It has become almost impossible to talk about East African writing without feeling haunted by the Sudanese-Ugandan writer and critic, Taban lo Liyong’s now (in)famous declaration that the region was a ‘literary desert’. Recently, Lo Liyong conceded that indeed the region was no longer a desert, although it was yet to yield a quality crop of writings. The issue of quality is a recurrent one, especially with regard to popular literature, a category that has historically been a subject of heated debate in the region. Questions of the relationship between popular literature and canonical literature have continued to exercise East African writing, both creative and critical. In a sense then, debates around quantity and quality provide an appropriate starting point for discussing East and Central African writing during 2004–05. Compared to Southern Africa, the volume of publishing in the region has remained low over the past two years. This is often blamed on the now ubiquitous ‘lack of a reading culture’; although perhaps the reading culture has more to do with economic factors than attitudes. However, even the narrow segment of the population with a significant disposable income is often seen to lack a passion for reading outside of primary educational material. On their part, publishers seem to take these dominant market patterns into consideration, and it is instructive that a huge volume of publications in 2004–05 in this region took the form of textbooks. Despite this, the last two years saw an upsurge of new and small publishing houses such as Mvule Africa in Kenya and MPB Publishers in Tanzania. This is remarkable in a market that has for decades been dominated by big multinationals including Longman, Oxford University Press, Heinemann and Macmillan, and the equally large local ones including East African Educational Publishers and Jomo Kenyatta Foundation. The emergence of small local publishers has served to broaden access to

A study of okot p'bitek's poetry

Central and East Africa

This paper is a post-colonial reading of Okot p’Bitek’s work, Song of Malaya. By premising her arguments on feminism and Michel Foucault’s genealogical ideas on power, the author provides the reader with a better understanding of power discourses in Okot p’Bitek’s poetry. The author systematically explores how the direct relation between power and bodies operates. With relevant examples from Song of Malaya, this paper shows how sex is political primarily because the male-female relationship is the paradigm for all power relations. Patriarchal ideology, for instance, exaggerates biological differences between men and women making certain that men always have the dominant or ‘masculine’ roles and women always have the subordinate or ‘feminine’ ones. This ideology is so powerful such that men will coerce or intimidate a woman where they feel that the woman has failed to submit or subordinate. For the woman to avoid a situation of cruelty and barbarity against her, she had better act feminine. It is this subordination that the poet wants the woman to liberate herself from. The author goes further and shows how other institutions like the church and family also help to enhance this ideology. In Song of Malaya, the family and church blame the prostitute for her actions just because she is a woman. The men fail to realize that they are the ones who have participated in the act of sex with the ‘Malaya’ (prostitute) so as to complete the action. Consequently, the author argues that since the works of Okot p’Bitek are premised on socio-cultural experiences, the individual characters in the selected work locate themselves within socio-cultural experiences by way of describing, contesting, refuting and illustrating them. The characters are located within given spaces of which they share and at the same time contest the power which they claim to signify. For example, Malaya is located in an immoral and hypocritical society which accords her a vantage position to criticize the hypocrisy of socio-cultural values. The more these characters fortify their positions, the more they expose themselves to criticism. Therefore, the selected work is constructed around characters that seem to be constantly engaged in conflict with each other, within themselves and their society. This paper thus explores the way the protagonists’ bodies in Okot’s Song of Malaya locate themselves either within the way of power over bodies or of bodies in the Foucauldian sense.

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A study of okot p'bitek's poetry

Citations

Central and East Africa

Paradoxes of Sexual Power in Song of Malaya