Journeying through Nairobi: Mapping the City through Prize-Winning Stories

Abstract

Nairobi as a city has been a prominent feature in many literary works set in Kenya from the pre-independence period, when the city started taking form, to the present. The city has also continued its presence in futuristic literary representations from Kenya. This article is concerned with Nairobi as a city and its representations within short stories in the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing. It analyses selected prize-winning and shortlisted stories in a literary project that aims to map the Nairobi city space, exploring both its precarity as well as its stability as presented through literature. Through the characters in these prized stories, the article foregrounds the journey motif as a tool used by the writers to explore and present the postcolonial city though contemporary lenses, paying particular attention to the significance of the chaos and informality used to describe the city. The article seeks to read the postcolonial African city in its complexities outside of the conventional binary lenses of local versus global, rural versus urban, and modern versus traditional. It acknowledges the significance of an international literary prize not only in shaping creative narratives but also in capturing the ‘spirit of the moment’. Through an analysis of these short stories under the larger umbrella of an international literary prize, this article attempts a reading of the creative representations of a city exploring the multi-layered nature of both text and physical space.

Keywords:

• Nairobi
• city
• journey motif
• chaos
• in/formality
• literary prizes

Introduction: Nairobi’s Historical Position in East African Literature

Nairobi, as one of the major cities in the East African region, has continued to feature prominently in literary and other creative works, such as film and music, since the early 1900s. In some of these works, the city, as the Kenyan capital and one of the leading economic hubs in the region, features as a refuge because of its expansive urban cover and geographical centrality, and in most of the creative works it serves as a representation of chaos and instability. However, in many of these texts, the city is written in comparison with the rural. Various creative writers and critics have foregrounded the East African city, noting its dominance as a theme in creative works. In The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (2007), Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi explain that ‘[t]he city and Anglophone literature in East Africa are intricately connected because they are both new phenomena and depend on each other for sustenance’ (169–70). Further, John Roger Kurtz, writing in Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel (1998), discusses the writings of the Kenyan city in literary works, postulating that the urban paradox of both success and failure depicts the African city as a locale for fundamental conflicts and contradictions on all levels of the social formation. Indeed, earlier and historical literary texts from the region tended to present the city as the source of moral decay, contrasting it with the rural which presents a much-needed cultural rooting. Kurtz (1998), citing several novels set in Nairobi during this historical and political period, writes that

The image of Nairobi is by no means dead, but Kenyan writers have been complicating the picture considerably in the thirty years since independence: Meja Mwangi’s well-known urban trilogy – Kill me Quick, Going Down River Road, and The Cockroach Dance – has become the paradigm for the exposure of Nairobi’s urban underbelly; popular texts such as those from Charles Mangua and David Maillu alternately celebrate the opportunities amid the bright lights of the city or excoriate its corrupt, parasitical nature; writers like Marjorie Oludhe McGoye, meanwhile, record the ways that ordinary Nairobians manage to find hope and home in this often hostile urban environment. (5)

Despite these early literary representations of the city, this focus started to shift significantly from the 1990s – a fact that Gikandi and Mwangi argue is a result of younger artists without a firm rural background, whose lives are centred around the city, moving to the forefront of literary and cultural production. It is from these young artists that various literary platforms emerged in the region starting from the late 1990s to the 2000s. These literary outfits were born outside of the mainstream publishing houses and other formal institutions of canon formation. They inhabited the marginal spaces that were characterized by informality of form, language, as well as publishing platforms. They emerged at a time when the country was transitioning from a long era of oppressive political rule and there was a lot of optimism in terms of development in all areas of socio-economic and political lives, including cultural production. The major literary outfits in the region were FEMRITE in Uganda, started in 1996, and Kwani? in Kenya formed in 2002. In an interview, Parselelo Kantai, one of the founding members of Kwani?, noted that at the establishment of the literary magazine there was ‘a lot of hope and tremendous optimism for the future [of Kenya],’ adding that ‘[t]his emergent writing (primarily published in Kwani? magazine) promised a chronicling of the new era as well as an interrogation of 25 years of silence’ (Musila 71). In Kenya, several similar outfits have followed Kwani? including Storymoja, Enkare Review, Jalada, Amka and Down River Road. The most significant linking factor in these literary outfits, which is the focus of this article, is that, although some of them have pan-African orientations, they are physically centered around Nairobi city, and that it is these literary avenues that continue to feed the major international prizes for African literature today.

