Ken Walibora was a firm believer in Kiswahili literature

Ken Walibora. Like his colleagues, he pushed for the broadening of the mass of literature in Kiswahili. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • His stint at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, gave him the critical edge and exposure to global intellectual traditions of our times.
  • Walibora’s belief in the imperative for writing in the Kiswahili language was based on a deep understanding of, and respect for, English.

Like many academics of his generation, Ken Walibora’s rise to national prominence was via the old-fashioned way: to make an irrefutable statement among his peers, which he did through his novel Siku Njema, and then follow it through with consistent industry and tenacious focus even in the wake of the most trying of distractions, most of which he faced up with a tinge of stoicism.

Having discovered his creative calling, Walibora went on to commit many of his ideas in books that now remain as his gift to lovers of literature, especially Kiswahili literature.

Even before his sudden death last week, Walibora’s books were well known to all Kenyans of a literary bent, which is why it would be superfluous of me to list them here.

More helpful, perhaps, is to reflect on some of the issues that Walibora thought of and what they meant to the wider Swahili nation.

During my interactions with his person and his writings, Walibora was acutely aware of, and bothered by, the lingering linguistic hierarchy that favoured the English language, and subordinated Kiswahili and other African languages.

It was this belief, I think, that drove him to philosophise his writings in particular, and Kiswahili literatures in general, through a range of critical essays, books, and conference presentations that raised his scholarly standing beyond Kenya.

DEPTH AND INFLUENCE

His stint at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, gave him the critical edge and exposure to global intellectual traditions of our times, networks in enviable circles of literary critics, and a work ethos that made him the widely respected scholar that he was.

This became manifest, in my view, in the highly venerated intellectual spaces in which Walibora voiced his ideas.

And while his publications, like those of many other scholars, were of varying depth and influence, I found two of them particularly distinguishable by their focus on the dazzling beauty of the Kiswahili language, and of its literatures in the world of knowledge.

The first was his critique of Raphael Kahaso and Nathan Mbwele’s Boi (1976), which was a Kiswahili translation of John Reed’s English version of Ferdinand Oyono’s chastisement of colonial hypocrisy in Houseboy.

Appearing in PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association), no less, Walibora’s article, “The Afterlife of Oyono’s ‘Houseboy’ in Swahili Schools Market", laid bare the dynamics that inform translations of literary works from European languages into Kiswahili, and back.

These dynamics, including the singular focus on secondary school readerships, and the market considerations, not only delimit the spread of literatures in Kiswahili, but also the richness of Kiswahili diction and varieties.

EXPANDING INDUSTRY

Translation, for Walibora, was paradoxically both an enabler and impediment to the growth of the language and its literary thought.

The second of Walibora’s essays that I found compelling was his chapter in Rose Marie Beck and Kai Krasse’s edited book, Abdilatif Abdalla: Poet in Politics.

"In Doing Things with Words in Prison Poetry", Walibora joined other renowned thinkers, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Said Ahmed Khamis, to celebrate the intellectual work of Abdilatif Abdalla, author of Sauti ya Dhiki, who was imprisoned back in 1969 for his pamphlet Kenya: Twendapi?

If, for Walibora, his vocation in studying and writing on Kiswahili prison literature was a profound expression of his belief in human freedoms and ideals of liberty, his essay on Abdilatif Abdalla was the peak of his communion with fellow writer critics from East Africa.

Yet, like Ngugi, Said Ahmed Khamis, and Abdilatif Abdalla, Walibora’s belief in the imperative for writing in the Kiswahili language was based on a deep understanding of, and respect for, English.

Knowing the political and cultural implications of writing in any language, Walibora, like his colleagues, pushed for the broadening of the mass of literature in Kiswahili to attain levels where cultural dialogues on equal or fair terms would be possible across languages and regions.

It was this belief, and following a number of conversations, that Walibora agreed, on my invitation, to join the editorial board of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, a Taylor & Francis-published journal that Tom Odhiambo and I founded in 2013.

REGIONAL IDENTITIES

Even before joining the board, Walibora was among the few established scholars who agreed to entrust us with their articles to publish in what was then an unaccredited journal.

That is how “The Female Condition as Double Incarceration in Wambui Otieno’s Mau Mau’s Daughter” appeared in the inaugural issue of the journal.

For the last six years, Walibora and I had collaborated closely in pursuing his academic agenda in line with our shared belief in the equality of the Kiswahili and English languages as markers of our regional identities and repositories of our intellectual thought.

Only this year, Walibora’s guest-edited issue of the journal achieved the feat of being the first ever bilingual journal publication, with articles in Kiswahili appearing side by side with their translations in English.

The double issue, which brought together respected Kiswahili scholars such as Mikhail Gromov, Saade Mbarouk and others, was the beginning of what we envisaged as a tradition of publishing a Kiswahili-English bilingual issue of the journal at least once a year.

During his stint as guest editor, Walibora reached out, and introduced me to a number of his contacts with help in peer review and all the logistics that go with such a task.

REVISED PAPER

And he did so with good cheer, sometimes inviting me to his Lavington home where, over endless cups of coffee, we would labour through and haggle about translations till late in the night.

It was such a relief and joy for both of us when the issue saw the light of day early this year.

It may well be that this idea will outlive Walibora’s untimely death. But his intervention at the time and the manner that he did is what transformed what wasn’t much more than a dreamy thought into a practice that, symbolically at least, compels the world to pause and examine what East Africa and its lingua franca have yielded to the world.

This is the Walibora I knew. The one that I worked with for six years on many projects, some official, others not.

It is the same Walibora who left on our desk a peer-reviewed and revised paper on "Mau Mau Author in Detention" that we shall now publish posthumously.

Godwin Siundu teaches at the University of Nairobi.