Stanley Gazemba on mermaids and how to prevent us from turning into robots
An interview by Elke Seghers

I interviewed the Kenyan author Stanley Gazemba on the occasion of his 2002 novel The Stone Hills of Maragoli being republished in the U.S. under the title Forbidden Fruit (June 2017). In April 2017, we had a conversation about his work and the Kenyan literary landscape at the Go Down Arts Centre in Nairobi, where Gazemba is the editor of Ketebul Music.

ES: As I understood it, Forbidden Fruit is going to be published soon.

SG: Yes, although in fact, Forbidden Fruit is not a new book, but was published in 2002 as The Stone Hills of Maragoli. The whole thing was quite an adventurous journey. It was first published by Acacia Publishers, which was at the time newly founded by someone who had left East African Educational Publishers. I had actually first submitted the manuscript to the latter publishing house, but Acacia picked it up. From the very moment it went to print, I started hearing rumours that the judges of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize had taken a liking to it. The book was competing neck to neck with a submission from East African Educational Publishers. However, the judges liked the book and in 2003, The Stone Hills of Maragoli won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature.

ES: What did winning the Jomo Kenyatta Prize mean for you?

SG: It helps your reputation as a writer, but it also creates problems. When I won, I received 50 000 shillings. But everyone had seen my face in the newspaper. So, if you walk into a pub, you have to buy the drinks. Your friends and your neighbours look at you differently, they think you are rich, when in reality, not much has changed.

ES: Do you think there should be more initiatives for Kenyan writers?

SG: I think, first of all, there is a need for sincerity. It feels as though publishers manipulate these prizes. I am told East African Educational Publishers were really rooting for their guy to win. As my publisher was small and was a competitor that had branched off from East African, there were a lot of things playing against me. I am told that publishers also pay bribes to the Kenya Institute for Curriculum Development to have their books accepted for the school system. Of course there’s no evidence to support this. All the same it is a rotten system and it is hard for authors to operate in such an environment. Maybe this is something that happens all over the world in publishing, but I think it is very discouraging. You cannot build a proper literary culture based on people pushing brown envelopes. Writing can only grow when the guys at the top are there because they deserve it. There is also the problem of piracy. There are a lot of pirated books on the market and the fines are relatively low.

ES: What happened after you won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize?

SG: Unfortunately, Acacia Publishers went bankrupt. After some time, Kwani? Trust decided to publish the novel. As Kwani? is an NGO, everybody had a fixed salary rather than a commission. I felt as though they did not make much effort to sell the book and I got frustrated with them. I was doing a lot of marketing myself. Publishing in Kenya is all about getting a book into the school system, so I was going to classes to talk to the students and sell some books. The book became a set text in quite a number of universities, mostly around Nairobi. But when my royalties started coming in, they did not reflect my efforts. That is why I decided I needed to find a serious commercial publisher.

ES: I understand you did not have an easy relationship with your publishers.

SG: I have had the same problems with almost all of my publishers. They are keen on putting books out but do not make much effort afterwards. Furthermore, they do not pay people on time and do not invest in promotion. That is the reason why I reached out to an American publisher. I met my American publisher last year at a festival in Uganda. At the very last day of the event, I decided to show him my book. He read the book on the plane home and he liked it. I immediately got an email to say that he was very interested and wanted to publish it. Things started moving very fast and I think it is now in print.

ES: How do you feel about reaching a new audience?

SG: I meant to break through internationally this year. Right now as we speak, I was supposed to be in Venice to launch a collection of short stories called Dog Meat Samosa. There had been plans for activities in the media over there. Unfortunately, I could not get the visa to go to Italy. This was not the first time I was invited to go to Venice, I was also invited in 2013 but had similar visa problems. The book has been published, but I do not know if it is going to sell well without me being there.

ES: What kind of audience do you target?

SG: I think my prime target is the average person, although I know that you cannot survive without elitist readers, because those are the people with the money; the average reader would most likely access your book from a public library. But that tiny middle class audience is not enough to make something a commercial success either. The reality on the ground is that you cannot survive in Kenya unless you are part of the school curriculum. Ultimately, I want to be successful internationally. I am sure that there is no writer who just wants to be read by his village.

ES: How does that affect your choice of language? You write in English, but use a lot of Luhya words in The Stone Hills of Maragoli. Do you think the only way to be read is to write in English?

