Kenyan Writer Research Articles

New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims

Beydoun, K. A. (2023). The new crusades: Islamophobia and the global war on Muslims.University of California Press. "How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?” wonders a voice in Wizard of the Crow, a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2006, p. 681). One answer to this rhetorical question is addressed by the Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said’s (2003) statement: “Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” (as cited in Beydoun, 2023, p. 68). Much of the colonial telling happens in the realm of education, whose institutionalized tools of textbooks and policies have been responsible for reproducing the fake history of the imperial narrative, one that silences the oppressed and lets the oppressors shine with nobility. Said’s statement not only answers the above question but also points to the empire’s hegemonic aspirations of constituting the identity of the Other since the Other in colonial discourse is framed as the uneducated who needs to be educated, necessarily, in the logics of the empire. Instilling racism as a major colonial project against the Muslim Other has been the case with the United States of America’s foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11, a renewed imperialism in the name of fighting “terror.” Therefore, educating the U.S. Muslim youths about themselves as being anti-Western barbaric terrorists is as colonially imperative as educating white American generations about the latter being defenders of White “democratic” civilization against the “barbarity” of the former. Challenging the dominant stories of the empire demands devising tools that shake the grand narrative from within by making the missing narratives visible and heard

The aqueous form and the Afro–Sino encounter in Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea

ABSTRACTThrough a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.

Education Versus Colonial Hardships in Ngugi’s Dreams in a Time of War (2010)

The 1952-1959 state of emergency is a milestone in Kenya’s colonial history. It was declared by the colonial government when the Mau Mau fighters, in their struggle to chase the British settlers away and give back to Kenyans the land which these Europeans took from them, started to attack indigenes loyal to the government. Thus, one can see why, in the autobiographies/memoirs by many Kenyan authors born before independence, the latter also deal with this period of their country’s history. The Kenyan writer’s work, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War comes back to the hardships of colonialism in which school is depicted as a breath of fresh air for the author. In this memoir, the writer has expressed his gratefulness to his mother as well. Using postcolonial theory and biographical criticism, this study will deal with Education versus Colonial Hardships in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War. However, one may wonder how school is taken as a breath of fresh air for the writer and why he is so grateful to his mother. This article is fully entrenched in postcolonialism, biographical criticism, racism and psychology during the British occupation of Kenya.

THE QUEST FOR UTOPIA IN BLACK THEATRE: AN ANALYTICAL STUDY OF NGUGI WA THING’O’S THE BLACK HERMIT

Utopia, the idea of a perfect society, has been a central theme in literature, philosophy, and art for centuries. The desire for utopia has inspired countless visionaries and reformers, who have sought to create a better world through various means, such as religion, ideology, science, or art. However, utopia has also been criticized and ridiculed as an impossible or even dangerous dream, that distracts us from the reality of our imperfect and flawed world.
 Ngugi Wa Thing’o, a prominent Kenyan writer and activist, has addressed the theme of utopia in many of his works, including his play The Black Hermit. Written in the 1960s, at a time of great political and cultural upheaval in Africa and beyond, The Black Hermit offers a complex and nuanced exploration of the quest for utopia in the context of black theatre. Through the character of the Black Hermit, a revolutionary who withdraws from the world to live in solitude, Ngugi raises questions about the nature and meaning of utopia, and its relationship to the struggles and aspirations of black people.
 The aim of this research is to deepen our understanding of Ngugi's work and thought by analysing The Black Hermit as a text that engages with the theme of utopia in a creative and thought-provoking way. It also examines how Ngugi uses the play to critique and challenge various utopia-building projects, and to propose his own vision of utopia as a process of becoming. The research also considers the relevance and significance of Ngugi's utopia to the contemporary world and the ways in which it speaks to universal human concerns.