Doreen Strauhs notes in African Literary NGOs (2013) that since the early 2000s prizewinning authors have emerged signally from the East African literary scenes, bringing back the transnational spotlight on the Anglophone literature of the region. Strauhs foregrounds these literary outfits that have contributed significantly to the production of the literary texts that end up in the prizewinning markets arguing that ‘these organizations have been providing a platform for writers of various backgrounds to experiment with form, media, content, and language, thereby giving birth to new literary trends as well as publications that not only transforms creative writing […] but also enrich the educational sector and local civil society as fora for opinion making’ (1). These outfits are not only invested in literary publishing but also in creative writing, literary marketing, as well as in providing links to writers associated with major international prizes for African writing. Further, because of the nature of these publishing outfits, which operate both in print and in online digital spaces, they have invested more in the short story genre. This investment in the short story genre by local literary platforms has been boosted by the fact that major literary prizes for African literature have also heavily invested in the short story genre. The award bodies that are open to African writers include the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing, the Queen Mary Wasafiri Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Brittle Paper Award for Fiction and the Short Story Day Africa Award (SSDA). One of the emerging trends in the literature produced through these literary platforms, and which is increasingly being presented through the international award bodies, is the dominance of the contemporary African city as a theme. This article is concerned with Nairobi as a city and its representations within the Caine Prize short stories, one of the major awards for the contemporary African short story.

The Caine, first awarded in 2000 to Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, is open only to African writers and considers only short stories in English, or in English translation. In terms of economic compensation and symbolic capital, the Caine is one of the most prestigious prizes for contemporary African literature across all genres. It awards £10 000 each year for the winning short story and £500 for each for the shortlisted stories. Part of the literary prestige associated with this prize comes from the fact that it does not only rely on the cash reward for the winners but also includes writing fellowships and mentorship. Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production (1993) affirms that the prestige of a literary prize is not only associated with the economic capital but also its cultural and symbolic value. Elaborating this notion, James English, in The Economy of Prestige (2005), underscores the value of the symbolic and cultural capital that comes with the connections the award bodies have in the literary market. This might include the judging panel, the prize patrons and the funding/donor bodies. Indeed, it is important to note that part of the prestige of the Caine comes from the fact that its patrons are sourced from the Nobel Prize in Literature’s African winners list. The patrons have included: Wole Soyinka, J.M. Coetzee and the late Nadine Gordimer. And, over the years, the judging panels have included key figures in African literature, including writers and critics, academics as well as journalists. The symbolic and cultural capital that judges or patrons bring to a prize competition cannot be bought or exchanged for economic capital. And although fraught with its controversies and scandals, various critics have also acknowledged the role that this prize continues to play in foregrounding contemporary African writings (Emenyonu; Pucherova; Awadalla and March-Russell).

Reading the City in Prizewinning Short Stories

Since the Caine was first awarded in 2000, there have been a total of 110 winning and shortlisted stories. In these entries, Kenyan writers have been well-represented with a total of 14 Kenyan stories on the shortlist for the last 21 years. Notable in these stories from Kenya is the dominance of Nairobi city, or a fictionalized version of Nairobi, in stories by both Kenyan and foreign writers. These short stories are: Binyavanga Wainaina’s ‘Discovering Home,’ which was the first Kenyan story to win the prize in 2002; Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s ‘Weight of Whispers’; ‘The Story of Comrade Lemma and the Black Jerusalem Boys Band’ and ‘You Wreck Her’ by Parselelo Kantai; ‘Tracking the Scent of My Mother’ by Muthoni Garland; ‘How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile’ by Mukoma wa Ngugi; ‘How Shall we Kill the Bishop?’ by Lily Mabura; ‘My Father’s Head’ by Okwiri Oduor; ‘The Lifebloom Gift’ by Abdul Adan; ‘Stick Fighting Days’ by Olufemi Terry; Billy Kahora’s ‘Gorilla’s Apprentice’ and ‘Urban Zoning’; Makena Onjerika’s ‘Fanta Blackcurrent’; Cherrie Kandie’s ‘Sew My Mouth’; and Troy Onyango’s ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ which was shortlisted in 2021.

