Come baby come, 2012 was a good year for Kenyan writers

Kenyan publishers and writers were on a roll throughout 2012, a year that also witnessed the loss of great literary figures in the country and across the world.

Daisy Rono, a manager at the Text Book Centre, says that the books Kenyans sunk their teeth into most deeply during the year were foreign self-help guides, but other works did well in the shops.

The most outstanding thing about the year was the way publishers upped their marketing game with sensational publicity stunts.

In a society where shyness among authors is considered a virtue, Kenyan critics will blacklist your books as soon as they sense that you are the self-promoting type. But during the year, Kenyan authors, probably borrowing a leaf from the innovative Kwani? writers, rolled up their sleeves and assisted their publishers to aggressively market their books.

The former advisor in the Prime Minister’s office, Miguna Miguna, was the biggest winner on this front. So sensational was the release of Miguna’s memoir, Peeling Back the Mask, in July, that University of Nairobi lecturers organised an impromptu academic conference in which even some level-headed scholars argued that the Kenyan novel as a genre was now dead, to be replaced by the memoir.

It remains to be seen if this Mayan calendar-like prophecy will come to be in 2013 and beyond.

In a field known for its notoriously self-effacing practitioners, Miguna Miguna proved that blowing one’s own trumpet could be a boon to the book industry. His memoir was published in London by Gilgamesh Africa after local presses allegedly refused to touch it unless the author expunged explosive revelations.

As Miguna launched the book in pomp, he popularised the American rapper K7’s 1983 line “come baby come!” Miguna was daring aggrieved parties on whose toes he might have stepped to sue him for libel. None of them took up the challenge.

Because of the media razzmatazz surrounding the memoir, analysts focused on Miguna’s beef with his mentor-turned-foe, the PM Raila Odinga.

But Miguna had interesting things to say about literature, most of which were either wrong or factually embellished.

He credits a teacher called Ndyatuura, currently a professor in Uganda, for introducing him to Meja Mwangi’s Carcass for Hounds at Njiiri School between 1988 and 1989. This can’t be the case because Miguna should have read this novel about Mau Mau war as a Form 3 set-book in Onjiko Secondary School in 1986, before he joined Form 5.

Maybe he meant Alex la Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End alongside Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood, Marxist masterpieces taught in literature classes in the late 1980s.

Miguna is likely not to have been influenced by Ndyatuura, Mpalirwa or Kagwala at Njiiri School, all of whom he acknowledges were low-profile literature teachers.

His demeanour from the memoir is that of a rough-edged polemical historian than a cool-mannered literary mind. If Miguna learnt his habits from any teacher at Njiiri, it must be from his burly history instructor, Mr Oryema Oryema.

Mr Oryema Oryema was one of the 12 children of Idi Amin’s henchman-turned-victim, Erinayo Wilson Oryema. Miguna doesn’t mention Oryema Oryema anywhere in the memoir.

Although I never attended class with Miguna Miguna (I was in a lower form and in a science stream), I used to watch the gigantic Mr Oryema Oryema through my biology lab window as he brandished books above his head, strutting around the classroom, probably teaching Miguna the art of blowing things out of proportion with a booming voice, elaborate gestures, and melodramatic facial expressions.

And you should know this about people in the diaspora and those who get published in the West (Miguna’s book was published in London): we tend to exaggerate the problems at home to get sympathy from our hosts and publishers.

Like neo-colonial writers, Miguna sometimes relies on stereotypes about Kenya in the West to thrive. He claims that Kenyatta and Moi administrations banned books by Ngugi and George Orwell, among others.
If Miguna didn’t read Orwell and Ngugi, it is not because they were banned.

Orwell’s Shamba la Wanyama (Kiswahili translation of Animal Farm) was a set-book in mid-1990s. Indeed, I read all Ngugi’s published works at the time, alongside Orwell’s novels, in the library of Miguna’s alma mater, Njiiri School.

As the most active Kenyan literary powerhouse, Ngugi no doubt led the pack this year with the publication of his second memoir, In the House of the Interpreter (Pantheon Books) and a scholarly book Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (Columbia University Press).

Ngugi first memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, also in English, was published in 2010. It recounts his early childhood until he entered Alliance High School at the height of the Mau Mau war in the 1950s.

