DOREEN STRAUHS
A New Day Has Dawned: The Future of Anglophone Kenyan Literature Belongs to Jambazi Fulanis

When your image and who you are is informed by somebody who does not know you, it becomes very difficult to break away from that mental slavery. (Aghan Odero)

Imperial discourse and literary works from the colonial centre, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, nurtured the image of Africa as the ‘dark continent’ and espoused the idea that its inhabitants are ‘inarticulate dirty savages’ (Conrad 20). In concordance with the colonial idea of the muted and naïve native, Rudyard Kipling’s popular notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ became a synonym for the European imperial mission: The poor ‘blacks’ of Africa had to be lifted onto the stage of sophistication and civilisation and to be led into the light and blessings of Jesus Christ.

The first literary piece to reach out from the dark heart of Africa, the novel Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, finally brought enlightenment in 1958, albeit this time to the Western European world. The native of Africa could speak, and in a socially intelligible English! Ever after things have fallen apart for the Western construction of the ‘black’ African, and an increasing number of voices from the ‘dark’ continent have found their place in the literary world and confirmed that English has become one of their natural tools for expression.

In fact, Africa is a ‘living laboratory of languages’ (Schmied 205) and especially in the metropolitan centres, such as Nairobi, where the linguistic levels mingle and intertwine as speakers code-switch between at least three linguistic dimensions: their local languages, an African lingua franca, such as Kiswahili, and English as an international and pan-African language. In every day communication and creative writing, English is nativised2 and blended with various local and national African languages. ‘[T]here is an inevitable fusion of English and the rest of the languages each looking for accommodation in the phrases and sentences of the other’ (Mavia 2005)3 English is no longer just the coloniser’s language but in its indigenised varieties it clearly informs parts of African identity in every day life.