In ‘Gorilla’s Apprentice,’ for instance, a teenager has formed an unlikely friendship with a gorilla at the Nairobi Animal Orphanage. It is his way of dealing with his socio-economic problems and an escape from his small flat that he shares with his mother. In the background, tension is rising in the city and there is evidence of imminent or ongoing violence. ‘Weight of Whispers’ narrates the experiences of the Rwandan genocide from a formerly privileged family’s point of view. The story centers on the family members living as refugees in Kenya, detailing the realities of displacement by war. Their disillusionment is evident as the reality of the situation hits the family and they have to learn to navigate the city, not as royals with diplomatic immunity and wealth, but as refugees looking for rest and peace. ‘My Father’s Head’ by Okwiri Oduor is a story of a young woman dealing with her emotions on how to mourn her father. She works in Nairobi in an old-people’s home and as the narration shows, her mourning is paralleled by the old people’s mourning of long-ago events that shook the city, displacing some people forever. Nairobi has also featured in other prizes such as Wasafiri, the Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) prize and the Writivism Short Story Prize. However, some of these prizes feed into the Caine. The Short Story Day Africa (SSDA), for instance, provides this progression as it moves from the local prize body to the international. Indeed, part of the SSDA winning package includes the assurance that the top stories each year would be automatically submitted for the Caine. Oduor’s 2014 Caine-winning story, ‘My Father’s Head,’ had won the SSDA prize in 2013. In these short stories, the city is presented as a precarious space the characters have learnt to navigate in order to create order and to survive.

Further, as these prized stories demonstrate, the authors have invested heavily in the journey motif that allows the reader to follow the characters as they map the city into various zones of visibility and invisibility as necessitated by their different positionalities. Using this approach as a background, this article analyses four selected prize stories and relies on their framing to read the African city from multidimensional perspectives and explore the delicate balance created between precarity and stability, and between visibility and invisibility. In this way, the article is invested in a discussion of how the short story theorizes the contemporary African city. These selected four stories are: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s ‘Weight of Whispers,’ Billy Kahora’s ‘Urban Zoning,’ Cherrie Kandie’s ‘Sew My Mouth’ and Makena Onjerika’s ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’. Owuor’s story won the Caine in 2003 and Onjerika’s won it in 2018, while Kandie’s and Kahora’s short stories were shortlisted for the prize in 2019 and 2012 respectively.

In focusing on these Caine stories, it is, however, significant to highlight that, since the launch of this prize, there have been continuous and ongoing discussions both within academic and social media spaces about the role of the prize in curating a particular kind of prize aesthetic for African literature. This aesthetic is one that seems to privilege and award pain and suffering, playing into the stereotypes about Africa as a continent ravaged by war, disease and death. Various critics such as Dobrota Pucherova in ‘“A Continent Learns to Tell its Story at Last,’” Samantha Pinto in ‘The Caine Prize and the Impossibility of “New” African Writing,’ among others, have decried the continued awarding of such stories in which child narrators populate the pages, telling of the violence on the continent in a formulaic manner, thereby leading to the problem of the ‘single story’ narrative as expounded by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.¹ Other critics outside of the academic sphere, such as Kenyan poet Stephen Derwent Partington, add that the UK-based Caine Prize, even though it is overseen by cosmopolitan African writers such as Ben Okri, ‘seems to be legitimizing the rather hackneyed claim that “the African cultural aesthetic” is exclusively one that states messages-and-morals about social issues, with no interest in entertainment.’² The same views have been raised by Nigerian critic, Ikhide R. Ikheloa, who contends that the Caine Prize is a prestigious literary prize but it has also encouraged the production of a literature that views Africa through a very narrow prism – that it only awards short stories that further stereotypes Africa.³

Indeed, some of the short stories in this analysis can also be read and interpreted through these lenses. However, the creative writing and literary production process is a long one that is also multidirectional, allowing for more than one interpretation of texts. Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall explain, in ‘Writing the World from an African Metropolis,’ that

there are many explanations for the failure of contemporary scholarship to describe the novelty and originality of this continent in all its complexity, to pay sufficient attention to that which is unknown about it, or to find order in the apparent mess of its past and the chaos of its present [noting that it is] not simply that life changes rapidly and vast domains of human struggle and achievement are hardly the object of documentation, archiving, or empirical description – and even less so of satisfactory narrative or interpretive understanding. It is also that uncertainty and turbulence, instability and unpredictability, and rapid, chronic, and multidirectional shifts are the social forms taken, in many instances by daily experience. (348–49)

