ESSAYS ON
LEADERSHIP FRONTIERS OF AFRICAN LITERATURE
By
Alexander   k   Opicho




Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents                                                                                                                Page
TABAN MAKITIYONG RENEKET LO LIYONG AND PREFECTURE OF AFRICAN LITERATURE 4
THE CURRENT EAST AFRICA IS NOT A LITERARY DESERT 27
AFRICAN WRITERS HAVE CULTURAL RIGHTS TO FORMULATE AND CREATE ENGLISH WORDS 31
LIKE PUSHKIN, AFRICAN WRITERS MUST CREATE THEIR OWN PROFFESSION OF LITERATURE 35
THERE IS POWER IN THE NAME ‘ALEXANDER’ 40
KENYAN COURTS AND PARLIAMENT ARE BETRAYERS OF HUMANE GOVERNANCE 47
AFRO-CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO RADICAL LITERATURE IS GOOD AND SWAGGERISH 50
YUNUS’S SOCIAL BANKING IS A GOOD BENCHCMARK FOR THIRD WORLD ENTREPRENEURS 54
HEROISM IS NOT GREATNESS BUT HUMILITY IN SERVICE TO HUMANITY 57
KENYAN STUDENTS; YOUR MOBILE INTERNET CULTURE IS ANTI- ACADEMICS 61
WHAT IS THE MAGIC IN THE WORD ‘DRINKARD’ OF AMOS TUTUOLA 63
SOCIETIES IN AFRICA HAVE TO MENTOR BUT NOT CONDEMN THE LIKES OF JULIUS MALEMA 66
AMERICA WILL NOT WIN THE WAR ON GLOBAL TERRORISM 69
AFRICA CAN OVERCOME A MENACE OF **** IN EVERY 30 MINUTES 71
COMPARATIVE ROLES OF AFRICAN-BRAZILIAN LITERATURE IN THE POLITICS OF RACIAL AND GENDER DEMOCRACY 76
NEO-COLONIALISM IS NOT THE MAIN VICE TO THE GAMBIAN POLITICS 85
RELATIVE MEDIA OBJECTIVITY IS ACHIEVEABLE IN AFRICA AGAINST POWER CULTURE AND TYRANNIES OF TASTE 89
READING CULTURE IS GOOD FOR BOTH THE POOR AND THE RICH 96
VIOLENT DEATH IS THE BANE OF AFRICAN WRITERS AND ARTISTS 100
AFRICAN WRITTERS AND ARTISTS MUST ASPIRE BEYOND A NOBEL PRIZE 104
WHAT ARE CULTURAL RIGHTS OF AFRICAN ENGLISH SPEAKERS? 109
WHY IMPRISONMENT OF WRITERS CONTRIBUTED MOST TO AFRICAN LITERATURE 113
DORIS LESSING: A FEMINIST, POET, NOVELIST, WHITE-AFRICANIST AND NOBELITE UN-TIMELY PASSES ON 121
Amilcar Cabral: Beacon of revolutionary literature and social democracy 127
How the State of Israel is brutally dealing with African refugees 131
Historical glimpses of language dilemma in Afro-Arabic literature 146
THIS YEAR 2013; IS THE YEAR OF GREAT DEATHS 153
AFRICAN LITERATURE WITHOUT POETRY IS LIKE LOVE WITHOUT VAGINAL *** 156



















PROLOGOMENA
BARRACK OBAMA READS MOBY ****
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
American president is reading Moby ****
Ja-kogello is reading Moby ****
Ja-siaya is reading Moby ****
Ja-merica is reading Moby ****
Jadello is reading Moby ****
Ja-buonji is reading Moby ****
His lovely Oeuvre of Melville Herman
And what are you reading?

Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because untimely death took his father
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because untimely death took his mother
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because untimely death to his brother
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because untimely death took the grannies
His lovely Oeuvre of Melville Herman  
And what are you reading?

Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Baba Michelle is reading Moby ****
Baba Sasha is reading Moby ****
Baba Malia is reading Moby ****
Baba nya-dhin is reading Moby ****
Sarah’s sire is reading Moby ****
Ja-sharia is reading Moby ****
The ****** is reading Moby ****
His lovely Oeuvre of Melville Herman
And what are you reading?

Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because here ekes audacity of hope
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because here ekes dreams of fathers
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because here ekes yes we can
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because here ekes American dream
His lovely Oeuvre of Melville Herman
And what are you readings?

Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because American president is like whale hunting
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because Obama is a money making animal
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because hunting Osama is whale riding
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because hunting Gaddaffi is whale riding
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because coming to Kenya is whale riding
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because Guantanamo prison is a bay of whales
Barrack Obama is reading Moby ****
Because Snowden is a Russian whale
Because launching drones is whale riding
His lovely Oeuvre of Melville Herman
And what are you reading, Moby ****?














