Representations of Kenyan history in oral literature: 1948-2002 (original) (raw)
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This paper discusses the representation of Kenyan history in oral literature between 1948 and 2002. The paper relied on library and ethnographic data. The ethnographic data included audio recordings of renditions of well known Mau Mau folksongs, popular and topical songs and a narrative. The play, Ngahika Ndeenda, by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Ngugi Wa Mirii was treated as an oral drama. The texts were translated from Gikuyu language to English and the content messages categorized for analysis. The analytical categories cover the literary representations of the Olenguruone land crises, the Mau Mau uprising and the independence era. The independence era is divided into Kenyatta and Uhuru and the Post Kenyatta era of 2002. The paper lays no claim to historical objectivity but interrogates the texts as literary artifacts. In the analysis and discussions, the Olenguruone land crisis emerges as the genesis of the armed resistance to colonialism and Kenyatta is represented as the collective wish for the de-colonization of Kenya. The paper further discusses the literary representations of the political changes surrounding the governance of President Jomo Kenyatta, President Daniel Arap Moi and the fight for democratic pluralism in Kenyan politics. This paper concludes that oral literature is a significant instrument in the reflection of change and innovations in politics. As a cultural artifact, it also becomes a form of national consciousness.
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.
Narrativizing Kenya's Historiography Through Selected Popular Fiction
The paper is premised on the intersection of popular fiction and history through narrativizing events. Language plays an important role in the revelation of a country's historical transformation. Writers use elevated language to foreground Kenya's historical transformation. Fictionalization of history is one mode the society is read and interrogated. The focus of the discussion is narrative techniques and how they interweave historical concerns within the Kenyan context. The paper is premised on the exploration of historiographic dimension as narrativized in selected popular texts. The major contention is that popular literature narrativizes the country's historical moments. The paper locates itself within New Historicist and Formalist theoretical frameworks. New Historicism as propagated by Greenblatt and Montrose indicates that texts are historical documents entrenched and located in culture and portrays of historical processes in a society. Formalism, as propounded by Victor Shklovsky examines the literariness of a text in the evaluation of ideological concerns; socio-historical, political and cultural issues notwithstanding. Narrative technique is one literary mode that mediates between history and fiction. Through purposive sampling, the texts Wahome Mutahi's Three Days on the Cross, Kinyanjui Kombani's The Last Villains of Molo and Muroki Ndung'u's A Friend of the Court were arrived at because they are pregnant with fictionalized history. Qualitative research method that is library based was used to excavate and chisel out data that that was required for analysis and interpretation. An interpretivist research design was used. The study aims at establishing that literature has affinity to history since there is interconnectedness. The study adds up to the dialectical polemics on both fictionalization of history and historicization of fiction; a debate that still bombards the literary scene.
Ideographs of Resistance and Identity Construction in the Kenyan Political Autobiography
CORETRAIN, 2018
The avalanche of autobiographies that are produced in postcolonial Kenya calls for sustained interrogation and analysis of the narratives created to elucidate those murky aspects of the colonial past and post-colonial present which may resolve the conundrum of failed independence. As the past studies on autobiography have shown, the autobiographical genre, and especially the political strand, has become a strong statement for resistance against hegemonic discourses that continue to inform national discourses in Kenya. This paper interrogates the Kenyan postcolonial leadership and the ways in which it is dramatized in the Kenyan political autobiography. Specifically, the paper interrogates Jaramogi Oginga Odinga's Not Yet Uhuru, Raila Odinga's The Flame of Freedom and Bildad Kaggia's Roots of Freedom to show that there is a discursive shift in the Kenyan political autobiography; a concerted effort to move away from themes of failed independence to constructing ideographs of resistance within the frameworks of class suicide espoused by Antonio Gramsci. The paper argues that Jaramogi, Kaggia and Raila use these ideographs of resistance to construct their senses of selves as Moses (Jaramogi), Joshua (Raila) while Kaggia sees himself as the black Messiah. The paper rides on textual analysis to contend that the authors of these texts negotiate and challenge terrains of history, ideology and class to present their authors as unparalleled nationalists. Leaning on a critical look at the production of such narratives, which are largely based on personal participation and observation, this paper interrogates and preserves authoritative data of the Kenyan past and present which is more vivid and accurate, than the annals, chronicles and other forms of modern historiography. Historians from earliest times have recognized that the closer such records were to the phenomena described in both time and place, the more their potential value as reliable sources for information.