‘Weight of Whispers,’ which was initially published by the Nairobi-based literary platform Kwani?, became the second entry by a Kenyan writer to win the prestigious prize, after Binyavanga Wainaina’s win in 2002. It also played an important role in cementing the place of the then new Kenyan literary platform within local and global literary spaces. In ‘Weight of Whispers’ the narrator, a former prince, tells of his family’s flight from Rwanda at the beginning of the 1994 genocide and their life as refugees in Kenya, exposing the corruption in the host government, which contributes to further dehumanization of the asylum seekers. The prince, Boniface Louis R. Kuseremane, his mother Agnethe-mama, his fiancée Lune and his sister Chi-Chi find themselves in Nairobi, escaping the war. Initially, they only view Nairobi as a transit space, hoping to finally go into exile in Europe. They check into a five-star hotel in Nairobi as they await the next leg of their journey. However, as they soon realize, they have been cut off from everyone and everything they knew and have no hope of escaping Nairobi. As the news of their helplessness and the reality of their economic and political downfall dawns on them, they must learn to navigate the new strange city.

The story follows the Kuseremane family as they escape from their five-star hotel and end up lodging in the poorer parts of town; they later move to find more permanent accommodation when the reality of their life as refugees hits them. As the former royals adjust to their new life, they learn to navigate Nairobi, selling off their jewelry, trying to process visas and travel documents unsuccessfully, learning new cultures and languages and confronting the reality of street life with its violence and its pockets of mercy. Through this displaced family narrative, the story relies on the characters to map Nairobi in socio-economic and political terms. The corruption and rot of the city is exposed as everyone aims to make a quick buck at the expense of people displaced by war. The international community’s blind eye on the genocide is exposed through the many immigration offices the prince visits, and the cosmopolitan nature of the city is revealed in both its positive and negative lights. By focusing on the story of the displaced royal family’s journeys through different parts of Nairobi, the writer manages to engage with the question of the international community’s response to the Rwandan genocide. The story is narrated from the first-person point of view and keeps shifting from one geographic location and time setting to another, the end result being a historical, political and cultural contextualization of the genocide.

‘Urban Zoning’ by Billy Kahora was first published in McSweeney’s when Kahora was the Kwani? managing editor. The story captures the complexity of living in this postcolonial city, amidst its chaos and unpredictability. This is the story of Kandle, who works at a Kenyan bank based in Nairobi. He has been away from work without official leave for close on two months and is expected in a disciplinary meeting to discuss his conduct. It is in this meeting that he will get to know whether he will be fired or allowed to keep his job. The story is framed in one short afternoon as Kandle leaves the bar, drunk, and walks towards his office building for the meeting. In his drunken walk on the streets of Nairobi, the reader is introduced to his personal life spanning from childhood to adulthood, which reveals his vulnerabilities and skills in navigating through life. His waking days are mainly filled with alcohol, and he has perfected the act of being so drunk that he achieves a state he calls ‘the zone’. As he walks from bar to office along the Nairobi streets, his goal is to find a balance between ‘the good zone’ and ‘the bad zone’. In a review of ‘Urban Zoning,’ Stephen Derwent Partington argues that ‘Kandle is not merely to be despised for his dissolution or pitied for his state, but also in some sense admired for his creative (if often unpleasant) ability to adapt and cope and move and live within urban spaces that might otherwise engulf him and the spirit of all those Kenyans who now, increasingly, are in the majority in our cities, as they are across the postcolonial world’.⁴

Indeed, as Kandle walks along the city streets, marking the city in zones through a balance of his reminiscences and gloom about the upcoming possible dismissal from work, he also participates in a physical geographical zoning of the city, a process that is echoed in Makena Onjerika’s prizewinning story ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’. The story was first published in Wasafiri in 2017. In this short story, the characters who are all street children and families in Nairobi have learnt to map and demarcate the city according to safety and survival. ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’ follows the lives of a group of girls from childhood to early adulthood, living in the city streets. Through the eyes of a naïve narrator, the writer explores issues of violence, abuse, poverty and pain through the children’s mapping of the city into safe and dangerous zones, the exploitative and conniving corners, as well as the honest and generous sections of the city that have opened the characters’ eyes to survival mechanisms in the city.

