Politics of a Kenyan romance novel

Early this week, I pointed out to a promising Kenyan storyteller that if local book reviews seem to be “all about the continuation of politics”, it is precisely because all writers are “writers in politics”.

Take for instance, Jo Alkemade’s autobiographical novel, Belonging in Africa (2014). On the face of it, this is a simple bildungsroman, a coming of age tale about an 18-year-old girl finding love in Nairobi in the late 1970s. But the stirrings of puppy love are hardly the focal point of this 256-page novel.

It has its fair share of the tender moments and anxious insecurities that make adolescent love so special, but what gives this book its irrevocable power is the protagonist’s search for a place where she, Sara Janssen, can gain unconditional acceptance.

Sara’s parents are Dutch expatriates who see Nairobi through the inherited “wisdom” of privileged visitors in African countries. Sara does not share in their anxieties about gangsters and conmen. Her Dutch is not flawless. Her memories of their apartment and relatives in Rijswijk are not happy and pristine.

Sara’s private school in Nairobi - Charles Coldham’s Tutorial College - has exposed her to fellow Europeans, Asian teachers, middle-class Africans, Kenyan whites and a British A-level Curriculum. Her other cultural references include the khanga cloths of Biashara Street; purchases of coloured sweets wrapped in newspaper and reja reja Embassy cigarettes from a nearby kiosk; vegetable samosas shared with her Pakistani friend, Rashid and the music of Bob Marley and The Isley Brothers which she dances to with her Ugandan boyfriend, Sam Dragu, on Friday nights at the Golf Range (now Simba Salon, Carnivore).

NASCENT POLYGAMY

A skilful rugby player, Sam has been sent to St Mary’s School in Nairobi to escape the vagaries of Idi Amin’s rule and the aftermath that pours Tanzanian troops into the streets of Kampala. Most of his siblings are in Kampala, his father is in prison there and his mother lives in a village in Northern Uganda.

Sam acknowledges the irony of the full scholarship he has won to the University of London with the words, “newly liberated African turns to land of the oppressor to get a proper education.” Sara seizes on Sam’s invitation to join him in England because she knows that her “only alternative was to go to Holland, a country where I hardly knew a soul and my thick accent marked me as an outsider as soon as I opened my mouth to speak the language.”

But if Sara feels alienated from her indigenous Dutch heritage how much belonging can she secure from her fluency in English, her years of residing in Kenya and her attachment to Sam? Her high school friend, Chloe faces the same question.

Chloe is a third generation Kenyan white who has “never left the country, even for a holiday.” Her parents were born in Kenya but they increasingly feel very insecure, as if the expulsion politics of Idi Amin could somehow go viral and hit Kenya. They migrate to Canada, believing that race offers a sense of belonging which autochthony – literally, springing from the land - cannot guarantee. 

Belonging is more than the legal matter which is resolved when governments issue documents that proclaim one’s citizenship. The memories that are built in a place over time are key to belonging; an emotional process of forming attachments and building strong social networks. But how permanent are these networks?

Alkemade explores some of them in her portrayal of Sam’s friend Daniel. Daniel’s father, Murgor, is originally from Kapenguria where the white wife that he brought to Kenya after his studies in England, now runs a sizeable maize farm.

Meanwhile, Dr Murgor practices medicine in Mombasa and is said to live with some other woman. If Mrs Murgor has taken to the land and is wrestling gainful value from it, does it also mean that she is at home with the customs of nascent polygamy?

Sara debates some of these questions for herself when she is confronted with the ethnic practices of Sam’s people in Uganda. She jumps right in, willing to do whatever is asked of her even as she wonders inwardly how far she is willing to go to fit in, to gain acceptance.

There are telling comparisons between Sam’s bossiness and Mr Janssen’s chauvinism. Indeed, Alkemade seems to be saying that the politics of gender often trumps the politics of race and creates a need for liberation, a search for equality that is as urgent as the African struggle for political independence once was. Ultimately, Sara finds her liberation thanks to Sam, but in circumstances that she could never have anticipated.

THREADBARE SCRIPT

The writer’s choice of an autobiographical novel which merges some of actual experiences with elements of fiction, is a clever way of negotiating the politics of memory.

Memory is always fraught with lapses, erasures and embellishments. By publicly choosing to add fiction to her memories, Alkemade escapes the accusation of inaccurate recollection and protests over unfair representation of herself and others.

The other advantage of the autobiographical novel is that it gives room for anonymity. Thus the writer declares in her disclaimer that, the setting of “East Africa in the late 1970s is as factually accurate as the author could determine. Many of the events described in the book did happen.  Though Sam, Sara and other characters were often inspired by, or compiled from, people known to the author at the time, they should not be mistaken for any real person.” 

While Alkemade’s characters may, indeed, be composites of people she once knew, her cast cannot remain as wholly anonymous as she may have wished. This is not just because those who frequented the places that Alkemade mentions may actually recognise themselves or others that they knew.

Even more important for the literary critic and the work of interpretation is the fact that the reading process does not always obey the rules of temporality. Whenever you start on a new book, you bring into it all the baggage of every other book that you have read before.

In the words of the American theorist, Frederic Jameson, the post-text or your conclusions about a text, is the sum total of that text and the pre-text - where, the pre-text is that which you have encountered before. 

From Alkemade’s autobiographical novel then, it is impossible not to leap back into Jeff Koinange’s Through My African Eyes.

I started reading Alkemade’s book soon after I walked out of yet another of those culture meetings where government officers in French-cut suits pepper their presentations with well-worn words about preserving the local culture of “Kenya’s 42 ethnic communities”.

I carried that threadbare script into my new reading and wondered half out-loud what it will take for those who are tasked with managing culture in this country to move beyond the obvious and embrace people like Chloe and Rashid.

When will we give due recognition to the likes of Sam Dragu, or, to be more direct, Joseph Drani, for the contributions they made to the development of sport in Kenya?

When we read these books, our intellect must be jolted by much more than their clever diction and their alleged fictions. We must mine these works for lessons on the breadth and depth of the term cultural diversity and learn how to mitigate our politics of identity through real inclusion.