Kunapipi XXVII:1

DAVID MAVIA
Shifting Visions: Of English Language Usage in Kenya

1 THE ROLE OF THE KENYAN WRITER
The concept of a Kenyan writer has always been abstract but even so it seems there is a literary suit that categorizes him or her. The mention of a writer in Kenya is almost swallowed by the shadow of the icon Ngugi. Recasting this image seems a monolithic feat, which might or might not be done; I don’t know whether that is good or bad.

The role of the Kenyan writer in the past is steeped in the baggage of colonial experience. Back then colonial education popularised the 3R’s: Read, (w)Rite and (a)Rithmetic. Those who caught the write R ended up as writers. They wrote for the villages or communities they came from and against the antagonistic forces of colonialism. The writer back then created works the sustenance for which was the East African experience especially revolving around the centres of ideological exchange, in this case Makerere, Nairobi, and Dar–es alaam Universities. Figures of the pen included John Ruganda, Rubadiri, Ngugi, Okot p Bitek, Meja Mwangi, Tabaan Lo Liyong et al.

They might not have envisaged the turn of events in this generation. As a young and inexperienced writer it is easy to see that the Kenyan first generation writers did not anticipate the brooding of a television generation — a generation informed more by images than the word, a generation devoid of any abstraction and reflective thinking — (we have lost this, our capacities to think by engaging in the written word competes with the screen, a muse which steals every moment of the linear, logical and contemplative. There has been a killing of the book and the word, thus the literary artist is being choked if not being ignored).

THE ROLE BACK THEN
I should say first and foremost that the role of the Kenyan writer back then was to create and sustain the memory of our identity in its historical context. We have forgotten who we are largely because of a loosely written history, which sustains a poor picture of our past. The role of the literary artist was to colour our thoughts with cradle moments and things we might have easily forgotten. They had a role to honestly and accurately paint our identity before the colonial experience, the erosion of it and the possible salvage of our humanity and uniqueness.

The artist struggled against all forces, including the celebration of independence, to remind us of the true picture. The one thing most African governments forgot is that independence should have covered politics, economics and culture. They took the first two, politics and economics, and ignored the last, culture. The literary artist at that time thus became the only cultural ambassador who stood in the gap to remind us that when we looked into the ‘new’ mirror of freedom from colonial rule what we were bound to see should not have been devoid of a cultural ingredient. So when we read their books we remember the villages, the rivers, the round huts, the names of places and people. When I read Achebe (a famous African Writer from West Africa) he has an indelible ability to capture village life taboos, sayings, customs, deities — there is a reliving of moments we never experienced as young twenty-first-century Africans. The distant historical other can be envisaged and thus we are able have a past that is not a vacuum. The only payment I can give these old writers is to read their books.