A similar narrative is Cherrie Kandie’s ‘Sew My Mouth,’ which was first submitted for the Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) competition as an unpublished piece. The story then appeared in SSDA’s anthology, ID Identity: New Short Fiction From Africa (2018), before being shortlisted for the Caine. The story is also set in Nairobi and it features two young women who have learnt to navigate the city on their own in the face of prejudice and oppressive laws against same-sex relationships. However, while the previous three stories are set in the outdoor spaces of the city, with the characters mapping and experiencing the geographical city through walking, Kandie’s short story is confined to the two women’s two-bedroom flat in Nairobi. The lovers are in their home, imagining walking the city without any inhibitions, exploring and navigating spaces that would otherwise be unaccepting of them:

On Friday night, after her parents leave, we hold hands and pretend that we are outside. We walk in Nairobi. Our matchbox flat becomes the large sprawling city. The two bedrooms are the suburbs. We live in the bigger of the suburbs, the one with generous pavements and many trees. We leave home and walk along the corridor, which is the highway to town. The kitchen, found just before we get to town, is Fagi’s wooden Coca-Cola box-shaped shop. We lean through the serving hatch and ask for a one-litre Fanta Orange that we put in a paper bag. We hold hands again. We imagine that Fagi says, “What a lovely couple!”

Then we get to the Central Business District. The sitting room, which is also the dining room, is the CBD. The wall unit that almost touches the ceiling is the Times Tower. We look up and say, “How tall! How long did they take to build that?”

At last we go back to our house in the suburbs after spending the whole day bumping into rough fabric sofas and smooth aluminium matatu chests, into polished wooden stools and grey concrete buildings, into sweaty people and dining chairs with proud long backs, all of these fitting, as if by magic, in the small CBD of our flat. (n.p.)

The journeys presented in these stories are not only physical but also metaphorical and psychological. As Kurtz, in ‘Post-marked Nairobi: Writing the City in Contemporary Kenya,’ says, we learn from geographers that ‘space – especially urban space – is a significant social product’ (104). Kandie’s characters, Magda and the unnamed narrator, as well as Owuor’s characters in ‘Weight of Whispers,’ best expound on the metaphorical and psychological journeys. The former royal family in ‘Weight of Whispers’ makes both physical and metaphorical journeys as they slowly learn to accept their reality as refugees in Nairobi and are confronted with their role in the genocide. Further, as mentioned earlier, Kandie’s story takes place within the two women’s apartment but, using their imagination, they move from room to room, from corner to corridor, imagining that they are navigating the various streets of the city. Through the narrator, the reader learns of the psychological struggle of Magda as she tries to fit into the expectations of her parents to marry a man, and to deny her homosexuality. Throughout the story, Magda keeps travelling between the happy, contented space with her lover and the space where her mother’s wish to refute her daughter’s sexuality reigns. Between these travels, Magda is physically and emotionally drained, and makes various attempts at suicide. Onjerika’s story, on the other hand, presents the journey from a physical geographical perspective as the characters traverse the city day and night, year after year, from childhood to adulthood, as well as a metaphorical journey towards maturity and awareness. While the characters in ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’ journey to maturity and awareness over many years, Kahora’s protagonist in ‘Urban Zoning’ can make the metaphorical and psychological journeys within short time spans, aided by his drunken state that allows him to keep zoning in and out and provides an escape from his reality when needed.

The employment of the journey motif must be understood within the context of orality where this stylistic device is a recurrent traditional narrative unit in oral literature that has gained a significant position in prose fiction. James Ogude (1997), writing about the use of popular forms in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels, foregrounds the journey/quest motif as one of the notable oral elements in his works. He argues that wa Thiong’o relies on this ‘technique of the journey to foreground the trials of the characters and to explore the process of social transformation in their lives’ (76). Indeed, as suggested above, these journeys present different routes of social transformation for the different characters in the stories selected for this analysis.

