based at the University of Nairobi – Taban lo Liyong, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Henry Owuor‐Anyumba – submitted a memorandum to the acting head of the English Department at the university seeking the abolition of the department, to be replaced with a Department of African Literature and Languages. The submission was in response to a presentation by the acting head of the department to the faculty board, discussing the place of cognate departments such as Modern Languages (French) and disciplines such as Linguistics and African Languages in relation to the English Department. The three academics took strong exception to this line of thought, particularly for the manner in which it was underpinned by “a basic assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1995, 439). Instead, the three scholars emphasized the need to “orientate ourselves towards placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa in the centre,” not so much as a rejection of other literary cultures, but as a reconfiguring of the patterns of dominance inherited from the colonial academy in Eastern Africa which centered English studies, by “establish[ing] the centrality of Africa in the department” (441). Recognizing the influence of European literatures, Portuguese, French, Swahili, Arabic, and Asian literatures in shaping modern African literature, the three proposed that the new reconfigured department center African oral literature, modern African literature, and “a selected course in European literature” (440). Curiously, they also felt strongly about Francophone African literature and proposed that knowledge of English, Kiswahili, and French be compulsory (440). The emphasis on oral literature was in part motivated by its interdisciplinary possibilities, as it would encompass anthropology, history, psychology, religion, and philosophy while simultaneously encouraging students’ sense of rootedness and innovation. In their words, supplementing modern African Literature courses with Oral Tradition courses meant that “the new literature [would] be set in the stream of history to which it belongs and so be better appreciated; and on the other hand, be better able to embrace and assimilate other thoughts without losing its roots” (441). Overall, the emphasis was on placing “Africa at the centre of things, not existing as an appendix or satellite of other countries and literatures,” following which one could then “radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us” (441).
The subsequent public memory of this moment in the shorthand of “abolition of the English Department” rendered the memo and the moment open to oversimplification in succeeding renditions. In the process, an important conversation about working assumptions of literary value that determine syllabi decisions has largely been under‐explored, yet it is one of the more interesting and prescient concerns the three academics raised. As they argued, the emphasis on teaching works of “undisputed literary excellence” not only obscures questions of positionality that shape literary value, but is also counterintuitive, as in any society “it is better to study representative works which mirror their society rather than to study a few isolated ‘classics,’ either of their own or of a foreign culture” (441).
In the end, the three main universities in the region – the Universities of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere University – replaced the English Department with Literature Departments. It would be a while, though, before the questions of value were embraced in the spirit proposed by the three scholars, especially where local popular fiction was concerned, as many of these departments retained inherited ideas of great literature and its centrality to literary studies. These same dynamics would later play out as cross‐generational tensions between the academy – primarily the University of Nairobi professoriate – and the emerging generation of young writers affiliated with the Kwani literary magazine and their iconoclastic approach to notions of the literary. A second unforeseen result was that the beneficiaries of the Ngugi–Anyumba–Taban 1972 revolution were left “stuck in their grove of stylistics, oral literature and the nineteenth‐and‐twentieth‐century European canon” to the exclusion of popular literature and cultures and postmodernism (Siundu 2016, 1549–1550). At the same time, it is interesting to revisit these debates and their implications in the region, at a time when the South African academy finds itself confronted by these same issues through student demands for what they term the decolonization of curricula.
Selected Writers
Long before it became fashionable for Africans to travel across the continent and write on their journeys – a trend popularized in recent years by South African writer Sihle Khumalo – Legson Kayira (1942–2012) had traveled from Malawi to Khartoum and on to the United States, accompanied by his Bible and a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Roscoe 1977, 215). Kayira wrote about his journeys in his 1965 memoir, I Will Try, which “remained on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks” (Ross 2012). In both his journey and its narration, Elliot Ross notes, Kayira understands himself to be following in the footsteps of missionaries such as David Livingstone, a perspective possibly imparted at the Livingstonia Mission School where he had studied (Ross 2012). Kayira’s first novel, The Looming Shadow (1967), inaugurated his comic spirit, which he would retain in much, though not all, of his subsequent fiction – Jingala (1969), Things Black and Beautiful (1970), The Civil Servant (1971), and Detainee (1974) – despite being at odds with the sober narratives of postcolonial disillusionment that were beginning to germinate at the time. Kayira shares the honor of being among the first Malawian novelists, along with poet and playwright academic David Rubadiri, whose sole novel, No Bride Price (1967), was followed by a range of poems, including the much anthologized “An African Thunderstorm,” and an equally well‐known poetry anthology, Poems from East Africa (1971), which he edited with David Cook. The third novelist in the trinity is Aubrey Kachingwe, whose highly political No Easy Task (1966) remains his only novel, as he turned to short fiction after its publication. Another major voice from Malawi is Jack Mapanje whose œuvre of poetry is widely recognized and studied. Mapanje’s Of Chameleon and Gods (1981) is easily the most widely read poetry collection from the country, and indeed, fairly well known across the continent.
Meantime, in Zambia, Dominic Mulaisho, a senior civil servant – whose early writing was done through dictation into an audiophone at lunchtime – is probably the second best known Zambian writer after Kenneth Kaunda and his 1962 autobiography, Zambia Shall be Free. That Mulaisho’s novels – The Tongue of the Dumb (1971) and The Smoke that Thunders (1979) – are both interested in power dynamics is unsurprising, as a good number of the region’s keenest analysts of power dynamics variously served in their countries’ governments. Here, Malawian David Rubadiri’s poem, “An African Thunderstorm,” and Ugandan Henry Barlow’s popular “Building the Nation” come to mind. Rubadiri served as Malawi’s ambassador before a fallout with the Kamuzu Banda regime which led to a long exile in Uganda and Kenya, while Henry Barlow’s cutting satire about the hypocrisies and wastefulness of civil servants was written during his term as a minister in the Ugandan government. But John Reed is skeptical about Mulaisho’s stylization of both the 1940s mission and the village in The Tongue of the Dumb, though he nonetheless believes it offers “a poetry of place, closely woven with the richness of growing things and the hardness of hunger” (Reed 1984, 92), which strengthens its link to the Old Testament that lends it its title. For Gordon McGregor, an academic at the newly launched University of Zambia, writing in 1969, Mulaisho’s novel was distinctive thanks to “a touch of satire and sardonic humour” that ran through it (cited in Currey 2008, 253).
The region has also produced its quarter of playwrights and dramatists, although this genre would seem to be under‐explored in recent decades. Among the major dramatists are Uganda’s John Ruganda whose plays Black Mamba (1973), Covenant with Death (1973), The Burdens (1972), and The Floods (1980) were variously staged in Kampala and Nairobi. The Burdens and The Floods are particularly well received and have been regularly featured on the Kenyan school and university curricula. Fellow Ugandan Robert Serumaga is equally recognized for his role as both actor and playwright. Among his better known plays are The Elephants (1971) and Majangwa (1974). Serumaga’s exploration of the absurd is evident both in his drama and his sole novel, Return to the Shadows (1969). Ruganda and Serumaga