In the second memoir In the House of the Interpreter, the author beautifully chronicles his life while at Alliance between 1954 and 1958. This is Ngugi’s best book so far.

He reveals in the memoir his love for Shakespeare and the role the Elizabethan bard has had in the formative years of Kenyan dramatists, such as Henry Kuria, Kimani Nyoike, Gerishon Ngugi, and Bethuel Kurutu.

Kiswahili translation

Although there have been complaints that Shakespeare’s plays featuring black characters have not been translated into Kiswahili, the Oxford University Press brought out during the year a translation of Othello by Ayub Mukhwana and P.I. Iribemwangi.

Ngugi’s other book this year, Globalectics, is not as theoretically sophisticated as Wole Soyinka’s Of Africa (Yale University Press, 2012). However, it is important on several levels.

For the first time, Ngugi has accepted in a major book that he modelled his A Grain of Wheat on Conrad’s Under Western Eyes.

Ngugi’s detractors dismiss A Grain of Wheat as a slavish imitation of Conrad, without Conrad’s humour, even going as far as accusing Ngugi of plagiarism.

Most importantly, in the book Ngugi offers an important biographical tribute to Henry Owuor-Anyumba, one of the three beacons, together with Ngugi and Taban lo Liyong, of the literature revolution of the late 1960s. Ngugi has not started writing his third memoir, based on his life in Makerere.

The Caribbean-Canadian philosopher Chike Jeffers is editing a collection of philosophical works in African languages.

Among the essays in the collection, titled Listening to Ourselves, are three essays in Kenyan languages.

Two are essays in Dholuo: Prof F. Ochieng’-Odhiambo’s “Ang’o Man e Nying’? (“What’s in a Name?) and Prof D.A. Masolo’s “Ngero ok Rias” (“A Proverb Never Lies”).

The other one is in Kikuyu is about gender and property by Betty Wambui Mwangi, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York–Oneonta.

Ngugi’s work is the subject of a new book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, edited by Oliver Lovesey for the Modern Languages Association, the most respected literary organisation in the world.

It has chapters by Prof Emilia Ilieva, Prof James Ogude, Prof Ndigirigi Gichingiri, and Prof Simon Gikandi, among other scholars of Ngugi’s books.

During the year, Prof Gikandi of Princeton University served as the editor of PMLA, the world most revered journal of literary studies.

He further published a well-received book: Slavery and the Culture of Taste. It won the James Russell Lowell Prize and was a finalist for both the Modern Language Association and the Melville J. Herskovits prizes.

Prof Christopher Odhiambo Joseph of Moi University had an essay in which he studied ambiguities in the representation of Africa in “pro-African” Hollywood movies.

The essay reads the representation of Kenya in Fernando Meirelles’s movie Constant Gardener, based on a 2001 novel by John le Carré.

It is in the book Hollywood’s Africa after 1994, edited by Prof MaryEllen Higgins of Penn State University.

Prof James Ogude of The University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, published a paper in Research in African Literatures in which he examines the dynamics behind the music played in Kenyan nightclubs.

His colleague, Dr Dina Ligaga explores in the same journal, published in Indiana, USA, the use of online venues in the staging of Kenyan popular culture. She studies the Makmende phenomenon online.

Another of my good friends from Witwatersrand and my former classmate at the University of Nairobi, Prof Dan “Pajero” Ojwang, wrote the first comprehensive study of East African Indian literature.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, Reading Migration and Culture (2012) studies a diverse set of Asian writers from East Africa, including M.G. Vassanji, Jameela Siddiqi, Shailja Patel, and Bahadur Tejani.

While Kenyan scholars thrived in Western publishing networks, local publishers had a good year, too, especially in the high school market in Kenya and the region. Simon Sossion of Target Publications says his company entered the Uganda market with the publication of Upper Primary course books in Science, English, Kiswahili and CRE.

The new company also had two of its books selected as set-books: Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Ken Walibora’s latest Kiswahili novel, Kidagaa Kimemwozea.

The Longhorn managing director Musyoki Muli says his company diversified aggressively into the non-textbook market.

Resounding success

Longhorn also entered into the Malawi market with resounding success, with 22 of the 24 textbook submissions approved for use in Malawian secondary schools.