Kahora’s main hero, Kandle, has learned to navigate the system both at work and in his social life and is able to live his life without consequences. After the meeting with his bosses at the bank, he manages to cunningly navigate the system and keep his job while enjoying all the time he needs to ‘recover’. In Onjerika’s ‘Fanta Blackcurrant,’ although the street children and families are still traversing the city and looking for different means of survival at the end of the story, their positionings have changed and they are no longer entirely helpless victims of the streets. They have mastered the art of navigating the streets for their own social and economic improvement. At the end of Kandie’s ‘Sew My Mouth,’ Magda is back home in the flat they share after being away for two months, and the narrator, likening her lover to the rain, notes: ‘There are things that are both expected and unexpected, and the rain is one of these things’ (n.p.). The story ends with the hope that, because of Magda’s return, she has finally accepted herself for who she is. The same social transformation has been achieved by the characters in Owuor’s ‘Weight of Whispers’. The formerly royal family moves from the privilege of detachment from their social and political surroundings, through disillusionment and blind belief in the power of their political and economic connections, to finally understanding the reality of life in a society with no social or economic support.

The use of the journey motif that is evident in these stories and other prizewinning works published on the same platform only serves to affirm the relationship between literature and society, where the journey in the text has influenced writers in their narratives to enter socio-cultural and political spaces in order to interrogate the dynamics of human conditions. Indeed, as Kurtz notes, ‘literary texts assist our understanding of the spatiality of a place like Nairobi, because they are revealing of the social contradictions and conflicts that have shaped postcolonial Kenya’s urban geography’ (‘Post-marked’ 109). The journey motif here is also used as a camera to present to the reader an unadulterated image of the city. In addition to the characters’ social transformation, relying on the journey motif also allows for a reading of the contemporary African city.

In his analysis of Kenyan author K.W. Wamitila’s works within the context of the journey motif, Evans M. Mbuthia notes that ‘journeys made by characters […] make their lives to [sic] change fundamentally’ and therefore the ‘act of journeying then can be said to foreground the thematic concerns of the author’ (65). In these prized stories, the characters’ physical and psychological mapping of the city can be read as a representation of the postcolonial city in all its complexity, capturing both its glamour and its disenchantment. This becomes particularly apt when short stories are the vehicle for representations of the city. Nadine Gordimer writes, in ‘The Short Story in Africa,’ that the genre is ‘a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness – which seems best expressed as flashes of fearful insight alternating with near-hypnotic states of indifference’ (170–71). Further, the contemporary short story in its increasing popularity in literary magazines, and in relation to local and international literary prizes, has been a useful tool for capturing the ‘spirit of the moment’ in various settings. Tinashe Mushakhavanu writes about Zimbabwean literary magazines and their contribution to the promotion of the short story. He notes that ‘literary magazines are essential and a good one testifies to the literary activity of a place. It is the memory of a particular period and the laboratory of new ideas. It represents a fairer and more balanced means of judging the richness of a national literature’ (133). It is these literary magazines and platforms that later feed into the prize industry. And although Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell argue, in The Postcolonial Short Story, that these platforms that initially host the short story in small magazines and online literary platforms are ephemeral, it is their links to the literary prizes that monumentalize the stories and the ‘spirit of the moment’ that they capture. On the same note, Shola Adenekan and Helen Cousins affirm that the ‘Anglophone African short story […] provides a model for a new kind of postcolonial text’ that ‘has always already displaced […] the novel as the postcolonial genre’ (78). Therefore, a reading of the city of Nairobi through the lenses of the prized stories provides a fascinating perspective on the postcolonial city today by providing an ‘entry-point into the messy complexity of the postcolonial world’ (Awadalla and March-Russell 10). Citing Gordimer, this fragmented and restless form is flexible, and therefore fits into the different literary platforms available for the African writer today.

