In a large number of works about postcolonial civil wars, detectives, investigations, quests or investigative journeys, violent intrigues and discoveries about the past all figure prominently. In fact, novels about the discordant and irrational universe of civil wars often cast the figure of the detective as their central protagonist. The detective is a metaphor for order in a world gone awry in the chaos of war. Nuruddin Farah employs such a character in order to investigate, interrogate and narrate Somalia’s complex postcolonial history. In Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Loyaan attempts to excavate the truth of his brother’s death, and in Links (2004), Jeebleh, a professor of literature living in New York, returns to his native Mogadishu in the middle of the ongoing internecine wars. This paper will offer a close reading of the figure of the metaphysical detective whose investigations serve to unearth existential truths and offer stronger historical frameworks for wars being depicted as senseless and chaotic.Keywords: Somalia, detective, postcolonial, metaphysical, historiography, civil war, family
{"title":"The Metaphysical Detective in Nuruddin Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk and Links","authors":"Bhakti Shringarpure","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.6","url":null,"abstract":"In a large number of works about postcolonial civil wars, detectives, investigations, quests or investigative journeys, violent intrigues and discoveries about the past all figure prominently. In fact, novels about the discordant and irrational universe of civil wars often cast the figure of the detective as their central protagonist. The detective is a metaphor for order in a world gone awry in the chaos of war. Nuruddin Farah employs such a character in order to investigate, interrogate and narrate Somalia’s complex postcolonial history. In Sweet and Sour Milk (1979), Loyaan attempts to excavate the truth of his brother’s death, and in Links (2004), Jeebleh, a professor of literature living in New York, returns to his native Mogadishu in the middle of the ongoing internecine wars. This paper will offer a close reading of the figure of the metaphysical detective whose investigations serve to unearth existential truths and offer stronger historical frameworks for wars being depicted as senseless and chaotic.Keywords: Somalia, detective, postcolonial, metaphysical, historiography, civil war, family","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"46 1","pages":"93–111-93–111"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43419507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"G. Musila, T. Steiner","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48611827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the representation of dynamics in a family that result in the separation of family members and their subsequent failure to reunite as a family. It specifically explores how Elieshi Lema’s In the Belly of Dar es Salaam represents characters who are victims of economic and political pressures that force them not only to be migrants but also to negotiate alternative affiliative relationships in order to survive. I explore the narrative in relation to the socio-cultural, economic and political instabilities that disrupt the lives of postcolonial subjects in Africa, producing migrants detached from their biological families. Since characters in this novel move from rural areas to urban spaces, this narrative offers an opportunity to read the city of Dar es Salaam as an agential space in the production of meanings and identities. These characters are forced by circumstances to forge new identities to meet certain needs at a particular time. I thus suggest that the novel portrays the precarity of existence in the city of Dar es Salaam as experienced by marginalised groups and how these groups negotiate affiliative relationships amongst themselves. This paper is interested in answering the following questions: how do characters move from rural to urban contexts? How do these marginalised characters negotiate their survival in the city of Dar es Salaam? How does the narrative conflate Sara and the city of Dar es Salaam as mothers to street children?Keywords: neoliberal migrants, Ujamaa, family, city space, Machinga, self-reliance
{"title":"Precarity and Affiliative Relationships in Elieshi Lema’s In the Belly of Dar es Salaam1","authors":"Y. C. Ng’umbi","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.4","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the representation of dynamics in a family that result in the separation of family members and their subsequent failure to reunite as a family. It specifically explores how Elieshi Lema’s In the Belly of Dar es Salaam represents characters who are victims of economic and political pressures that force them not only to be migrants but also to negotiate alternative affiliative relationships in order to survive. I explore the narrative in relation to the socio-cultural, economic and political instabilities that disrupt the lives of postcolonial subjects in Africa, producing migrants detached from their biological families. Since characters in this novel move from rural areas to urban spaces, this narrative offers an opportunity to read the city of Dar es Salaam as an agential space in the production of meanings and identities. These characters are forced by circumstances to forge new identities to meet certain needs at a particular time. I thus suggest that the novel portrays the precarity of existence in the city of Dar es Salaam as experienced by marginalised groups and how these groups negotiate affiliative relationships amongst themselves. This paper is interested in answering the following questions: how do characters move from rural to urban contexts? How do these marginalised characters negotiate their survival in the city of Dar es Salaam? How does the narrative conflate Sara and the city of Dar es Salaam as mothers to street children?Keywords: neoliberal migrants, Ujamaa, family, city space, Machinga, self-reliance","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"46 1","pages":"55–73-55–73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46086672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Looking