CHAPTER ONE
TABAN MAKITIYONG RENEKET LO LIYONG AND PREFECTURE OF AFRICAN LITERATURE

I am writing this article from Kenya on this day of 23 September 2013 when the Al shabab, an Arabo-Islamic arm of the global terrorist group the Al gaeda have lynched siege on the shopping mall in Nairobi known as the West Gate where an average of forty people have been killed and a hundreds are held hostage. The media is full of horrendous and terrifying images. They have made me to hate this day. I hate terrorism, I hate American foreign policy on Arabs, I hate philosophy behind formation of the state of Israel and I equally hate religious fundamentalism. Also on this date, all the media and public talks in Kenya are full of intellectual and literary tearing of one Kenyan by another plus a retort in the equal measure as a result of the ripples in the African literature pool whose epicenter is the Professor Taban Lo Liyong .He is an epicenter because he had initially decried literary mediocrity among the African scholars and University professors, Wherein under the same juncture he also quipped that Kenya’s doyen of literature Ngugi wa Thiong’o never deserved a Nobel prize. Liyong’s stand has provoked intellectual reasons and offalities to fly like fireworks in the East African literary atmosphere among which the most glittering is Chris Wanjala’s contrasting position that; who made Liyong the prefect and ombudsman of African literature? This calls for answers. Both good answers and controversial responses. Digging deeper into the flesh of literature as often displayed by Lo Liyong.
Liyong is not a fresher in the realm of literary witticism. He is a seasoned hand .Especially when contributions of Liyong to east African literary journal during his student days in the fifties of the last century during which he declared east Africa a literary desert. In addition to his fantastic titles; Another ****** Dead and The Un-even Rips of Frantz Fanon, Professor Taban Lo Liyong also humorously called Amos Tutuola the son of Zinjathropus, what a farcical literary joke? I also want to appreciate this Liyong’s artfulness of language in this capacity and identify him in a literary sense as Taban Matiyong Lo   Liyong the son of Eshu. He is an ideological and literature descended of the great West African Eshu. Eshu the god of trouble which was dramatized by Obutunde Ijimere in the imprisonment of Obadala and also recounted by Achebe in the classical essays; Morning Yet of Creation Day. I call him Eshu because of his intellectual and literary ability to trigger the East and West Africans into active altercation of literary, cultural and political exchanges every other time he visits these regions. Whether in Lagos, Accra or Nairobi.
Now, in relation to Ngugi and intellectual quality of Kenyan University literature professors was Liyong right or wrong?  Does Liyong’s stand-point on Ngugi’s incompetence for Nobel recognition and mediocrity in literary scholarship among Kenyan Universities hold water. Are Liyong’s accusations of East Africa in these perspectives factually watertight and devoid of a fallacy of self-aggrandizement to African literary prefecture as Professor Chris Wanjala laments. Active literary involvement by anyone would obviously uncover that ;It is not Liyong Alone who has this intellectual bent towards East Africa, any literary common sense can easily ask a question that; Does Ngugi’s literary work really deserve or merit for Nobel recognition or not ? The answers are both yes and no. There are very many of those in Kenya who will readily cow from the debate to say yes. Like especially the community of alumni of the University of Nairobi who were Ngugi’s students in the department of English in which Ngugi was a Faculty during the mid of the last century. Also the general Kenyan masses who have been conditioned by warped political culture which always and obviously confine the Kenyan poor into a cocoonery of chauvinistic thought that Ngugi should or must win because he is one of us or Obama must win because he is one of us or Kemboi must win because he is the son of the Kenyan soil. These must also be the emotional tid-bits upon which the Kenyan Media has been based to be catapulted into Publicity feat that Ngugi will win the Nobel Prize without reporting to the same Kenyan populace the actual truths about other likely winners in the quarters from the overseas. I am in that Kenyan school thought comprising of those who genuinely argue that Ngugi’s literary work does not befit, nor merit, nor deserve recognition of Nobel Prize for literature. This position is eked on global status of the Nobel Prize in relation to Ngugi’s Kikuyu literary and writing philosophy. It is a universal truth that any and all prizes are awarded on the basis of Particular efforts displayed with peculiarity. Nobel Prize for literature is similarly awarded in recognition of unique literary effort displayed by the winner. It is not an exception when it comes to the question of formidability in a particular effort. However, the most basic literary virtue to be displayed as an overture of the writer is conversion of theory into practice. This was called by Karl Marx, Hegel, Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, especially in Freire’s  pedagogy of the oppressed as praxis.History of literature and politics in their respective homogenous and comparative capacities has it that ;There has been eminent level of praxis by previous Nobelites.Right away from Rabitranathe Tagore to Wole Soyinka, From Dorriss Lessing to Wangari Mathai.Similar to JM Coatze ,Gao Tziaping,Alexander Vasleyvitch Solzhenystisn and Baraka Obama.This ideological stand of praxis is the one that made Alfred Nobel himself to to