NGUGI WA THIONG’O’NUN BİR BUĞDAY TANESİ ESERİNDE ARADA KÜLTÜR

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the leading names among East Africa’s first generation of writers, that is, those Africans who began to write and publish in English at the end of the colonial era. His historical novel A Grain of Wheat, which is concerned with the achievement of Kenyan independence, explores several issues such as national consciousness and symbols, decolonisation, independence, and neocolonialism. In the novel, Ngũgĩ portrays lots of realistic themes (violence, betrayal, etc.) and describes people’s deep feelings about the colonial world. In this context, this study attempts to read the novel in light of postcolonialism, through a close analysis of the text in terms of its different representations of people’s activities, characters, and the Mau Mau revolt. The study shows how a national culture develops and how a national ideology is presented, and reveals the hybrid relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of “in-between”. In his discussion of the mentioned term, Bhabha uses concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, negotiation, interstice, and liminality to show that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. This contact zone, in the context of postcolonial culture, then, becomes a place of colonial invasion and resistance; also a place of cooperation and reception, communication and mimicry and it is used to explain how people choose and create culture from colonial culture. Relying on the theoretical support of Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “in-between”, this study analyses the possibility of the development of in-between culture in the novel which demonstrates that the mixture of cultures is an effective way for newly independent countries to get rid of the shadow of colonialism.

African Women as the Alpha and Omega of Their Own Promotion as Dealt with in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross

This paper aims at giving more insights into how African women at large can reverse the traditional trend to be the architects of their own empowerment as dealt with in the selected novels like Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross by the well-known Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In these novels, the author raises the thought-provoking issue of the great responsibility befalling African women to achieve their own empowerment today. The results of our findings will lead us to impart to the reader that the responsibility befalling African women to achieve their own empowerment is quite tremendous. With this in view, African women must use the potentials that they are endowed with so as to set the good example to the coming generation. Through the lens of feminism, womanism, and Marxist literary criticism this paper arouses African women’s awareness on the place they must carve out for themselves on the social, political, and even economic arena if they really want to stop paying lip service to gender equality.

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

Representations of Indian Ocean Ecologies, Heritage and Kinship in Banaadiri Fishing Poems and Owuor's The Dragonfly Sea

ABSTRACT This article brings Yvonne Owuor’s 2019 novel The Dragonfly Sea into conversation with nine Banaadiri fishing poems called geeraarro, a form of classical Somali oral poetry in the maanso category. I explore the ways in which ideas of labour, kinship, and cultural heritage are presented in the fishing poems created over generations by an Indian Ocean coastal community as compared to a novel based on an Indian Ocean Island community, written by a Kenyan writer, and published by a major US publishing house. Working through oral narrative structures, the novel and the poems explore the relationship between littoral communities and Indian Ocean ecologies. I model how the comparative analysis of radically different forms of literature can illuminate the relationship between story, poetry and ecological sensibility. It breaks down the barriers between orality and literacy through the use of a range of analytical approaches including close reading, close listening, textual and performance analysis.

Hayat kadınlığına giden yol: Ngugi’nin Wanja’sı ve Ekwensi’nin Jagua Nana'sı

Every individual has to make decisions that will significantly affect their destinies/futures at certain periods of their lives. Sometimes they take these decisions in line with their own wishes, and sometimes have to take it because of external factors and against their own wills. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wanja and Nigerian writer Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, who are the subject of this study, also make decisions that will change the course of their lives in the end and they begin to live by means of prostitution. Both characters choose this profession for separate purposes/reasons, however, the profession they want/have to do is the same. In general, prostitution, which is perceived as inappropriate for the moral codes, beliefs and lifestyles of the society in most regions, is carried out professionally and systematically in today’s Kenya and Nigeria. Prostitution, mostly preferred for economic reasons, has even become a tourism sector. The major factor behind is the colonial past, which seriously affected the African continent and left deep scars in the lives of the people living in the region. Therefore, in the light of these elements, while examining the preferences of Wanja and Jagua Nana, the condition of women in the colonized lands, how colonialism affected these native women as well as the relationship between colonialism and prostitution will also be examined in this study for they are the background forces that have triggered such choices.

