Between imagination and delusion: Cosmopolitan postcolonial critique in Ken Walibora’s Ndoto ya Amerika [The American Dream]

Abstract

This paper reads Ken Walibora’s Kiswahili children’s book Ndoto ya Amerika [The American Dream] as a critical intervention in the politics of the imagination in Kenya. I argue that although the story is radical in its subtle criticism of the West, its main focus is the disillusionment with the post‐independence dispensation in Africa. By tracking the story’s imaginative engagements with the Kiswahili language, the African American diaspora, and the disciplinary apparatus of the postcolonial Kenyan state, I find that Walibora promotes “rooted cosmopolitanism” as a framework for literary and political development. Despite its artistic innovativeness in addressing the problems that African nations face, Ndoto ya Amerika has received little critical attention. It behoves the postcolonial critic to consider popular and children’s texts in indigenous languages of the Global South, as texts like Ndoto ya Amerika offer an energetic critique of universalized notions of cosmopolitanism while proposing alternative cosmopolitan practices. I read Ndoto ya Amerika as undermining dominant notions of cosmopolitanism which, in their triumphalist perception of globalization, privilege the affluent postcolonial subject based in the West.

Keywords:

• Ken Walibora
• Kiswahili
• children’s literature
• African cosmopolitanism
• African diaspora in America
• crime

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ariel Bookman, George Gathigi, Joseph Situma, Lila Luce, Ernest Waititu, Larry Ndivo, David Wachanga, and Stephen Partington for reading this article in its various stages and offering invaluable advice and comments. The editors and anonymous reviewers at JPW gave me extremely useful feedback and suggestions, for which I am grateful.

Notes

1. For a powerful critique of cosmopolitanism as conceived by intellectuals based in the western academy, including some of those I have listed here, see Simon Gikandi’s “Between Roots and Routes”. Very useful in outlining this critique as postcolonial studies continues to re‐examine its terms and practices is Janet Wilson’s introduction to “Theoretical Reroutings” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium. We should note that even when these scholars disagree with one another, they all stress the need to avoid universalistic views of cosmopolitanism that celebrate globalization at the expense of indigenous and local cultural expressions and practices.

2. See, for example, Asenath Bole Odaga’s Literature for Children and Young People in Kenya and Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind (16–20). Echoing Bob Dixon’s Catching them Young, Odaga and Ngũgĩ severally decry the colonial system’s use of European children’s stories to brainwash African children into willing servants of the colonialist agenda.

3. This is the name of Walibora’s village. But the story is not autobiographical; neither is the narrator, for all the empathy created towards him, the mouthpiece of the writer.

4. Subsequent translations in parentheses are mine.

5. Makuchi is the pen‐name of the US‐based anglophone Cameroonian writer and critic Juliana Nfah‐Abennyi.

6. Following Swahili morphology, I will refer to the language as Kiswahili and its ethnic indigenous speakers as the Swahili people.

7. For a discussion of exoticization and commoditization of anglophone African writing in the West, see Huggan.

8. Soyinka argues that “the artist has always functioned in African Society as the record of the mores and experience of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. It is time therefore for the modern artist to respond to this essence of himself” (13).

9. Walibora coined his pen‐name Walibora from Swahilinizing his Luhya name. He divided the name Waliaula into Wali (Kiswahili for cooked rice) and aula (Luhya for good or better). Bora is Kiswahili for good or better (see Waititu’s “Walibora Away from TV Fame”). In Luhya, “Waliaula” means “the one who leads a herd of cattle in another or different direction”.

10. For example, see Walibora’s essay “Prison, Poetry, and Polyphony in Abdilatif Abdalla’s Sauti ya Dhiki”. He reads Abdalla’s language as dialogic and disruptive even though Abdalla uses a classical Arabic verse form, which has been rejected by inland poets such as Kithaka wa Mberia and Euphrase Kezilahabi as too conservative to express modern themes. The departure from the classical format has been the trend since the introduction of free verse in Tanzanian poetry since the late 1960s.

11. In a personal interview he says his reading of African diaspora writing was limited to Richard Wright’s Native Son, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Vic Reid’s New Day.

12. For a discussion of civic virtue in Kenya see Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, especially Chapter 12 on “moral ethnicity”.