Brave New Words by Susheila Nasta

Author:Susheila Nasta
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912408214
Publisher: Myriad Editions

The Politics of Writing Popular Fiction: challenging the African literary tradition1

Mukoma Wa Ngugi

I

IN 1962 A GROUP of young African writers gathered at Makerere University for a conference titled ‘African Writers of English Expression’. This group included Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, Lewis Nkosi, Dennis Brutus and my father Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. In short, the writers convened at Makerere would go on to define African literature as we know it today. While they discussed and disagreed on a number of issues, including whether African literature should be in English or in African languages, who could be defined as an African writer, or what could be called an African novel, the one thing they agreed on was that literature should be in the service of decolonisation.

In just a few years most of them would be detained or forced into political exile. In fact, they were so fiercely political that their publisher, Heinemann Educational Publishers through the African Writers Series, which gave us titles like Things Fall Apart (1958) and The River Between (1965), had a section titled ‘Authors in Prison’ in their monthly newsletter. Closer to home, my father would in 1977 be detained by the Jomo Kenyatta government for his anti-neocolonial Kenya/Africa political writing. In a lot of ways, the more the African governments jailed and tortured the writers, or killed them as in the case of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the more it showed just how powerful their pens were.

What emerged aesthetically from the Makerere Conference was a consensus that African literature had to be in English, the novel realist and most definitely political. To be sure the consensus was contested—for example on the language question—but those contesting were lone voices. I therefore see myself writing both within and outside of that literary tradition. Within, because I have grown up reading and admiring the literature produced by the Makerere generation and because I too believe that the act of writing is a political act; outside, because I also write detective fiction in addition to poetry and ‘literary’ fiction. It is my literary tradition. This is because I fell into detective fiction by accident.

Much like a found poem, Nairobi Heat (2011) is a found novel—at least the bare bones of the story that my imagination in turn fleshed out. While doing my PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I lived very close to the football stadium where tailgating started as early as 8.00am. I was not surprised when on getting home after a late night elsewhere (there is a reason UW-Madison tops party school lists) I found a white female student dressed in a cheerleader outfit passed out by the door to my second-floor apartment. I did not know her so I called 911, explained the situation, and shortly afterwards an ambulance accompanied by an African American policeman arrived. She was barely conscious, and as the policeman tried to get her details through her getting sick, it suddenly hit me. Here I was, an African student with an African American policeman, and a barely conscious white woman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.