stick to his gun of intellectual  values and deny Leo Tolstoy the prize in 1907 because there was no clear connection between rudimentary Tolstoy in the nihilism and Feasible Tolstoy in the possible manner  of the times .In a similar stretch Ngugi wa Thiongo’s literary works and his ideological choices are full of ideological theory but devoid of ideological praxis. Evidence for justification in relation to this position is found back in the 70’s and 80’s of the last century, When Ngugi was an active communist theoretician of Kenya. His stature as a Kenyan communist ideologue could only get a parallel in the likes of Leon Trotsky and Gramsci. This ideological stature was displayed in Ngugi’s adoration of the North Korean communism under the auspice of the Korean leader Kim Yun Sung. This is so bare when you read Ngugi’s writers in politics, a communist pamphlet he published with the African red family. By that time this pamphlet was treated equally as Mao tse Tung’s collected works by the Kenya government which means that they were both illegal publications and if in any case you were found with them you would obviously serve nine months in prison. And of course when the late Brigadier Augustine Odongo was found with them he was jailed for nine months at Kodhiak maximum prison in Kisumu ,Kenya .O.K, the story of Odongo is preserved for another day. But remember that, this was Ngugi only at his rudimentary stage. But when Ngugi got an opportunity to get an ideological asylum, he did not go to Russia, nor East Germany, Nor Tanzania, nor China but instead he went to the USA , a country whose ideological civilization is in sharp contradiction with communism; a religion which Ngugi proffessess.In relation to this choices of Ngugi one can easily share with me these reflections; is one intellectually  honest if he argues that he is a socialist revolutionary when his or her employer is an American institution like the university of California in Irvine ?
Ngugi was not the only endangered communist ideologue of the time. There were also several others. Both in Kenya and without Kenya. They were the likes of; Raila Odinga, George Moset Anyona, ***** Mutunga and very many others from Kenya. But in Africa some to be mentioned were Walter Rodney, Yoweri Museven,Isa Shivji,Jacob Tzuma ,Robert Mugabe and others. The difference between Ngugi and all of these socialist contemporaries of him is that; Ngugi went to America and began accumulating private property just like any other capitalist. But these others remained in Africa both in freedom and detention to ensure that powers of political darkness which had bedeviled Africa during the last century must go. And indeed the powers somehow went. Raila has  been in Kenya most of the times,Anyona died in Kenya while in the struggle for second liberation of Kenyan people from the devilish fangs of Moi’s dark reign of terror and tyrany.Walter Rodney worked in Tanzania at Dare salaam University where he wrote his land mark book; How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Later on he went back to his country of birth in Africa, Guyana where he was assassinated while in the revolutionary struggle for political good of the Guyanese people. Yoweri Museven practically implemented socialism by fighting politics of sham and nonsense out of Uganda of which as per today Uganda is somehow admirable. Isa Shivji has ever remained in Dare salaam University, inspite of poverty. He is now the chair of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere school of Pan African studies. Jacob Tsuma and Robert Mugabe they are current presidents of South Africa and Zimbabwe respectively. The gist of this reference to African socialist revolutionaries as contemporaries to Ngugi wa Thiong’o is that a socialist revolutionary must and should not run away from the oppressor in to a zone of comfort. But instead must remain and relentlessly fight, just like in the words of Fidel Castro; fight and die in the battle field as long as it is a struggle against the enemy of the revolution. This view by Castro is pertinent as it’s a Revolutionary praxis which actually is redolent of practice of an ideology that has to be held for ever above ideological cosmentics.Ngugi scores badly on this. So if the Nobel academy looks at Ngugi in terms of defending human rights then it must be reminded that Ngugi have no marks on the same because he only ran away from the practical struggle. Anyway, Politics and ideology has its own fate. But let us now come back to literature. Ngugi and his books. As at  this time of writing this essay  Ngugi has published the following works; Weep not Child, The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, Black Hermit, Petals of Blood, Devils on the Cross,Matigari,Homecoming,Decolonizing the Mind, Writers in Politics, Ngugi Detained, Pen Points and Gun Points, Wizard of the Crow,Globalectics,Remeembering Africa, Dreams in Times of War and I Will Marry When I Want as well as the Trial of Dedan Kimathi which he wrote along with Micere Githae Mugo.Out of this list the only works with literary depth that call for intellectualized attention are ;A Grain of wheat, Wizard of the crow and Globalectics. The Grain of wheat is simply a post colonial reflection of Kenyan politics. Its themes, plot, lessons and entire synechedoche is also found in Wole Soyinka’s Season of Anomie as well as Achebe’s Anthills of the savannah. My argument dove-tails with those of Liyong’s stand that rewarding Ngugi’s Grain of wheat and forgetting Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and A man of the people would be a literary ceremony devoid of literary justice. Wizard of the Crow is indeed a magnum opus. I am ready to call it Ngugi’s oeuv

by
Alexander  K  Opicho
Eldoret,Kenya
(aopicho@yahoo.com)

Ladbrokes, the online betting firm has once again nominated Ngugi wa Thiong'o as a candidate for Nobel prize in literature 2014.The firm arrives at the probable nominee through a highly polished probabilist mechanism.It also nominated Ngugi as the probable candidate for literature Nobel prize, but the final was Alice Munro the Canadian short story writress.The eventuality of Ngugi winning the literature Nobel prize is a long a waited event in Africa , especially among Kenyans.
However, Ngugi is not the only nominee , he is among others and even to make it worse he is not the top scoring nominee. He has tied with four  others at the score of 50/1 points.These  are; Umberto Eco who wrote the famous book In the Name of the Rose, Nuruddin Farah a Kenya *** Somalian veteran poet and prose writer   and   then Darcia Maraini.
There are eleven writers of global stature who are currently scoring above Ngugi wa Thiong'o.They are operating at the level of 50/1 scores. These include ;Margaret Atwoo d, Salman Rushdie, Cees Nooteboom, Don DeLillo, Amos Oz, Javier Marias, Cormac McCarthy , Bob Dylan, Peter Handke, William Trevor and Les Murray . The missing writer in this category of global writers is Yan Martel the author of Life of Mr. Pi , whose also on the list of the favourite writers of president Barrack Obama.His book Life of Mr. Pi once shared  a prize and equivalent acclaim with Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Legs. So, why Martel was not nominated remains the usual intrigues of Nobel nomination process.
Haruki Murakami ,Assia Djebar,Svetlana Aleksijevitj , Peter Nadas, Joyce Carol Oates , Adonis ,Milan Kundera , Philip Roth , Mircea Cartarescu, Ko Un , Jon Fosse  and Thomas Pynchon  are currently scoring below Ngugi.They are operating between 10/1 and 26/1 scores.However among them Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates and Phillip Roth were very story contenders and hence competeters for the same prize with Ngugi during last year.But Joyce Carol Oates is a weaker contender this year given than he recently wrote an offensive and tortuous poem against the eminent American  poet Robert Frost .  Oates drew from the book Lovely, Dark and  Deep  which   paints the  Frost  as an arrogant, sexist pig who gave up on his mentally ill children. The story has outraged Frost’s fans, biographers, and  his survivors.
Inspite of all these there is no literary value that can make Ngugi wa Thiong'o to deserve a Nobel prize reward for  Literature. Apart from his first  two books weep not child and the river between that had concrete literary position, his later works are pamphlets of communism , that keep of regurgitating communism as initially written by Karl Marx and France Fanon.His second last book Globalectics is written as annual lectures in respect of Rene Wellek, the books is a practical duplication of Paulo Freire , and Spivak Gavatri.His contemporaries at the University of Nairobi accusing him of tribalism when it came to supervising post graduate students. he was soft on his fellow Kiguyu's and discriminative agains Luo and Luhyia students.He lifestyle as communist ideologue is also self defeating as teaches in america at Irvine University , very busy amassing wealths just like any other capitalist.He campaign for vernacular writing is egually not water tight on the bench of praxis, as he himself teaches special English in America but not kiguyu language.
Another stunning revelation from the Swedish academy is nomiantion of Vladimir Putin the Russian president for Nobel peace prize alongside fifty something  organizations as competitors.the nominations is based on his role he played in the Nuclear disarmament of Syria.The Ukraine question has not been yet raised.But logic of these goes like historical imbroglio that puzzled the world in relation to the role of ****** in relation communism against the then gathering storm for the second world war.

I often remember with a lot of thrill in my spine every time I reflect on the Writings of Miguna Miguna in his book peeling Back the Masks, a certain sub-plot that most of Kenyan students in Canada, America, Britain, Germany or Australia often fail to go through pre-university examinations and then they opt for faculty friendly courses like carpentry and electrical-wire man offered at some polytechnics in this countries. Then these students end up living as informal sector workers in the Diaspora, and hence putting themselves into a cash strapped condition that they don’t easily come back home. This is also the same texture of revelations I have been encountering for the past five months of my regular reading of the literary pages of The Saturday Nation, in which a most of Kenyans write alongside some foreigners, but notably Professor Austin Bukenya as the foreign writer, Bukenya himself being a Ugandan.
The revelations are that the writers who were regularly writing on these pages sometimes ago have gradually waned up, not because of anything but due to their intellectual irrelevance. Mostly caused by a defect of intellectual inferiority. They were the likes of Evans Mwangi; Mwangi was forthrightly coming up with a tribally fine-tuned niche in the name of being Ngugi wa Thiong’o scholar. He had a specialization in writing about Ngugi because Ngugi is his tribesman, they are both Kikuyu’s.He also had substantial writings on Ngugi’s children; Mukoma, Lee, Nducu and Wanjiku wa Ngugi, who are in similar stretch of their father struggling to be established as writers. But all in all, Professor Evans Mwangi has already ended up as an intellectual without consequences.
Another writer in point was one; Dr Tom Odhiambo, who also teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. He had been writing on the same pages but with a strong bent towards Luo Chauvinism and stark Conspiracy against Luhyia veteran literary Critic Professor Chris Wanjala.
The only Kenyan literary activist who has been trying to remain globally vogue in his literary writings on this platform is Dr Godwin Siundu; he often displays Global relevance through his pataphorous approach to literary appreciations and criticism.
But whatsoever the case, professor Bukenya has towered seriously above these Kenyans.Bukenya’s command of English language and literary command has no match on the Kenyan literary market. Bukenya Tackles globalectics of literature as Kenyans struggle with tribalism of their home literature.Ethinicity is the enemy of Kenyan literature and as well an established foe of any other Kenyan professional perspective.
Why Kenyans are threatened with intellectual suffocation when exposed to otherness is because of a few reasons. As cited above ethinicism remains a dominant factor. But also, lack of homogenous public language, absence of ideology in their political history, failure of politics to achieve common nationalism and corruption in the public sector are contributing forces among others.
Your consecutive  look at the literary pages of  the Saturday Nation of the previous three weekends will be an empirical testimony to this position.Bukenya’s stories have surveyed dialectics of English language, aging of African literature , translation and greatness of Uganda orature with a focus on Okot P’ Bitek. And this weekend he has beautifully lime-lighted on Julius Nyerere’s Intellectual tigritude. Nyerere’s as the killer of colonialism but while at the same time he lingered as the staunch lover of Shakespeare.
This is simply a farcical repetition of the previous tragic history, as reflected in the words of Karl Marx in his 18th Brumaire, which made the Ugandan educated Sudanese Poet, Taban Reneket Makititiyong Lo Liyong to look at Kenya’s literary poverty and then take a synechedochal stand to decry that east Africa is a literary desert. He was right, but in a sense he did not mean east Africa per se, he meant Kenya .Kenya at that time had only an English Department at the University of Nairobi. The department was poorly performing in terms of research. It was desperately tethered duplicating of the European classics as its literary overture.
But when the foreign and radical blood came to Kenya, in guest of helping Kenya to overcome the fog in the seasons end from colonial mire to literary and cultural freedom, Native Kenyans were surprisingly never friendly to them at all at all. Some of the intellectuals who had come to Kenya that time were the greats like :Ezekiel Mphalele from south Africa, Okot p’ Bitek from Uganda,Okello Oculii from Uganda,Ayi Kwei Armah from Ghana, Joie De Graft from Ghana, Walter Rodney from Guyana, Austeen Bukenya from Uganda and Taban Lo Liyong from Uganda.
All of these foreigners in Kenya have later on been absolved by time and history  as literary greats.They have proved clear intellectual and literary superlativety  over and above all Kenyans. The point of contrite is that, Kenyans of that era did not give them a chance to share their intellectual resource with the peasants and masses of Kenya. Instead Kenyan bureaucrats began their usual came of intimidation and tribal nagging whenever intellectually outshone.
Austeen Bukenya was condemned into poverty at Machakos girls high school to be an English teacher or a teacher of English without a salary. Liyong and Pitek were perpetually witch-hunted out of University of Nairobi by Ngugi and Wanjala. Rodney and Armah were frustrated until they desperately moved to Tanzania from where they wrote their respective oeuvres. Armah wrote Why are we Blessed, While Rodney wrote the world famous book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Mphalele was frustrated to oblivion, only for him to die mysteriously when on a literary tour in West Africa.
But sadly enough, the Kenyans who were seriously illiterate, in the  likes of : Daniel Moi, Jomo Kenyatta, Ezekiel Barengtunny  and many intellectuals so-so’s shamelessly made themselves to be  chancellors of the Universities .They were chancellors who never went beyond class seven of primary schools in their child hood. They then became bovaristic if not atavistic only to begin writing lame books like Nyayo Philosophy, Suffering without Bitterness, Facing Mount Kenya and other literary trash of the same calibre. It is this intellectual sludge that they again turned to impose as compulsory reading materials on sons and daughters of poor Kenyans.
By
Alexander K. Opicho
Eldoret, Kenya.

