Do we have a place for ‘ethnic writers’?

By Abenea Ndago

Is there a real need for the role of the African writer to change with the times?

I have had to re-read Tom Odhiambo’s article eight years ago ‘Time we had ethnic Literature in Kenya’–– (Sunday Standard, July 14, 2002) –– in which he advocated an ethnic perspective to the country’s literary tradition.

I will not engage in any debate because there is none to. Indeed, I think that those who hold the contrary opinion live in denial. The fact is local literature has often yielded itself to ethnic sensibilities, sometimes in a very boring manner.

If we say that Karen Blixen, Out of Africa and Elspeth Huxley White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and The Making of Kenya, propounded the coloniser’s view, isn’t it already ethnic? This sort of literature is so deeply entrenched in this country that, rather than detain ourselves, what we need to ask is how to take advantage of it.

Positive ethnicity

I say so because one of the biggest diseases in this country is our inability to reap the most profit from such remnants of our colonial past as tribalism. Almost invariably, the habit has been to approach ‘tribe’ with two mouths –– to disown it aloud under the sun on one side, and to sing choruses to it under the stars on the other.

The task of fighting the vice has been left exclusively to politicians –– the same people who benefit immensely in its continued existence. Where then is the place of the contemporary ‘ethnic writer’?

It is Koigi Wamwere who coined and introduced the concept of ‘negative ethnicity’ into our national discourse. It implies that the reverse of it also exists. My opinion is that no one is better placed than the contemporary African writer to enhance the concept of ‘positive ethnicity’.

Stereotypes and myths

In an article titled ‘Literature and the Immortality of Colonialism’ (in Africa at the Beginning of the 21st Century) Prof Peter Amuka accuses Ngugi wa Thiong’o and other writers of his generation of throwing themselves headlong into Cold War issues at the expense of inter-communal and national dynamics.

Take for instance the issue of stereotypes and myths in this country and others like countries Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and even Nigeria. How many writers from these countries have taken a forthright position in dealing with the resultant bad blood that springs from these stereotypes and myths? Who in Kenya?

And yet, as we already know, these same myths are at the heart of respective calamities that have bedevilled various political histories of various African countries. Whether it is the Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe, Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, Luo and Kikuyu in Kenya, or Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani in Nigeria, state myths have often either erupted into outright civil war and even murder. They have also ensured some communities are kept away from power.

It is true that many of these myths were initially hatched and perpetuated by the colonisers for very obvious reasons. The painful efficiency with which the modern African state has recycled the same puts the coloniser to shame. We have perfected the art and used our diversity as a destructive weapon.

Writers are often regarded as teachers or social visionaries. The addition to the modern African writer’s role should debunking tribal and state myths by writing from inside the tribe without dissolving in it.

The modern African writer does great injustice to the continent by pretending to run away from the tribe because then the myths run unchecked. He also loses all authority to judge the tribe objectively. Only by standing inside it can he glorify the saintly and castigate the ghostly.

—The writer is an MA student at the University of Nairobi