SG: I think that is a tricky question. Language is something political. In Kenya, we have no choice but to write in English. English has become a global language and if you really want to be read by a cross-section of readers around the world, you cannot avoid English. But having said that, I find that, although English is widely used in Kenya, there are certain things that we can only communicate amongst ourselves, be it in Kiswahili or Luhya or Lulogooli. I will express the things that I feel deep inside in Lulogooli. The question is how to express oneself in that deep way to someone who does not understand Lulogooli or Kiswahili. Achebe was writing in English but he had his own version, a certain English that can be understood by a British reader, but that is clearly not British English. The challenge on the African writer is to use the tools available to him, but in a way that certain things are twisted to make it convey what he wants to say.  If I would use phrases or expressions that I have read in a book by George Eliot, I think I would come across as a fake. The only solution is to use that language but use it in such a way that it is Africanized, bent to suit one’s own. That is why I said language is something political.

ES: Let’s talk a bit about the book itself. I noticed The Stone Hills of Maragoli focuses on life in the countryside and the perspective of the labourers.

SG: I set The Stone Hills of Maragoli in a fictitious village modelled on the village in which I grew up in Western Kenya. It was a deliberate decision. Although I now live in Nairobi, I chose to set my book in the village because that is the only place where you can have a taste of authentic Kenyan everyday life as a visitor to the country. It is very important to me to tell the Kenyan story from the point-of-view of an ordinary Kenyan who walks the dusty streets of the small back-wood towns. It is the reason I choose to root those stories I set in Nairobi deep in the ghettos of the city. One such book is a collection of short stories about Nairobi called Nairobi Echoes. I like to think that the soul of any city is buried in those ghetto places. They are rarely highlighted, but that is where the majority of people live. I am also deeply attached to labourers because I believe they are the engine of any economy- the guys who roll up their sleeves and put the greasy wrenches to the machine’s nuts and bolts, crawling into the belly of the machine to fix what is bothering it. The farmhands who tend to the coffee and the cows are the people who really drive an economy. And they are very open folks too. In middle class Nairobi, for instance, there is a façade; people try to put up a front. They eat their food with knives and forks like white people, whereas if you go to these other places, people wash their hands and eat in the traditional way. It is more interesting for me to observe and write about these ordinary people who are more accessible.

ES: So you want to show life as it is in your writing?

SG: Yes, I want to capture it in its basic form. I came to find that people in the village are much more real, just like in the ghettos. In the kind of stories I write, I create characters from the people I interact with. As a writer, I am always keen to know about someone’s fears, joys and aspirations, about what makes them who they are.

ES: I was also interested in the depiction of the seductive Madam Tabitha. She is described as a creature half-woman and half-fish. Where does this image come from?

SG: The image of a mermaid has always been the centre stage of the discourse of the village and by extension the ghetto. There are always stories of farmers who make money and want to make up for lost time after the harvest season. The farmer moves to the market centre or the local town and books himself into a hotel with a commercial sex worker. The story always ends with the poor farmer losing all of his money to the lady, who oftentimes comes from Nairobi, or, even worse, Mombasa, and is much more wily and street-smart. This narrative of people losing their sanity and wealth to a flashy and attractive lady who drives them mad has never changed. And that agrees with the image of the mermaid who is very beautiful but not quite human. I think Madam Tabitha, as a character, feeds off of all of those stories.

ES: Are there any writers that influenced you?

SG: Chinua Achebe, who I studied in High school, although the experience was a little unpleasant as the system made you cram passages from his books instead of reading for pleasure. The early Ngugi wa Thiong’o used to write very well until Marxism went into his head. I enjoy Meja Mwangi. I also like John Steinbeck’s style although I am told he is an old-fashioned American writer. Ken Follet is very good at creating characters. When it comes to contemporary African writers, there is Ben Okri, Chimamanda Adichie and Nadifa Mohamed, to mention but a few.

ES: As a final question, why do you think literature is important?

SG: I think we cannot do without writers. I do not think there is any society that has developed scientifically without that growth being fuelled by the arts. I think the arts give direction to the other spheres. On that note, I believe the arts are not just, as they are derogatively called in universities, humanities. They are much more. You cannot be a good creator if you do not understand other spheres of life. You need to be an informed person in order to write. Most importantly, if it were not for the arts, we would become robots. What would people look like without culture; without good books, music and theatre? I also believe it is very easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger, for example from a foreign country, if both of you have read such or such a writer or if both of you are interested in the same musical instrument. Those are some of the things that make me believe that the arts are important. Even in politics it is usually a musician who is hyping up the crowd before the politician mounts the stage.