at two short stories from Dilman Dila’s critically acclaimed short story collection, A Killing in the Sun (2014), I explore the controversial use of DDT in rural Uganda as a site of ecoambiguity. My close reading of “The Leafy Man” and “The Yellow People” illumines various paradoxes around the consumption of internationally sponsored insecticide and its subsequent cost to local society. These paradoxes contradict the Manichean thinking of earlier forms of postcolonial nationalism and self-determined nativist thought. I argue that by identifying ecoambiguity as a more appropriate tenor for insecticide usage in Uganda, Dila’s short stories grapple with the realities of the neoliberal African state that must remain open to ambiguity and reconfigurations of the human, as it attempts to come to terms with, and potentially alleviate, local ecodegradation in a global economy.Keywords: Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun, African speculative fiction, African science fiction, African ecocriticism
{"title":"Aliens and Insecticide: Ecoambiguity in Two Stories from Dilman Dila’s A Killing in the Sun","authors":"N. Moonsamy","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.5","url":null,"abstract":"Looking at two short stories from Dilman Dila’s critically acclaimed short story collection, A Killing in the Sun (2014), I explore the controversial use of DDT in rural Uganda as a site of ecoambiguity. My close reading of “The Leafy Man” and “The Yellow People” illumines various paradoxes around the consumption of internationally sponsored insecticide and its subsequent cost to local society. These paradoxes contradict the Manichean thinking of earlier forms of postcolonial nationalism and self-determined nativist thought. I argue that by identifying ecoambiguity as a more appropriate tenor for insecticide usage in Uganda, Dila’s short stories grapple with the realities of the neoliberal African state that must remain open to ambiguity and reconfigurations of the human, as it attempts to come to terms with, and potentially alleviate, local ecodegradation in a global economy.Keywords: Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun, African speculative fiction, African science fiction, African ecocriticism","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"46 1","pages":"75–92-75–92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44592685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and argues that it ought to be read as a Mau Mau novel. The anti-colonial Mau Mau insurgency remains historically elusive due to its members’ own secrecy and to the colonialist propaganda that elided the true scope of British brutality and dismissed Mau Mau as mere barbarism. However elusive this history, Mau Mau serves for many as a national creation myth in which the Mau Mau participants are freedom fighters rather than atavistic terrorists. As such, Mau Mau is often depicted as a black/white binary, but Vassanji’s novel provides a perspective from Kenya’s Asian community, whose people experience the conflict as cultural outsiders, if not collaborators in colonial oppression. As Vikram’s narrative suggests, a binary reading of Mau Mau is problematic for Asians such as the Lalls, whose progeny increasingly identify as African. The Mau Mau motif in Vassanji’s narrative becomes the constant and unresolved myth in Vikram’s life that challenges his personal sense of self and of belonging, and Mau Mau’s ubiquitous presence suggests the potency of its contested legacy.
{"title":"Mau Mau’s Lasting Myth in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall","authors":"Steve Almquist","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.2","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and argues that it ought to be read as a Mau Mau novel. The anti-colonial Mau Mau insurgency remains historically elusive due to its members’ own secrecy and to the colonialist propaganda that elided the true scope of British brutality and dismissed Mau Mau as mere barbarism. However elusive this history, Mau Mau serves for many as a national creation myth in which the Mau Mau participants are freedom fighters rather than atavistic terrorists. As such, Mau Mau is often depicted as a black/white binary, but Vassanji’s novel provides a perspective from Kenya’s Asian community, whose people experience the conflict as cultural outsiders, if not collaborators in colonial oppression. As Vikram’s narrative suggests, a binary reading of Mau Mau is problematic for Asians such as the Lalls, whose progeny increasingly identify as African. The Mau Mau motif in Vassanji’s narrative becomes the constant and unresolved myth in Vikram’s life that challenges his personal sense of self and of belonging, and Mau Mau’s ubiquitous presence suggests the potency of its contested legacy.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"46 1","pages":"15–35-15–35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42054950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheless, while Ethiopia is deployed as a trope of racial difference and race-based cultural aspirations, the demarcation it marks between self and other is indeterminate and ambiguous. This demarcation is unstable insofar as the trope of Ethiopia, and what it signifies in the world of the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, is defined not only by the cultural or religious meanings accrued over a period of almost thirty centuries, but also by the imperial politics of modern Ethiopia in the period under consideration. This politics crystallises around the coronation of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, and marks both the culmination of the historical deployment of the Ethiopian trope and its moment of deconstruction.Keywords: Race, colonialism, Ethiopianism, pan-Africanism
