Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 17

Peter Nazareth remarks on the diasporic impetus as a central element embedded in foundational East African writing, thanks to the porous intellectual and creative borders which writers and scholars criss‐crossed between the 1960s and 1980s. Illustrative here is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s first play, The Black Hermit, which was first performed in Kampala as part of Uganda’s independence celebrations in 1962 (Nazareth 1984, 7), while his first two novels were also written during his stay in Uganda. In similar vein, Malawian David Rubadiri’s No Bride Price was written in Uganda, as was much of his poetry, while Kenyan playwright and scholar Ali Mazrui wrote The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1971) in Uganda (Nazareth 1984, 7). In many respects, then, the current wave of diasporic writing on East and Central Africa by figures such as Ethiopia’s Dinaw Mengestu and Maaza Mengiste, Somalia’s Nuruddin Farah, Ali Farah, Warsan Shire, and Nadifa Mohamed, Zambia’s Namwali Serpell and Rwanda’s Immaculée Ilibagiza is heir to an older legacy of diasporic voices in the region’s letters.

At the same time, the East African Asian community has been prolific in its contributions to the making of East African writing. Long before Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Asian community in Uganda, preceded by Tanzania’s Africanization program, which equally displaced the East African Asian community, novelists and poets such as Ugandans Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth, and Jagjit Singh were a major part of the literary scene, with Rajat Neorgy’s Transition magazine, edited from Uganda, as a vital platform of literary formation in the region. The magazine, which continues to provide cutting‐edge literary insights, has since relocated to the US. On the Asian expulsions, Jagjit Singh’s poem “Portrait of an Asian as an East African” remains one of the classics among literary meditations on this historical moment. These disruptions aside, the East African Asian community remains a prolific and key voice in the region’s literature, with contemporary figures such as Tanzanian Kenyan M. G. Vassanji and Kenyan poet Shailja Patel as widely recognized writers, and younger voices such as Canada‐based Iman Verjee, whose 2016 novel Who Will Catch Us As We Fall? is set in post‐millennial Kenya and variously nods back to the country’s entangled histories. An important addition to this library is Peter Kimani’s Dance of the Jakaranda (2016), an accomplished historical novel interweaving a triracial tapestry of black, Asian, and British encounters in the region, from the building of the ill‐fated Kenya–Uganda railway all the way to post‐independence interactions. If, as Godwin Siundu’s reading of M. G. Vassanji’s writing suggests, the genealogies of East African Asian intellectual trajectories are “subsumed both in political histories of the region and overcast by a dominant pan‐Africanist logic whose exclusivism intimidated and then killed what had initially promised to be vibrant Afro‐Asian dialogic creativity” (2018, 7), then Kimani’s novel offers fresh breath to the promise of this Afro‐Asian creativity, through his novel’s riveting reimagining of cross‐racial solidarities and forms of reciprocal hospitality.

While Idi Amin’s Asian expulsion and the resultant exiling of writers is better known, in fact many East and Central African countries have forced their writers either into detention without trial or exile, at one point or another. In addition to the Asian writers, Okot p’Bitek, Richard Ntiru, and John Ruganda were similarly forced into exile. Across in Kenya, the Jomo Kenyatta regime imprisoned Ngugi wa Thiong’o over his theater activities with the Kamiriithu community, while the Moi regime sank into deep paranoia and repression of writers and intellectuals in the 1980s, following the failed 1982 coup, sending writers Micere Mugo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and intellectuals Atieno Odhiambo and Alamin Mazrui into exile, while another group spent time in detention without trial, bequeathing Kenya with a sizable body of post‐independence prison literature. In recent years, increasing censorship has pushed several Ethiopian writers and journalists into exile, including satirist Habtamu Seyoum.