Stanley Gazemba, Forbidden Fruit (Astoria, NY: The Mantle 2017). ISBN 978-0-9986423-0-7. Available from The Mantle; 286 pages

 
Hidden behind a leafy courtyard off Nairobi’s Riverside Drive, Kwani Trust houses one of Kenya’s (and perhaps Africa’s) most fascinating literary contributions of the last decades. The small, cosy shop can hardly reveal the magnitude of this movement, which since its inception in 2003 has adopted an increasingly influential voice within Africa’s intellectual and cultural arena. Kwani Trust has developed into a literary hub that assembles an ever expanding community of writers, poets, journalists, academics, photographers etc., who showcase a great variety of work in an impressive range of literary products and happenings. Apart from its role as a publishing house, Kwani Trust provides training opportunities for upcoming talent, organises literary festivals (the last edition of Kwani LitFest dates from 2015, the next one is to be expected in 2018), holds numerous projects dedicated to the promotion of contemporary literature, and, perhaps most importantly, comments upon current social, political and cultural affairs through its magazine Kwani?. As a compilation of prose fiction, poetry, literary experiments, journalism, interviews, articles, and photography, this journal offers a selection of today’s best and brightest literary talents in Kenya, the rest of the continent, and beyond. In this contribution, I will consider the role that Kwani assumes today within Kenya’s literary field through the most recent issue of its magazine: Kwani? 08, and by referring to the ground-breaking study by Doreen Strauhs on Kwani Trust and similar initiatives past and present.  

Literary organisations in Africa that situate themselves outside the regular commercial publishing circuit and, at the same time, do not operate within or thanks to state-funded (academic) institutions  are neither extraordinary nor new. In her book African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation, Doreen Strauhs has studied Kwani Trust together with the Ugandan organisation FEMRITE as two examples of African LINGOs. LINGO, as Strauhs has coined the term, stands for literary non-governmental organisation. Strauhs defines this as “[f]irst and foremost, […] a non-governmental organisation with a focus on the production and promotion of literary talent, events, and publications that is situated in the nonprofit sector.”[1]  Naming various examples from Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana, Strauhs indicates that LINGOs exist throughout the continent.[2]  Also within Kenya several other initiatives that dedicate themselves to the written word situate themselves in this non-profit sociocultural sphere. Jalada, Twaweza Communications, Storymoja… they all operate independently from governmental guidelines or strictly commercial agendas. Moreover, these various initiatives are embedded within a tradition that stretches back for over more than half a century.

Consequently, Strauhs suggests that LINGOs such as Kwani Trust and FEMRITE are not as new or revolutionary as they like to stage themselves. According to Strauhs, the first LINGOs surfaced at the beginning of the 1960s, elaborating on and responding to the literary networks that were rooted in colonial cultural and academic infrastructures. As such, LINGOs have been driven from their very first beginnings “by networks of people spanning across and beyond transnational borders, triggering contacts and synergies between writers as well as critics from around the world.”[3] Chemchemi Creative Centre, established in 1963 in Nairobi and directed by the South African writer Es’kia Mphahlele was directly influenced by Ibadan’s Mbari Club, and, as such, prefigured the cosmopolitan and hybrid nature of today’s Kwani Trust. The Kwani? magazine, in its turn, is a direct heir to the late Transition magazine, a literary journal that in the sixties and seventies echoed the equally legendary Black Orpheus magazine. From the very beginning, literary associations looked beyond the borders of the nation and adopted transnational perspectives on literary creativity in the continent and the diaspora. After two difficult decades at the end of the 20th century due to political, economic and social upheavals, the LINGO and its editorial appendages re-entered Africa’s literary stage. Kwani? 01 appeared in 2003, its first editor being Binyavanga Wainaina, who had been awarded with the Caine Prize for African Writing the year before. An acclaimed author arriving from South Africa, establishing an ambitious literary project in Nairobi: Es’kia Mphahlele’s course seemed to be repeated.