In response to a sardonic essay written in the recent Saturday Nation by Proffessor Ekara Kabaji, wryly  disregarding the position of Kwani in the global literary movement within and without Kenya , I beg to be permitted a leeway  to observe that any literature, orature, music,drama,cyborature,prisnorature,wallorature,streetorature , sculptor  or painting can effortlessly thrive and off course it has been thriving without professors of  literature, but the reverse is not possible as a proffessor of literature cannot be when literature is not there. Facts in support of this position are bare and readily available in the history of world literature, why they may not be seen is perhaps the blurring effects from tor like protuberant irrelevance of professors of literature in a given literary civilization.
A starting point is that literature exists as a people’s subculture, it can be written or not written like the case of orature which survive as an educative and aesthetic value stored in the collective memory of the given people. The people to be pillars of this collectivity of the memory are not differentiated by academic ranking for superlativity of any reason, but they are simply a people of that place, that community, that time, that heritage, that era and that collective experience. Writing it down is an option, but novels and other written matter is not a sine qua non for existence of literature in such situations. This is not a bolekaja of literature as Proffessor Ekara Kabaji would readily put, but it is a stretch towards realism that it is only people’s condition that creates literature. Poverty, slavery, colonialism, ***, marriage, circumcision, migration, or any other conditions experienced as collective experience of the people is stored or even stowed away in the collective memory of the people as their literature. Literature does not come from idealistic imagination of an educated person.
Historical experience of written literature informs us that the good novels, prose, drama and poetry were written before human society had people known as professors of literature. I want you my dear reader and You-Tube audience to reflect on the Cantos of Dante Alighieri in Italy, novels of Geoffrey Chaucer in England, Herman Melville and his Moby **** in Americas, poetry of Omar khwarisim in Persia, Homeric epics of Odyssey in Greece and the Makonde sculptures of Africa and finally link your reflections to Romesh Tulsi who grafted the Indian epic poetry of Ramayana and Mahabharata. At least you must realize that in those days literature was good, full of charm, very aesthetic and superbly entertaining. This leads to a re-justification that, weapon of theory is not useful in literature. University taught theories of literature have helped not in the growth of literature as compared to the role played by folk culture.
Keen observation will lead you dear reader, down to revelations that; professors of literature squarely depend on the thespic work of the people who are not substantially educated to make a living. Let me share with you the story about Dr. Tom Odhiambo who went to University of Witwasterand in South Africa for post graduate studies in literature only to do his Doctoral research on books of David G Maillu. Maillu is a Kenyan writer, he did not finish his second year of secondary school education but he has been successfully writing poetry and prose for the past three decades. His successful romantic work is After 4.30, probably sarcasm against Kenyan office capitalism, while his eclectic, philosophical and scholarly work is the Broken Drum. Maillu has many other works on his name. But the point is that Dr. Odhiambo now teaches at University of Nairobi in the capacity of senior lecturer in Literature. What makes him to put food on the table is the effort of un-educated person in the name of David Maillu. Dr.Odhiambo himself has not written any book we can mention him for, apart from regular literary journalism he is often involved in on the platforms of the Literary discourse in the Kenyan Saturday Nation which are in turn regular Harangues and ripostes among literature teachers at the University of Nairobi, the likes of Dr Siundu, Proffessor wanjala Chris and Evans Mwangi just but to mention by not being oblivious to professors; Indangasi and Shitanda.
No study has yet been done to establish the role of university professors on growth of African literature. One is overdue. Results may be positive role on negative role, myself I contemplate negative role. Especially when I reflect on how the African literati reacted on the publication of Amos Tutuola’s book The Palm Wine Drinkard. The reactions were more disparaging than appreciative. Taban Lo Liyong reacted to this book by calling Amos Tutuola the son of Zinjathropus as well as taking a self styled intellectual responsibility in form of writing a more  schooled version of this book; Taking Wisdom up the Palm Tree. Nigerians of Igbo (Tutuola being a Yoruba) nation cowed from being associated with the book as it had shamefully broken English, broken grammar etc. Wole Soyinka had a blemished stand, but it is only Achebe who came out forthrightly to appreciate the book in its efforts to Africanize English for the purpose of African literature. Courtesy of Igbo wisdom. But in a nutshell, what had happened is that Amos Tutuola had taken a plunge to contribute towards written literature in Africa.
One more contemplated result from the research about professors and African literature can be that apart from their role of criticism, professors write very boring books. A ready point of reference is deliberate and reasonless obscurantism taken Wole Soyinka in all of his books, Soyinka’s books are difficult to understand, sombre, without humour and not capable to entertain an average reader. In fact Wole Soyinka has been writing for himself but not for the people. No common man can quote Soyinka the way Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is quoted. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart when he had not began his graduate studies. However, he did not escape the obvious mistake of professors to become obscure in the Anthills of the Savanna, the book he wrote when he had become a proffessor. This is on a sharp contrast to entertaining effectiveness, simplicity and thematic diversity of Captain Elechi Amadi, Amadi who studied chemistry but not literature. He does not have a second degree, but his books from the Concubine, The great Ponds, and Sunset in the Biafra and Isibiru are as spellbinding as their counterparts in Russia.
Kenyan scenario has Ngugi wa Thiongio, he displayed eminence in his first two books; Weep not Child and The River Between. These ones he wrote when he was not yet educated, as he was still an undergraduate student at Makerere University. But later on Ngugi became a victim of prosaic socialism, an ideology that warped his literary imagination only to put him in a paradoxical situation as an African communist who works in America as an English teacher at Irvine University. His other outcrops are misuse of Mau Mau as a literary springboard and campaigning for use of Kikuyu dialect of the Gema languages to become literary Lingua Franca in Kenya. Such efforts of Ngugi are only a disservice to Kenyan literature in particular and African literature collectively. Ngugi having been a student of Caribbean literature has failed to borrow from global literary behaviour of Vitian S. Naipaul.  Ngugi’s position also contrasts sharply with Meja Mwangi whose urban folksy literature swollen with diversity in themes has remained spellbinding entertainers.
The world’s literary thirsty has never failed to get palatable quenching from the works of Harriet Bechetor Stowe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, Alice Munro, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, John Steinbeck, Garcia Guarbriel Marguez,Salman Rushdie, Lenrie Peters, Cyprian Ekwenzi, Nikolai Gogol,I mean the list is as long as the road from Kaduna to Cape town. Contribution of these writers to global literature has been and is still critical. Literature could not be without them. Surprisingly, most of them are not trained in literature; they don’t have a diploma or a degree in literature, but some have won literature Nobel Prize and other prizes. Alfred Nobel himself the author of a classical novella, The Nemesis, does not have University education in literature. What else can we say apart from acceding to the truth that literature can blossom without professors, the Vis-à-vis an obvious and stark impossibility.

