A Companion to African Literatures. Группа авторов

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Francis Imbuga holds the mantle of the foremost playwright in the country, up to his death, with Betrayal in the City (1976) as his most performed and studied play in the region. At the time of his death in 2012, he had published twelve plays, with Aminata (1988) and Shrine of Tears (1992) being particularly well received. Among the women playwrights, Micere Mugo’s The Long Illness of Ex‐Chief Kiti (1976) is lesser known than The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976), co‐authored with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, while Uganda’s Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu is an important part of the first generation of East African playwrights.

      At the same time, the East African Asian community has been prolific in its contributions to the making of East African writing. Long before Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Asian community in Uganda, preceded by Tanzania’s Africanization program, which equally displaced the East African Asian community, novelists and poets such as Ugandans Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth, and Jagjit Singh were a major part of the literary scene, with Rajat Neorgy’s Transition magazine, edited from Uganda, as a vital platform of literary formation in the region. The magazine, which continues to provide cutting‐edge literary insights, has since relocated to the US. On the Asian expulsions, Jagjit Singh’s poem “Portrait of an Asian as an East African” remains one of the classics among literary meditations on this historical moment. These disruptions aside, the East African Asian community remains a prolific and key voice in the region’s literature, with contemporary figures such as Tanzanian Kenyan M. G. Vassanji and Kenyan poet Shailja Patel as widely recognized writers, and younger voices such as Canada‐based Iman Verjee, whose 2016 novel Who Will Catch Us As We Fall? is set in post‐millennial Kenya and variously nods back to the country’s entangled histories. An important addition to this library is Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (2016), an accomplished historical novel interweaving a triracial tapestry of black, Asian, and British encounters in the region, from the building of the ill‐fated Kenya–Uganda railway all the way to post‐independence interactions. If, as Godwin Siundu’s reading of M. G. Vassanji’s writing suggests, the genealogies of East African Asian intellectual trajectories are “subsumed both in political histories of the region and overcast by a dominant pan‐Africanist logic whose exclusivism intimidated and then killed what had initially promised to be vibrant Afro‐Asian dialogic creativity” (2018, 7), then Kimani’s novel offers fresh breath to the promise of this Afro‐Asian creativity, through his novel’s riveting reimagining of cross‐racial solidarities and forms of reciprocal hospitality.

      While Idi Amin’s Asian expulsion and the resultant exiling of writers is better known, in fact many East and Central African countries have forced their writers either into detention without trial or exile, at one point or another. In addition to the Asian writers, Okot p’Bitek, Richard Ntiru, and John Ruganda were similarly forced into exile. Across in Kenya, the Jomo Kenyatta regime imprisoned Ngugi wa Thiong’o over his theater activities with the Kamiriithu community, while the Moi regime sank into deep paranoia and repression of writers and intellectuals in the 1980s, following the failed 1982 coup, sending writers Micere Mugo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and intellectuals Atieno Odhiambo and Alamin Mazrui into exile, while another group spent time in detention without trial, bequeathing Kenya with a sizable body of post‐independence prison literature. In recent years, increasing censorship has pushed several Ethiopian writers and journalists into exile, including satirist Habtamu Seyoum.

      In many respects, these dynamics remain at play, with various literary initiatives and arts and culture platforms continuing to serve as important catalysts of literary production. Among these are the feminist writers’ initiative Femrite in Uganda, which has been an immense success in inserting women’s voices and narratives into the region’s literary landscape, albeit with a heavy inflection of gender and development impulses. Femrite has either published or mentored a cross‐generational mix of Ugandan writers including Doreen Baingana, Mary Karooro Okurut, and Monica Arac de Nyeko, among others. While the novels and narratives produced under the Femrite banner would occasionally appear modest in their choices of gender epistemologies, they nonetheless shifted the East African literary scene in ways that are impossible to ignore. In similar vein, the Kwani Trust, whose entry coincided with Kenya’s so‐called second democratization wave after the 2002 exit of both the ruling party and President Daniel Arap Moi, inaugurated a fresh redefinition of the literary in Kenya, with a regional sensibility and a passionate embrace of the experimental. Kwani magazine started off by offering new writers space to explore the widest stretch of their literary imaginaries, often to the irritation of the professoriate at universities, who subscribed to different ideas of the literary. The primarily donor‐funded Kwani Trust has since extended its mandate to include hosting the Kwani Literary Festival, which is pan‐African in scope, starting a Kwani bookshop, and, most interestingly, awarding the Kwani Manuscript Prize. The inaugural prize went to Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, whose historical novel Kintu (2014) was first published by Kwani and has been very well received, both in the continent and overseas, resulting in the release of an American edition in 2017. At the time of writing, Kintu is widely considered the most important novel to emerge from the region in recent years, alongside its sister novel, also published by Kwani Trust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014). In a region that, like many other regions on the continent, has held greater promise for male writers, it is remarkable that the two top recent novels are both female‐authored historical novels, meditating on the nation project in Uganda and Kenya respectively.

      Other noteworthy initiatives are Jalada magazine, which is primarily digital; Jahazi magazine; and Writivism, which started off as a literary festival but has since expanded to include a literary prize for short stories, which are subsequently published in a Writivism anthology; and, more recently, writers’ workshops aimed at mentorship and promotion of the art of writing for emerging writers. There is also the Mabati Prize for African‐language literature, which has tended to be associated with Kiswahili writing. Marie Kruger’s work on Femrite, Doreen Strauhs (2013) on literary NGOs, Doseline Kiguru on literary prizes, Kate Wallis (2018, 2019) and Stephanie Bosch Santana (2019) on literary networks as well as Shola Adenekan (2012) on digital literature offer generative insights into current directions in East African literatures.

      Overall, then, the East and Central African region’s literary histories continue

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