The other Kenya: underground and alternative literature (original) (raw)
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Kenya: Twendapi?: Re-Reading Abdilatif Abdalla's Pamphlet Fifty Years After Independence
Africa, 2016
ABSTRACTThe pamphletKenya: Twendapi?(Kenya: Where are we heading?) is a text often referred to but rarely read or analysed. Abdilatif Abdalla wrote it as a twenty-two-year-old political activist of the KPU opposition as a critique of the dictatorial tendencies of Jomo Kenyatta and his KANU government in 1968, and consequently suffered three years of isolation in prison. Many (at least on the East African political and literary scene) know aboutKenya: Twendapi?but few seem to have read it – indeed, it seems almost unavailable to read. This contribution toAfrica's Local Intellectuals series provides a summary reconstruction of its main points and arguments, and a contextual discussion of the text. This is combined with the first published English translation (overseen by Abdalla himself) and a reprint of the original Swahili text, an important but almost inaccessible document. The article proceeds with a perspective first on the political context in Kenya at the time – an early tu...
Kenya: Repression and Resistance from Colony to Neo-colony 1948–1990
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2021
Introduction: The Dialectics of Repression and Resistance Kwame Nkrumah (1962), in his quote, 'The enemy is imperialism, which uses as its weapons, colonial (1962ism and neo-colonialism', sums up the struggle in Kenya and Africahistorical as well as current. It also provides the context and the scope of this article. Repression by imperialism and people's resistance in response to it cannot be seen in isolation from each other. These oppositesrepression and resistanceare in a cause-and-effect relationship with each other, with the process having been started by colonial repression in 1884. The struggle continued in the 1960s as African countries achieved political independence: now it was neo-colonialism that people's forces had to fight. Neo-colonialism's grip on African countries is now as entrenched as was that of the colonial powers in the earlier period. The contradiction between imperialism and people was, and is, the main feature of life for working people in Kenya and Africa. The global "cold war" between capitalism and socialism was reflected in Kenya in the contradiction between the conservatives and the radicals in KANU in the independence period. Later this developed into the contradiction between the comprador ruling class and resistance movement maintaining the line of Mau Mau and seeking socialist solutions. This contradiction needs to be seen not only in its particular manifestation in Kenya but also in its global, universal aspect as well. History is sometimes seen in mutually exclusive countryperspectives, and thus the complete picture of global repression and resistance is missed. Imperialist repression, exploitation, and oppression in Kenya can only be fully understood in the context of similar repression in India or Malaysia, for example. Similarly, the resistance of the peoples of Kenya and India, among others, has much in common with each other. Only such an overarching approach can help us understand, not only the geographical aspects of repression and resistance in different countries, but also the historical links between events at different historical periods in any one country. At the same time, it is necessary to understand the reasons that imperialist repression started. It was not, as some imperialist apologists
Editor's Introduction to the Kenya Edition, Nairobi: Vita Books 2021
Groundings: Development, Pan-Africanism and Critical Theory
Written 25 years ago, Kenya: A Prison Notebook has inspired generations and proved a great resource and a hand book in political education in Kenya and beyond. It chronicles Maina Wa Kinyatti’s arrest and detention by the Moi regime, and powerfully captures Kenya’s history.
African Studies Review, 2018
's dissertation advisor. These five studies-of money and ritual life, violence and disease, race and conservation, music, and tourism-have much in common. Amid poverty, disenfranchisement, illness, and uncertainty, the communities in each of these stories strive for survival and security. The forum also embraces difference, covering different parts of Kenya and revealing how different groups of Kenyans are often divided by very distinct, local concerns. Combined, they provide a window on the diversity of Kenyan lives and livelihoods, from rural to urban areas and from the coast to the north and the west. The authors have situated their analyses in complex but specific disparities in access to resources and power. These inequalities shape the analysis of the articles as well as the narratives articulated by people in the articles. The articles present peoples' efforts to construct narratives that articulate a space for self (albeit primarily a male self) in questions about history and world-making. Specific issues of access to resources (money, land, cattle, grazing, marketing, medicine, employment, stability) and power (familial, age-based, wealth, ritual, gendered, voice, state, international, electoral, race, ethnic, violent) frame the questions of history and world-making presented here,
The Multiple Histories in Kenyan Liberation Literature and Implications for Contemporary Realities
Shigali, H. R. L. (2017). The Multiple Histories in Kenyan Liberation Literature and Implications for Contemporary Realities.. Journal of African Interdisciplinary Studies: 1, 2, 5 – 17., 2017
Much of Kenyan fiction and history to date focus on or alludes to the colonial invasion, occupation and its aftermath including the struggle for liberation and post-independence challenges. Ordinarily the two disciplines are assumed to be contrasting-history being generally factual while fiction is creative imagination. This article disrupts this assumption. It examines the connection between the two in the constructions and reconstructions of multiple histories that exist in Kenyan repository. Both disciplines adapt aesthetic strategies to create usable pasts that have implications for current political realities in the country. Whereas creative writers acknowledge the fictionality of their texts, professional historians insist on the factuality of their constructions. Critical analysis of selected texts from both disciplines is guided by Roland Barthes, Hayden White and Peter Gay's frameworks which essentially erase the supposed boundary between history and fiction. The scope is limited to five selected from the many in Kenyan fiction and history which engage the armed struggle phase of the liberation struggle. The objective is to explore the implications of the multiple histories in the texts to current realities. Overall it becomes clear that the over-emphasis on the Mau Mau armed phase of the struggle and its manipulation in distribution of national resources and political power is contestable. There is documentation of what is described as "the other Mau Mau." In which case, Mau Mau becomes an umbrella concept for all forms of resistance to British invasion, occupation and its aftermath. The political class has embraced exclusive constructions as the real and only truth. This article vouches for the all-inclusive approach advanced by Maramogi Oginga Odinga and William R. Ochieng' among others.
Kiswahili Resistance Publishing at the Kenya Coast
Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 1988
Publishing, as one aspect of a communication system, reflects current contradictions in a society. It serves the particular class interests of those whose tool it is. This is universally applicable but its particular