.
The need to “discuss” gender matters on radio is more acutely felt by
individuals who have few other public spaces, if any, upon which to express
their ideas.
At another level that these shows are understood as “scripted talk” does
not necessarily mean the situations they present could never happen—they
are as probable as other forms of creative fiction that people engage with in
other spheres. Like other fictional presentations these scripts too have a moral
embedded to them; the more socially-respectable the male villain is the
higher the emotional drama and the consequent “fall.” This might be seen in
the following accusatory narrative on Busted:
I recall one show way back in 2007 which featured a cheating Catholic priest. The poor man
was put on air to be asked whether he believed in the sanctity of priestly vows, the sacred
rite of confession and the role-model status of a Catholic priest. On his part he was
guardedly telling Ciku to come over to his parish where they could meet and discuss these
issues all the while not knowing that a) he was on air to the whole nation and b) that his girl
had been on air before him confessing to an affair with him, her pregnancy and his advice
that she abort shortly before he abandoned her. I arrived at my destination before I got to
hear the part where Ciku put the girl back on air to confront the amorous priest.
Important as the issues of sexuality raised here are, the narrative goes beyond
the “shocking” revelations a church man’s randy escapades to point to the
moral crises of facing mainstream society’s values. The critique is directed at
obvious double standards, and often total irrelevance of some of religion’s
edicts to adherents; the hypocrisy of church leaders constantly comes up in
Kenyans’ moral economy. In a related context dilemmas that individuals face
when they follow religion uncritically have been a subject of the Classic
show. For example in mid-2008 a woman called in asking for “advice” on

what to do with regard to a pregnancy for which she claimed her biological
son, in his thirties, was responsible. A “mama’s boy,” he used lived to live in
the mother’s house. He is alleged to have drugged her drink after which he
raped her. He then cleaned her up and put her to bed and when she regained
consciousness the following morning she had no recollection of the previous
night’s happenings and she suspected nothing untoward since she was in her
own bed anyway. She only learnt of her pregnancy when she went to consult
her gynecologist over her missed periods. Being born again, she claimed that
she had not sexual partner and therefore the finger of blame was pointed at
her son. The mother’s Christian faith, she stated, did not allow her to undergo
an abortion yet even to her it was clear that having to give birth to and to
raise a child sired by her own son is an abomination. Again, religion here is
presented as a hindrance to making pragmatic choices in life because it is not
attuned to believers’ material realities. At a more social level, the woman
does not question the wisdom or lack of it in housing and providing for a 30-
year old son who ordinarily would be expected to be independent. Be that as
it may this narrative – as callers’ responses indicated – speaks to the rampant
social problem of incest.
One of the curious contradictions of Kenyan law is that whereas it
expressly defines incest as a crime, rarely is it punished mainly because it is
rarely reported but also because such incidents are often ‘settled out of court’
with the women and girls in question persuaded by elders and family
members to hush up matters. Whereas the latter method might be families’
way of avoiding further shame that would follow from publicly exposing
incest – the women’s humiliation is disregarded in favour of social peace – it
also means that both women and men who disagree with these indignities
have few forums where they can ventilate about this form of gender abuse.
Like all questions of sexuality, this one too almost always leads to a
discourse on gender power. Two incidents might be used to demonstrate this
point. An informant reports:
The topic that day was about the incest that is happening among Gikuyu families in
Kawangware and Riruta Satellite [Nairobi suburbs]. This young girl had gone to inform her
married older sister that their dad wanted to have sex with her. She had refused and instead
reasoned that informing her sister about the problem was the most appropriate thing to do.
She was shocked to learn from the elder sibling that the father had had sex with all the
daughters in the family. Of course there were many calls coming in condemning such
practice as the height of incest and breakdown in social values. Several people however said
that this has been happening routinely as a form of ritual sex that guarantees the girls a land
inheritance from their father. It was alleged that this is the reason why Gikuyu women from
those areas always find a reason to visit their paternal homes every once in a while despite
their being married. The sad bit about it is that there have been deaths associated with fights
over property since the boys do not see how their parents can endow an inheritance to these
married women. On their part women have been known to organize for the killing of their
brothers for refusing to allow the girls to inherit their father’s property. There is quite enmity
between female and male siblings around Kawangware.
It is instructive that people are even willing to invent rituals that contravene
one of a community’s most sacred ethical norms in order to explain away
particular social phenomena; in Gikuyu culture there has never been such a
thing as ritual incest. Indeed, incest of any nature between close blood
relatives was outlawed (Kenyatta 35) but then if this new ritual exists it
demonstrates how radically change has impacted upon social ethics. On the
other had whether it is true or not that the murders alluded to are as a result of
sibling rivalry over land inheritance, what seems clear enough is that land,
the principal means of economic production in Kenya, is a major point of
conflict. But it is also true that Kawangware and Riruta Satellite are densely
populated low income peri-urban neighbourhood where crime (rape, murder,
robberies and illegal brewing of cheap alcohol, chang’aa) is rampant. The
houses are tiny and closely packed together thus creating a cover under which
things like incest can easily happen within the family set-up; husbands
sleeping with domestic servants is another topic that has been repeatedly
narrated on Classic FM radio. In a process of “inverted projection” whereby
victims are given negative attributes in order to justify whatever negative
treatment is meted out to them by aggressors (Dundes, From Game to War),
city residents explain away the various social phenomena by blaming ‘the
breakdown in social values’ on women. This is certainly made even clearer in
the second narrative on incest.
Sometimes in 2008, a caller stated that men should be wary of Kiambu
girls, especially the ones who apparently are “doing well. Have you ever
wondered how come nearly all the girls from near Kiambu town drive
expensive cars and live in their own houses on their fathers’ compounds?
Those are daddy’s girls and do not even bother asking to marry them. Their
fathers build them houses and buy them these cars in return for sleeping with
them.” While male callers predictably castigated the practice as immoral, a
few ladies who called even claimed to be involved in such relationships with
their fathers, with one of them remarking “after all, my dad is a man like any
other and in any case he is the best man I know having seen him all my life
so why should I give my body to some other man that I don’t know? He takes
care of all my needs anyway!” It was illustrative that male callers blamed the
women for not keeping the requisite social distance from their fathers, and
the unstated position seemed to be that the latter might not really be to blame
since they supposedly did not court the temptation and that it was visited
upon them. Again, if these claims are to be believed, two key issues emerge
from them; first is the normative position according to which women are
viewed as breaching social norms and, secondly, the underlying issue that
such a breach masks. In the latter case, the real concern for these men is
rooted in the fact that Kiambu women own (expensive) cars and houses, two
of the most central signifiers of male status in Kenya; it is also true that
perhaps on account of their father’s set of contacts these women are
connected to vast business networks and hence their material prosperity. If
the men do not command similar wealth, then naturally this will cause them
to be wary of such women. Marrying such independent women obviously
means that the men would have to live under their terms – contemptuously
known in Kiswahili as kukaliwa, “to be sat on” – something that does not sit
well with men in cultures where they consider themselves generally as the
real owners of wealth. This in turn has spawned the common stereotype that
Kiambu women are “not suitable for marriage.” It is further claimed that the
real reason fathers ask for astronomical bride-wealth figures for their
daughters is to make it impossible for any prospective suitors to marry their
daughters and thus ensuring continuity of their hanky-panky. However, it is
necessary to note that Kiambu occupies a special place in Kenyan politics as
the home of the so-called “Kiambu Mafia,” a group of fabulously wealthy
men who were close to then-president Jomo Kenyatta and who in popular
stereotypes are infamous for their arrogance and for their pursuit of both
power and their enemies with singular ruthlessness. It seems natural then for
less-prosperous men such as those who call in to the show to try and get back
at the wealthy men by besmirching their daughters’ character.
The tensions between poor(er) men and richer women are played out in a
related presentation reported from January 2009. A woman called in to say
that because her salary stands at a million Kenya shillings per month, she
cannot stand “lazy men” and consequently she had found it impossible to a
male partner. Apparently stung by the allegation that they earned less money
(if at all) due to laziness, the men who called said it was not possible for “a
woman to be earning that kind of a salary” or that she must have slept with a
man in order to get to such a highly-paying job, if it was true in the first place
that she earned such a salary. Whether this story is true or not, it can be used
to gauge the contemporary “backlash” against women (Faludi) in which men
blame their own lack of social mobility on women who have made concrete
social and material gains. Ultimately, anxieties over access to and control
over material resources are woven into the local folklore that informs the
construction and “discussion” FM radio narratives. These might then be seen
as attempts to interrogate some of the more unsettling social-economic

realities in modern Kenya which, as we have seen relate to both power and
identity.
At other times in order to spice their staged performances studio
presenters also adapt popular culture texts from other spaces. An informant
reported the following narrative about the February 6 2009 Classic FM
breakfast show:
Maina was doubtlessly inspired by Millie Jackson’s 1984 remake of Luther Ingram’s 1974 If
Loving You is Wrong when he invited all mistresses to call in and confirm that Christmas is
indeed the worst time of year for them as “their” men run off to enjoy festivities with their
families and leave their mistresses stewing in the pain of abandonment for days on end!
Maina asked the mistresses to call and share stories of how they overcame those boring
days. For my son and I listening to the show, the gem came from a 25 year old man who
called to say his “mama” [woman] had left him at her house as she went back home to her
husband for the holidays and he spent the lonely days indoors until she returned on 2nd
January 2009. In typical fashion Mwalimu King’ang’i intoned in his Kikamba-accented
Kiswahili: “ati ukakaa hapo ndeee kama muti ya stima? Endelea kutembea na huyo mama
wa 45 years na uta zeeka kama mujinga!” [so you just sat there idly like an electricity pole?
You continue moving with that 45 year-old woman and you will age like a fool]. But what
my son and I wanted to know was what does the word “mistress” mean? Back you have to
admit that our male mistress succeeded in turning the show on its head which was why
Maina rang him in the first place!
However, the persona in Jackson’s song is a married man who acknowledges

