Detecting globalisation, modernity and gender subjectivity in David Maillu's Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DXT

Abstract

Through a study of his detective novel, Benni Kamba 009 in Operation DX, and the debates surrounding the emergence of East African Popular literature in English, this paper reflects on the contribution of the Kenyan writer, David Maillu, to the production of a Popular discourse of Post-colonial African modernity. It argues that Maillu engages with the formation of new personal and public identities within a Post-colonial formation in which the Nationalist goal of full Decolonisation has given way to Neo-colonialism and an unethical Globalisation, facilitated by a corrupt leadership. It also contends that, whilst Maillu's adaptation of “the man of action” model from the classic Western Hardboiled novel offers him an imaginative hybrid counter-hegemonic narrative of agency and structure, it also blunts the radical edge of his proposal, as it forces him to accept undemocratic and patriarchal forms of power. Even so, the paper concludes that Maillu must be seen as a significant writer who has shown how African Popular literature in its heyday was not a purveyor of “corrupt” pleasures, but rather a site of serious debate about the character of Post-colonial modernity.

Keywords:

• African
• popular literature
• detective fiction
• subjectivity
• Maillu
• globalisation
• gender identity
• postcolonial modernity

Notes

1. In the mid-1970s, the border between the two countries was closed as the once flourishing East African Community, bringing together Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, became increasingly unsustainable due to major ideological differences among the leaders of the three countries. Idi Amin replaced Milton Obote in Uganda and Julius Nyerere adopted Ujaamaa, African Socialism, as the official ideology of Tanzania, with Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya openly promoting capitalism.

2. Arnold, “Popular Literature in Tanzania,” 93.

3. Evidently, Arnold, as most Marxist critics of the 1970s, was, in the context of an intense Cold War, working with a much more absolutist notion of ideology than would later be possible under the influence of revisionist Marxists such as Louis Althusser and those practising under the umbrella of Cultural Studies such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams.

4. Gugelberger, Marxism and African Literature.

5. Chakava, “Publishing in a Multilingual Situation,” 86–7.

6. Odaga, Popular Literature in East Africa, 46.

7. Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa,” 11. This is perhaps the first major effort to theorise African popular culture.

8. Lindfors, “East African Popular Literature,” 115.

9. Arnold's book, Culture and Anarchy, influenced the leading twentieth-century English critic, R Leavis, especially in his view that literature had a universal civilising function.

10. Ohly, “Swahili Pop Literature,” 43–4.

11. I also employ a similar approach: see, for instance, Msiska, “Sexual Politics in Malawian Popular Fiction,” 23–33.

12. For other examples of such work, see Barber's Readings in African Popular Arts and Newell's Readings in African Popular Fiction. As for Lindfors, he has clearly changed his views towards Maillu as evident in his later work such as African Popular Literatures. Also, from his article: “The Rise of African Pornography,” it is clear that he has found firmer examples of this art form than Maillu could ever provide.

13. Lindfors, “Romances for the Office Worker,” 89.

14. For the idea of the Master–Slave dialectic, see Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

15. Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, 7.

16. See Williams, Marxism and Literature and Morley and Chen, ed. Stuart Hall.

17. Mouffe, “Democracy, Power and the ‘Political’,” 245–56.

18. All quotations from the text are from the 1986 edition of David Maillu's Operation DXT.

19. Maillu, Operation DXT, 75

20. For Rousseau's idea of “the Noble Savage,” see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse upon the Origin.

21. Maillu, Operation DXT, 79

22. See “Dedication” in Maillu's The Equatorial Assignment. For examples of Negritude thought, see Senghor, Nouvelle Poesie.

23. Maillu, Operation DXT, 29–30.

24. Mnthali, “Change and the Intelligentsia in African Literature,” 1984.

25. P'Bitek, Song of Lawino, 199.

26. Batsleer, Davies, O'Rourke and Weedon, Rewriting English, 78.

27. wa Thiong'o, The Barrel. Here, I am referring to Gramsci's concept of “the organic intellectual” from Prison Notebooks, which best describes Ngugi's idea of the committed writer. Incredible as it may seem, Maillu claims that his readings of Kikamba poetry on Voice of Kenya in the early 1970s influenced Ngugi's adoption of African Language for a Populist writing: see http://artmatters.netfirms.com/maillu.htm (accessed September 9, 2008).

28. wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind.

29. Maillu, Operation DXT, 23.

30. Maillu, Operation DXT, 23.

31. Batsleer et al., Rewriting English, 75–6.

32. Batsleer et al., Rewriting English, 78.

33. For the notion of Manicheanism, see Fanon, The Wretched, 30–3; for a discussion of the feminisation of the colonised, see Rodgers, “Empires of the Imagination,” 103–21.

34. Fanon, The Wretched, 30–3.

35. Barber, “African Language Literatures.”

36. For the idea of the writer as an “Imbongi” or Griot, see Mapanje, “The Changing Fortunes of the Writer,” 216–33.

37. See Symons, Bloody Murder, 200.

38. Kalitera, Mother, Why Mother.

39. Maillu, Operation DXT, 84.

40. In his The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argues that dream narratives employ the device of secondary revision in which relations between objects and their usual referents is reworked and mapped out onto a different set of values. What I am suggesting here is that a similar process is at work in the way in which Maillu's narrative organises its representation of gender ideology. Most importantly, I am proposing that such an approach can enrich our interpretation and understanding of the strategies of representation in East African Popular fiction as well as African Popular fiction as a whole.

41. Maillu, Operation DXT, 145–6.

42. Maillu, Operation DXT, 133.

43. Maillu, Operation DXT, 133–4.

44. Fanon, The Wretched. 30–3.

45. It is interesting that the figure of the strong charismatic leader in Africa transcends the ideological colours of individual leaders, whether left or right, Pan-Africanist or otherwise.

46. wa Thiong'o's Matigari and Soyinka's Season of Anomy.

47. Maillu, Operation DXT, 57–8.

48. See McCall Smith, The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency.