Transgression in Swahili Narrative Fiction and Its Reception by Rémi Armand Tchokothe (review)

In Transgression in Swahili Narrative Fiction and Its Reception, Rémi Armand Tchokothe raises intriguing questions about Swahili prose fiction of the last twenty-five years. He considers “transgression” in the sense of violation of social, political, and religious norms as well as “transgression” as the challenging of stylistic and structural conventions. His consideration of stylistic transgression is based on the M.A. thesis of the late Kadenge Kazungu, a brilliant scholar and teacher whose work is seldom credited. While Kazungu used the terms “deviation” and “foregrounding” rather than “transgression,” his arguments concerning contradiction, narrative disruption, lexical prominence, dialects, and symbolism clearly inform Tchokothe’s work and to his credit Tchokothe provides Kazungu’s work with much need recognition. Tchokothe also provides summaries of two other unpublished M.A. theses by Gamau Gatare and Magaju Kagendo.

To a large extent Tchokothe’s work focusses on two novels: Seithy Chachage’s Makuadi wa Soko Huria and Kyallo Wamitila’s Bina-Adamu! There is also some discussion of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s novels Nagona and Mzingile and of William Mkufya’s Ziraili na Zirani. In the fifth chapter Tchokothe considers intertextuality or “felicitous’ borrowing”/plagurism particularly with respect to the relationship between Bina-Adamu! and Nagona and Mzingile and between Bina-Adamu! and Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Babu Alipofufuka.

Unfortunately Transgression in Swahili Narrative Fiction and Its Reception is basically an unedited dissertation. Copy editing would have reduced, if not eliminated, awkward phrasings such as “undertones a social malaise” (46), run-together words such as “alsoportrays” and “hisattempt” (46), idiosyncratic capitalization like “Literature in African languages” (20), malapropisms such as “potsmodernism” (120), and the confusing italicization of the names of some characters and some Swahili terms. Editing of content might have also eliminated more serious errors. For example, Tchokothe seems to have confused Mohamed S. Mohamed’s novel Kiu with the author’s novel Nyota ya Rehema. In the conclusion of a discussion of Kiu Tchokothe states that “The peak of violence is reached when Rehema’s husband Sulubu is shaken off his principles when their land is robbed for the second time” (46), but these are characters and events in the novel Nyota ya Rehema not in Kiu.