that he has a wife and children waiting for him. In the above instance, the
man has no family, meaning that unlike the other man his dalliance with the
older woman might not necessarily be driven by the search for sexual thrills
as an escape from the routine of marriage. Though he could be getting some
emotional succor out of the ‘relationship’, in a society where unions between
older women and younger men are generally frowned upon as was
demonstrated by the public invective occasioned by 67-year old Wambui-
Otieno’s marriage to 25-year-old Mbugua in 2003 (see Wa Mureithi, “Kenya
Split by Wedding”), the callers expected a real reason why the young man
would willingly subject himself to such a situation. What is most instructive
about this story is that it points to the broader emergent phenomenon of “toy
boys” and the role reversals where men become dependent on women for
material provisions. In his own admission, the young man in the story above
is the “kept” partner – he is living in her house – a role that has hitherto been
thought of as belonging solely to women. Incidentally it is a common-enough
practice around the tourist towns of Mombasa and Malindi to find young
local married men who, as legitimate forms of income-earning, provide
sexual services to other women with the full knowledge of their wives (see
also Musila 128, n.14). As a look at any Soulmates column in the Saturday
Nation Magazine might reveal, young men are increasingly turning to older
women (married or single) for material sustenance; those who advertise for
“soulmates” are usually unemployed but at any rate they explicitly state that
they expect the women to be financially-secure. This suggests that they
expect some form of compensation for supplying “companionship.” The
following two entries from the Saturday Nation October 31 2008 amply
demonstrate this conclusion.
I am a 26-year-old Luo man staying in Nairobi’s Eastlands and currently unemployed but a
college leaver. I am medium in looks and looking for a lady for love, romance and good
times. The lady should be of any race and not more than 45 years, must be financially-stable,
medium to big body size and preferably staying in Nairobi. Must be ready to start
immediately. If interested sms only to 0715647009.
I’m Richie, 25, from Mombasa - a romantic, charming man looking for a financially-stable
older woman for a romantic or secret relationship. Age, race or tribe no issue. For more, call
0735972904. (Original emphasis)
The fact that these advertisements for “romantic relationships” are framed in
the manner of job descriptions makes it clear that the men in question see
themselves as “service providers” of sorts (permanent callboys) and the
invocation of the word romance is merely a cover for other kinds of
anticipated negotiations. Whatever the case, the rampant joblessness amongst
Kenya’s youth seems to suggest that there are many more men who are likely
to be caught up in similar role reversals such as are suggested by the FM
radio shows.
In this regard, it is necessary to point out that young women are also
caught up in unusual dilemmas. Where for instance it is generally accepted
that men often actively seek out multiple female sexual partners – whether
within the set up of socially recognised polygamous practice or in the more
rampant mistress and concubinage cultures – women too are now assuming
the agency for seeking out men for whatever goals they might have in mind.
In this case, the men happen to be their girlfriends’ boyfriends as the
following narrative illustrates.
Sometimes in mid-2008, Maina asked ladies whether they share men and whether they are
happy to do it. I was surprised that many ladies called in, declaring they do it, willingly and
happily, and that they admire their lady friend’s boyfriend and go ahead to sleep with them
if they get a chance. Many lady callers said they actually know who the other lady friends of
their boyfriends are but they don’t mind provided they get their share of love. I was really
surprised that it can happen. I wondered whether this is acceptance or “refusal to die” of the
African polygamous culture which I thought was dead in our emerging modernity but which
seems to be unconsciously or consciously rampant among the youth in our society.

(Emphasis added)
This pre-marital sharing of men cannot strictly speaking be called polygamy

because marriage is not involved. However, what is interesting is that women
clearly have the option of looking for their own boyfriends choose not to do
so and instead pursue relationships with those men who are already “taken.”
Informants explained this issue on the basis of economics: ostensibly there
are not enough “good” single working men to go around. Thus where the
religiously inclined are tempted to object to the boyfriend-sharing practice,
the women involved will argue that in fact such acts are an expression of
their “liberated modernity.” This then might indicate, as does the informant
above, that young women are consciously on the look-out for values and
practices that the mainstream might disapprove (on the basis of religion
and/or “modernity”) which they then rework to pragmatically address their
needs. Modernity here takes an intriguing character when its very
composition is forged out of supposedly “dead” local practices, calling to
question the very assumption made by mainstream society (church,
government and the school system for example) that to be modern
necessarily means to part with particular local traditions, or that the young
always want to distance themselves from the old. These are the very
complexities of life in contemporary Kenya that FM radio shows bring into
the public domain where they might then be debated. Ultimately, even if
studio presenters are deemed to be “pseudo-psychologists” it might still be
argued that the mini-narratives they present – or whose emergence they
facilitate to be emerge through collaborative telling – mask deeper socio-
cultural realities about Kenya and especially about urban culture.
Conclusion: The Moral in the Story of and for Contemporary

Kenyan Folkloristics
This paper set out to examine the nature of oral performances on the FM
radio contemporary Kenya beginning and it began with a review of some
conceptual issues in Kenyan folkloristics. It has been argued that part of the
reason that a rethinking of these issues is necessary has to do with the fact
that there have been radical shifts in the field since the 1970s. It has been
argued that folkloristics theory and praxis needs to be re-oriented to cater for
cultural productions that result from the vast socio-economic changes that
have occurred particularly over the last fifteen years since the advent of FM
radio but also in the long term since the beginnings of the interaction between
locals and the mass media. Arising from the discussion of the data a number
of conclusions might be drawn. The folkloric performances that have
emerged on FM radio are a function of the result of the frenetic lifestyles into
which Kenyans have been ushered as they go about the regular business of
contemporary existence. For instance all sources indicated that they listen(ed)
to the radio shows commuting between places or even working out at the
gym; no one indicated that they ever purposively sit down to listen to these
shows. At any rate, given the nature of urban life, where and when can it
ever be logistically possible to gather a group of Kenyans for them to “just to
tell stories”? This demonstrates a sociological fact that might be useful to an
understanding of the transformation of folklore practices particularly in
Nairobi, and perhaps other urban centres as well. Increasingly people’s
lifestyles do not allow them to merely engage in leisurely contemplation of or
participation in folklore say by dedicating a whole day or a few hours to these
kinds of performances. Where traditionally people might have gathered to
participate in specific forms of folklore performances and where stylistic
formulae would even be deployed to alert them to the fact that a
differentiated type of social activity was underway, now individuals
participate in folkloric performances all the time – sometimes consciously, at
other times not-so consciously. As such folklore is seamlessly ingrained into
acts of ordinary life – a matatu ride, driving to work, having a drink at the
beer lounge – in a manner that even participants take for granted. Every
minute is a folkloric moment and one cannot meaningfully set apart folklore
from the business of life itself. This then might lead us to another issue – that
of structure.
How might the narratives’ structure, as “observed-heard” on these radio
shows, be described? To answer this question necessitates thinking about the
term narrator. Whereas more usually within traditional modes of folklore a
performer’s role is conceptualised as that of a single dominating narrator the
nature of FM shows is such that we can only think of multiple narrators. The
stories that callers recount are only loosely tied to those of other callers
(whose identity thus oscillates between audience and performer) by an idea
and not by any binding or discernible plot. As such callers’ accounts are
mini-narratives, clips of larger stories that may or may never have happened.
In the case of Classic the two studio presenters and their oppositional
commentary add to the narration another dimension – that of interested
observers whose duty is to evaluate, chide or support callers/participants.
Even though what each participant’s contribution matters not all of it bears or
is given the same weight by other commentator-narrators in their overall
interpretation of these performances; the scandal and excess wired into them
is a structural device meant to make them vivid and therefore memorable.
Therefore it seems possible to think about FM radio narratives as loosely-
tied, collectively narrated-discussed self-performances mediated by
technology. In this case it is no longer possible to talk about an ‘oral’ culture
per se but more meaningfully we might talk about its auditised agency –
through the cell phone and the radio – without which this particular kind of
cultural performance cannot take place. And whereas these accounts might be
linked by a broad theme they could have as many morals as there are mini-
narratives. This then suggests that the overall performance will be as complex
and as layered as the totality of callers’ social experiences.
In a related sense participation in FM talk shows seems to be structured
around two main characteristics: age and class. Older working class people
rarely call in to these shows; the majority of callers are young(er) people,
many of them unemployed and a vast number being in low-paying informal
jobs. However, the fact that the older generation does not call in does not
mean they do not listen to these shows. They also happen to be part of the
middle class that drives to work or performs works at the gym while through
listening they voyeuristically participate in the world of ‘those crazy others’
as an informant put it. This seems to indicate that whereas the social
happenings (real or imagined) that are the spine of these shows affect the
whole society, the youth are more eager to experiment with new ways of
representing their experiences than older Kenyans who often tend to fall back
to the idea of taste – the socially appropriate – in their characterisation of
these shows as “debased,” “madness,” “nonsense” and “pornography.” This
need not surprise as it is the same epithets that are routinely hurled at Kenyan
youth culture generally; the incomprehensibility of banality can be a source
of deep anguish for members of mainstream society. However whether or not
one agrees with the content and particular expressive style of FM radio
narratives, the fact is that they have evolved into a key aspect of youth
culture an examination of which might enable a window into the world of
contemporary Kenyan youth. If anything is to be learnt from the many
studies of subcultures worldwide – from the punks and the mods to rappers
and graffiti artists (see among others Hebdige, 1979; Rose, 1994; Ross and
Rose, 1994; MacDonald, 2002) – then it is that mainstream society’s wishes
for members of a subculture to restrain their rhetorical expression – somatic
and verbal – are futile. Defiance of societal constraint is core to the politics of
all subcultures, and Nairobi FM culture is not and logically cannot be
different. After all as vernacular expression folklore contests, or is at least
placed in oppositional terms to, institutionalised truths as contained in
mainstream narratives whose restrained language is a core aspect of the ways