{"title":"The Twice-Told Tale: Ethiopia, Race, and the Veil of Signs","authors":"Dirk Klopper","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i3.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i3.3","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the retelling of the story of Ethiopia in the Ethiopianist and pan-Africanist movements of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. In this story, the trope of Ethiopia, which had been deployed in ancient history to signify Africa as racial other, is appropriated by Africans living on the continent and in the diaspora to signify the liberation of African people from both colonial rule and cultural alienation. Nevertheless, while Ethiopia is deployed as a trope of racial difference and race-based cultural aspirations, the demarcation it marks between self and other is indeterminate and ambiguous. This demarcation is unstable insofar as the trope of Ethiopia, and what it signifies in the world of the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, is defined not only by the cultural or religious meanings accrued over a period of almost thirty centuries, but also by the imperial politics of modern Ethiopia in the period under consideration. This politics crystallises around the coronation of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, and marks both the culmination of the historical deployment of the Ethiopian trope and its moment of deconstruction.Keywords: Race, colonialism, Ethiopianism, pan-Africanism","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":"46 1","pages":"37–54-37–54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45138139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses a selection of South African English and Afrikaans humorous and satirical poems and songs about the railways. They include a folksong, “The Kimberley Train”, which dates back to the earliest expansion of the railways to the interior, and poems and songs from the 1960s to the early 90s. While Hugh Masekela raged at the condition of migrant miners, the target of the satire by English- and Afrikaans-speaking writers was the Afrikaner nation, its culture and history. Four of the poems are ballads in the heroic tradition. The characters featured are working-class Afrikaners, and the diction employed is a colloquial South African dialect consisting of modern slang, mixed English and Afrikaans, and Fanakalo. A common method of the humour and satire exploits the connotations of personal and place names.Keywords: Railway poems, railway songs, South African satire, South African poetry, South African folksongs, South African English dialect
{"title":"Folksong and ballad as social comment in some South African railway poems and songs","authors":"Elwyn Jenkins","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i2.6","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses a selection of South African English and Afrikaans humorous and satirical poems and songs about the railways. They include a folksong, “The Kimberley Train”, which dates back to the earliest expansion of the railways to the interior, and poems and songs from the 1960s to the early 90s. While Hugh Masekela raged at the condition of migrant miners, the target of the satire by English- and Afrikaans-speaking writers was the Afrikaner nation, its culture and history. Four of the poems are ballads in the heroic tradition. The characters featured are working-class Afrikaners, and the diction employed is a colloquial South African dialect consisting of modern slang, mixed English and Afrikaans, and Fanakalo. A common method of the humour and satire exploits the connotations of personal and place names.Keywords: Railway poems, railway songs, South African satire, South African poetry, South African folksongs, South African English dialect","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41685010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although the act of mutilation is a widespread cultural and aesthetic practice, its pathological manifestations prompt shock, dismay and serious concern. Wopko Jensma has appropriated these qualities of aberrant mutilation to foreground social despair in bizarre cameos of racial oppression and underclass misery. Jensma’s use of mutilation as a poetic resource is typical of his experimental style and departure from convention. His poetry of fragmentation, bizarre pathological motifs, selfmutilation, sado-machoism, and conflicted speakers dispersed across multiple subjectivities undermine the reductive politics of racial essence and privilege the marginalized in society. Image, narrative and diction coalesce in dissonant aesthetic strategies to express the anguish and psychological annihilation emanating from human degradation and despair. Keywords: Mutilation, social despair, oppression, experimental poetry, dissonant aesthetics
{"title":"‘First Pluck the Eyes Out’: mutilation in the poetry of Wopko Jensma","authors":"Ayub Sheik","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i2.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i2.7","url":null,"abstract":"Although the act of mutilation is a widespread cultural and aesthetic practice, its pathological manifestations prompt shock, dismay and serious concern. Wopko Jensma has appropriated these qualities of aberrant mutilation to foreground social despair in bizarre cameos of racial oppression and underclass misery. Jensma’s use of mutilation as a poetic resource is typical of his experimental style and departure from convention. His poetry of fragmentation, bizarre pathological motifs, selfmutilation, sado-machoism, and conflicted speakers dispersed across multiple subjectivities undermine the reductive politics of racial essence and privilege the marginalized in society. Image, narrative and diction coalesce in dissonant aesthetic strategies to express the anguish and psychological annihilation emanating from human degradation and despair. Keywords: Mutilation, social despair, oppression, experimental poetry, dissonant aesthetics","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41879248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932/i>","authors":"T. Steiner","doi":"10.4314/eia.v46i2.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4314/eia.v46i2.9","url":null,"abstract":"Book Title: Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932Book Author: Brian WillanJacana, 2018. 711 pp. ISBN 978–1–4314–2644–7.","PeriodicalId":41428,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH IN AFRICA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41626170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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