“Export sales to Uganda, Rwanda, and South Sudan provided the much needed gap-filler for a shrinking textbook market in Kenya,” says Mr Muli, whose company also launched Henry ole Kulet’s 2011 novel Vanishing Herds, a story about conflicts between humans and non-human animals.

The Kwani Trust remained the hub of experimental writing. Billy Kahora, the managing editor of the revolutionary journal Kwani?, had one of his stories shortlisted for the Caine Prize.

He reveals that the organisation has digitized 60 per cent of content, besides launching Kwani Diaspora, the seventh issue of the journal with 570 pages of African, East African, and Kenyan experiences in the diaspora. Among writers featured in the issue are Michael Soi, Isaac Amuke, Keguro Macharia, and Abdul Adan.

The annual Kwani Litfest brought to Nairobi major writers, such as Nawal el Sadaawi, Helon Habila, and Jamal Mahjoub. In addition, the Kwani Manuscript Prize attracted 283 entries from all over the continent and the diaspora. “The novels will be launched next year,” says Billy.

Some new writers came to the fore during the year. Anthony Mbugua entered the club of millionaires when he bagged the inaugural Burt Prize for African Writing in September.

Administered by the National Book Development Council of Kenya (NBDCK), the award is to the tune of Sh1 million, the biggest literary award in Kenya’s history.

Longhorn Publishers revealed to the Saturday Nation that it is publishing Mbugua’s debut novel, Never say Never alongside the Burt Prize first run-up manuscript, Ngumi Kibera’s The Devil’s Hill.

“This was a good year for me because after years of trying I was finally published. I’m working on three more stories,” says Burt winner, Mbugua, in an interview.

Anthony Mbugua’s namesake, Ng’ang’a Mbugua, also had a good year. He says he registered the best sales for his self-published books since 2009, while he had the highest royalties for books published by other firms since he started writing in 2000.

The new face of successful self-publishing in Kenya, Ng’ang’a Mbugua says the first quarter of the year was particularly encouraging. “I made good sales especially with Terrorists of the Aberdare, which was being used as a study text at Daystar University,” he says.

September was a good month for Ng’ang’a Mbugua since his novel, Different Colours, won the Wahome Mutahi Literary Prize, which comes with a Sh50,000 cash award.

For upcoming writers and theorists, the death of Prof Francis Imbuga (1947-2012) in November was a big blow. The theatre guru is best known for his plays Betrayal in the City and Aminata, which have been set-books in high school.

Mourning Imbuga on various platforms, writers often repeated a line he gives to his character Jere in Betrayal in the City: “When the madness of an entire nation disturbs a solitary mind, it is not enough to say that the man is mad.”

Imbuga’s last published play came to light after his death. Treating the themes of ethnic violence and bad governance, The Return of Mgofu (2011) calls for policies that would empower women, end retrogressive traditions, and enhance respect for human life.

“At my age, what is my best seed?” asks the dying old Mgofu towards the end of the play. “Ladies and gentlemen, my best seed for you is to request all of you to respect human blood. Respect it with all your sensibilities.”

While Imbuga implored us to join unity dances across the society to heal a bleeding nation, the British author Barbara Kimenye (1929-2012) passed on in August. She began her writing career while working in Kenya in the 1960s.

Her best remembered books include the charming Moses series, about a mischievous boy who easily became the darling of Kenyan students.

The world also lost experimental British writer Christine Brooke-Rose (1923 –2012). She started off as a conventional realist writer of comedy-of-manners novels, but after a serious illness in the early 1960s, Brooke-Rose wrote novels in extremely playful language that some lazy critics found unreadable. Her best works include Verbivore (1990), Textermination (1991), and Amalgamemnon (1994).

Memories

Born the same year as Brooke-Rose, the Nobel-Prize winner in literature Wisawa Szymborska died in February this year. While awarding her the Nobel Prize in 1996, the committee praised her poetry “that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

Despite six decades of active writing, Szymborska had less than 400 published poems. Explaining this, she said: “There is a trash bin in my room. A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.”

But Imbuga and his fellow departed writers in Kenya and the world will survive in our memories because of the immense contributions they made towards literature and the improvement of humanity at large.

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