in which the dominant culture seeks to determine what constitutes acceptable
representational strategies. What ought to concern critics, beyond the matter
of its rhetoric, is FM radio culture’s politics, the underlying social issues and
anxieties that it points to; no matter the language used in evaluating them
these remain unalterable material realities. At the same time it is necessary to
be avoid drawing too rigid a line separating urban and rural spaces since
some of the realities upon which these radio shows dwell (sexuality,
violence, ‘kept’ men and joblessness for instance) are evident in the rural
countryside too. More usefully one might show how the FM radio
phenomenon generally highlights socio-economic changes that are common
to Kenya but which have impacted upon individuals’ sense of being with
differentiated outcomes. This might then make it possible to tease out
particular factors responsible for differences for example in youth identities
in different parts of the country.
Ultimately it needs be stated that students of Kenyan folklore have the
responsibility of ploughing the field beyond where the local pioneers of the
discipline left off. For instance, while many students will recite the popular
definition of “oral literature” as encompassing all the regular activities that
people engage in during the course of everyday life including jokes, gestures
and insults (Lo Liyong, “Introduction”), serious thought does not seem to
have been applied to the import of Lo Liyong’s delineation of folklore. If this
had been the case, it would not have taken close to four decades before
seeing at Kenyan universities’ literature departments the first trickle of post-
graduate work in non-canonical fields of folklore. 12 On the one hand Lo
Liyong was implicitly pointing to possible folklore forms and sub-genres that
might be interrogated off the beaten path and on the other his definition
included the rubrics that might have been used to chart new fieldwork spaces.
He probably was also the first to conceptualise East African folklore as
popular culture, a connection that has taken unusually long to take root in
folkloristics. It therefore need not surprise for instance that even years after
the publication of the edited volume Readings in African Popular Culture
(Barber) – the introduction and essays suggest frameworks that enable the
interrogation of a broad range of popular arts in Africa – the connections
12
When in April 2000 a PhD proposal on the study of matatu folklore was presented to the
literature department at a local university, it was tossed out with the injunction that it could
only be studied “perhaps in a hundred years at a sociology, anthropology or history
department.” Since then a few M.A and PhD students at Kenyatta University have over the
last few years successfully undertaken the study of contemporary local popular music as
well as rap and hip hop culture.
between diverse spaces of popular culture of which folklore is a key part are,
still, hardly appreciated. In this case it might even be argued that for a long
time now a singular failure of Kenyan folkloristics has been one of a reticent
imagination and perhaps an unwillingness to experiment with data that might
lead to the reformulation of old(er) concepts. A radical rethinking of the
traditional parameters according to which folkloristics genres have hitherto
been categorised and understood is required if we are going to study
meaningfully emergent genres. These things are possible. For instance
fieldwork for this paper was carried out largely in cyberspace. Sources, all
Kenyan, were scattered far afield across three continents in Kenya, Uganda,
Tanzania, South Africa, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA; they were not
known to each other but they have a shared tradition of listening to FM radio
call-in shows. This, in short, is the virtual field where members have no
physical ties and they are not even aware that they constitute a “community.”
However analytically it is possible to see that in fact they are a folk group. As
for the insistence on the need for visuality in folkloric communication,
Youtube.com, Myspace and Facebook offer a vast fieldwork resource. Overall
it is hoped that the kind of interrogation done here demonstrates at least in a
preliminary sense some conceptual and methodological turns that might be of
use in the study of Kenyan folklore.
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Michael Wainaina
Empire Speaks Back: Authenticity, Folk Voices and

Re-Presentation of Across in Gikuyu Radio Narratives
Introduction
Cognizant of the dominant stereotypical image of Africa in Western writing;

in appreciation of the fact that stereotyping of difference works both ways;
being critical of the capacity of canonised African literature to capture
authentic voices of the folk as they speak back to the West; recognising the
power of radio in its reinforcement of oracy and representation of a folk-
centred world view; I proceed to analyse radio narratives from Kameme Kayũ
Ka Mũingĩ (The Voice of the People Radio) an independent community-
oriented radio station in Nairobi Kenya that broadcasts in Gĩkũyũ to answer
the question: “What are the contemporary representations of across, going
across and engaging with those from across 1 in relation to transgression of
geographical and cultural borders by Gĩkũyũ folk?” The analysis shows
that the folk create their own image of across and the crossing of borders in
characterising the relationship between themselves and the West. They not
only speak back to the stereotypes of the West about Africa, but they also
create their own stereotypes in return. They characterise those from across as
odd and gullible. They freely suspend the moral rules of engagement that
they use with their own, evaluate their relationship with the West on largely
economic terms and take no moral responsibility in engaging with those from
across in extortionist and depraved terms .The dominant stereotypical image
of Africa in Western thought and the equally stereotypical responses by the
folk in engaging with Westerners indicates that there does not seem to be a
mutually affirming discourse between the two cultures.
1
The word for “abroad” or “overseas” especially in relation to Europe and America in
Gĩkũyũ language is Mũrĩmo meaning “across.”
348 Michael Wainaina
The Imperials Write Africa
In Western writing and thought Africa has remained the strange other, the
resource and now, the market and experimental laboratory of Western
technology (Abubakar). Africa has been a representational narrative subject
or “object-being” since antiquity.
This stereotypical approach to writing Africa characterised the
demarcations of Africa versus the West through the medieval context –
where the relationship was represented by Pagan versus Christian
dichotomies; to the renaissance – where the relationship was represented by
malformation versus perfection dichotomies; to the enlightenment and post-
enlightenment periods – where the relationship was characterised by the
racial inferiority versus superiority dichotomies; to the post colonial era
where Africa is not only the ancestral home of humankind but also the centre
of today’s tensions, civil wars, dislocations, and genocides. It is instructive to
note that the rhetorics and discourses of “African otherness” have survived
African decolonisation. But the Empire is writing back!
The Empire Writes Back
A body of post-colonial studies of literary responses to the writing of Africa

by the West has gained currency over the last few decades. My concern in
this paper emanates from a discomfiture with the fact of “writing” in relation
to the problem of representation and the language of African literature.
The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing
defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully
adapted to the colonized place. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 37; emphasis added).
My contention is that this emphasis on writing is overstated because African

communities are largely oral and are fairly still attached to their vernaculars.
Therefore “post colonial writing” represents only a part of the body of
cultural production of African cultures. Given the relatively low literacy rates
in Africa, this writing circulates within a minority who can read and write
and those who are comfortable with foreign languages. Unfortunately,
postcolonial theorising in and about Africa especially on literary forms has
tended to privilege this canonised written literature and place it at the centre
of the so called African literatures. This form has a big dilemma arising from
its definitional crisis in trying to “(seize) the language of the centre and
replacing it in a discourse [supposedly] fully adapted to the colonized place.”
Empire Speaks Back 349
The grip of European languages on “African literature” is so enmeshed in

the colonial process and product so as to create a big dilemma as to whether
the concept of African literature in colonial languages is tenable. Ngugi Wa
Thiongo tenuously discusses this dilemma in Decolonising the Mind. He
decries at length the assault of African Literature by European languages
under the misguided pursuits of elitist pioneer African writers who were part
of an emerging and alienated petty-bourgeoisie class. This class was equally
a product of the colonial education system which had deliberately taught
them to look down on their own languages. His argument is that this class
essentialised their alienated state as “the state of the African,” and thus
legitimised their conception of African literature in European languages. This
class:
spoke as if its (alienated) identity was that of society as a whole. The literature it produced
in European languages was given the identity of African literature as if there had never been
literature in African Languages. Yet by avoiding a real confrontation with the language
issue, it was clearly wearing false robes of identity: It was a pretender to the throne of the
mainstream African literature. (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 22)
The in-authenticity of this literature in portraying realistic African experience

is emphasised by the fact that written literature in English, “falsely and even
absurdly created an English speaking African peasantry and working class, a
clear negation or falsification of the historical process” (22).
Arising from the above, in writing about the transgressions, disruptions
and or redrawing of borders and notions of border crossings within literary
forms of cultural production, I am compelled by the absurdities of African
literatures written in European languages to seek for authentic peasantry or
folk voices. The folk voices must be sought from among the people and must
be delivered in the language of the people. In extending his argument on the
use of European languages in African literature, Ngugi remarks:
African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the
fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify and argue about the (sic) international
conferences. These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the
peasantry. (23)
The Empire Speaks Back
Using their own languages, this peasantry has created their own view of the
West with its attendant identities, relationships, borders and their
transgressions. I seek to investigate how they construct, deconstruct and
reconstruct identities as they characterise and interpret the actions,

motivations and consequences of crossing borders by way of Westerners
coming within their geographical boundaries and also in the case of one of
their own crossing borders to the West.
In investigating the contemporary representations, I explore the folk
voices through radio narratives. The focus on the radio here is by no means
fortuitous and I should turn to the subject of radio briefly in order to
contextualise its usefulness in the foregrounding of authentic folk voices.
Subversions of the Medium: Why Radio?
According to Daloz and Verrier-Frechette:
radio is rightly acknowledged as the crucial medium of mass communication in sub-Saharan

