Absolute Power and other stories

Introduction

Introduction By Prof. Chris L. Wanjala, Professor of Literature University of Nairobi B efore you, are twelve short stories exploring aspects of the 21st Century life in the rural as well as urbanAfrican setting, and giving you a jolt on the bliss of courtship and the pain of maintaining a marriage. The themes cover a wide range—from the tenacity with which old demagogues hold onto political power, to teenage love and infatuation in the village setting; family life with its challenging and inexorable attraction of married men to their extramarital satisfaction while their libidinal energy still lasts; and the pain that such wayward men bring to their wives and children. Early in the anthology you will encounter vociferous sloganeering that accompanies political campaigns, the intense activities and vicissitudes of life concomitant with early childhood and growing up in Africa and the allure of Western life which is mistaken for a globalization which sweeps, like a bad whiff, through all the nooks and unprotected space in which men, women and children live. Vestiges of traditional life and practices preach that the girl child should grow up at the side of her mother within the range of firm watch of the extended family, thus subjecting her to forced child labour characterized by domestic chores and duties, whilst the boy child lazies around, cutting corners and breathlessly pursuing after the girl child as the latter wearily goes to the river, the well, or the local forest, in search of water and firewood for domestic use. A loose urchin escapes the less stringy hold of his father, and waylays the unsuspecting girl child at water points, and makes infatuated advances at her as he seeks to assuage his lust, couched in seductive allusions to “love.” We go back to E. M. Forster’s suggestion that for a story to be interesting, the reader should discover “how things turn out”. The reader knows his or her interest and that that interest is satisfied by features of the story. Most of the stories in this volume are told from the point of view of the youth, highlighting political violence over disputed election results or a usurped island in the middle of an African lake or ocean, and in all this drama the youth take leading roles. The reader will readily recognize the points of view and how the stories offered here are different and why the difference makes a difference. The short stories highlight unbridled rivalry which culminates in coups d’ etat, and the incessant counterblasts among politicians of different ethnic groups and religious backgrounds.As it were, brother slays brother in the vicious and diabolical power struggle. Rural stories in this anthology tell you what you should do when your village, or your community, is attacked by voracious swarms of locusts which ravage the green stretches of your countryside and turn them into desiccated brown patches. These are hitherto unsung calamities that compare with earthquakes that have rocked South-East Asia, the floods which have visited Americans in New Orleans, and the Tsunamis of ocean waters. One feels in these accounts that the world is definitely coming to an end. Some of these short stories read like reports in high noon on events in villages; they capture the goings-on in the lives of peasants and nomadic pastoralists of our time. The book ends with stories about adult life of marriage that would prepare a young reader of short fiction for the elaborate accounts of romance and infidelity in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary. The accounts in this book take our mind’s eye to alien locales and distant climes. vi Absolute Power The stories do not only invite the reader to assume the feelings, voices, and postures of the narrator and characters, but also offer varying tastes in stylistic, structural, characterizing, and thematic aspects, suited to all educational levels of our country. Undergraduates in our universities will be fascinated by the symbols and allusions, the descriptive detail, nuance, and the sense of pattern of imagery, that give unity to the stories in the last quarter of the anthology. The mature reader will come across deliberate structural devices like foreshadowing and flashback which reveal themselves. Thematic units like survival and initiation are in the anthology, especially in its initial pages. The short stories portray the countryside as un-spoilt; the countryside is the setting of rituals like circumcision...