Familial cartographies in contemporary East African short stories

Abstract

Using two East African short stories by Binyavanga Wainiana and Muthoni Garland, this article explores literal, literary and nation-families as recurrent motifs in contemporary East African short stories, which comment on intergenerational relationships and the ensuing patterns of power relations. If, as much scholarship on the post-colonial state opines, the disintegration of the state in Africa ushered in a shift towards family networks, and, broadly, the domestic space, then contemporary East African short stories would seem to suggest that the refuge offered by the family space has, at best, been fraught with contradictions, with the familial space emerging as both a space of healing and a site haunted by the same predatory dynamics that mark the phallocratic state. It is in this environment that the arts – music, literature and other arts – seem to offer a platform for cross-generational critical engagement.

Keywords:

• East African short stories
• family
• gender

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Yianna Liatsos for her incisive feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to my Writing Group members – Nwabisa Bangeni, Louise Green, Lynda Spencer and Tina Steiner – for their suggestions on the article.

Notes

See Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992). Neil Lazarus revists this debate more recently in The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011).

Critics have noted Vera's deliberate strategy of setting her narratives at key moments in Zimbabwean national history, and simultaneously shifting the spotlight to the lives of marginal, ordinary characters, with little to commend them, except their everyday lives and enduring quest for agency and dignity. See Muponde and Taruvinga's Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (2002) for interesting reflections on Vera's work.

See for instance McClintock (1995), Stratton (1994) and Samuelson (2007) among others.

This trend is particularly evident in the negritude poetry of Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Black Consciousness poetry emerging from apartheid South Africa. These present a romanticized image of a feminine, idyllic Africa contrasted with a cold, dehumanizing Western modernity.

In some ways, a gendered perversion of Mahmood Mamdani's (1996) citizen – subject dichotomy or, for that matter, the Marxist maxim owners of capital (power) and owners of labour (the ruled).

See for instance bell hook's incisive essay ‘Reflections on Race and Sex’ (1990, 57–64).

In his Caine Prize winning story ‘Seventh Street Alchemy’, Zimbabwean writer Brian Chikwava references this culture through his description of the protagonist, Fiso's home: ‘At the corner of Samora Machel Avenue and Seventh Street, in a flat whose bedroom is adorned with two newspaper cuttings of the president, lives a fifty-two-year-old quasi-prostitute with thirty-seven teeth and a pair of six-inch heeled perspex platform shoes’ (2005, 18).

I have discussed these complicities between traditional patriarchy and colonial administrations in greater detail, elsewhere (Musila 2009).

‘Discovering Home’ was the inaugural winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002. Wainaina later extended the story into a memoir, One Day I Will Write About this Place, published in 2011.

I refer to him as a narrator in recognition of the blurred genre boundaries in the story, particularly in the ‘docufiction’/‘fictionalized autobiography’ slant of the story.

The matatu minibus in Kenya was for a long time actively involved in the production and consumption of a particular cultural ethos involving an eclectic mix of music, graffiti art, fashion and global cultural icons. The key vectors of this ethos were the matatu conductors (mainly male) who were actively engaged in processes of experimenting and imagining a range of new identities which often privileged modernity and a cosmopolitan cultural capital. See Mbugua wa Mungai (2007) for a detailed discussion of matatu culture in Kenya.

To borrow a phrase from Parselelo Kantai's incisive essay ‘In the Grip of the Vampire State: Maasai Land Struggles in Kenyan Politics’ (2007).

I have explored the question of the phallocractic state in detail elsewhere (Musila 2009).

The notion of ‘urban ethnicity’ references the ongoing contestation of bounded categories such as tradition/modernity; rural/urban; ethnic/modern which have often haunted urban subjectivities in Africa. Instead, as Nyairo argues, the idea of ‘urban ethnicity’ captures the flux, flows and negotiation of identities across different spaces and cultural repertoires.

Upon taking over the reigns of power in 1978, after the demise of the first president Jomo Kenyatta, president Moi intensified the centralization of state power in the person of the president, initiated by the Kenyatta regime through the ruling party Kenya African National Union (KANU). KANU was soon popularized as ‘baba na mama wa taifa’ (father and mother of the nation), making the president the ultra-paternal authority at the helm of the nation-family. I have explored this in detail elsewhere (Musila 2009). See also Angelique Haugerud's The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya (1995) for a detailed reflection on Moi's Kenya in the 1980s–1990s.

See Yvonne Vera's Under the Tongue (1996).