Africa: both more widespread than television and more accessible than newspapers. Its
omnipresence in everyday life, whether in rural or urban settings explains its strategic
importance as a means of communication. (Qtd. in Furdon and Furniss 180)
The authors underscore the importance of radio as a crucial medium of mass

communication in sub-Sahara Africa. I have elected to focus on the radio, not
only because of its importance as cited above but also because of its close
relationship to the colonial and post-colonial developments in African
history.
Radio was first seen as a means for settlers and colonial civil servants to
keep in touch with African cities and the world outside Africa. It later served
the needs of a small African elite. Britain introduced state radio services in
Kenya as early as 1927 (Spitulnik). Radio’s potential role in informing (and
misinforming?) the masses has been the driving force of the successive
policies adopted by different regimes in Kenya. From its advent in the 1920s,
colonial authorities held inflated and often racist views of the ‘subversive’
impact of African exposure to radio and other mass media (Zaffiro). Such
were further given impetus by the propaganda legacy of WWII and further
strengthened by the hostile anti-communist strains of the early cold war
years. The rise of serious African nationalist challenges to colonial
domination after WWII set the stage for extensive heavy handed and
generally unsuccessful colonial information ‘management’ policies. Notably,
colonial Britain was generally more credulous than other European colonial
powers as it drew from extensive wartime propaganda experience to develop,
use and tightly control radio, newspapers and film to fashion post war
(mis)information policies for its African territories, one of which was Kenya.
Ownership and control of radio and regulatory mechanisms were

inherited by the new states following independence and with the exception of
a few religious radio services, it was not until the 1990s that commercial
radio and deregulated public service parastatal radio services appeared in
Africa and most specifically in Kenya. In line with the colonial objectives of
radio, African leaders have viewed radio as a powerful tool for ‘national
integration,’ ‘development’ and maintaining themselves in power. With the
former two platitudes and the later aim, highly centralised state broadcast
monopolies could be justified. The history of radio can thus be described
with among many others words, as ‘highly controlled’ with the aim of
subjugating the masses through a top-bottom (mis)information structure that
imposes itself on truly people driven and relevant content and values.
In Kenya, the situation has changed over the last few years with the entry
into the electronic media market of independent, indigenous investment in
broadcasting. This has seen unprecedented growth of FM stations some of
which broadcast in vernacular. This is a phenomenal development for
contemporary narrative since radio reinforces oracy, the dominant form of
African composition and performance, and a counter-balance to the Euro-
African versions of African literature in foreign languages as discussed
above. Thus, the establishment of vernacular radio stations means that we can
now hear “authentic” folk voices, disencumbered from the need to translate
authentic cultural voices into a foreign language. The folk are thus able to use
and subvert the controlled and exclusive medium of radio to present their
own experiences, as opposed to that of the coloniser or the equally oppressive
post-colonial African regimes. This access equally subverts the notion of
perceived cultural superiority of foreign languages by presenting folk
experiences in indigenous languages through oracy, a decidedly indigenous
mode of narrative production.
The radio offers wide reach, provides space for indigenous language and
re-emphasises oracy. For the folk, it provides the platform for authenticating
cultural experience through indigenous language and the power to name and
affirm themselves and their own experiences and world view. Radio
reinstates the folk’s power to express themselves and with this reinstatement
the folk is ready to speak back presenting their version of across.
We the People
In the year 2000, a Radio station was commissioned in Nairobi, Kenya. It

was named Kameme, Kayũ ka Mũingĩ, translated as “The Voice of the
People Radio” which was broadcasting in Gĩkũyũ, the language spoken by

the AGĩkũyũ of Central Kenya, the largest ethnic community in Kenya. One
of the premium programs was a narrative performance titled “Mathekania na
Mataaro ma Gĩthingithia” (MMG) interpretively translated as “The
Anecdotes of Gĩthingithia.” A more direct translation that captures the
essence of the narratives would be “The Moral Impartations and Humorous
Narrations of Gĩthingithia.” The narratives in MMG seek to create a realistic
presentation of ‘the people’ what I refer to as the ‘folk.’ In the context of
MMG, this would refer to all Gĩkũyũ speakers. The style and form MMG
however, seeks an idiosyncratic way to characterise ‘the folk,’ which I adopt
in this paper.
First, the narratives are delivered in a dialogue between two characters,
named Gĩthingithia and Njaramba. Through self-disclosure, we are able to
establish the station of life of both characters. Gĩthingithia is the narrator, the
‘owner’ of the narratives, and hence the title, “The Anecdotes of
Gĩthingithia.” He is a literate, worldly-wise, fantastic conversationalist with a
keen sense of the bizarre and the funny. He is in his late fifties or early sixties
and for a villager his age, he is quite mobile, especially in the rural-urban
circuits. He also has modest real estate investments on the outskirts of
Nairobi and an extensive social network. His mobility, rural-urban
connections, interests and his chronological age bring him in contact with a
wide range of ‘folk,’ players whom he experiences, watches, hears about,
remembers and/or imagines. Typically, these players are rural dwellers or
have active rural ties and/or belong to the urban margins.
Njaramba is Gĩthingithia’s illiterate friend, neighbour and an age-mate in
the traditional sense of the word. Though they share the same values and
worldview, Gĩthingithia is everything Njaramba is not. The latter seems to
understand that Gĩthingithia is a more worldly-wise, more experienced, better
networked peer, and holds a good deal of respect for him. In all the
narrations, he is the receiver, a fitting representation of the illiterate/semi-
literate, non-travelled rural folk.
A good descriptor of folk-lore as characterised in these narrations is the
fact that a good number of the stories revolve around clarifications of rumour
and gossip. According to Bergmann, gossip is a moral discourse about the
behaviour, social situation and character of absent known others. It is a “form
of sociable interaction which depends upon the strategic management of
information through the creation of others as ‘moral characters’ in talk”
(Yerkovich 192). As a speech act, gossip allows people the possibility to
express their communities’ values and beliefs on ideal, proper and moral
behaviour and also, with considerable force and intention, to influence proper
behaviour without risking direct confrontation. Gluckman asserts that, as

scandal, gossip functions as a system that asserts collective norms as well as
creating and maintaining strong communal bonds because the process of
gossiping creates and strengthens social ties of intimacy. For an individual,
like Githingtihia, knowing the latest gossip increases their status, reputation
and the social standing within a social network since they claim a special
access to knowledge and the privilege to speak it. Therefore we need to look
at gossip as both text and social activity.
Two definitional aspects of gossip discussed above are relevant in our
understanding of the folk in MMG. The first is gossip being “talk about
someone with someone else.” The discourse between Gĩthingithia and
Njaramba often involves people around the village or at least people known
to either or both them. In other instances, the names are given and the places
of the action of the story identified. The second aspect is that gossip “is a
moral discourse.” In fact, the program is called “mataaro,” which means
“moral impartations.” MMG as gossip creates “moral characters in talk,”
allowing Gĩthingithia and Njaramba to, “express their community’s values
and beliefs on ideal, proper and moral behavior […] and influence behavior
without risking direct confrontation” (Yerkovich 192; Peek and Yankah 152).
This latter aspect of gossip brings us to the broadcasted audience of
MMG, i.e., the audience receiving these stories over the radio. It is their
behaviour that MMG seeks to represent and influence. They thus become
players in the function of gossip “as a system that asserts collective norms as
well as creating and maintaining strong communal bonds” (Peek and Yankah
152). Njaramba and Gĩthingithia, thus become to the broadcasted audience,
not just two narrators on radio, but their ‘folks’ – neighbours – revealing the
behaviour of other ‘folks’ through gossip, which they – the broadcasted
audience – eavesdrops in. Because the audience is able to receive information
about others Gĩthingithia, the narrator of MMG, claims status, reputation, and
social standing within the broadcasted ‘folk,’ since he claims special access
to knowledge about other ‘folks,’ (named and described in the discourse),
and the privilege to speak it via radio. To the listening ‘folk,’ the moral
characters in MMG are thus people who live among ‘us.’ MMG never
discusses remote experiences from newspapers, radio, TV, books, nor
discusses remote personalities or historical figures, or scientific and
technological advances, or any other type of experiences outside the folk.
The narratives are about the folk told by the folk to the folk. They thus offer
us a very unique arena to explore representations of notions of across among
the folk through radio as contrasted to the West’s conception of the folks’
otherness as discussed above.
Oddities and Degeneration of Across
While MMG has an impressive repertoire of stories only a few feature

Western characters. This tells us that the Westerner is a rare oddity in the day
to day lives of the folk. In terms of borders, the geographical distance of the
West seems to be real in the lives of the folk and therefore when they
encounter Westerners, they stand out and their mannerisms become an object
of curiosity for the folk. Among the folk, a Westerner is referred to as
Mũthũngũ (pronounced /moðo:ngo/) a Gĩkũyũ version of the Swahili word,
mzungu referring to white people. I use the term “white people” deliberately
because in the world of the folk all white people be they Europeans,
Americans, Canadians, Australians etc., are all the same. While
geographically and culturally white people are of particular nationalities and
would refer to themselves and each other in relation to their nationalities, to
the folk they are all athũngũ (plural of Mũthũngũ). The term is loaded with
cultural connotation of difference and otherness in regard to the subject. I
will use the term in this paper, as used in the stories, to refer to any and all
Western white peoples, in line with the folk understanding of the concept.
I start by discussing two stories 2 where the folk encounter the Westerner
“across.” Our first story is Gĩthingithia Visits London. This is a travel
narrative where Gĩthingithia is relating his experiences after he had traveled
to London.
Gĩthingithia guceera London (Gĩthingithia Visits London)

