Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Long before it became fashionable for Africans to travel across the continent and write on their journeys – a trend popularized in recent years by South African writer Sihle Khumalo – Legson Kayira (1942–2012) had traveled from Malawi to Khartoum and on to the United States, accompanied by his Bible and a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Roscoe 1977, 215). Kayira wrote about his journeys in his 1965 memoir, I Will Try, which “remained on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks” (Ross 2012). In both his journey and its narration, Elliot Ross notes, Kayira understands himself to be following in the footsteps of missionaries such as David Livingstone, a perspective possibly imparted at the Livingstonia Mission School where he had studied (Ross 2012). Kayira’s first novel, The Looming Shadow (1967), inaugurated his comic spirit, which he would retain in much, though not all, of his subsequent fiction – Jingala (1969), Things Black and Beautiful (1970), The Civil Servant (1971), and Detainee (1974) – despite being at odds with the sober narratives of postcolonial disillusionment that were beginning to germinate at the time. Kayira shares the honor of being among the first Malawian novelists, along with poet and playwright academic David Rubadiri, whose sole novel, No Bride Price (1967), was followed by a range of poems, including the much anthologized “An African Thunderstorm,” and an equally well‐known poetry anthology, Poems from East Africa (1971), which he edited with David Cook. The third novelist in the trinity is Aubrey Kachingwe, whose highly political No Easy Task (1966) remains his only novel, as he turned to short fiction after its publication. Another major voice from Malawi is Jack Mapanje whose œuvre of poetry is widely recognized and studied. Mapanje’s Of Chameleon and Gods (1981) is easily the most widely read poetry collection from the country, and indeed, fairly well known across the continent.

Meantime, in Zambia, Dominic Mulaisho, a senior civil servant – whose early writing was done through dictation into an audiophone at lunchtime – is probably the second best known Zambian writer after Kenneth Kaunda and his 1962 autobiography, Zambia Shall be Free. That Mulaisho’s novels – The Tongue of the Dumb (1971) and The Smoke that Thunders (1979) – are both interested in power dynamics is unsurprising, as a good number of the region’s keenest analysts of power dynamics variously served in their countries’ governments. Here, Malawian David Rubadiri’s poem, “An African Thunderstorm,” and Ugandan Henry Barlow’s popular “Building the Nation” come to mind. Rubadiri served as Malawi’s ambassador before a fallout with the Kamuzu Banda regime which led to a long exile in Uganda and Kenya, while Henry Barlow’s cutting satire about the hypocrisies and wastefulness of civil servants was written during his term as a minister in the Ugandan government. But John Reed is skeptical about Mulaisho’s stylization of both the 1940s mission and the village in The Tongue of the Dumb, though he nonetheless believes it offers “a poetry of place, closely woven with the richness of growing things and the hardness of hunger” (Reed 1984, 92), which strengthens its link to the Old Testament that lends it its title. For Gordon McGregor, an academic at the newly launched University of Zambia, writing in 1969, Mulaisho’s novel was distinctive thanks to “a touch of satire and sardonic humour” that ran through it (cited in Currey 2008, 253).

The region has also produced its quarter of playwrights and dramatists, although this genre would seem to be under‐explored in recent decades. Among the major dramatists are Uganda’s John Ruganda whose plays Black Mamba (1973), Covenant with Death (1973), The Burdens (1972), and The Floods (1980) were variously staged in Kampala and Nairobi. The Burdens and The Floods are particularly well received and have been regularly featured on the Kenyan school and university curricula. Fellow Ugandan Robert Serumaga is equally recognized for his role as both actor and playwright. Among his better known plays are The Elephants (1971) and Majangwa (1974). Serumaga’s exploration of the absurd is evident both in his drama and his sole novel, Return to the Shadows (1969). Ruganda and Serumaga have a shared concern in their writing with social decay through abuses of power, corruption, and violence. Across in Kenya, 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.