Historical Sources and the Writing of Fiction: An Analysis of Valerie Cuthbert’s The Great Siege of Fort Jesus

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of Valerie Cuthbert’s The Great Siege of Fort Jesus (1970) by interrogating the relationship between its historical sources and its bias and omissions. Written for young adults, the novel engages with histories of the Kenyan coast during the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Using this text as a lens permits more general reflections on writers’ use of sources and how their choices shape the historical novels that emerge. I examine Cuthbert’s sources to determine which she adopts, what revisions she undertakes and which she neglects entirely. I conclude that the history Cuthbert relies on is notably one-sided, amounting to misrepresentation with potentially detrimental political consequences. Both her sources and the novel that emerges from them, I conclude, implicate and inscribe specific ideological positions tied to a specific arrangement of power.

Keywords:

• historical sources
• historical fiction
• the great siege
• Fort Jesus
• Kenyan coast
• Portuguese
• Omani Arabs
• Mijikenda

Acknowledgement

I thank my supervisors Prof. Tina Steiner and Dr Uhuru Phalafala for their comments on the chapter of my dissertation from which this paper is extracted.

Notes

1 In The Great Siege, the Swahili are the African people at the coast, which the novel differentiates from the Bantu from the hinterland, and who are historically known to be of Arab descent (a result of intermarriages between Arabs and the Bantus).

2 Bantu is one of three main groups of people in Kenya, the other two being the Nilotic and the Cushitic.

3 ‘Zinj’ or ‘Zanj’ is an Arabic word for ‘black’. It was commonly used to refer to the Africans of the East African coast. It is from this that Zanzibar got its name from ‘Zangibar’ or ‘Zanjabar,’ meaning ‘land of the black people’.

4 There exist anthropological and sociological studies on gossip and rumour as forms of narrativization, like Stewart and Strathern (2004) and White (Vampires 2000).

5 There seem, however, to be differing accounts as to when Mombasa was attacked the second time. Coupland says it was in 1528, and others like Berg (1968) mention 1526. A detailed narration of the Portuguese’ ‘storming and plundering of Mombasa’ given by Strandes (1899) indicates that it ran from November 1528 to March 1529 (103–13).