Gĩthingithia goes on a trip to London. On one winter day he goes to see the Queen’s
residence at 10 Downing Street (sic). He gets hungry and goes into a restaurant to have some
food and hot coffee. As he is eating away, an elderly English couple strolls into the
restaurant and sits next to him. The man goes to the counter and orders for a single plate of
french fries and hamburger. He carries the food to where the wife is and sits down. He then
asks for an extra empty plate and divides the food into two portions and passes one portion
to the wife. Gĩthingithia thinks that they do not have enough money and they have decided
to share one plate. He walks up to them and volunteers to buy them an extra plate of food.
They politely decline the offer by saying that they have been married for over fifty years and
that they share everything.
Then, the man proceeds to eat as the wife watches. Gĩthingithia still watching and interested
thinks that the wife is not eating because the food is hot. When the man is about to finish his
food and the woman has not touched her food, Gĩthingithia walks up to the couple to enquire
on what the problem could be. The woman complains that he is really meddling into their
2
Stories discussed in this paper were accessed from Kameme Studios. They were downloaded
on CD, replayed, transcribed and translated freely. They were truncated into a synopsis as
presented in the current paper. The stories are delivered in conversation mode but the
synopsis is presented in prose for the benefit of the reader and demands on space.
affairs. She explains that she is going to eat after the husband has finished since she is
waiting for him to give him their ‘teeth’ (dentures) for her to eat the food.
Both Gĩthingithia and Njaramba are tickled by the absurdity of the couple sharing a pair of
‘teeth.’
This story illustrates the transgression of geographical and cultural

boundaries when Gĩthingithia travels to the West. When narrating his
experiences, Gĩthingithia chooses to foreground a pretty bizarre event that
portrays the English couple as an oddity. The sharing of dentures by the
couple is a strange event in the minds of the folk. It is not uncommon for
people who travel across to regale the folk back home with stories from the
other side. In such stories, it is not uncommon that incidences highlighted
foreground the odd and the unusual as in the case of this story. Often, fancy
and a sense of adventure inform these travelogues and their purpose is to
amuse, to amaze or to uplift the status of the narrator rather than to present
factual information about across. The actual facts in these stories are of
secondary importance. In this particular story, the bizarre is foregrounded at
the expense of any other “normal” experiences Gĩthingithia may have had,
reinforcing stereotypes about across by portraying it as an odd and bizarre
place.
Facts and figures are not important. One notes that Gĩthingithia claims to
have gone to the Queen’s residence at 10 Downing Street. This is factually
incorrect. The folks’ knowledge and use of such facts as to who exactly lives
in 10 Downing Street or the exact residence of the Queen is limited, for such
facts are largely unnecessary. They observe selectively, constructing their
own image of across, a process which has little regard to correctness of
places and people. The case for the scarce knowledge of such facts begs
comparison here. Often one hears the reference of Africa in the West as if the
whole continent is one country with South Africa as its capital. In one of my
own travels to Salt Lake City, Utah, I met up with an African American
young man in a train station. As we sat waiting for the train, he looked at my
shoe and retorted:
“Nice shoe!”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Where did you buy it?” he enquired.
I told him “I bought it in Nairobi, Kenya.”
The young man tried to jog his mind for a second then asked, “Where the (Expletive) is
NairobiKenya? California!” For him, Nairobi Kenya is one word and it could as well be in
California. Likewise, for the folk, 10 Downing Street is the Queen’s residence!
The folk associates some status to those who have been across. In an effort to
earn this status, those who deliver these travelogues exaggerate their
engagement with the place and the people. One sees this attempt in
Gĩthingithia’s insistence that he offered to buy food for the English couple
that came into the restaurant and was sharing one plate. As the subsequent
discussions of this paper will show, this is a deliberate subversion of the
expected relationship between the folks and the Westerner. Economic
relations between the two hardly portray the folk as the benefactor and the
Westerner as recipient. In subverting this relationship and putting himself in
the place of a benefactor, the narrator is trying to elevate his own position in
order to live up to the status ascribed to those who have been across by the
folk. The economic relations between the folk and the Westerners are of a
different kind. I proceed to illustrate these using a different story.
Mũrũ Wa Ngahũ (The Son of Ngahũ) 3

Gĩthingithia begins by informing Njaramba that the Son of Ngahũ who had gone across has
come back to the village. Njaramba responds by saying that he has heard that when his wife
had gone to visit him across, he threw her out of his house. Gĩthingithia clarifies that that
was not the case and that he knew what really happened. Njaramba asks him to narrate it for
him adding that he (Gĩthingithia) always has deeper knowledge of issues.
Gĩthingithia narrates that when the Son of Ngahũ went across, he finished his studies and
got employed. And because getting-by economically when one is across is not as easy as the
village folks think, the Son of Ngahũ moved in with a Mũthũngũ woman to boost his
economic well-being. It looked like he had been married by the Mũthũngũ woman because it
is he who took his belongings and moved into the Mũthũngũ woman’s house. This is very
disappointing to the two characters because in normal circumstances men do not get married
by women. Njaramba wonders whether the man would have any respect in the house now
that he was the one married to the woman. Gĩthingithia remarks that it is really the Son of
Ngahũ’s problem seeing that he had consciously decided to enter into such an arrangement.
Njaramba concurs.
Gĩthingithia continues to narrate that before the Son of Ngahũ went across, he had done a
wedding and promised the wife that he would arrange for her to join him soon after his
arrival there. After waiting for a long time without any effort on his part to invite her over,
she started wondering what the problem was but comforted herself that the husband was
probably too busy making money. However rumours started circulating that her husband
was married by a Mũthũngũ woman. When she heard the rumor, she wrote to her husband
and told him that it really didn’t matter whether he was married to a Mũthũngũ woman or
not, she was still his wife. Njaramba concurs that that position is tenable because she had
3
Among the folk, kinship ties are very important and often, as in this case one is referred to
by his kinship ties as opposed to their personal names. This reinforces a sense of kinship
among the folk, foregrounding the role of communal ties in individual identity and
behaviour.
been married to him and goats 4 paid for her bride price. When the man got to know that he
had been discovered he got very uneasy. However, correspondence began between him and
the wife. He informed her that he would very much want her to visit him across but it would
be dangerous especially if the Mũthũngũ woman got to know that she was his legally
wedded wife. The wife said she would like to meet him nevertheless. They agreed she could
go across but that they should tell the Mũthũngũ woman that she was his sister so that she
would actually facilitate her crossing over. Arrangements were made for her to go, and when
she arrived across, she was met by the Son of Ngahũ and his Mũthũngũ wife. They went to
the house and the “sister” was settled into a guest room. She was however very
uncomfortable and grew jealous of the Mũthũngũ woman and her relationship with her
husband. The man would occasionally sneak into the room of the “sister” at night. This
arrangement continued until one day, the Mũthũngũ wife forgot her mobile phone after
leaving the house. She came back to pick it and found her husband in a compromised
situation with his “sister.” She was shocked beyond words. The “sister” explained that they
were man and wife and that the whole arrangement was a sham. The Mũthũngũ woman was
very annoyed and kicked them both out of her house. It is after that ordeal that they came
back to the village quietly and are trying to rebuild their lives.
After the Son of Ngahũ goes across, rumours start circulating in the village
that he had entered into an illicit relationship with a Mũthũngũ woman. This
is eventually proven true and his wife comes to know of it. First, his going
across represents a temporary break from his communal and cultural ties and
structures occasioned by sheer geographical distance. These ties and
structures would have prevented him from getting into such a relationship in
the first place. One can thus say that the distance of across is not only
geographical but it is also socio-cultural and moral. With cultural ties and
moral codes of home so remote, an otherwise well respected member of the
folk suspends the cultural and moral values of his people to “get married” by
a Mũthũngũ woman. The narrator is quick to note that this arrangement on
the part of the Son of Ngahũ is for economic expediency. Economic
advantage thus becomes a major motivation in suspending all rules of moral
engagement when folks cross over. This advantage is persuasive enough
since the real wife, who had mistaken his silence for industry and enterprise
as he makes money agrees to go and live with him without the precondition
of breaking this relationship with the Mũthũngũ woman. It thus seems that
the wife’s expectation that the husband was busy making money was not at
variance with the fact of the illicit relationship. She sees the economic
advantage for both of them in his staying in the relationship, but much more
importantly, downplays the significance of the “romantic” side of the
4
Payment of goats as bride price is a necessary and sufficient requirement for a union to be
recognized as a marriage under customary law.
relationship which the Mũthũngũ woman seems to have been convinced

about.
It is instructive to note that the illicit relationship across does not
delegitimise the relationship back home. Njaramba correctly notes that the
Son of Ngahũ had paid goats as bride price and thus the local woman
remained his legal wife without regard to what he may have got himself into,
and in this case despite what the Mũthũngũ wife may have been made to
believe. The local customary system is binding and the transgressions of
across cannot break the local ties. In fact, in analysing the actions of the Son
of Ngahũ, Gĩthingithia and Njaramba agree that he was culpable but only of
neglecting his local wife, not of extortion of the Mũthũngũ woman. While
rules of engagement are suspended across for economic expediency, this does
not delegitimise local relations and one can navigate pretty effortlessly
between the two states. The fact that the Son of Ngahũ lived in the same
house with his local wife and the Mũthũngũ woman, with the consent of the
former to extort the latter, explains this navigation. It was made possible by
the fact that the rules of engagement for the couple when viewed across were
mutually inclusive, none delegitimising the other. It is however not surprising
that once the Mũthũngũ woman discovered the arrangement, her deluded life
was over. For the other couple however, they simply returned home and took
over where they had left off. This emphasis on perverted social relations,
redefined morality and value system based on economic ends is exemplified
further in situations where the Westerners come from across and engage the
folk in their home ground.
Misadventures of the Transgressing Stranger from Across
We subsequently turn to the events engendered by the Westerners coming

over and engaging the folk in their home turf. This encounter is illustrated by
two stories Ndereba Wa Mĩrũthi (The Lion Rider) and Cokora na Mũgathĩ
(The Street boy and a necklace)
Ndereba Wa Mĩrũthi (The Lion Rider)