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)



I have been reading the old copy of Saturday Nation, a week end edition of the daily nation in Kenya. It was published some weeks ago. It has some enticing feature stories that have made me to reflect on a certain family value in Africa. The three feature stories I have been reading are ; Lupita Nyong’o stellar performance in the movie, 12 years a slave, in which she emerged a top American actor, attracting in the same course the most coveted Oscar prize, I have also read in the same paper the shooting literature star of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an American based Nigerian writress, who had had her last book Americana win the American Booker Prize, and lastly , I have also ready  a very captivating account of Wanjiku wa Ngugi’s spellbinding debutante in her book, the fall of saints. Wanjiku account was written by Proffessor Evans Mwangi a Thiong’o literary scholar based in Newyork. Mwangi being a Ngugi wa Thiongi’o, scholar wrote this article because Wanjiku wa Ngugi is also a daughter to the world famous Kenyan novelist, Ngugi Njogu wa Thiongi’o.
In each of the three above cases, emanates a significant observation that the fathers to the respective ladies are great men in their respective capacity, and that the ladies mentioned are now obvious heirs to the family names, family intellectual domain and family selling point respectively.
Lupita is heir to proffessor Peter Anyang Nyong’o, Adichie is an heir to the African literary heritage of proffessor Chinua Achebe, and While Wanjiku is a promising successor to Proffessor Thiongi’o.
These are actually a crystallization of strange unfolding that time has now challenged old mindset among African societies. The mindset in which Africans have not been counting girls as children .This family value has been there up to today. If an African man tells you that I don’t have a family it means that he is expressing three connotations; he is not married, he is married but he does not have a children, or he is married but his wife have only been bearing him girls, because if anything; an African man is only responsible for siring sons, daughters are a mistake of the wife.
This typology of family civilization got to its peak in the mid of  last year, when the Luo council of elders, hailing from Siaya County of Kenya, where Baraka Obama is rooted, expressed their open puzzle over Baraka Obama as per why he can’t take his time to have sons. They are now organizing a delegation that will go to America to counsel President Obama over the matter that he needs to re-organize his posterity strategy other than thinking in terms of Sasha and Malia.
What I mean is that Africans don’t believe if at all family interests can be carried forward through a daughter. They don’t believe if a girl can be an intellectual or command any wisdom that can go places. But realities from a historical experience that great African men don’t sire great sons but instead they sire great daughters must make this society of male chauvinists to have a mental paradigm shift in relation to child valuation and recognition. To accept a social déjàvu that daughters have a big capacity to carry forward the family name than the previously mistaken notion that they are only sons who can do this.
Facts on the ground range from the case of Julius Nyerere,Kwameh Nkrumah, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Tom Mboya, Masinde Muliro, Nelson Mandela, Mutula Kilonzo, and Francis Imbuga just to mention a few African heroes. Justification of this list showing Africa’s reversal of Prospero complex abodes in the facts that; Susan Nyerere is currently the most outspoken in the Nyerere family. Similarly, Nkrumah’s daughter is currently a politician in Ghanaian parliament and very promising politically. Betty Shabazz X was recently reported to have put Louis Farrakhan on the spot over the ****** plot of her father the late Malcolm X.Mireille Fanon Mendes is the director of human rights activist organization known as Frantz Fanon foundation. This is the organization which recently recognized Mumia Abu-Jamal with a prestigious prize. Mumia Abu-Jamal is an African-American writer and journalist, author of six human rights focussed books and hundreds of similar spirited columns and articles. He has spent the last three decades on racially biased Pennsylvania’s death row. And now general population in America and in the world knows that Mumia Abu-Jamal was wrongfully convicted and sentenced for the ****** of Philadelphia Police man, Daniel Faulkner. His demand for a neutral trial and unconditional freedom is enmassely supported by heads of state, Nobel laureates, human rights organizations, scholars, religious leaders, artists and bioethical scientists. All this is nothing other than universal singing of the tune in the poetic writings of Frantz Omar Fanon entitled Facts of blackness, through his daughter Mireille.
And equally enough, those of you who have delved into posthumous family conditions of Richard Wright must have appreciated stellar performance of proffessor Julia Wright in respect to the genetic legacy of her father. Dr. Susan Mboya is currently living in South Africa and she is serving the society in the same tandem her late father Tom Mboya discharged anti-colonial service to the people of Kenya, Africa and world in general.Masinde Muliro has Mrs. Namwalie Muliro and Mutula Kilonzo has Kethi Kilonzo. The point is that, just like all of other heroes in Africa, these two great politicians have their daughters; Namwalie and Kethi as the heirs to their political legacy.
This phenomenon is not unique to Africa. But it is a universal genetic condition. The study of genetics has a concept that inferior genes of the mother are passed through an X chromosomes in XY to the sons, while superior genes of the father are passed through an X chromosome of the ** to the daughters.
Just but to wind up my story I want also to counsel The Luo council of elders that president Obama, their son who lives in America does not have misplaced values in projecting his posterity through Sasia and Malia. Personally I am aware that as per now there is no any African boy at age of Sasha Obama that has ever read Yann Martel’s Life of Mr. Pi. But in stark contrast the international media reported Sasha Obama to have vividly read this book until she commented to Baraka Obama that, ‘daddy, this is a very good book’.  And of course this is how an intellectual is made.

