Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular culture and literature in East Africa, edited by James Ogude and Joyce Nyairo

Abstract

This book is another welcome development in the study of popular culture in Africa for a number of reasons. One of these is the radical approach it adopts in engaging with the idea of the popular. This is why, for both scholars and general readers, it is likely to become required reading. In their introduction the editors perceptively engage the question of concepts and show how the issues they interrogate chime with the perspective they pursue in an effort to extricate popular culture from its relative obscurity in East African scholarship in general and Kenyan scholarship in particular. Following Karen Barber the editors define popular culture as the vast domain of cultural production that defies categorization (as ‘traditional’ or ‘elite’; as ‘oral’ or ‘literate’; as ‘indigenous’ or ‘Western’), because ‘it straddles and dissolves these distinctions’ (p.3). This includes popular music, popular fiction and popular media. The fascination with these elements of the popular can be accounted for in the way they typify the connections between the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the conventional and the radical, the local and the global, together with their utility and values which cut across spheres of politics, economy, and technology.