Does this suggest that Kwani Trust will face the same challenges as Chemchemi Creative Centre, its defunct predecessor? Strauhs considers the history of LINGOs in the 1960s and 70s in order to indicate some of the main issues that threaten today’s organisations survival in volatile African book markets. The author identifies two conditions which can nurture or harm the institutionalisation of the LINGO: the one is socio-political, the other sociocultural. A stable social and political climate that allows limited forms of free speech in a fairly democratic environment is necessary for LINGOs to function, although FEMRITE demonstrates in Uganda that organisations can be surprisingly flexible to adapt to unfavourable political conditions. Visibility and funding opportunities open up along with the international recognition that is awarded to the LINGO and the writers involved. Here, sociocultural factors come into play: literary networks and prizes heighten the author’s and publisher’s prestige. However, (foreign) funding and (international) recognition are double-edged swords: they can stifle creativity as much as they can boost it. Given these multiple challenges, Strauhs identifies several threats and weaknesses that limit the influence and sustainability of African LINGOs. Non-African funding structures that limit the organisation’s independence, the fragile right of free speech and the infrastructural limitations of publishing distribution networks are major threats. Possible weaknesses are a too outspoken political commitment that might trigger repressive measures from political regimes and a lack of resources to implement crisis management when necessary.[4] Nevertheless, the Concerned Kenyan Writers’ response to the crisis following the electoral tragedy of 2007 has proven that literature can become a tough opponent to political authority and socio-economic challenges. For its survival, the LINGO faces obstacles that are more persistent and profound. Strauhs concludes that “the dependency on funding in the light of limited local markets for creative writing and the lack of government support probably remains the most prominent challenge to the LINGOs sustainability.” [5] For the time being, however, Kwani Trust seems to flourish, unhampered by the apparent curtailing of free speech and artistic freedom in many parts of the world. It’s magazine, again, provides convincing evidence.

With several hundreds of pages and a remarkably wide thematic and stylistic range, Kwani? journal is undoubtedly the organisation’s flagship publication. In a way, it serves as a sample of what the organisation stands for, and how it opens up an intellectual space for social, political and cultural debate. Every issue has its principal theme. The most recent one, Kwani? 08, appeared in 2015 and takes the 2013 general elections as starting point. Today, as the consequences of the 2017 general elections are still taking shape, the journal seems more relevant than ever. Even though the last issue appeared two years ago, it still provides profound insights into Kenya’s political landscape, and the ways in which Kenyans cope with the country’s principal challenges. Besides, little has changed since the previous elections anyway. The main competitors in 2017 are the same as back then. The socio-political context in which the elections have taken place are strikingly familiar as well: fear of a repetition of the 2007 post-election violence, the public opinion’s critique on the tendency in Kenyan politics to mobilise ethnic-based alliances, and, ultimately, the general distrust in the election’s procedures.   

Given its length and scope, tackling every contribution to Kwani? 08 is an impossible task. Instead, I would like to single out some interesting features. First of all, there is the immense variety in genres, voices and modes of narration. The extensive table of contents announces following sections: short takes, long takes, elegy and verse, map and journey, revelation and conversation, spectacle and invention, electoral meanderings, scenarios, the other, and photo essays. This diversity in narrative media reflects the multitude of voices and perspectives the issue offers. This edition’s unifying theme, the 2013 elections, are examined through a prism of testimonies, pamphlets, analyses, reports, poems, interviews, text messages, plays and photographs. The magazine shows how literature can become a complex play that works in several directions. Strauhs, who draws theoretically from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach towards literature, appreciates the LINGO’s configuration strikingly as follows: “[T]he bottom-up promotion of information is exactly what again shows the LINGO’s ambivalent role as both producers of literature as well as agents participating in the process of public opinion making.” [6] In his editorial, Billy Kahora criticises the “Peace Industry” that followed the post-election tragedy in 2007. The peace campaign was so deafening it led to the critique “that [it] forced the making of certain choices and curbed real scrutiny into things.” [7] The eighth Kwani? issue therefore looks behind smoke-screens set up by political parties, the official authorities, and the media.

In the first contribution, entitled “Moving on to what?”, Patrick Gathara compares concerned Kenyans to the wife of Lot, who, against premonitions, turned around to face the destruction of her native Sodom and got instantly transformed into a pillar of salt. Gathara likens the biblical flight from Sodom to the general exodus in 2013 in Kenya from “the flames of five years before that and the iniquity of the last 50 years”. [8] Lot’s wife looked back out of rage, which is exactly the same reason why some Kenyans do look back in 2013. Most of them, however, did not look back. They followed authority’s almost Biblical guidelines instead. Gathara is “outraged at the lack of outrage”. [9] In 2013, accepting the status-quo was considered as the only alternative to anarchy. Gathara laments how “Kenya has become a country of official truth with very few daring to challenge the official narratives.” [10] In an exemplary contribution that fuses opinion making and literary prose, the author foreshadows the issue’s main conceptions. The magazine and its contributors do look back, even if this means taking the risk of provoking divine powers. Kwani Trust offers a space for critical judgement, and, as such, fills the moral gap that other media leave open.