Us in Relation to the Universe—Collaborative North-South Photographic Practice Research

In 1986 Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argued that ‘[t]he choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves’ (Ngũgĩ 1986:4). This article re-applies Ngũgĩ’s analysis to contemporary African photographic practice, since images are similarly central to people’s self-definition. Collaborating with the Zambian National Visual Arts Council, the practice-research project Stories of Kalingalinga developed a photographic workshop (2019) and exhibition (2020) to counteract Zambia’s lack of institutional engagement with photography. Focused on Kalingalinga, a high-density neighbourhood undergoing gentrification in Zambia’s capital Lusaka, the workshop provided space to experiment in decolonising creative practice through slow action research. As a photographer, animateur and curator from the global north, I present work by Zambian project participants Scotty Jongolo, Danny Chiyesu, Zenzele Chulu, Edith Chiliboy, Natalia Gonzalez Acosta, Margaret Malawo Mumba, Dennis Mubanga Kabwe, David Daut Makala, Muchemwa Sichone and Yande Yombwe. The article discusses the decolonisation of Zambian photography and the workshop’s deepening of my own decolonial photographic practice. I highlight the importance of empowering Zambian photographers through encouraging critically informed image-making in contemporary African photographic practice. African visual self-governance requires building supportive communities that embrace alternative and creative ways of knowledge creation.

Postcolonial Narratives: Literature of Migritude

The article is dedicated to the history of migritude, a phenomenon that arose among the African intellectual emigration at the beginning of the 21st century. Its origin is associated with the name of the Kenyan writer of Indian origin Shailja Patel, the author of poetical show (2006) and the poem under the title “Migritude” (2010). As a result, a literary movement of the same name was formed, the bias of which is connected, on the one hand, with the renewal of the format of post-colonial narratives and their themes, and, on the other hand, with the tectonic changes that have taken place on the world stage in the context of globalization. The author of the article focuses on the ego-story of Shailja Patel and its transformation, primarily due to content, into the history of an entire generation living in the era, which coincided in time with the situations of postcoloniality and postmodernity. Addressing the issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, racism, segregation and migration is not new. Eventually women joined the discussion and set themselves the task of answering the question posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay “Can Subaltern Speak?” They radically changed the range of topics proposed for discussion by addressing the ideas of gender equality and the fight against stereotypes, focusing on the problems of social and professional identity without regard to ethnicity and race. The article identifies a number of the most famous authors of migritude (Fatou Diome, Christina Ali Farah, Igiaba Scego, researchers of their works Augusta Irele and Ashna Ali, etc.) and the topics they refer to. Particular emphasis is placed on their interpretation of the problem of identity in the context of the strategy of interculturalism in conjunction with the processes of globalization, liberalization, democratization and digitalization. The author comes to the conclusion that in recent years the discursive field of migritude has been forming with its own borders (within the Diaspora) and practices (primarily adaptative), terminology, intellectual and social communities, activists and sympathizers. In conditions when migration has become a marker of the modern world order migritude has become a norm for them as an opportunity to realize a number of their most important intentions, including self-realization, obtaining a profession, and achieving success.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: The Paths of a kenyan Writer in Literary Historiography

Resumo O presente artigo pretende discutir como o escritor queniano Ngugi Wa Thiong’o aborda a história de três de seus livros: Um grão de trigo, Descolonizar a mente e Memórias em tempos de guerra. Em um primeiro momento, elabora-se uma introdução a respeito de como o autor foi estudado no Brasil, passando a seguir para uma discussão de como ele desenvolveu sua historiografia literária em três momentos que vão da escrita em inglês, seguindo pela crítica ensaística e chegando à consolidação madura de suas abordagens. Espera-se com o artigo contribuir para os estudos em teoria da história, sobretudo com autores fora do eixo Europa-Estados Unidos.