Njaramba seeks clarification on the puzzling development where the Son of Kagwai has
built an expensive stone house. The young man earns a living doing petty menial jobs in the
village, earning peanuts. “How then was he able to build a brick house?” Njaramba enquires.
Gĩthingithia explains that, tired of the menial jobs he was doing in the village, Kagwai’s son
decided to try his luck poaching in the game park. He prayed to God that when he goes
poaching he meets elephants and rhinos and not dangerous animals like lions, leopards and
snakes. As fate would have it, when he went to the game park, the first animal he encounters
was a hungry lion. When the lion charged, the youngman climbed a tree. The lion lay at the
bottom of the tree in wait for the youngman to come down. With time both the lion and the
youngman fell asleep. The youngman let go of the branch on which he was resting and he
fell on the lion. The lion was startled by the youngman on its back. The youngman held onto
its tail and the lion started moving in circles trying to get hold of the youngman on its back.
Some Western tourists happened to be nearby and saw the commotion of the youngman
riding on the back of a lion. They started taking video clips of the extremely exciting scene.
In due course, the youngman out of fatigue and fright let go of the lion. The lion runs away.
When he came to, the youngman realized that the scene had attracted some athũngũ tourists.
When they came near him, his first words were (in heavily accented English), “Dollars then
talk.” He wanted to be given dollars so that he could explain what was happening. When he
was given some dollars, he told the tourists that he does his daily routine exercises by riding
on all sorts of wild animals. He told them that that day’s performance only involved the lion,
but if they wanted to see him ride on other animals like the leopards and rhinos, they should
come there the following day and pay so that he could come the following Sunday to
perform. The following day the tourists brought a lot of money and gave it to the lion rider
booking the Sunday performance. On Sunday the tourists were back, looking for the lion
rider. The youngman of course never turned up. That is how the Son of Kagwai had grown
rich overnight and put up the stone house that Njaramba was asking about.
The hero of “The Lion Rider” is an illiterate manual labourer called the Son
of Kagwai. In real terms, this kind of a person would be condemned to the
intergenerational poverty that hounds a large percentage of illiterate rural
peasants all over sub-Saharan Africa. Nothing short of a miracle would
obviate this kind of fate for the Son of Kagwai. The villagers are therefore
understandably puzzled when he puts up a stone building, a preserve of the
urban middle class and the upper class in the experience of the folk. But then
miracles do happen when a Mũthũngũ comes into the picture. The miracle for
Kagwai’s son happened through a very bizarre chance encounter with tourists
in his near tragic attempt to try his hand at poaching. It however takes the
subversion of the image of “intelligent Western other” for the young man to
have his way with the tourists.
Western writing has attributed intelligence to western civilisation and its
antonyms to Africa. It is ridiculous to believe that a man can do his daily
exercises by riding on lions and rhinos. To understand why “intelligent”
tourists would fall for such a trick, we may need to revisit the images of
Africa that have historically informed the Western imagination and even
today, informs millions of white tourists crossing over into the continent with
a sense of heightened adventure.
In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” Chinua
Achebe argues that that there has been a dorminant image of Africa in
Western thought. The image, according to Abubakar is represented by a
“style of symbolizing Africa in which the enormous complexities of the
continent are reduced to simple conventions or rhetorics of representation,
such as ‘oddity,’ ‘savagery’ or ‘darkness’” (Abubakar 844). Thus, Africa is,

at least the “other,” against which the Westerners could only think of within
the binary of civilised/savage, white west/black Africa. During the colonial
period, in order to justify colonialism and exploitation, Africa and Africans
were caricatured as “wild” and in dire need of “civilisation.” Nandwa andd
Bukenya describe this image in more vivid terms:
It became a habit during the colonial period for Europeans to exaggerate and ridicule
everything African. The fashion was to present everything as “wild wild” and “way way
out.” European audiences […] were always hungering for something new and bizarre out of
Africa […] and there was a […] definite bias in what [Europeans] published about Africa.
They usually went for the outlandish, the facetious, and the shocking, in a word, the
sensational. (32)
The currency of these images in Western cultures cannot be disputed. I have

been offering an online course 5 where students from different Universities
North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa are pared in ctured cross-
curricula interactive sessions embedded in their regular curriculum. The
course typically starts by asking students to give their perspectives of other
students and their countries. I have sampled some sentiments expressed about
Kenya by American students:
When I think of Kenya, I think of a hot and dry climate with many wild animals like giraffes
and antelope just running around. Here, we have squirrels everywhere we turn, but I can
imagine in Kenya it is quite different. I feel that the people are all very tall and skinny and
have the build of basketball players. To be completely honest, when I think of Kenya, most
of all I think of the Disney cartoon film “The Lion King.” I imagine beautiful sunsets and
flat plains, but I can't quite make a perception of what I think the social life of a young adult
might be, or what education is like.
Another student writes:
[When I think of Kenya] I […] think of great track athletes competing in the Olympic
games. I always wished I could be a great runner like the Kenyans when I ran track in high
school. I also think of a very hot, desert-type climate, with flat dirt plains, few trees and the
kings themselves, lions.
Another one writes:
5
The course is branded Global Modules and is meant to help students explore ideas of global
concern from a multi-cultural perspective. It can be accessed on
http://www.globalmodules.net.
When I think of Kenya, I do get the image of great athletes, however I also, like [the student
with the response above, name omitted] get the feeling that there are wide open plains with
many wild animals roaming around. However I am sure that I am completely wrong it is still
what pops into my head when I think of Kenya.
Another writes:
Whenever I think of Kenya, I picture all of the photos that a friend's mother had taken a few
years ago. Beautiful lions, cheetahs, and other animals that can probably rip your head off.
Elephants are okay though. Anyways, I’ve always admired Kenya’s wildlife. Although I
don’t know much about its people, I imagine incredible tribal artwork, as well as some really
intense stretched earlobes. I hope so, because gauges are sacred.
And another writes:
When I think about Kenya, images of the jungle, wild animals and gold Olympic medalists
come into my mind.
And yet another writes:
When I think of Kenya my first perception is that the country is mainly comprised of large
wildlife preservations and also a number more populated metropolises. It also seems that
Kenyans lead a much simpler life than what the average American lives.
With these kinds of stereotypes its little wonder that Western tourists cross
over from the North to come to “wild Africa” to “go back in time” and
experience the African landscape in its exotic primal, vegetative and wild un-
tameness. Motivated by such images, a lion rider is the epitome of all
experiences of bizarre Africa for a modern Western tourist. And yes, it is
ridiculous to believe that a man can do his daily exercises by riding on lions
and rhinos, but that would be so only in Europe and America, this is Africa!
Thus the tourists so easily believe what the lion rider tells them and are only
too willing to pay, after all, it is the kind of spectacle they had saved for a
long time in the hope of crossing over to Africa to see. On his part, the young
man’s perception of the Mũthũngũ as a rich lay about in search of adventure,
makes him quickly turn his near tragic encounter with the lion into a once in
a lifetime economic opportunity. It is doubtful he would have asked for
money in the very unlikely event the tourists were local folks. The chance
encounter engenders the playing out of imaginations of otherness; for the
tourists, the lifetime experience of African wildness and for the young man,
an opportunity to exploit the expectations of excitable Westerners, to make
easy money. Thus his first words when he sniffs the opportunity knocking
are, “dollars then talk.”
One significant fact is that this story is among the very few where the
narrators describe characters as being naïve and ignorant. As the narrative
closes, Gĩthingithia and Njaramba agree that this is an illustration of
ignorance on the part of the Western tourists. The myth of intelligent other
gets subverted when the Westerners are tricked by a village destitute like the
Son of Kagwai. But more significantly, it is an indictment of an unjustifiable,
if not plainly ignorant representation of Africa and Africans by Westerners. It
is their expectation of exotic wildness and savagery in Africa, and the whole
“going back in time” project being referred to as an enterprise in ignorance.
The economic implications of contact with the Western other are strongly
reflected in the next story, “The Streetboy and the Necklace.”
Cokora na Mũgathĩ (The Streetboy and the Necklace).

A streetboy snatches a necklace from a Mũthũngũ outside the Hilton, Nairobi, and runs
away. When the streetboy is pursued by members of the public and fears being apprehended,
he swallows the necklace. The Mũthũngũ insists that under no circumstances was he ready
to part with the necklace. He suggests that the fair and non-oppressive method to retrieve the
necklace it to feed the streetboy with a lot of food so that the necklace can go through the
alimentary canal and come out in excrement. The streetboy is taken to the police station and
fed on a lot of ugali 6 and milk bought by the Mũthũngũ. Everyone including the Mũthũngũ
waits for the necklace to come out. The streetboy suspects that the necklace must be very
expensive, since he would not expect the Mũthũngũ to be so concerned about a necklace that
is not expensive. Gĩthingithia and Njaramba are in agreement with the sentiment that the fact
that the Mũthũngũ was willing to wait for the necklace implies that it must have been a very
expensive one. The necklace eventually comes out but the streetboy is not about to let it go.
Since he is in the police station surrounded by policemen he hatches an escape plan. He
removes his clothes and smears his whole body with the excrement. He then calls out saying
that the necklace had come out and they should open the cell and come and get it. Everyone
including the Mũthũngũ comes to the cell in order to receive the necklace. On opening, the
streetboy comes out stark naked smeared all over with excrement holding the necklace on
one hand and excrement on the other. No one was willing to go near him, and he runs away
with the necklace as the policemen watch and the Mũthũngũ laughs in amazement.
The prospects of the monetary gain from the necklace, is the motivation of
the totally baffling events of the story. Both the narrators and the street boy
are in agreement that the necklace must have been very expensive because in
their view that is the only plausible reason why the Mũthũngũ was
determined to wait. On the strength of that, the street boy had to resort to
6
A staple Kenyan diet made by cooking a mixture of ground maize meal and water into a
thick gruel.
extreme measures to retain the “expensive” necklace. It is possible that the