The magazine defies dominant narratives by opening up spaces where as many voices as possible can be heard. The section “SMS Politikal” consists of text messages sent during the election week, [11] Tom Maliti’s interview with Philip Ochieng includes questions from an audience,[12] Ngala Chome introduces excerpts from a Pwani elections observer’s diary, [13] and Usama Goldsmith’s extensive oral history of the Mombasa Republican Council questions identity, assumptions about Kenyan nationhood and official narratives through an elaborate selection of testimonies, documents, news items etc.[14] Some contributors, such as the poet Kate Hampton, invite the reader to react via Twitter, thus including social media in a literary setting.[15] The magazine raises a platform where personal, official, academic and fictional narrations by authors, readers and other instances get transmitted. As a result, the election theme expands to more universal subjects such as love and identity (see for instance Abdul Adan’s story “The Somalification of James Karangi” on forbidden love in a tribal political configuration),[16] or to other places in Africa and the diaspora. Examples include “Skin Parliament” by Chike Pilgrim, a writer from Trinidad and Tobago,[17] Dele Meiji’s poem “Cueta” referring to the refugee crisis on the Mediterranean,[18] and Jennifer Huxta’s report on the first free elections in Tunisia.[19]

Kwani Trust’s authors evidently write beyond borders. First of all, they transcend Kenya as a nation. Although the LINGO’s signature remains undeniably Kenyan, both its literary input and its distribution network are transnational. Secondly, the writers deliberately refrain from traditional stylistic, thematic or linguistic categorisations. Fact or fiction, written or oral, print or digital, text or image, English or Swahili; Kwani Trust rejects easy qualifications. African literatures in general tend to defy rigid and stubborn conceptualisations of what literature ought to be, and Kwani Trust skilfully reminds us of this. In doing so, the LINGO points perhaps in the direction in which literature’s function lies in our times and the next. That is: in being critical, daring and diverse. With its stylistic, thematic and social inclusiveness on the one hand, and its self-reflexive institutional goals on the other, Africa’s LINGOs in general – and Kwani Trust in particular – serve as noteworthy examples of literature’s ongoing relevance. In times of fact-opinion blending and diminishing space for nuance and diverging perspectives, magazines such as Kwani? show that the transfer of ideas can be ingenious and dynamic, which is reflected in the journal’s variety in narrative modes and genres. When old menaces such as social polarisation, contestation of freedom of speech and nationalistic fervour regain influence, Kwani Trust proves that literature, as a space for (transnational) dialogue and exchange, is resilient and powerful.  
 
Ewout Decoorne
 
Kahora, Billy (ed.), Kwani? 08, Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2015.
Strauhs, Doreen, African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
 
[1] D. Strauhs, African Literary NGOs : Power, Politics, and Participation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 22.
[2] Ibid. p. 31.
[3] Ibid. p. 42.
[4] Ibid. p. 76.
[5] Ibid. p. 90.
[6] Ibid. p. 167.
[7] B. Kahora, “Editorial” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, Nairobi: Kwani Trust, 2013, p. 8.
[8] P. Gathara, “Moving On To What?” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 14.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., p. 19.
[11] “SMS Politikal” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 38.
[12] T. Maliti, “An Interview With Philip Ochieng” in B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 40.
[13] Chome N., “Diary of a Pwani Elections Observer” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 118.
[14] U. Goldsmith, “An Oral History of the MRC”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 44.
[15] K. Hampton, “Seeds of Democracy”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 413.
[16] A. Adan, “The Somalification of James Karangi” in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 352.
[17] C. Pilgrim, “Skin Parliament”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 540.
[18] D. Meiji, “Ceuta”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 560.
[19] J. Huxta, “On Tunisian Elections”, in: B. Kahora, Kwani 08, p. 586.

 
Colonialism and nationalism are big words. So big that they may become meaningless abstractions. Through telling about his personal experiences with these overarching concepts, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o shows what possible meanings they can acquire. In the trilogy of memoirs he wrote – Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter and Birth of a Dream Weaver – Ngũgĩ charts the vicissitudes of life from his birth in 1938 in a peasant homestead in Limuru, Central Kenya to his admission to Leeds University in 1964.
           
The first book (2010) focuses on the childhood years of the author. The main ingredients are games and story-telling; Ngũgĩ’s siblings, the wives of his father and his mother’s decision to divorce; the tensions between colonial/missionary schools and local culture; and the start of the war for independence in Kenya in the 1950s.
 
