Rubadiri led fight to decolonise African poetry in the 1960s

East African literary and cultural scholars should be grateful to David Rubadiri, who died last week, for at least three things: introducing generations of students to the joy of poetry, partly answering the colonialist question of the African as a human being, and then rebuking the African political elite that turned the optimism of independence to disillusionment and hopelessness.

For many people of my generation at least, the literary transition from secondary to university education was mediated by poems from Cook and Rubadiri’s collection, Poems from East Africa.

Little did we know, as we struggled to learn basic criticism, that the anthology Poems from East Africa had done much more than just bringing together poems by many East Africans, from Jared Angira to Henry Barlow, Jagjit Singh to Bahdur Tejani, whose voices would otherwise have been scattered elsewhere or never been published at all.

DIVERSE VOICES

The collection was the launching pad for many of the poets, whose works have since been widely anthologised elsewhere, attracting extensive critical attention from scholars from the rest of the world, because, stylistically at least, some of the poems made a radical departure from the canonical staple of the day.

In this way, the collection had, long before the phrase became ubiquitous, undertaken a massive project of decolonising poetry.

Collectively, the anthology was a strong ideological statement that invited responses from other parts of Africa, notably Wole Soyinka’s Poems From Black Africa, which was published four years after the Cook and Rubadiri collection.

The diverse yet previously silenced voices that were included in Poems from East Africa were Rubadiri’s contemporaries and, like Rubadiri himself, children of the British Empire that had only a decade earlier begun to grudgingly fold up.

A majority of the poets had acquired a western European education that, interestingly, sharpened their sensibilities to more Africanist concerns and modes of expression.

Such was the case with Rubadiri himself who, despite his higher education acquired in Bristol and in Cambridge, remained responsive to African historical and contemporary turning points.

He employed this awareness by borrowing structural models from his European training, which he customised to suit his immediate needs by conscientiously documenting critical historical moments in verse.

This sophisticated knowledge of different poetic traditions, in my view, is what made Rubadiri’s ‘Stanley Meets Mutesa’ such a powerful poem that simultaneously paid homage to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi,’ while narrating the tragic encounter between Western Europe and Africa.

PAN-AFRICANISM

The unequal power terms that framed the Euro-African encounters remain the subject of critical studies across the disciplines, from anthropology to literature, most of which are determined to loosen the interpretative stranglehold that Eurocentric positions have on analysis and apprehension of the past and the present.

Coming to age at a time when the global intellectual climate still entertained racist notions, Rubadiri and his contemporaries had to confront their (and our) dehumanisation by inaugurating a long-term project of portraying the African as a human being.

'Stanley Meets Mutesa' was, against this background, an East African declaration of both the human and the humane in us; a celebration of structural logics of societal organisation and social engagements among a people who had fallen under the violent domination of imperialist Europe and who, as Achebe would proclaim in a different context, had been knocked silent by the traumas of dispossession.

Those who recovered sooner from these traumas were more often the intellectual elites of Rubadiri’s generation. They found that one of their primary social responsibilities was to negate the colonialist ideas that propounded notions of Africans as non-human or sub-human.

The Rubadiris, the Ngugis and the p’Bitek’s of Eastern Africa, in discursive unity with the Achebes and the Senghors of Western Africa, spearheaded a restorative campaign that was propelled by the post-colonial logic of voicing a previously devoiced people, creating literatures that now constitute our heritage and contribution to global human knowledge.

Their contributions, shared through debates circulated in journals such as Transition, Black Orpheus and Présence Africaine, and their novels, drama, and poetry, ensured that they not only created a valuable archive and established traditions of scholarly pan-Africanism, they were also a sure way of remaining in conversation with scholars from other parts of the world.

INTELLECTUAL

As products of a colonial education with all its contradictions, the educated of that generation had tasted the conveniences of modernity as were available then; yet they were also nagged by the reality that the greatest majority of their compatriots were literal drawers of water and hewers of wood.

The same generation had seen and touched the naïve optimism that greeted the coming of political independence; but it also had to confront the devastating despair that marked the rise of an avaricious African political class soon after independence.

Conscientious intellectuals of the time, including Rubadiri, resorted to the pen and paper to create literatures that could both chronicle this turn of events, while nourishing hope that things could somehow be restored. That is the context in which Rubadiri’s book, No Bride Price was conceived and authored.

For the almost 90 years that Rubadiri lived, therefore, he walked and worked on this continent creating and growing literatures and cultures in Uganda, where he obtained his foundational education, in Kenya where he grew the Kenya National Theatre, in Botswana where he was a faculty member at the university, and in his ancestral Malawi, where he served as Vice Chancellor at the university in Zomba, and as one of Malawi’s most renowned diplomats.

In the truest sense, Rubadiri was a travelling intellectual whose journeys in the discipline coincided with journeys on the continent, and whose work demonstrated that one can overcome the strictures of the moment by building structures for the future.

As he embarks on his last journey into eternity, we salute him for all he did in creating knowledge in poetry, launching intellectual traditions and structures of intellectual creativity in this region, and heaving the entire Eastern Africa on his shoulders as he trudged on his way to literary rendezvous at Black Orpheus, Présence Africaine, and Transition where his contemporaries such as Achebe and Mphahlele had brought Western Africa and Southern Africa, in conversations.

The writer teaches at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]