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Reviewed by:
  • The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945
  • Peter Nazareth
The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 By Simon GikandiEvan Mwangi. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. xxii + 194 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-12520-8 cloth.

Following an intense 22-page historical and literary introduction, the volume contains biographies of 78 authors as well as Topics, really short essays to explain the contexts, subtexts, fields of operation, and achievement of the writers. A begins with AI DS/HIV, telling us how writers, especially women, dealt with it. Other titles are: Autobiography; Black Aesthetic; Christianity and Christian Missions; Colonialism; Cultural Nationalism; Decolonization; Education and Literacy; Ethnicity and Ethnic Literatures; Gender and Feminist Criticism; Journals [and their importance in the growth of East African literature]; Language Question [exemplified in Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose later novels cannot be discussed because they were written in Gikuyu]; Literary Theory and Criticism; Nation and Nationalism; Newspapers and Mass Media; Novel; Oral Literature and Performance (Orature); Poetry and Poetics; Popular Culture; Popular Literature; Precolonial Society; Publishing; Theater and Performance; Urbanization and the Rural.

A thorough volume indeed. Yet I found some flaws. My two radio plays were broadcast by the BBC in the 1960s, not the 1970s—as was my “Brave New Cosmos,” the first play on BBC African Theatre by an East African, included in the volume Origin East Africa (1965) edited by David Cook, not, as stated, by David Cook and David Rubadiri, though they did co-edit Poems from East Africa (1971). One letter is missing in Charles Sarvan and one is incorrect in Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, two scholars listed in the entry on me. Nuruddin Farah’s first name frequently appears as Nurrudin. Byron Kawadwa’s last name appears as Kadadwa in the text.

And there are omissions. There is no entry on Meja Mwangi, but his work is described, which means he is not totally absent, unlike Nega Mezlekia (Ethiopia, The God Who Begat a Jackal, 2002) and Jameela Siddiqi (Kenya-born Ugandan) whose polyphonic novels, The Feast of the Nine Virgins (2001) and Bombay Gardens (2006), provide different takes on the Dictator and the Expulsion of Asians from Uganda. But there are entries on other fine new novelists such as Uganda’s Moses Isegawa and Goretti Kyomuhendo alongside the pioneering Grace Ogot.

There was a time when East Africa was one, and then the countries were pulled apart. Gikandi and Mwangi bring together all the “lost” writers—dead, murdered, rejected because they were not indigenous, or in exile. I was moved to tears when I read about Ugandans who died in questionable circumstances, such as Kawadwa, Okot p’Bitek, Elvania Zirimu, and Pio Zirimu. The last letter I received from Pio said, “Scoop out what you can and bring it home” (a line I used in The General Is Up, a novel about how to deconstruct the media). Gikandi and Mwangi have done that and expanded the idea of home by adding Ethiopia and Somalia to Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania (and providing a helpful chronology of major political events). Thus, while the old colonial maps might look like quilts, their book is a literary quilt that reassures us, as Tagore once did, that nothing is lost, a quilt that allows for more colorful patches. [End Page 149]

Peter Nazareth
University of Iowa
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