In the House of the Interpreter (2012) tells about Ngũgĩ’s time at the prestigious Alliance High School as a teenager. In the meantime the war is a full-blown reality and the safety of the homestead is brutally destroyed as the village is razed to the ground, one his half-brothers killed, another brother fights in the forests, is then captured and detained, and his mother spends time in prison. Despite these troubling times, the young Ngũgĩ manages to pursue his education and is eventually admitted to Makerere University in Uganda.
 
This is where Birth of a Dream Weaver starts. Many young intellectuals from all over East Africa find themselves at Makerere in the early 1960s and already for this reason the book is an interesting read. The climate in which this important generation of African writers is formed is vividly described. We learn about Ngũgĩ’s first meetings with writers, like Peter Nazareth and Jonathan Kariara, and future politicians like Benjamin Mkapa (third President of Tanzania), and how he enters the realm of the important African literary magazines like Penpoint and Transition. Ngũgĩ receives an invitation for the famous First International Conference of Writers of English Expression in 1962, where he finds himself “among the big names of the time”: Ezekiel Mphahlele, Bloke Modisane, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Langston Hughes, etc. It is here that the debates take place that so much mark Ngũgĩ’s later career and his eventual choice to write in his native Gĩkũyũ.
 
Nobody is, of course, born a writer. Yet, already as a child in Dreams in a Time of War, Ngũgĩ’s love of performance and reading became apparent, and this has clearly not diminished in Birth of a Dream Weaver. The young James Ngugi, as he is then called, writes a play for the University interhall English competition, and thrills at the publication of his short story – The Fig Tree – in Penpoint in 1960. He describes how he takes a bus to Nairobi to personally deliver his first novel manuscript to the East African Literature Bureau, and the changes of its title from “Wrestling with God” to “The Black Messiah”, to be published in the end as The River Between. The first performance of his three-act play The Black Hermit is spelled out in rich detail, while in the meantime his second novel Weep not, Child is published. Although he does himself not quite understand why, he leaves his career as a journalist with Kenya’s largest newspaper The Daily Nation. He wants to weave dreams and be a writer.
 
All this is set against the background of friendly competition between the different Halls of Makerere University, the cockiness of the students shouting “Uncle!” at the Student Guild assemblies, not realizing they are referring to the French “Encore!” (154), and the encounters between students and staff at Makerere.
 
But this book would not be Ngũgĩ’s, if not politics played a major part in it. We learn about the differences in political history between Uganda and the settler colony of Kenya, and of the various resistance movements that confronted the colonial system. Of course, the so-called Mau Mau – “called by its rightful name, Land and Freedom Army” (ix) – receives ample attention, but as a Kenyan in Uganda Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o broadens the scope to include politics at a world level, discussing colonialism and racism in history.
 
For Ngũgĩ, politics is not a matter beyond himself and his activities; it directly impinges on him. Thus Birth of a dream weaver starts with the story of how Ngũgĩ’s prize-winning play ‘The Wound in the Heart” was refused to be performed at the Kampala National Theatre as in it it is suggested that a British officer had raped a woman during the war. “They have nothing against the play as a play, […] but they think a British officer could not do that!” (p. 4) is the explanation Ngũgĩ is offered. The author continues with narrating the Hola Massacre whereby eleven men were bludgeoned to death by British camp officers in 1959. People in Central Kenya know better than that ‘a British officer could not do that’. In the settler worldview, the lives of “the natives” are not worth mentioning, compared to animals at best.
 
Also in the dealings with the professors at Makerere University, race relations are a crucial factor. Some teachers indeed fulfil all the stereotypes of racist colonial attitudes, looking down on the students with patronizing condescension. Yet others prove inspiring for the young Ngũgĩ. Apart of the crucial role of his mother in pursuing his education, Ngũgĩ stresses the support of his fellow students and some of his teachers at Makerere University.
 
It is precisely the sense for personal detail that makes this memoir so fascinating. Instead of blanket terms and rigid categories, we get the atmosphere of the late colonial world in East Africa through daily experiences in the interactions between people. The memoir’s three broad themes – the inequalities and injustices of colonialism, the growth of a generation of African intellectuals, carrying the haunting memory of colonial violence as well as the hopes and fears for the future, and Ngũgĩ’s own start as a writer – are cleverly woven together in beautiful prose. Perhaps this will finally convince the jury to award Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Birth of a Dream Weaver. A Writer’s Awakening (London: Harvill Secker (Pinguin Vintage) 2016). 238 pp (notes + 20 photographs).

