“Mau Mau Author in Detention: The Subversive ‘We’ in a Colonial Era Detention Diary” — which follows this tribute — is Ken Walibora’s last academic work that he submitted for publication before his sudden death in April 2020. Walibora’s death robbed the eastern Africa literary fraternity of a scholar who found value in building bridges across disciplines (literature and media studies) languages, (Kiswahili and English), and regions (East Africa and North America) at a time when such transcendental conversations are so sorely needed to make local and global knowledge systems, in all languages, available to humanity.
Walibora started off as an award-winning author of Kiswahili prose, moved on to television journalism, both in Kenya, and then changed careers to university teaching in the United States before relocating back to Kenya. Thereafter, he continued with creative writing, literary criticism, university teaching, convened and conducted numerous literary writing clinics all over eastern Africa, and served on numerous manuscript and literary prize evaluation panels, including the prestigious Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature. He was also a member of the East African Community’s Language Policy Panel in Arusha, and ran a regular column in Taifa Leo, a leading newspaper in Kenya that is published in Kiswahili. In all these, his singular vision of knowledge creation, individually and collaboratively, yielded such a tremendous volume of work that it is reasonable to view him as the most important Kiswahili language and literature scholar that eastern Africa has produced in the recent past.
In the last few years of his career, and in pursuit of his scholarly vision, Walibora found a willing and enabling ally in Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, in which he published two important articles, and agreed to serve on its International Advisory Board. It was in the latter capacity that he guest-edited the first ever bilingual Kiswahili-English issue of this journal (a first for any journal), which was published at the end of 2019. The Kiswahili-English Special Issue has so far received tremendous approval from scholars all over the world who focus on eastern African literary and Kiswahili studies. At the time of his death, Walibora was already mobilising contributions of for a second instalment of the same project. This article, and by extension this issue, are therefore published in memory of Ken Waliaula Walibora, whose belief in exposing the eastern African literary and cultural knowledge reservoirs preoccupied the final years of his life. As the editorial collective of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, we remain grateful for his ready buy-in to our scholarly vision, and his commitment in pulling through with the Kiswahili-English Special Issue of the journal, a major milestone in the journal’s own journey towards maturity as the leading institution of literary and cultural discourse in and on eastern Africa.