Ngugu wa Thiong'o - The Making of a Rebel: A Source Book in Kenyan Literature and Resistance
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, 1992
This article presents the findings of a linguistic ethnographic pilot study, conducted as part of an ongoing research study, to examine how students utilise their knowledge and experience in understanding literary texts being studied from different cultural and temporal spaces. The analysis of this development in the students' comprehension of new concepts during their learning of Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare, 2008), was conducted in an inner city, ethnically diverse East Midlands school, and drew on schema theory (e.g. Stockwell, 2002) and conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998). These frameworks were used to track the development of understanding of novel concepts such as love, with the findings demonstrating the students' enriched comprehension by combining concepts they are familiar with to create a new conception. Here, the focus was on how activities conducted in the classroom, such as short writing tasks and classroom discussions, encouraged students to reflect on such combining or merging of concepts which draws on vital relations which provides an alternative way to perceive ideas.
Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2001
The main question pursued in this paper is how power is performed and manifested in some of the dramatic texts by post-colonial African writers, especially in the infamously dictatorial contexts such as Kenya. A corollary question raised is how the politically minded dramatist survives, and what indeed are the dramatic ingredients that have made for perishing, imprisonment, banishment and exile in those same circumstances. Lastly, and in passing, the question is posed: what is the role, if any, of the 'Kenyan subaltern', so to speak, in his historical predicament, in the presumed and foregoing relations of power? These questions are answered by way of a comparative foray into the works of two Kenyan playwrights, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Francis Imbuga. An attempt is made to theorise the implications of one's ' lives and methods' as represented by the world famous and widely known, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, in fact better known as a major African novelist, and the intensely, even satirically dissident, Francis Imbuga. It is recognised that there is a need to subject the formal elements deployed by some post-colonial African playwrights to more comprehensive analyses, and to in fact, interrogate their own representations of history. A major interest here is to re-read the aesthetic, and/or other formal parameters, especially those outside the political domain that seem to have made Francis Imbuga 'survive', including within the educational curriculum, in spite of his intensely and sometimes highly subversive body of plays. By comparison, Ngugi's methods are [re]considered in the play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, in an attempt to indicate why the dramatist's methods and in-built artistic strategies are critical, not just to our understanding of the reaction of the political establishment, but equally so, to Ngugi's continued prominence in the readings and interpretations of colonial (and postcolonial) Kenyan political history.
Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 2014
Oral storytelling and national kinship The story, in the form of the oral narrative, has always been a communalizing genre in the traditional African setting. It then functioned as a tool that brings together not only the artist and the particular audience, but also the entire community within which the performances are derived and performed. However, postcolonial, modern and global situations have greatly impacted on the traditional kinship structures in Africa and kinship fostering tools like the African oral narrative have not been spared. The introduction of the oral storytelling onto the proscenium stage in the Kenya Schools and Colleges Drama Festivals (KSCDF) has contributed to perpetuate the performance of this genre to significant degrees. This move has not only recalled attention to oral narratives, but also has revolutionized the performance and functional aspects of oral storytelling. Various aspects of the oral narrative genre have changed, from the multi-ethnic audience to the elaborate narrative structures and the varying orientations of the oral artists in KSCDF. The dramatic elements of the narrative have also been enhanced to justify its inclusion within the wider dramatic genre. This article investigates the structural and thematic reorientations of the contemporary Kenyan oral narrative and how it influences the reorientations of kinship in a postcolonial reality characterized by heterogeneous consumer audience and the need for national commonality. The aim is to understand the reorientations of oral storytelling and its scripted machinations of multi-ethnicity woven into the narrative as part of its contemporarily requisite features; the question is whether or not these reorientations enable the ideological adoption of some form of kinship across the diverse ethnic groups in Kenya.
Narrating the Kenyan Nation in Different Colours
Chemchemi International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
At a time like now when the Kenyan nation is undergoing social, economic, political, cultural, and other forms of turmoil, the society needs stories that would help it rethink its identity(ies). The society needs narratives of renewal and hope, but which at the same time seek to restore its humanity. This paper explores the place of literature and literary writers in the discourse on the identity question through a close reading of the novel Different Colours by Ng’ang’a Mbugua. The paper argues that Different Colours is a modern allegory on and of Kenya and the Kenyan society. The image(s) evoked and provoked by the “different colours” of the title, the artists’ world in the text and the multiplicity of hues and shades that form the painting at the centre of the narrative recall the attempt to imagine contemporary Kenya. Producing a painting is no different from imagining and constructing a nation out of the different hues of races, tribes, religions, and cultures that is a country like...