Surviving the Genocide: The Singularity of Suffering in Yvonne Owuor's “Weight of Whispers”

ABSTRACT Although Theodor Adorno famously declared in 1983 that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, profound acts of horror have inspired many literary masterpieces. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is no exception, having motivated some of Africa’s literary gems. While a huge archive of Rwandan genocide fiction easily and conveniently slips into the binaries of evil/good and Tutsi/Hutu, which have become default tropes of writing about this African traumatic reality, Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor sets her short story in Nairobi and after the genocide in order to offer alternative insights into the less explored aspect of genocide fiction — post-genocide suffering. Whereas the Kuseremanes ironically assume that they have escaped the ghost of the genocide when they relocate to Nairobi, Owuor’s spatial and temporal registers demonstrate how dislocation and innuendoes of their complicity in the genocide catalyses the family’s inordinate suffering. She invests her short story with implicitly nuanced and subtle techniques that forcefully foreground the point that the Kuseremanes might have escaped the horrors of the genocide such as mass murder and rape by relocating to Nairobi, but they are fated to endure inordinate suffering because of genocide induced dislocation and societal rupture.

Kenya’s “Fake Essay” Writers and the Light they Shine on Assumptions of Shadows in Knowledge Production

ABSTRACT In this contribution to the special issue on Fakery in Africa, I examine the booming “fake essay” industry and draw on the role and perspectives increasingly occupied by of tens of thousands of young and highly-educated Kenyans. These so-called “Shadow Scholars” are part of a vast global online marketplace, an invisible knowledge production economy, where students and academics in the global North solicit and pay for their services in exchange for confidential and plagiarism-free essays, theses, dissertations, qualifications and publications. This article centres on descriptions of these writers as “shadows” as a means of complicating not only the most popular description of Africa in the global imagination – as existing in the shadow of an infinite number of different entities – but to challenge the notion of the shadow in relation to African knowledge production as being fake. It pays attention to the Kenyan writers’ protestations that their knowledge, experiences and labour are all real and that analogies with shadows reduce them and the impact of their work to something that is non-existent and not alive. From their perspective the term shadow is pejorative because it further reduces the intellectual contribution of Africans, presenting them as derivative.

Interventions in Adolescent Lives in Africa Through Story

This essay sets out to show how stories can help shape and change people’s understanding of their environment and how it impacts upon them. We report on how these ideas of storytelling informed a March 2020 UKRI GCRF funded Accelerate Hub workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, on narrative and adolescence in Africa, and point to related examples of storytelling interventions from elsewhere on the continent. We then explore questions that the workshop raised about the kinds of storytelling available to young people on the continent today and how understanding people’s stories is important for social policy design. The essay draws on the work of the Black Consciousness thinker and activist Steve Biko (1946–77), and of Kenyan writer and activist Binyavanga Wainaina (1971– 2019), to outline the significance of storytelling to projects of individual and collective emancipation. We build the case that there is an uneven geography of stories: that different people have different access to narrative making and therefore to self-envisioning. The essay closes by exploring how better access to infrastructures of storytelling might provide grounds for transformation in young people’s lives in Africa, and so might condition our approaches to policy intervention in African contexts. We suggest that linking storytelling, agency and social context to the field of social development and intervention can have important practical benefits for young people across Africa.

Metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel: A case study reading of Kyallo Wamitila’s Dharau ya Ini

