Mwangi got it all wrong; Mazrui’s is a solid book

It has taken more than four years to review a book again, time spent smarting over the scathing remarks of one anonymous reader to my review. I had reviewed Prof Kyallo Wamitila’s voluminous Swahili novel, Harufu ya Mapera (The Scent of Guavas), only for one online comment to severely trash my review for failing to mention where it is sold and its cover price. 

In the meantime I have also been awaiting a review of my own critical and creative works because I have continued to be prolific in both fields. The reviews of my own creative works have been few and far between, mostly in the Swahili daily, Taifa Leo and the Swahili portal Swahilihub and less in the English papers, while my critical works have been given a complete blackout by most avenues of review. 

I admire the tenacity of Prof Evan Mwangi who, despite routinely ruffling many feathers in his approach to literary criticism, has almost always stayed the course and continues to enrich this forum with his audacious reviews and insights.

His recent review of John Mugane’sThe Story of Swahili (2015) and Alamin M. Mazrui’sCultural Politics of Translation: East Africa in a Global Context (2016), was acerbic in its critique and unapologetically condescending. Mwangi chides Mazrui for falling into the trap of sanitising or glossing over “Arab involvement in slavery.”

Mwangi writes:  “As literary critics, we have given Swahili writing short shrift. Most people who analyse Swahili literature are trained as linguists and probably lack the necessary critical skills to help them come to terms with the ghost of slavery that haunts the literature.” By “short shrift,” Mwangi means critics have given Swahili literature “rapid and unsympathetic dismissal.”

It would be interesting to ponder Mwangi’s remark about Arab slavery in view of Joe Khamisi’s The Wretched Africans in which the Kenyan politician blames the Arabs for brutalising his slave ancestors.  It, however, bears stating that it is short shrift that Mwangi himself gives Mazrui’s compelling text.

DOGS THAT READ

His review is not apolitical and it bears out Mazrui analytical premise that translations take place within a milieu of “cultural politics,” for instance the Arab-African divide at work in Swahili translations of the Bible. The book comprehensively traces the trajectory of borrowings from Arabic in the Swahili translations of the Bible including words like shetani (devil), dhambi (sin) and ardhi (earth) having Arabic etymology. But as the author points out, anti-Arabic cultural politics and sentiments explain the replacement of shetani in some recent Swahili Bibles with Lusifa derived from Lucifer.

In brief, Mazrui’s book is a sedulous and piercing study of Swahili translations of religious texts (e.g. Qur’an and Bible), secular, legal, and philosophical, (e.g. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth), in which he links the text with the context of cultural politics. It is yet another magisterial work by one of Africa’s brightest and best minds.

Published at a time when translation levels have gone to the dogs to the point where translators erroneously think Barack Obama’s uncle in Kogelo is mjomba in Swahili and my maternal aunt is shangazi, Mazrui’s book could not have come at a better time.

Indeed, I hope that Mwangi’s articles helped whet the appetite for the book, if to confirm the literary scholar’s essentialising and totalising claims.

I do not want to critique Mwangi for arrogating to himself the status of prefect of Swahili literature or even for his bizarre style of proclaiming to his readers, “My dog Sigmund and I have of late been reading a lot of Swahili literature and its translations for some short projects we are working on.” 

To say the least, Mwangi’s new-found camaraderie with his dog is baffling and bemusing. One could ask, since when did dogs begin reading? Perhaps I need to be pardoned for misreading Mwangi’s imaginatively playful and humorous style.  But let me reiterate here that translation levels in Kenya have gone to Mwangi’s dog Sigmund and other dogs.

Yet, indeed, I do hope that like my review of Wamitila’s Harufu ya Mapera, Mwangi’s review will elicit much interest in Mazrui’s book despite or because of his cynical approach to Swahili creative and critical works.  But he commits the sin of omission the irate reader accused me of four years ago: He does not tell us where to buy the book and for how much. I was, of course, insulted when the reader pointed out my sin in very harsh terms.  But, I think, the price of Cultural Politics of Translation truly deserves mention here.

The book, available on Amazon.com, was published by Routlege, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, in 2016 with a cover price of $150 which is the equivalent of about Sh15,600.  That is certainly out of reach for most African scholars and students who desperately need it, including those at Prof Jane Mutiga’s Centre for Translation and Interpretation, at the University of Nairobi. The price may lend credence to Mwangi’s warped view that the book is written for a Western audience.

PROHIBITIVE PRICING

The book situates Swahili translation within a global context and, therefore, is of interest to both the East African reader and the global one as well. To lock out the East African by pricing it beyond his reach is to say the least unjustifiable and self-defeatist. 

But that has almost become the norm with research published in the West on Africa by Africans or Africanists, including my own Narrating Prison Experience: Narratives of Political Incarceration in Africa (2013) published by Common Ground Publications in Chicago. 

If scholarship in Africa is said to be wanting, it is partly because, most of the studies on Africa have been thus rendered inaccessible and unavailable through such prohibitive pricing. The livid reader berated me for not mentioning the price of Wamitila’s novel four years ago, although the book, published locally by Vida-Muwa, was and still is quite inexpensive.

By foregrounding the question of the price on Mazrui’s Cultural Politics of Translation, I am not merely trying to make amends. I am on a more serious note appealing to the Western publishers who publish books for which Africa is the object of study to make amends by considering producing cheaper African editions to create some epistemic equivalence between Africa and its Diaspora.

This is perhaps the “publishing rebellion” Western publishers have to stage, something akin to Mwangi’s proposal for a “literary slave rebellion in Kenyan literary studies.”