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2 Rereading East African Literature Through a Human Rights Lens: The Example of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child
Katwiwa Mule
East African literature, like African literature in general, has often been read in terms of the institutions, ideologies, and individuals that gave rise to it and subsequently shaped its unique character.1 In his authoritative essay, “African Literature and the Colonial Factor,” Simon Gikandi provocatively argues that “what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe had not taken place” (Gikandi 2004, 379). Gikandi’s argument is based on the premise that
[M]odern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
(Gikandi 2004, 379; emphasis added)
Gikandi does of course acknowledge here, as elsewhere, that literature in Africa predates the European colonial encounter,2 but in accounting for what he and Evan Mwangi in another study call its “strong sense of regionality” (Gikandi and Mwangi 2007, vii), both argue that there’s a paucity of writing in this region compared to Western and Southern Africa because, besides the relatively speaking smaller size of Eastern Africa and the region’s relatively late encounter with European colonialism, “all other regions of Africa have been in contact with Europe since the late sixteenth century and have thus developed traditions of culture and writing in European languages that are as old as the colonial encounter” (vii). The point here
