How literature is dying in the hands of young people writing on pornography

We live in prosperous times in which everything seems to go. We have had shifting paradigms against which we have seen the study of literature in East Africa.

As a matter of fact we don’t seem to have coherent approaches that can readily guide the learner in our educational institutions regarding the way they look at literature at any more. Whereas it is no longer mandatory that the local critic has to emulate his or her expatriate European and North American teacher, nor slavishly put emphasis on the role of traditional African aesthetics to analyse literature, our study of literature seems to be grossly unguided.

Today a literary critic can draw from a gender or class perspective without looking for a confirming voice from Great Britain or from the US. With the influences of mass media, a literary critic can analyse literary texts for television media, newspapers, magazines, radio, film, and even church or in a mosque.

But herein lies the danger. The Western scholars taught us to see literary criticism and literature as truth-telling instruments. They urged upper schools, tertiary level institutions and universities to study literature in terms of how it can maintain Western civilizations in a positive way. But today, the discriminate values for studying literature seem to have been thrown out through the window.

The departure of the Western teachers in the university was followed by people of very little systematic training in the teaching of literature in schools and universities. Some of them saw literature as less a body of knowledge than a free play for personal judgments.

It is for this reason that most of the indigenous literary critics majored more in subjective and personal essays than anything else. The educational spirit that they promoted was more radical in rhetoric than in scholarly substance, despite the fact that what they said came to change the direction of teaching literature in our schools and universities.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

Today, however, we need to relook at the views on literature by the likes of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, Taban lo Liyong and Henry Owuor Anyumba. Their views now look highly conservative in their effects on the learner in the first quarter of the 21st Century.

East Africans now discuss the Constitution process using literary criticism. They have also imbibed socialist realist approaches from Western Europe and the Far East.

It is not surprising that students of literature tie discussions on literature with post-election violence, war or terror, tolerance, human rights records, exploitation of children and women in the church and elsewhere. The discussions have a global scope touching on authoritarianism in some African regimes. Literature talks about the mobility of populations from rural to urban areas and include issues of identity.

Literature has left seats of learning schools, tertiary institutions and universities and is utilised by departments of culture. Departments of literature are now centres of excellence in music, folklore, art and religion and cultural studies, film, and theatre.

The new generation of literary academics joined the thinly populated terrain for formal graduate studies at home and abroad and it is at this level that they depart from the conventional studies of English and literature as we knew it then in older universities like Makerere, in Uganda, University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the University of Ghana in Legon.

Today there are numerous people, especially in institutions of higher education, who write articles and reviews on literature and speak on radio and television about literature, culture, art and politics.

When I ask students about the theoretical frameworks they are utilising for their higher degree research, they gasp and say psychological, linguistic, Marxist, Post-colonial, Feminist or Gender, which means that literary studies are interlocking so much with other social sciences and humanities. The departure into these theoretical frameworks shows that the discipline is greatly under threat and misunderstanding.

As we alluded to earlier, the first crop of literary critics and scholars in East Africa wrote from their Euro-North American perspectives. The cases in point were Gerald Moore, with his reviews in Transition and the ultimate publication of his three books, David Cook of Makerere University, George Wing and Adrian Roscoe of the University College, Nairobi, and Robert Green of the University College , Dar es Salaam. They were driven by the curiosity of the outside world and the desire to dig their critical teeth into something alien.

They are the ones Prof Wole Soyinka had in mind when he quipped that they worked for publishers who hovered like benevolent vultures over the still-born foetus of the African Muse.

At any given opportunity, they tore into the works fanned up by prejudices and cynicism that was the hallmark of colonial settlement in East Africa.

We were brought up by Adrian Roscoe. He arranged for me to publish my first piece in Busara. He and Angus Calder made me present my first paper ever on Joseph Buruga, a Ugandan poet, and J S Mbiti, a Kenyan poet.

GIFT OF RHETORIC

Adrian Roscoe took me to the East African Literature Bureau and introduced me to Noah Sempira, who employed me as an editor. He encouraged me to edit Standpoints on African Literature and made his own contribution on Gabriel Okara’s The Voice. He was always concerned with the quality of my literary style and made sure I wrote well. He influenced my choice of East Africa as an area study.

Their places were taken by writers who made pronouncements about the critical perspectives on African literature from the West. A dichotomy emerged between writers and critics who looked to Western Europe for inspiration and writers and critics who looked to Eastern Europe and China for inspiration.

The East Africans who studied at the University of Leeds like Peter Nazareth of  Literature and Society in Modern Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of the literary essays, Homecoming, Grant Kamenju of the University of Dar es Salaam and Pio Zirimu of Makerere greatly influenced the study of literature in East African Universities.

Peter Nazareth in his pro-Eastern European discourse could take on Ali Mazrui and Taban Lo Liyong for their Western leanings and show the mettle they were made of. The Nigerian, Ime Ikiddeh, was their classmate in Leeds and in cheering Nazareth for being so critical of Ali A Mazrui, says Nazareth’s “The Trial of the Juggler is certainly not the best essay in the book (The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility), but how maliciously I enjoy watching Ali Mazrui kicked in the a**! Some of us have long got tired of this Professor’s gift of rhetoric, and learned equivocation in the best British tradition. Uncommon intellect, yes, but how misguided!”

The younger literary critics who came after the Leeds group have completely lost the way. They are merely parodying American proponents of popular culture on gender, corruption and political violence without maintaining a critical analysis of texts as their Western counterparts did immediately after the World War II. Now that the vogue is for literary critics to bandy sociological theories around, it is even more difficult to say what literary criticism and literature are.

Literature, as we knew it, is dying in the hands of these young people who write their theses on pornography and sexuality.