Birth of a dreamweaver will be published in a Dutch translation in Fall 2017 under the title: De geboorte van een dromenwever (Amsterdam University Press)

References
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Dreams in a time of war: a childhood memoir (2010).
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, In the house of the interpreter (2012).

Inge Brinkman, African Languages and Cultures, Ghent University
Contact: Inge.Brinkman@UGent.be

 

Is this a poem?
 
I long for you, as one
 Whose dhow in summer winds
Is blown adrift and lost,
 Longs for land, and finds –
 Again the compass tells –
 A grey and empty sea.
  
Surely yes, this is a poem, says my heart. Yet it was not - as we literacy obsessed might think - written down. Nor was it designed for readers. It was composed and sung by a Somali lorry driver in the east of Africa. It was sung in town taverns, hummed by young men as they went about their labours, listened to with half (or more, or less) attention on the battery-operated radios and cassette-players carried by camel riders on long journeys across the desert.

It is an example of the Somali genre of poetry or literary composition known as balwo, whose development in the 1940s is credited to the singer/poet Abdi Sinimo. It is also popular in the neighboring Djibouti. The flavour is lighthearted but of profoundly felt emotion. It was popularised by the younger urban population, especially the lorry drivers. It is characterized by condensed imagery of love and nature, expressed in flowing lyrics and emotional language.

This particular brand of ‘poetry’ is not unique to Somalia and Djibouti, or to Eastern Africa. Unwritten songs or spoken words abound throughout the continent, which accompany people in their daily occupations and leisure. For instance, a Tanzanian Nyamwezi lover sings:

My love is soft and tender,
 My love Saada comforts me,
 My love has a voice like a fine instrument of music…
 
Whilst elsewhere in East Africa a cheerful love song by a young man goes (how lovely and right!)
 
All things in nature love one another.
The lips love the teeth,
The beard loves the chin,
And all the little ants go “brrr-r-r-r” together.
 
Are such songs 'poetry'? When I embarked on the research that culminated in my Oral Literature in Africa I, like other researchers, had to face this question. The first thing I learnt was that in Africa, songs could indeed be poems: words musicalized. I should not have been surprised, however. Was this not how poetry began? Do we not speak often how equally lovely the words of hymns, Lieder or pop songs are?
 
So too with African songs, East African or other. When I listen to the sung words, there I find poetry. And all the better for the combination too; the arts that ancient and mediaeval thinkers so rightly joined together in the ancient concept of musica -'sung words'.  And if this is true of them, as of African literature, so too, surely, of Native American, or Indian, or Maori songs.
 
Sometimes these oral, unwritten, chants seem unappealing however. From the other side of the African continent, but alike in essence, take the opening (English translation) of a Ghanaian dirge:
 
 Grandsire Gyima
 with a slim but generous arm ...
 
How - well, unpoetic! But the analysis in Nketia's ground-breaking Funeral Dirges of the Akan People shows how each word has poetic associations and imagery, giving the whole an intense, emotional, and metaphorical depth.
 
I suspect that someone unacquainted with English literature would similarly find little poetry in the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet, full of 'ordinary' words:
 
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore
 So do our minutes hasten to their end; …
 
Each word and its associations carry poetic weight. It is even more so when, as here, they are brought together in a metric line. Is not that depth and resonance of culturally recognized overtones another characteristic of poetry?
 
And the sound. When I look at published African poem-songs I want to read them aloud, at least in my mind. Their sound is so lovely. Not just the metre or the rhythm or the music, but the resonances within and between lines, flowing through and bringing sound and sense into the heart.
 
We surely demand of poetry that it should have something of this depth, of emotion, sound and sense, qualities that draw us somehow into the eternal, the universal. Blake put it so perfectly in his “Auguries of Innocence” - 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand... '.
 
We find this depth in Africa too, east, west, south, north and in unwritten literature throughout the world.
 
I learnt two other lessons, both from working on my Oral Literature in Africa and, in a more immediate way, in constructing my recent Poems from Black Inked Pearl. First, that the difference that we take for granted between ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’ in our printed-text traditions, is in fact problematic and culture bound: not, as it turns out in practice, contrast but continuum. And second, that multiple factors blend together – some more, some less present, as the case may be – to make up what we might, in the end, label by the felicitous term ‘poetry’.
 