Defining the Chaos and Instability of the City in the Literary Text

While literary representations of Nairobi city in works by earlier generation writers such as Meja Mwangi, Charles Mangua, David Mailu and Marjorie McOludhe presented the city in binaristic opposition to the rural, with the city as the centre and the rural as the margin, the analysis of contemporary prized stories demonstrates a marked difference. The short stories in this analysis, and within the wider frame of the international literary prize, present the city in its wholeness in being able to capture both the close cultural and communal ties of rural and urban modernity, with all its luxuries and complexities. In the three stories I discussed, the characters are not simply victims of a degraded urban modernity but are active players in the making of the postcolonial city. Kahora’s main character, Kandle, is presented as one who is aware of the complexities of the city, and although he is of questionable character, he has learnt to navigate the chaos of the city by always placing himself in strategic spaces and positions whether in the context of his job or in his drinking escapades, which sometimes run to seventy-two hours. As Partington notes, Kandle is a survivor, a cunning player of the system. On the same note, the children characters in Onjerika’s ‘Fanta Blackcurrant’ are initially presented as victims of a violent society that is incapable of loving and bringing up children. They have no families and have all gathered and formed a community in the streets. Later, as the children grow older and mature, they learn different means of survival. One of the characters, Meri, learns to rely on the guilt and pity of strangers on the streets and, when that fails, she starts to threaten pedestrians on the streets with faeces – that they must give her money, or she will smear them with faecal matter.

In all the stories, however, the city is defined by chaos and instability, which has led the characters to invent different ways of navigating and surviving it. Ranka Primorac, in ‘The Heart of the City,’ explores the postcolonial city and its representations in women’s writing from Zambia and highlights the ‘regimes of subjectivity and self-making imposed on those who are required to interweave their existence with the conditions of instability, uncertainty and discontinuity which recur in many post-colonial contexts’ (25). In line with her argument, the continuous state of chaos and instability in the city ‘and the constant possibility of abrupt and sudden irruptions into everyday flows contributes to the production of fractured identities capable of internalizing a register of improvisations and multiple, sudden changes of speed and direction in both mental and material movement’ (25). This is especially captured by Kahora’s main character in ‘Urban Zoning’ where, as Partington expounds:

Kahora’s primary way of presenting the ambivalence in his story is through Kandle’s experience of a binary, of two mental zones: the drunken ‘Good Zone’, where sepia-nice nostalgia reigns as he recalls his past and where he in the present seems invincible, even able to cheat death; the equally drunken ‘Bad Zone’, which he sometimes slips into when reminiscing. But these two zones cannot be controlled or fully isolated and instead dream-sequence into each other, deconstructing the harsh binary, implying that the urban postcolonial world is both/and, not simplistically either/or, as is the case in so much other literature from the continent or, specifically, from Kenya’s literary history. It would seem that Kahora is cleverly, then, presenting the city as a deeply ambiguous, polyvalent space, neither wholly good (as certain flippant postmodernists might claim) nor wholly bad (as certain post-independence fiction has always claimed). The city, then, is monumentally diverse, a place of struggle and survival, or threat and opportunity, of death and of making a living and a life of sorts. (n.p.)

Through such characters as Kandle, Kuseremane, Meri and Magda, these writers engage a different way of theorizing the contemporary African city that embraces the chaos and instability not as negative connotations but as part of their definition. They are implicitly in conversation with African urban theorists, such as AbdouMaliq Simone in For the City Yet to Come, theorizing questions of formality versus informality in the contemporary African city. Simone argues that, ‘far from being marginal to contemporary processes of scalar recomposition and the reimagination of political communities, African cities can be seen as a frontier for a wide range of diffuse experimentation with the reconfiguration of bodies, territories, and social arrangements necessary to recalibrate technologies of control’ (2). Relying on the example of various African cities, Simone calls for a re-evaluation of the value of informality within these spaces, noting how ‘informality occupies a space where good institutions and productive economies are purportedly absent, but also where informality uses a proficiency in emergent formal institutions to elaborate new spaces of operation’ (24). The literary presentation of Nairobi city in the prizewinning works is of a city whose inhabitants not only populate informal networks because of the failure of formal institutions but also those who seemingly find order in the disorder – which is cast as both habitation and resistance.

As noted earlier, Gordimer describes the short story as a ‘fragmented and restless form’ and this characterization of the short story parallels these stories’ representation of the city. The writers do not aim to present the city as a whole but have rather invested in the short story form to present Nairobi in fragments; snippets viewed through the characters’ walking the city, in which the fragments explore and embrace both the positive and the negative. The fragments do not aim to form a whole but should rather be viewed as complete in their representations of the city. The author focuses on the plot, character, setting, and theme in a brief compact manner, capturing only fragments of the whole and yet managing to contrive understanding and impact.