Contemporary Swahili novels transgress the boundaries of the novel text itself. They employ metatextualities of different categories in order to fulfil a variety of functions. In this essay, I explore metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel, and provide a case study reading of one of the novels by the prolific and award-winning writer Kyallo Wadi Wamitila. My reading of Wamitila’s novel Dharau ya Ini (Contempt of the Liver, 2007) concentrates on metanarration and metareference. I analyse how narration, especially point of view, is used and how it is discussed and reflected upon by the text and in the text itself (metanarration). Another focus will be put on instances of metareference, especially on references to oral literature and to the literary genres of drama and poetry, as part of a work of prose. These analyses are done by a close reading informed by current research on metatextualities, and, in one of the examples, by phonostylistics. A general purpose of this study is to show how Swahili novel writing as African language writing participates in global discourses on, and practices in, literature and the arts. In a perspective of East(ern) African literature, it argues that Swahili literature and literary studies provide stimuli to literary theory and practice otherwise still dominated by its Anglophone counterpart in the region, and beyond. As regards Swahili literature, it reflects the crucial impact of Kenyan writing since about the turn of the millennium, in a sphere hitherto dominated by writers from Tanzania. The study is part of a research project I am undertaking in analysing metatextualities in contemporary Swahili novels by both Tanzanian and Kenyan writers.

Hybridizing Gikuyu in the face of globalization: The case of Ngugi wa Thiongos novel Murogi wa Kagogo

African literature in European languages entrenches the marginalization of large communities who cannot use European languages. Therefore, the revolutionary move by the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, to write in Gikuyu is a bold step towards empowering marginalized groups in Africa. In his literary essays, Ngugi argues that in the era of globalization African languages should enrich themselves by entering into dialogue with other languages of the world. A reading of Ngugi’s novel, Murogi wa Kagogo, using insights from sociolinguistics, reveals that Ngugi achieves this through hybridizing Gikuyu with English, Kiswahili, Sheng and even Latin. The article, specifically, attempts to show how Ngugi has hybridized Gikuyu using strategies like codeswitching, borrowing and diglossia. Drawing on Murogi wa Kagogo, this article argues that literature in African languages must embrace the strategies of hybridity in order to make African languages relevant to new global realities. The article further seeks to problematize the tendency by postcolonial theorists to almost wholly exclude African literature written in indigenous languages from the orbit of their critiques. This article is also an attempt to add to the few studies that exploit sociolinguistic approaches to examine literary texts. Key words: Murogi wa Kagogo, hybridity, sociolinguistics, postcolonial theory.

African Culturalist Subversion of Western Otherizing Logic in Decolonising the Mind: Ngugi’s Indigenization Project

When discussing African literature, it becomes impossible to bypass the issue of language, and more importantly African native languages, which seem to be close to quasi-inexistent when it comes to writing in them. In fact, most African written literature has come to life using the languages of the European languages imposed by force and at times subtly by the colonizers. In his book groundbreaking Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer and critic, addresses the issue by attacking these European languages in practice in both African nation-states and literature, and what the said languages represent ideologically and hegemonically when in use in Africa. In order to have a truly African literature, i.e. one utterly independent from the former colonial influences, Ngugi proposes a literature in African in African indigenous languages. How does he go about putting this in practice? Does such a proposition fit well in our days and age? These are the questions, among others, this paper seeks to address. Keywords: Africa, literature, indigenous, Europe, West, Other, subversion, culture, language

Building Bridges: African Biomedicine in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

Using the insights provided by Professor Michael Worton and sociologist David Baronov, the paper strives to show that the cultural aspect of medicine is intrinsic to health and illness. This paper seeks to present the vibrancy of pluralistic medical practices in contemporary Africa through Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Wizard of the Crow. It seeks to illustrate the pragmatic nature of African pluralistic medical practices that absorb and assimilate certain aspects from biomedicine, thereby paving the way for a distinctive blend that may rightly be termed as African biomedicine. It contends that African pluralistic medicine, biomedicine, and African biomedicine can coexist peacefully and contribute to the wellbeing of the African society in a highly globalized world.

Trajectories in Decolonizing Language: A Conversation with Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Abstract This interview presents the celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi's changing orientations in decolonizing language. After adopting a Marxist approach to language in the 1980s, he now adopts an embodied and ecological orientation from his indigenous Gikuyu tradition. He articulates the importance of vernaculars and multimodal art forms in social transformation. He discusses the role of affective dispositions such as memory, pain, and hope in resistance.