1 East and Central Africa: An Introduction
Grace A. Musila
Apart from the annual ritual of declaring Ngugi wa Thiong’o the preferred winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, other tropes that come up when mapping Eastern and Central African literary imaginaries are: Taban lo Liyong’s infamous declaration of East Africa as a literary desert; the Makerere Conference of 1962; the abolition of the English Department; and the seeming overshadowing of Malawi, Zambia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti by the region’s literary and economic powerhouses, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
In his preface to a study of East African literature co‐authored with Evan Mwangi, Simon Gikandi underscores what he terms a “strong sense of regionality” in East African literatures, which he considers to be partly a result of the region’s attempt to sustain political and economic stability in the 1960s and 1970s, while other parts of the continent were rocked by strife; but also, because the region’s authors enjoyed access to a flourishing publishing industry and academy which were heavily invested in the promotion of literary culture (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, vii). Gikandi also attributes the relative youth of Anglophone East African writing to three factors: the relative smallness of the region and its population; its belated colonial contact that meant late establishment of colonial institutions central to literary production; and its writers’ regional locatedness, in comparison to writers from elsewhere (vii). For Gikandi, this regionalized sensibility had two effects: regional household names such as Okot p’Bitek remained unknown elsewhere for a long time, while the region’s Anglophone writing found itself doubly‐marginal, both in African literary history and relative to the region’s indigenous‐language literatures. Remarkable in this regard is the case of Anglophone literatures in Tanzania and Ethiopia, both of which retain much stronger local language (Swahili and Amharic, respectively) literatures.
Ethiopia and Tanzania both have a much older and larger catalogue of African‐language writing compared to English‐language writing. In both cases, history has had a major hand in crafting this literary scene: Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika and Zanzibar) was initially a German colony (1880–1919); after World War I, Germany handed Tanganyika over to Britain. An important fragment for Tanzania’s literary history is the Maji Maji resistance (1905–1907), in which various communities of Southern Tanganyika came together to protest forced labor in cotton plantations, among other grievances. While Tanganyika suffered heavy fatalities due to German‐engineered famine and war casualties – prophet Kinjeketile Ngwale’s reassurance that the special water would render combatants bulletproof failed to materialize – the resistance nonetheless distilled local communities’ grievances and enabled them to articulate these to themselves and the Germans in ways that earned the resistance an iconic place in Tanzanian national history. The resistance is the subject of one of the best known and most widely performed and taught Tanzanian plays: Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile (1970), easily an anticolonial classic, in the same category as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1977). L. A. Mbughuni (1984, 256–257) emphasizes that both plays cast a glance back at Kenyan and Tanzanian histories of anticolonial resistance, pivoting around iconic leaders, Kinjeketile Ngwale and Dedan Kimathi, who, despite losing the battle, retain moral victory that eventually translates to anticolonial victory.
Tanganyika’s unification with Zanzibar to form the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964 was soon followed by first president Julius Kambarange Nyerere’s launch of Ujamaa or African socialism. From 1967, Tanzania’s national development was framed around Ujamaa, whose insistence on self‐reliance and equality inevitably impacted cultural policy, particularly given Nyerere’s investment in Kiswahili as a unifying national language and as a literary language. Nyerere took literature and Kiswahili seriously enough to personally translate Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Kiswahili, in part because these two plays’ concerns resonated with Ujamaa’s political project. By the time Nyerere conceded that Ujamaa had failed in 1985, leading to the liberalization of Tanzania’s economy and politics, the cultural impact of Ujamaa had taken root, resulting in a vibrant Kiswahili literary scene which, while building on a legacy of over three hundred years, was nonetheless strengthened by Ujamaa’s principles, in ways that allow Kiswahili writing to retain literary prominence to date in Tanzania (Mbise 1984).
On its part, apart from the distinction of never being colonized, Ethiopia also holds the distinction of having “the only extended written tradition predating both the Arabic and European incursions into the continent,” initially in Geʿez, then in Amharic, whose literary tradition is over a thousand years old (Griffiths 2000, 262). Griffiths notes the influence of this tradition on English‐language Ethiopian writing, evident in works such as Sahle Sellassie’s Warrior King (1974) – a historical novel reimagining the unification of Ethiopia under Kassa Hailu aka Emperor Tewodros II – and plays such as Tsegaye Gabre‐Mehdin’s Collision of Altars (1977). For Griffiths, Ethiopian writing in English retains a fascination with historical settings, as seen in more recent writing such as Bereket Habte Sellassie’s reimagining of the unseating of Emperor Haile Selassie, in his 1993 novel Riding the Whirlwind. However, it is Daniachew Worku’s The Thirteenth Sun (1973) that Griffiths considers the most accomplished Ethiopian English novel of the twentieth century, in part owing to its sophisticated treatment of modern Ethiopian cultural struggles with the tensions between traditional animist practices and the equally traditional Ethiopian Coptic Christianity (Griffiths 2000, 263–264). Gebra Selasie Tesfay’s The Company of My Shadow (1993) offers autobiographical insights into the Mengistu Haile Mariam regime that succeeded Emperor Haile Selassie’s rule, by reflecting on the author’s own involvement in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which ousted the Mengistu‐led Derg regime in 1991. This is a subject he shares with Maaza Mengiste, whose debut novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) reimagines the fall of the emperor and the transition into the Derg’s rule that plunged Ethiopia into a seven‐year reign of terror under the autocracy of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Hama Tuma’s The Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories (1993) uses black humor to sketch out the absurdities of the ostensibly socialist Derg regime in Ethiopia following Emperor Selassie’s deposition and death. Dinaw Mengestu’s writing too is preoccupied with the impact of the fall of the Selassie empire and the scarred lives that have since unfolded for Ethiopians in the diaspora. With three novels to his name so far – The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2007), How to Read the Air (2010), and All Our Names (2014) – Mengestu’s meditations on the emotional costs of the displacement and the infinite betrayals of the American dream for African migrants remain remarkable in their sensitive rendition of the scalding emotional scars of migrant experience.
Gikandi considers East African writing over the last century as having been driven by “the dialectic between [the] forceful desire by European powers to reshape the region to serve imperial interests, and the equally powerful need of colonized Africans to secure their autonomy” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 1). Yet, he is quick to point out the uniqueness of the region, owing to its encounters with the two forces that have proven decisive in shaping African literary imaginaries: globalization and Christianity. Of the former, growing scholarship on Indian Ocean Worlds emphasizes what Isabel Hofmeyr has described as Indian Ocean Worlds’ transnational modes of imagination that preceded European imperialism (Hofmeyr 2012, 585) and which were largely embedded in religious and cultural Islam. At the same time, while Christianity and the mission school remain key protagonists in East African letters, “Christianity in East Africa, introduced to Ethiopia from the Near East in the fourth century, is older than the European Christian church” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 2). Despite seemingly pulling in different religious directions, the predominance of Islam in the Eastern African coast and its powerful imprint on Swahili literatures and cultures have meant that even decidedly Christian communities are in some ways culturally inflected with Islam, a scenario that is most visible in Tanzania and coastal Kenya.
