Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Among the key institutions of literary production in the 1970s and 1980s in East and Central Africa were cultural initiatives and literary magazines, most of which were hosted at universities, including Penpoint at Makerere University, Darlite and Umma at the University of Dar es Salaam, and Busara at the University of Nairobi. Perhaps the best known of these was Transition magazine, run from Kampala from the 1960s by Rajat Neorgy, and which has since relocated to the US. Related to these platforms were various foreign‐funded cultural spaces such as the British Council, Goethe Institute, the Ford Foundation, and Alliance Française, each of which variously invested in arts and culture as part of their cultural diplomacy initiatives.

In many respects, these dynamics remain at play, with various literary initiatives and arts and culture platforms continuing to serve as important catalysts of literary production. Among these are the feminist writers’ initiative Femrite in Uganda, which has been an immense success in inserting women’s voices and narratives into the region’s literary landscape, albeit with a heavy inflection of gender and development impulses. Femrite has either published or mentored a cross‐generational mix of Ugandan writers including Doreen Baingana, Mary Karooro Okurut, and Monica Arac de Nyeko, among others. While the novels and narratives produced under the Femrite banner would occasionally appear modest in their choices of gender epistemologies, they nonetheless shifted the East African literary scene in ways that are impossible to ignore. In similar vein, the Kwani Trust, whose entry coincided with Kenya’s so‐called second democratization wave after the 2002 exit of both the ruling party and President Daniel Arap Moi, inaugurated a fresh redefinition of the literary in Kenya, with a regional sensibility and a passionate embrace of the experimental. Kwani magazine started off by offering new writers space to explore the widest stretch of their literary imaginaries, often to the irritation of the professoriate at universities, who subscribed to different ideas of the literary. The primarily donor‐funded Kwani Trust has since extended its mandate to include hosting the Kwani Literary Festival, which is pan‐African in scope, starting a Kwani bookshop, and, most interestingly, awarding the Kwani Manuscript Prize. The inaugural prize went to Uganda’s Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, whose historical novel Kintu (2014) was first published by Kwani and has been very well received, both in the continent and overseas, resulting in the release of an American edition in 2017. At the time of writing, Kintu is widely considered the most important novel to emerge from the region in recent years, alongside its sister novel, also published by Kwani Trust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014). In a region that, like many other regions on the continent, has held greater promise for male writers, it is remarkable that the two top recent novels are both female‐authored historical novels, meditating on the nation project in Uganda and Kenya respectively.

Other noteworthy initiatives are Jalada magazine, which is primarily digital; Jahazi magazine; and Writivism, which started off as a literary festival but has since expanded to include a literary prize for short stories, which are subsequently published in a Writivism anthology; and, more recently, writers’ workshops aimed at mentorship and promotion of the art of writing for emerging writers. There is also the Mabati Prize for African‐language literature, which has tended to be associated with Kiswahili writing. Marie Kruger’s work on Femrite, Doreen Strauhs (2013) on literary NGOs, Doseline Kiguru on literary prizes, Kate Wallis (2018, 2019) and Stephanie Bosch Santana (2019) on literary networks as well as Shola Adenekan (2012) on digital literature offer generative insights into current directions in East African literatures.

Overall, then, the East and Central African region’s literary histories continue to sketch out fascinating patterns of literary practice, through a riveting blend of new terrains of literary practice and uncanny recalls of preceding practices.