necklace had another value to the Mũthũngũ, other than a monetary one. But
in the mind of the folk, white people are rich. In fact, a “poor white man” is
an oxymoron in the imagination of the folk. Within this context the extreme
measures of the street boy seem well calculated.
The Financial End Justifies the Immoral Means
In reference to the stories where Westerners cross over and get into the turf of
the folk, it seems that the ensuing engagement is purely economic. Moral
precepts and values applied by the folk in dealing with their own are
suspended for economic gain without any sense of moral liability when
dealing with the Western other. Viewed from a moral point of view the
events of “The Streetboy and the Necklace” and “The Lion Rider,” depict
wanton if not criminal theft and extortion of Westerners by the folk.
However, in the stories, there is no indication of recognition of any wrong-
doing on the part of the streetboy or the Son of Kagwai. It is known in the
village how the young man got rich. Yet, there is no indication that there is
indignation from the fact that he grew rich by extorting from athũngũ. One
notes by listening to a large repertoire of these stories that describe
engagements of folks with their own that they are highly moralistic to the
extent of being preachy. In fact, an expanded definition of the stories as noted
earlier is “The humour and moral impartations of Gĩthingithia” signifying
that issues of propriety and morality are at the centre of the narrative radio
program. Rarely would the folk get away with immoral or criminal behaviour
in engaging with one another. The fact of moral impropriety is however not
extended to the Westerners. In dealing with them, the folk have essentialised
the rich/poor dichotomy with which they engage the Westerner at the
expense of their own codes of right and wrong. So, while the actions of the
protagonists of the two stories border on criminality, the street boy is
portrayed as innovative and the lion rider as quick-witted as they admirably
rise to a once in a lifetime opportunity to make money from a Mũthũngũ. In
the mind of the folks, the financial end justifies the immoral means when the
money is got from a Mũthũngũ.
This should be seen against the background of the sense of justice that the
Mũthũngũ seeks to be guided by which only serves to emphasise his outsider
status. After the streetboy snatches the necklace and is caught, the Mũthũngũ
victim wants to use the most ‘just’ and ‘fair’ method to retrieve the necklace.
The whole idea of feeding the streetboy and waiting for the necklace to pass
through the alimentary canal was his. His outsider status does not allow him
to realise that in the laws of the street-jungle, where the streetboy reigns
supreme, concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ as espoused in his understanding
of social justice are farfetched and even naive. In the street jungle ‘mob
justice’ is the only justice since the folks do not underestimate the street boy.
It is not uncommon for motorists to be harassed by streetboys carrying
excrement in their hands in the streets of Nairobi. In the event that the street
boy had snatched a necklace from the folk, chances are that he would have
been lynched and cut open to retrieve the necklace. The fact that he gets away
with stealing from a ‘just’ and ‘fair’ Mũthũngũ only emphasises the cavalier
attitude of the folks to the concept of justice when a Mũthũngũ is involved.
Clearly, the concept of wronging and being wronged does not extend to the
Western other in the morality of the folks. They are allowed impunity when
the would be victim is a Mũthũngũ.
Conclusion: Search for a Mutually Affirming Discourse
In this paper I set out to answer the question, “What are the contemporary
representations of across, going across and engaging with those from across
in relation to transgression of geographical and cultural borders by Gĩkũyũ
folk?” Against a backdrop of controversy as to what constitutes authentic
African literature, I have sought to show that authentic folk voices from
which this question can be explored can be captured through the newly
liberalised mass communication medium of radio. By analysing four stories
from the conversational radio narratives titled Mathekania na Mataaro ma
Gĩthingithia, I have shown that these folk voices provide us with unique
insights on how the folk reconstruct identities and relationships across
geographical and cultural borders in the contemporary world.
It is clear that the folk construct their own stereotypes in regard to the said
identities and relationships with the West. They characterise those from
across as odd and gullible. They freely suspend the moral rules of
engagement that they use with their own, evaluate their relationship with the
West on largely economic terms, and take no moral responsibility in
engaging with those from across in extortionist and depraved terms.
My contention therefore is that the existence of a stereotypical image of
Africa in the West needs to be seen in line with the capacity for reciprocity
by the folk. In a Chapter entitled “The Persistence of Natives,” Limerick
1987 asserts that “the natives did not vanish” (179). She reckons that the
natives [folk] are as much the actors as the acted on and that “it is important –
and unnerving – to realize that ethnic stereotyping can work both ways”
(180). I have endeavored to show that in the Gĩkũyũ case the folk did not
vanish, and although their voices were hardly captured in the canonised
written African literature, they continue to express themselves and construct
their counter-images and re-presentations through folklore.
The dominant stereotypical image of Africa in Western thought and the
equally stereotypical responses by the folk in engaging with the West
indicate that there does not seem to be a mutually affirming discourse
between the two cultures. If the essential function of a boundary is to
facilitate communication, there is urgency to institute meaningful
communication that interrogates existing stereotypical inscriptions across
Western and African cultures in search of a mutually affirming discourse.
Works Cited
Abubakar, Tanimu. “Africa in Western Literature.” Encyclopedia of African

History. Ed. Kevin Shillington. Vol. 1. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn-
Taylor and Francis, 2005. 843-46.
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness.” Massachussetts Review 18.14 (1977): 782-94. Rpt. in
Hopes and Impediments. London: Heinemann, 1988. 1-13.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The
Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000. Questia. 11 Feb. 2009
<http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=106719011>.
Bergmann, Jurg. Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organisation of Gossip.
New York: Aldine, 1993.
Daloz, Jean Pascal, and Katherine Verrier-Frechette. “Is Radio Pluralism an
Instrument of Political Change? Insights from Zambia.” African
Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition. Ed. Richard Fardon and
Graham Furniss. Oxford: James Curry, 2000. 180-87.
Gluckman, Max. “Gossip and Scandal.” Current Anthropology 4.3 (1963):
307-16.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of
the American West. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1987. Questia. 20 Jan.
2009 <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=3970346>.
“Mathekania na Mataaro ma Gĩthingithia” (MMG). Radio Broadcast.
Nairobi: Kameme, Kayũ ka Mũingĩ, 2000.
Nandwa, J., and Austin Bukenya. African Oral Literature for Schools.
Nairobi: Longman Kenya, 1983.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in

African Literature. Nairobi: EAEP, 1986.
Peek, Philip M., and Kwesi Yankah. African Folklore: An Encyclopedia.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
Shillington, Kevin, ed. Encyclopedia of African History. 3 vols. New York:
Fitzroy Dearborn-Taylor and Francis, 2005.
Spitulnik, Debra. “Electronic Media and Oral Traditions.” African Folklore:
An Encyclopedia. Ed. Phillip Peek and Kwesi Yankah. New York:
Routledge, 2004. 109-13.
Yerkovich, Sally. “Gossiping as a Way of Speaking.” Journal of
Communication 27 (1997): 192-96.
Zaffiro, James. “Media as Propaganda.” Encyclopedia of African History. Ed.
Kevin Shillington. Vol. 2. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn-Taylor and
Francis, 2005. 972-73.
Contributors
Remmy Shiundu Barasa teaches in the Faculty of Education, St. Augustine

University of Tanzania. His research interests are in narrative theories and
contemporary African literature. He holds MA (Literature) and B.Ed. (Hons)
degrees from Kenyatta University in Kenya.
Fella Benabed teaches English at Badji Mokhtar University, Annaba in

Algeria. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature. She
has a Magister Degree (equivalent to Master of Arts) in Comparative
Literature. In her thesis, she adopted a post-colonial approach to the novels of
Wole Soyinka and Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and studied the issues of
colonialism, neocolonialism, interculturality and hybridity in Africa. She is
presently writing a doctoral thesis on Native American literature, using a
multidisciplinary approach, particularly postcolonial and ecocritical, to study
the issues of internal colonialism and environmental racism in the United
States of America. She is equally interested in the study of globalisation and
ICTs to keep track of international academic advancements.
Jens Elze-Volland holds a BA in English and Spanish and an MA in English

Studies from the Free University Berlin. He has studied at the Free
University Berlin, University of Potsdam and Georgia State University and
has been a visiting academic at the English and African Studies Departments
at the University of Cape Town in 2009. He is currently working on his PhD
in English at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at
the Free University Berlin. His areas of research and teaching include the
history of the novel, narratology, 18th century British Literature, Modernisms,
Postcolonial Literatures, Sociology and Urban Studies.
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton

University. He graduated with a first class degree in literature from the
University of Nairobi, was a British Council Scholar at the University of
Edinburgh, and got his PhD in English from Northwestern University. His
major Fields of Research and Teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and
Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the
“Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He also has a special interest in
the relation between literature and the production of knowledge and the
history of English as a field of study. His many books include Reading the
African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and
368 Negotiating Afropolitanism
Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of

Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He is the general editor of The
Encyclopedia of African Literature and co-editor of The Cambridge History
of African and Caribbean Literature.
Mikhail Gromov was born in Moscow on 27.08.1967. After graduating from

the Department of African Studies, Moscow Lomonosov State University,
with MA in African literature and Swahili language, he joined a PhD course
at Gorky Institute of World Literature (Moscow), which he completed
successfully in 1993. Since 2003 he has been living and working in Kenya,
where he currently holds the post of Assistant Professor of Literature at the
United States International University in Nairobi. His works have been
published in such journals as Kiswahili and Nairobi Journal of Literature, he
is a regular contributor to the journal Swahili Forum and a regular participant
of the Swahili Colloquiums at the University of Bayreuth since 1995.
Recently he participated as one of the authors in the international project
Outline of Swahili Literature, published by Brill in 2008. His areas of interest
are literatures of Eastern and Southern Africa in English and Indigenous
languages, Swahili literature, comparative literature.
Emilia Ilieva is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Egerton

