who mobilized Malawians in protest against British recruitment of carrier corps who were dying in large numbers in Tanganyika and Somalia (Currey 2008, 257). Mwase’s Strike a Blow and Die (1967) was rescued from the national archives by a visiting Harvard scholar, Robert Rotberg, who arranged for its publication by Harvard University Press in 1967. It was actually written in 1931–1932, during Mwase’s term in prison for tax embezzlement (Currey 2008, 257).
Across in Zambia, John Reed underlines the uniqueness of Zambia’s history as a British colony largely governed from South Africa. As a result, Reed writes, Zambia’s encounter with Europe came “transformed, harshened and provincialized, by way of South Africa” (Reed 1984, 83). Owing to this unique encounter of “experienc[ing] European culture as the colony of a colony” (83), Zambian fiction not only lacked an Africanist or protest impetus, as would be the case with Zimbabwean, South African, and Eastern African writing, but also Zambian writers felt no compulsion to take British or American writing as models. Reed counts among their influences journalistic training, non‐literary fiction in magazines, school set works, and African novels from other parts of the continent. Just as East African literature has been haunted by Taban lo Liyong’s charge of a literary desert, Zambian writing is often considered to be overshadowed by the more robust neighboring literary scenes to the south and the east, especially where English‐language writing is concerned. For Ranka Primorac, part of the issue is that Zambian English writing not only resists easy categorization, it finds itself “asserting its existence and visibility, yet being undermined by conditions of economic crisis and lack” (Primorac 2013, 101). In her view, though, the challenge Zambian writing poses is one that invites the “postcolonializing and localizing” of analytic categories, genres, and ideas of literary value, in part because, for instance, “the generic term bildungsroman, with its Eurocentric and realism‐inflected textual and cultural implications, may not be entirely adequate in describing non‐European configurations of emergence narratives” (Primorac 2013, 109). Alongside a robust body of local‐language literatures, post‐independence Zambia saw a growing list of English‐language short fiction by writers such as Kafungulwa Mubitana, Simon D. Katema, and William Saidi. A recurrent concern across these narratives is the tension between tradition and modernity, inflected with moral questions of right and wrong, which also features in the first two Zambian novels in English, Andreya Masiye’s Before Dawn (1971) and Dominic Mulaisho’s Tongue of the Dumb (1971). Other early authors are Gideon Phiri, author of Ticklish Sensation (1971); William Simukwasa, author of Coup! (1979); Grieve Sibale, who wrote Between Two Worlds (1979); and Joseph Muyuni, author of A Question of Motive (1978). In Primorac’s words, much of this fiction seeks to “thematise and transmit social change [and] transact a cultural coming to terms with modernity” (Primorac 2013, 109).
The different political trajectories of the region’s countries inevitably shaped their socio‐cultural impetuses and, by extension, their literary cultures, at the levels of both form and content. Thus, Somali and Ugandan literature features a longer engagement with questions of civil war and post‐independence conflict, as seen in the work of playwright John Ruganda (The Burdens, The Floods) and Nuruddin Farah and Nadifa Mohamed’s fiction; while Tanzania and Ethiopia’s socialist encounters differently inflected their respective literatures, when one considers Hama Tuma’s satirical anthology, The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor and Other Stories, or Tanzania’s extensive Ujamaa literature, both in English and Kiswahili. At the same time, Kenya’s trajectory as a settler colony, coupled with its post‐independence embrace of neoliberal capitalism, in some ways made for a more vibrant economy, with rich returns for the literary publishing scene; but these returns would soon be scuppered by increasing autocracy and the eventual hollowing out of the intellectual community, as Dan Ojwang, Atieno Odhiambo, and Thandika Mkandawire variously show.
African‐Language Literatures and the Language Question
Gikandi remarks that where Anglophone East African writing is considered young relative to other regional literatures – prompting Ugandan Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong to declare the region a literary desert – African‐language literatures in the region go back centuries. Examples are the aforementioned Geʿez literatures of Ethiopia, going back to the middle ages, while Swahili literature traces its roots back to the fifteenth century (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii).
In retrospect, it is clear that East Africa had not been a literary wilderness. While the region did not produce writers with international reputations until the 1960s, it had a substantial literary culture in African languages such as Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania, Somali in Somalia, and Amharic in Ethiopia. Because these literatures dated as far back as the fifteenth century, they often had a local and regional authority and reputation that writing in English could not easily match.
(Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 9)
An important paradox for Gikandi, though, is that despite being a late arrival on the continent’s literary scene, Anglophone East African writing “is fundamentally connected to older forms of literary expression in African languages” (viii). Elsewhere, Fiona Moolla (2014) remarks on the tendency to read Nuruddin Farah’s From a Broken Rib (1970) – which holds the distinction of being the first Anglophone male‐authored novel to feature a female protagonist – with emphasis on its oral features, which are in turn deemed to signal Farah’s novels’ emergence from orality, an idea that gains stronger resonance given that the author’s mother was a poet. Moolla’s reminder here, though, is that Somali orature deviates from popular perceptions of African orature in two important ways. First, it is individually composed and does not rely on formulae. Second, Somali society takes this format of individual composition so seriously that any subsequent renditions of the poem must acknowledge the composer and rely on memory to ensure accurate recitation of the original poem. In this context, then, Moolla’s reading unsettles assumptions about African orality as symbolizing “the collective outpouring of the communal spirit” which, in an evolutionary logic, “develops into individual expression articulated through writing, [and] in particular, the novel” (Moolla, 2014, 2). For her, on the contrary, Somali orature underscores the affirmation of the individual against what she terms the “social‐transcendental horizon” (2).
Interestingly, this influence between African‐language and European‐language writing in the region goes both ways, as Alamin Mazrui’s Cultural Politics of Translation (2016) illustrates. Mazrui discusses Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s conviction that translation of Shakespeare and other classics into Kiswahili would modernize the language and Tanzania, while giving Kiswahili the nourishment it needed to develop into a literary language in its own right. Remarkable here is the success of the Nyerere project in socially engineering a powerful Kiswahili literary tradition which continues to outshine the Anglophone literary tradition in the country, decades after the demise of the Ujamaa project and Tanzania’s return to the neoliberal fold. Equally noteworthy is Kiswahili’s hospitable embrace of literatures from other regions of the continent and the world, and the ways in which these literatures were to leave a powerful imprint on regional sensibilities. Although translations of classics such as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as Okonkwo Shujaa or Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy as Mchimba Madini will be familiar to Kiswahili scholars, they enjoyed less popularity with readerships compared to their originals, in part because readers had already been exposed to the English originals, largely through school curricula, which in turn spilled beyond the school gates as students influenced friends’ and colleagues’ reading lists. However, Wole Soyinka’s The Trials of Brother Jero and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice would have completely different fates in translation as Masaibu ya Ndugu Jero and Mabepari wa Venisi respectively, because they became Kiswahili set works in schools, and therefore entered Kenyan and Tanzanian literary imaginaries in Kiswahili. For many Kenyan readers, present company included, Brother Jero was decidedly East African, and located in our Kiswahili cultural imaginaries, even after we encountered Soyinka’s other works in English.
Gikandi underlines the paradox that colonial literacy in African languages meant that