The former point came across only too clearly to me when faced with the problem of extracting the ‘poetry’ from my prose novel (if it is prose). This posed a startling and unexpected challenge. Interesting too. Surely separating out the poems that studded my novel should be easy? Not so! I knew from my reading about oral literature in Africa, Native America and the South Pacific that the distinction between 'prose' and 'verse' is a slim one, intersection rather than division. Indeed when I re-read my novel aloud, or go, with ears open, to other examples of 'poetic prose' (James Joyce or Walt Whitman or Dylan Thomas, for instance) it often sounds like poetry. Somehow, as with many African stories, it almost all feels like a kind of blank verse.
 
I learnt that from Sierra Leonian story-telling (Finnegan 1967). Yes there were indeed clearly distinct songs inset in many of the tales – a species of poetry. The rest I took as ‘prose’. But when I listened again to my tapes, too long neglected, - oh, in the descriptive passages what cadences, what melody of phrasing, what – yes, music! Certainly these passages were different from the ‘poems’. But neither were they, apart from the everyday-like dialogues, plain ordinary ‘prose’. They were something in between, a ‘something’ that I then realised is far from unparalleled in the world of verbal art, early or late, east or west.
 
It is a continuum and an ambiguity not unrelated to the controversy I was once (but thankfully no longer) embroiled in: was there traditionally ‘epic’ (conventionally assumed to be a ‘verse’ form) in Africa, or primarily ‘saga’ (similar or the same stories in prose – see Finnegan 1970/2012, chapter 4). It was a hotly fought battle. But the opposing lines were arguably drawn up on mistaken assumptions: they based themselves on a supposed position between verse and prose opposition, not taking account of continuity and overlap. For a subtle and mind-opening take on this, see the brilliant account in Okpewho 1979. My position was – and still is – that the overlap between verse and prose in ‘spoken’ words is important and inherently necessary in composing the structure and style of the form.
 
Or take the many praise poems of Africa, so rightly famous. Are they prose or poetry (assuming for the moment that this is indeed a two-fold choice)? The convention in recent years has been to write them in lines – as  ‘poetry’. But that has depended almost wholly on the decisions by the transcriber who transformed the spoken (or in this case shouted) words into discrete lines on a printed page. Such a passage as one of the Zulu praise poems could equally be written as piece of dramatically delivered oratory, like this:
 
The Driver Away of the old man born of Langa’s daughter, the Ever-Ready-to-Meet-Every-Challenge, Shaka! The first born sons…
 
In the published version we get
 
The Driver Away of the old man born of Langa’s daughter,
The Ever-Ready-to-Meet-Every-Challenge. 
Shaka!
The first born sons… (Grant 1927/9).
 
Nor is that choice arbitrary. There are the metaphors and images; the traditional poetic praise names with all their rich overtones; the parallelisms and rhythms; the sounded resonant echoing (in the original) of vowel and consonant; the pauses between what can be represented as separate lines; the heightened lofty style of panegyric. And when we have a description of the declaimed mode of delivery with its sense of occasion, its high note, and the special instruments and garb expected of it  – why then from these many indications it is easy to conclude that, here, is a species of poetry?
 
So – it is just a matter of several factors not just one (as we too typographically hooked-up people may imagine: something about jagged right margins). No one can be the decider, it has to be many. Among them we must count the complexity of such interrelated aspects as music, sound, sense, imagery, sonic and poetic associations, repletion at a number of levels, local classification/genre recognition with its accepted poetic conventions; a feeling of beauty and emotional intensity, a sense of universality behind often quite ordinary words: a path for living. All these things, for me, together make up what I wish to call a poem.
 
But in the end, of course, none of that is enough. No single factor, that is, or even a multiplicity. Whether anywhere in Africa, Asia-Pacific, or Elizabethan England, a poem can only live in the response of the individual soul, the reader, the listener.
 
References
Bronislav W. Andrzejewski, 'The art of the miniature in Somali poetry', African Languages Review 6, 1967, reprinted in B W Andrzejewski, In Praise of Somali Literature, Callender Press, 2013.
Ruth Finnegan, Limba Stories and Story-Telling, Clarendon Press 1967.
Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 2nd edition, Open Book, 2012. (accessible online: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/97).
Ruth Finnegan, Black Inked Pearl, a poetic novel, Garn Press, 2015.
Ruth Finnegan, Kate’s Poems from 'Black Inked Pearl', Callender Press, 2016.
E W Grant. ‘The izibongo of the Zulu chiefs’, Bantu Studies 3, 1927/9.
J H K Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan, Achimota, 1955 (no publisher)
Hugh Tracey, 'Behind the lyrics', African Music 3,2,19