Further, Awadalla and March-Russell, writing about the short story as a liminal literary form, argue that the marginality of the postcolonial short story could ‘be recuperated in the form of a negative dialectic – the value of the short story arises from what it is not,’ adding that the short story ‘exists within the “torn halves” of art and culture, and it is this liminal position that produces a form rich in both tension and possibility’ (5). Taken from this perspective, the chaos of the city as represented through the stories’ aims to go beyond the exotic interpretation of postcolonial literatures. Graham Huggan proposes that postcolonial writers targeting the foreign audience has led to the production of literature as an ‘exotic commodity’ (22). Therefore, borrowing from Kurtz’s conclusion of his analysis of the Kenyan urban novels,

the most useful way to negotiate the connections between the postcolonial city and the postcolonial novel [and short story] is to see both as complex hybrid creations. Each was born of the interaction of indigenous social forms and institutions with imported (in most cases, European) social forms and institutions, and each has taken shape within the opportunities and constraints they offer. This interaction is a complicated and overdetermined process, yielding multifaceted and often contradictory results both in the urban landscape and in the urban novel [and short story]. (Urban Obsessions 4)

As we have seen, the prizewinning stories discussed centre the city. Therefore, Primorac’s observation in ‘The City, Text, Future’ is pertinent: ‘urban residents establish correspondences between the mirroring heterogeneities of text and city, they bypass the hierarchical dichotomy between the “global” and the “local” through which both the textual and the urban are often conceived’ (2). This perspective is especially apt when the city is presented in the short story genre in East Africa, increasingly on digital platforms. F. Odun Balogun, writing in Tradition and Modernity in the African Short Story, explains the significance of the short story genre in capturing the spirit of an age:

Writers find it [the short story] a most pliable genre and hence the short story has become a regular school of craftmanship and experimentation that pioneers new themes and new prose styles. In the hands of talented writers, the short story becomes the ideal medium to make a quick statement about a contemporary situation that is captured as a moment of history. Its ephemeral and contemporary significance can be carefully balanced against its permanent and more treasured universal value, using the mediating measure of an appropriate art form. (174)

The structure and the form of the short story makes it flexible enough to be accommodated in different media spaces, which in turn makes it adaptable to changing circumstances. It has been able to overcome the ‘conventional opposition between degraded urban modernity and the glorified spaces of traditional’ (Primorac 21). Further, because international literary prizes such as the Caine favour the genre, it has become the primary means of accessing global literary marketplaces. Indeed, borrowing from Awadalla and March-Russell’s conclusion to their discussion of the status of the postcolonial short story:

In taking what might be deemed to be of marginal interest – the short story – and placing it centre-stage, we hope to have extended the postcolonial critique of centres and margins that underwrites the hierarchical practice of Empire but which, arguably, has been sustained by the neo-colonial activities of globalization. In this scenario, the restless fragmentation of the short story has a vital role to play. (8)

These short stories, therefore, serve not only to capture the ‘spirit of the age’ but their presence on the international literary award scene makes them an avenue for far-reaching discussions of the relations between literature and cities.

Conclusion

This article focuses on the contemporary African short stories that have been popularized through international literary prizes that represent and engage the postcolonial urban space. Like previous literary and other creative outputs from the region, Nairobi has continued to feature prominently in new literary works that are now increasingly receiving global recognition through the mechanisms of international literary prizes. However, while earlier novels and stories about Nairobi mainly focused on the binary between the urban and the rural, where the later represented desired cultural roots and the city a site of urban degeneracy, contemporary literary representations of the city are embracing urban spaces in all their complexity. In these new representations, the chaos of the city is embraced and presented as necessary to the condition of the postcolonial city. Through my analysis of the prizewinning stories, I have shown how the short story writers are implicitly engaged in conversations with theorists of the contemporary postcolonial city – both advocating for an acknowledgment of the multifaceted nature of a city such as Nairobi.

Notes

1 This is in reference to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s now famous TED talk on ‘The Danger of a Single Story’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = D9Ihs241zeg.

2 http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/+More+responsibilities+

3 http://xokigbo.com/2012/03/11/the-2011-caine-prize-how-not-to-write-about-africa/

4 https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/on-reading-billy-kahoras-caine-nominated-short-story-urban-zoning-by-stephen-derwent-partington/