The Nation and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa (review)

Narrowly imagined national communities exclude from the collective imagination those with inconvenient historical roles, ideologies, ethnicities, or genders. Writers of fiction have often abetted that exclusion, but now frequently contest it, hoping to reform and broaden the nation—a task made difficult in Africa by high illiteracy rates.

The Kenyan scholar Tirop Peter Simatei, in this revision of his prize-winning doctoral dissertation at Bayreuth University, examines the contentious dialogue between East African literature and nation-building in East Africa. Despite unevenness in writing and works covered, his comparison of black East African writers (including some not often discussed) with East African Indian and women’s perspectives shows some valuable innovation. It moves beyond earlier discussions of the African literature of disillusionment to analyze writers’ resistance to the homogenizing project of postcolonial capitalist nation-building.

Simatei considers two works by Kenyan African authors: Leonard Kibera’s Voices in the Dark (1971) and Ngugi wa Thiong ’o’s Matigari (1989). He perceptively analyzes Kibera’s work, which contests the exclusion of the Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) fighters from the Kenyan national project, and highlights Kibera’s use of irony and premature, postmodern self-reflexivity to question the writing of “committed” literature, which exploits characters to serve the writer’s ideological ends. In his discussion of Matigari, Simatei shows Ngugi’s attempt to replace the state ’s homogenizing capitalist symbolism with a popular symbolism of resistance, but notes that Ngugi’s Manichean vision of a world of exploiters and resistant victims is as narrowly exclusionary as the official vision he hopes to replace.

I found Simatei’s treatment of the East African Indian situation the most interesting and subtle in his book, although even there, he shows unevenness. After considering the history of Asians in East Africa, noting their ambivalence toward empire and the exclusiveness of their community, he examines M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1996), and Goan Peter Nazareth’s In a Brown Mantle (1972), and The General is Up (1991). He curiously pairs the latter with a thwarted African-Indian love affair in David Rubadiri’s No Bride Price (1967), evidently because both authors wrote about Uganda and featured Asians in their novels. Unfortunately, Rubadiri’s work seems nearly irrelevant, given that the Indian is not East African but a visitor at several removes from any imagined Ugandan community, and the author himself is a Malawian African who was studying at Makerere University when he wrote the novel. Simatei’s treatment of Vassanji’s work, however, illuminates the multilayered Indian response to exclusion from the national project and, indeed, Indians’ literal expulsion from East Africa, despite the important role they had played in the independence struggle.

I wished Simatei’s treatment of women writers had been equally enlightening, but he found few expressions of women’s perspectives on a reimagined patriarchal community, and the balance given the works he did consider seemed peculiar. In Oludhe MacGoye, his writer is a Briton married into a Luo family. Her first novel, Coming to Birth (1986), for example, which he discusses at some length, recites Kenyan history as backdrop, but the theme is the protagonist’s emergence from oppressive patriarchal tradition into greater freedom in the city, almost as if the visions of modernization theorists (or of colonists) were being performed in the novel: stultifying traditional constraints on women are loosened by opportunities provided by colonial urban capitalism. Simatei’s capable if lengthy treatment has minimal connection to his general theme of contested nation-building. In The Present Moment (1987), MacGoye inserts women into the national story, but they end as hapless victims of the same betrayal that Kihiga described years earlier, so we see little attempt to contest a patriarchal national project. Simatei has more to work with in Mary Okurut’s The Invisible Weevil...