University, Kenya. She is a prolific critic and has published widely on
African literature. Her contributions appear in The Encyclopaedia of World
Literature in the 2oth Century (1999), The Companion to African Literatures
(2000), The Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English
(2005) and Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2005)
among others. Her publications also appear in Bulgarian and Russian learned
journals. She has translated a number of African fiction into Bulgarian
notably, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977).
Sim Kilosho Kabale is lectures in the Foreign Languages Department,

Kenyatta University, Kenya. He also gives seminars periodically at the
l’institut supérieur pédagogique de Bukavu and the University of Bukavu in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. He holds a PhD in the science of
language and communication from the University of Rouen (France).
Professor Kilosho is interested in Francophone Literature and Popular
Culture. He has published learned articles prolifically in these domains.
Catherine Kroll Catherine Kroll is Associate Professor of English at

Sonoma State University in California, USA. Among her recent publications
Contributors 369
are “Rwanda’s Speaking Subjects: The Inescapable Affiliations of Boubacar

Boris Diop’s Murambi” (Third World Quarterly 2007) and “Imagining
Ourselves into Transcultural Spaces: De-centering Whiteness in the
Classroom” in Undoing Whiteness: Critical Educultural Teaching
Approaches for Social Justice Activism, ed. Virginia Lea and Erma Jean
Sims (Peter Lang, 2008). Her current research focuses on representations of
land and place in South African writing.
Nalini Iyer is Associate Professor of English and also the Director of the
Center for the Study of Justice in Society at Seattle University. She was also
the Patricia Wismer Professor for Gender and Diversity Studies at Seattle
University from 2003-2005. Nalini Iyer specialises in Postcolonial Studies
and teaches courses in British, African, and South Asian literatures. She has
published essays in ARIEL, Pakistan Journal of Women Studies, and Samar.
Professor Iyer is currently working on a book focusing on South Asian
American writing in North America.
J. K. S. Makokha is DAAD doctoral research fellow at the Institut für

Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin. He holds an MA (Literature)
and B.Ed. (Hons) degrees from Kenyatta University in Kenya. He teaches
courses on African, Caribbean and South Asian literature in the Institute for
English Philology, Free University of Berlin. Makokha is the author of
Reading M. G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction
(2009) and co-editor of Weavers and Bards: Emerging Perspectives on
Literary and Narrative Styles in Contemporary African Literature
(forthcoming 2010). His areas of interests include: Contemporary African
literatures, Diasporic literatures and Gender. His poetry has appeared in
various journals in the USA, Europe and Africa.
John E. Masterson is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at

the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He
teaches postcolonial studies, critical theory, European and U.S. literatures.
He has published chapters and articles on Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers and Nuruddin Farah. Forthcoming articles
concern the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Kiran Desai, as well as an
interview with Elleke Boehmer about her 2008 novel, Nile Baby. He is
currently preparing a monograph for publication entitled The Disorder of
Things: A Comparative Approach to the Work of Nuruddin Farah.
370 Negotiating Afropolitanism
Lennox Odiemo-Munara is currently a graduate research student in

literature at Egerton University, Kenya, where he has also been a teaching
assistant. His research and academic interests are in postcolonial studies,
gender criticism, and philosophy of literature. He has published in literary
journals such as Research in African Literatures; and contributed to A
Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (2005), The
Sage Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice (2007), and Women
Writing Africa: The Eastern Region (2007). He is also a creative writer.
Mbugua wa Mungai teaches at the Literature Department, Kenyatta

University, Kenya. He holds BA (Hons) and MA (Lit) degrees from the
institution. He received his PhD in Comparative Folklore from Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the author of numerous articles on
aspects of African popular culture and the history of African folklore
research. He is currently doing postdoctoral work as a Fulbright scholar at
Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University in the United States.
Sola Ogunbayo is a poet and literary critic. He teaches literature at the
Department of English, Redeemer’s University, Ogun State, Nigeria. He is
the author of two works of fiction, The Wheel of God (2001) and The Lion
and Joel (2002). Ogunbayo is currently a PhD candidate at the University of
Lagos. His fields of interests are: Myth Criticism, Romantic Poetry and
Postcolonial Literature.
Alina N. Rinkanya lectures in the Department of Literature, University of

Nairobi, Kenya. Since 1985, she has taught various courses at the Department
in European, Eastern African, African-American literatures. She holds an
MA degree (Literature) from the Leningrad State University (1980) and
received her PhD degree from the Gorky Institute of World Literature
(Moscow) in 2001. Her dissertation was entitled, The Development of Kenyan
Novel in 1980s - 1990s. She is currently preparing a monographic study of
the same name. Her areas of research interest are: Literatures of Eastern
Africa, Urban languages as literary medium, Comparative literary studies.
Phillip Rothwell is Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Graduate Program

Director at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of A
Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative and A
Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality and Gender in the Work of Mia
Couto.
Contributors 371
Godwin Siundu is a lecturer in the Department of Literature, University of

Nairobi. He holds a PhD from University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.
His articles have been published in a number of scholarly journals such as
African Identities, Africa Insights and the Nairobi Literary Journal among
others. He is also the author of several book chapters in a number of edited
volumes.
Maria Jesus Cabarcos-Traseira graduated from the University of Santiago

de Compostela and then completed her PhD in English at the University of
Kansas. She currently lectures at the Department of English Philology at the
University of Corunna (Universidade da Coruña), Spain. Her main research
areas are contemporary (South) African and Australian literatures in English,
which she has approached from the point of view of postcolonial studies,
ethical criticism, feminist theory and eco-criticism, as well as the study of the
reception of literary texts and genres across cultures. She has published
articles and book chapters in her areas of interest.
Michael Wainaina is Associate Dean, Graduate School, Kenyatta

University, Kenya. He holds MA and PhD degrees and teaches courses on
African literature at the Literature Department in the same instituion. He has
published widely in the fields of Popular Culture and Orature in
contemporary Africa. He is currently working on a book project entitled, The
Worlds of Gikuyu Mythology: A Mytho-Structural Analysis of a Culture’s
Modes of Though and Practice (2009).
Jennifer Wawrzinek researches and teaches at Freie Universität Berlin. She

holds a PhD in English from the University of Melbourne, is the author of the
monograph Ambiguous Subjects: Dissolution and Metamorphosis in the
Postmodern Sublime (2008) and co-editor of the collection Frontier
Skirmishes (Winter Verlag 2010). She has been a Felix Meyer Scholar and a
Varuna Fellow, and she is currently working on a book-length project which
examines the notion of radical passivity in British Romanticism.
Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of English Literature at the Institut für

Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Figures de
la maladie chez Andre Gide (1997), Transcultural Graffiti: Diasporic
Writing and the Teaching of Literary Studies (2005), Space in Theory:
Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze (2008), and Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space:
Postcolonial Place and Literary DeiXis (2010).

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Negotiating Afropolitanism

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover design: Pier Post

Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden

From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

Part I: Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism

Sim Kilosho Kabale

Jens Frederic Elze-Volland

Part II: Dissidence, Absence, Transgression

Part III: Unhomeliness, Diasporic Narration, Heterotopia

Emilia Ilieva and Lennox Odiemo-Munara

Remmy Shiundu Barasa and J. K. S. Makokha

Maria Jesus Cabarcos Traseira

We wish to express our gratitude to Russell West-Pavlov of the English

terms; it is simply a recognition of how the structural disadjustment of

A celebration of Afropolitanism should also, of course, consider the

Introduction: In the Spirit of Afropolitanism

In his 2001 introduction to a special edition of the African Studies Review at

integration of the whole continent under a single government with a cabinet

into the continental cultural discourse, Afropolitanism. He arrived at the term

It is this anti-essentialist stance and the desire to complicate primary roots as

African? Perhaps the debate needs to be kept alive even as provisional

elaborates this point further, using what he calls the “worlds-in-movement”

Afropolitanism is the spirit that espouses this “paradigm of itinerancy,

This volume brings together a range of scholars located in English

Border Crossings, Precarity, Syncretism

Afropolitanism and Erudition in Francophone African

The spread of cosmopolitan trends in African literary production at the turn

On the basis of this concept of Afropolitanism, we want to examine the self-

Phenomenon of Border Crossings and Voyages of Protagonists

According to Mbembe, Afropolitanism results from an experience of several

Let us note that in these two kouroumanesque novels, these African

The Fiction of Erudition

It is a challenging undertaking when one sets out to determine at every

His father-teacher proceeds to expound the famous “Fermat’s theorem”, the

also in philosophy. To convince us he quotes by heart a few titles of his

execution with blows from blunt machetes practised in the genocide of

African Religious Beliefs and Tradtitions

Cultures of mobility bear the spirit of Afropolitanism, Achille Mbembe has

We focus particularly on characters that mix the practices of Paganism,

The neutralisation of animism and paganism forces by biblical power implied

C’est le Dieu des Blancs qui a invité ça, dit le Nègre.

We understand by philosophical thought the reflexions or knowledge aimed

This display of encyclopaedic religious knowledge continues when the

The Historical Frames of Pre-colonial Africa

Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Precarity and Picaresque in Contemporary Nigerian

postcoloniality, embraces what is normally perceived in the West as a metropolitan or

I would therefore opt for understanding the post-1980s transformations not so

to be in thrall to the sociohistorical” (Gaylard 7). I consider it indispensable

Despite the almost unanimous Western critique of this form of governance,

In The Famished Road, this double function of – often violent – domination

“wage employment almost disappeared in Africa since the deregulation of the

On a first glance, the picaresque and the Bildungsroman are not so

This picaresque non-development of the subject can also be transplanted

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London: Routledge, 2000.

Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. London: Random House, 1992.

Border-Crossing Through Myth-Making:

from the literary perspective. To him, a myth is essentially an aesthetic

The Politicised Imagination in Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman