education, their views were absent in the literary debates of the 1950s and 1960s; “in the end, the identity of East African literature was determined in university departments and literary journals and thus reflected the interests and anxieties of a small elite” who subsequently shaped the region’s literary cultures and institutions of literary production (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 9).
Elsewhere, Adrian Roscoe’s discussion of vernacular literatures in East Africa emphasizes the role of missionary societies, and later vernacular journals, as the early institutions for the promotion and publishing of African‐language literatures from the region (Roscoe 1977). Roscoe speculates that possibly because of connections to Muslim verse, poetry was a better developed form in Swahili writing than prose, which only emerged much later, partly thanks to vernacular newspapers and vernacular teaching in school curricula (Roscoe 1977, 8). Among the early Kiswahili fiction and life writing that Roscoe surveys are Martin Kayamba’s Tulivyoona na Tulivyofanya Uingereza (1932), James Mbotela’s Uhuru wa Watumwa (1934), and Mohammed Said Abdalla’s Mzimu wa Watu wa Kale (1960) and Kisima cha Giningi (1965). Another notable title in the region’s vernacular literature, which appears to be overlooked in Roscoe’s list, is Aniceti Kitereza’s Mwana Myombekere na Bibi Bugonoka, Ntulanalwo na Bulihwali, a historical novel which, though published in Kiswahili in 1981, was actually completed in 1945 in Kerewe, but lacked a publisher. Kitereza’s book has since been translated into German and Swedish, while fellow Tanzanian novelist Gabriel Ruhumbika translated it into English in 2002, directly from Kerewe.
It is fascinating to revisit concerns about the forms of artistic and social alienation that confronted the first generations of African writers in East and Central Africa, who found themselves struggling to reconcile the new aesthetics culled from the literature curricula of schools and universities – inevitably steeped in “the great tradition” and the English canon – with their concerns about their communities’ lives and aesthetics on the one hand and, on the other, the promise and challenge of the artist as an individual. In Gikandi’s view, though, these tensions, which have often been read as irreconcilable and alienating, may actually have given these writers’ works a particular, distinctive edge: “early East African literature in English was defined by the obvious tension between European forms of literary expression and local materials or topics” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, 10).
Zambian literature appears to complicate this dynamic further, owing to local‐language fiction, primarily in Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi, and Tonga, published after World War II. Reed describes the Nyanja fiction as short novelettes, often with a moral at their core, whose structure and logics might be a blend of both indigenous morality tales and Victorian moral tales and the English magazine story (Reed 1984, 84).
An interesting development in recent years has been the emergence of Sheng – a Kenyan urban patois – as a language of cultural production, primarily through music, short fiction, and popular poetry, with the latter two popularized by Kwani literary magazine and online literary platforms. Chege Githiora’s Sheng: Rise of a Kenyan Swahili Vernacular (2018) is an important research resource that is bound to generate more scholarly engagement with Sheng cultural productions. Still on the language question, John Mugane, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Biodun Jeyifo rebooted this topic in a 2017 issue of Journal of African Cultural Studies, debating whether English was an African language.
The Makerere Conference
It has now become traditional to nod to the 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers of English Expression when thinking about the histories of Anglophone African writing. Reporting on the conference for the Kenyan newspaper Sunday Nation, in an essay that was subsequently published in the August 1962 issue of Transition magazine, J. T. Ngugi (subsequently known as Ngugi wa Thiong’o) writes of his excitement about meeting South African Ezekiel Mphahlele and Chinua Achebe,
The young Nigerian novelist whose two novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, seem to herald the birth of a society in which writers, freed from the burden of political protests and jibes at a disintegrating colonialism, can cast an unsentimental eye at human relationship in all its delicate and sometimes harsh intricacies … With the death of colonialism, a new society is being born. And with it a new literature.
(Ngugi 1962, 7)
As Ngugi wa Thiong’o would soon discover, he was being a tad optimistic about the future. In fact, his own writing career for the next fifty years would be preoccupied with various incarnations of what Gikandi, in a reading of Ngugi’s own A Grain of Wheat, terms “arrested decolonization” (2000, 98).
It is hard to contest the fact that the debates at the conference articulated a foundational set of questions that were to preoccupy African writers and critics alike for decades to come. Expectedly, the question of defining African literature, and the related one on the language of African literature, particularly preoccupied delegates, and the discussions at the conference, and subsequently, remain foundational to critical and creative approaches to African writing to date. Interestingly, the focus on definition and language overshadowed another set of debates that were broached at the conference but did not gain as much traction subsequently: the question of audience and its implications for the circuits of production and consumption of African literature. While this set of questions is better known to contemporary scholars and writers via the work of Eileen Julien (2006) and Akin Adesokan (2012) on the extroverted novel, Pascale Casanova and Sarah Brouillette on the literary marketplace, and James English on literary value, these concerns were first flagged at the Makerere conference. In his post‐conference reflections, South African writer Bloke Modisane writes:
Sparks flew during the session devoted to a dialogue between two publishers. Vital and sometimes penetrating questions were thrown – like poison arrows – at the publishers. Were African writers getting a square deal from publishers’ readers? Were they guided by preconceived ideas as to what an African novel ought to be? Did the publishers have African readers? Were the selections guided by the considerations of a European audience? At times the questions implied a difference between a European and an African audience and then the need for a publishing house in Africa was discussed.
(Modisane 1962, 5)
Like the issue of definition, this set of questions on the production and consumption of African writing was largely suspended, and to a large extent remains unresolved, returning to haunt East African writing in interesting ways. Notable here is the duo of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu. Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa,” and his subsequent work with the Kwani Trust and Kwani magazine (see below) broach the question of problematic contemporary representations of Africa, which retain a strong appeal in the international literary market; while Dinaw Mengestu takes this challenge a step further in his novel How to Read the Air by using an unreliable narrator, Jonas Woldemarian, to both stage and subvert versions of what Mengestu terms “the Africa narrative,” precisely by weaving elaborate lies that mock American assumptions about migrants’ heartrending journeys to the US.
At a time when debates about the extroverted African novel, as Eileen Julien and Akin Adesokan’s work illustrates, are at their peak, Gikandi’s reminder about the region’s receptiveness to experimental styles of writing in the 1970s – and local readerships’ embrace of these forms – is instructive. The East African Publishing House was receptive to Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, inadvertently challenging international publishers’ rigid conceptions of literary value (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii), and subsequently attracting prominent authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah, who opted for East African publishers for Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, both of which represented a shift from “the high modernist norm that had won him international prominence” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, viii).
The Abolition of the English Department