Given the apparent magical surrealism that the months of April is the month of fate for and death of writers, artists, dramatis, philosophers and poets, a phenomenon which readily gets support from the cases of untimely and early April deaths of; Max Weber, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Francis Imbuga, and Chinua Achebe  then  Wisdom of the moment behooves me to adjure away the fateful month by  allowing  me to mourn Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez by expressing my feelings of grieve through the following dirge of elegy;
You lived alone in the solitude
Of pure hundred years in Colombia
Roaming in Amacondo with a Spanish tongue
Carrying the bones of your grandmother in a sisal sag
On your poverty written Colombian back,
Gadabouting to make love in times of cholera,
On none other than your bitter-sweet memories
Of your melancholic ***** the daughter of Castro,
Your cowardice made you to fear your momentous life
In this glorious and poetic time of April 2014,
Only to succumb to untimely black death
That similarly dimunitized your cultural ancestor;
Miguel de Cervantes, a quixotic Spaniard,
You were to write to the colonel for your life,
Before eating the cockerel you had ear-marked
For Olympic cockfight, the hope of the oppressed,
Come back from death, you dear Marquez
To tell me more stories fanaticism to surrealism,
From Tarzanic Africa the fabulous land
An avatar of evil gods that are impish propre
Only Vitian Naipaul and Salman Rushdie are not enough,
For both of them are so naïve to tell the African stories,
I will miss you a lot the rest of my life, my dear Garbo,
But I will ever carry your living soul, my dear Garcia,
Soul of your literature and poetry in a Maasai kioondo
On my broad African shoulders during my journey of art,
When coming to America to look for your culture
That gave you versatile tongue and quill of a pen,
Both I will take as your memento and crystallize them
Into my future thespic umbrella of orature and literature.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an eminent Latin American and most widely acclaimed authors, died untimely at his home in Mexico City on Thursday, 17th April 2014. The 1982 literature Nobel laureate, whose reputation drew comparisons to Mark Twain of adventures of Huckleberry Finny and Charles Dickens of hard Times, was 87 of age. Already a luminous legend in his well used lifetime, Latin American writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was perceived as not only one of the most consequential writers of the 20th and 21ist centuries, but also the sterling performing Spanish-language author since the world’s experience of Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish Jail bird and Author of Don Quixote who lived in the 17th century.
Like very many other writers from the politically and economically poor parts of the world, in the likes of J M Coatze, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Doris May Lessing, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, V S Naipaul, and Rabidranathe Tagore, Marguez won the literature Nobel prize in addition to the previous countless awards for his magically fabulous novels, gripping short stories, farcical screenplays, incisive journalistic contributions and spellbinding essays. But due to postmodern global thespic civilization the Nobel Prize is recognized as most important of his prizes in the sense that, he received in 1982, as the first Colombian author to achieve such literary eminence. The eminence of his work in literature communicated in Spanish are towered by none other than the Bible, especially  in its Homeric style which Moses used when writing the book of Genesis and the fictitious drama of Job.
Just like Ngugi, Achebe, Soyinka, and Ousmane Marquez is not the first born. He is the youngest of siblings. He was born on March 6, 1927 in the Colombian village of Aracataca, on the Caribbean coast. His literary bravado was displayed in his book, Love in the Times of Cholera.  In which he narrated how his parents met and got married. Marguez did not grow up with his father and mother, but instead he grew up with his grandparents. He often felt lonely as a child. Environment of aunts and grandmother did not fill the psychological void of father and mother. This social phenomenon of inadequate parenthood is also seen catapulting Richard Wright, Charlese Dickens, and Barrack Obama to literary excellency.Obama recounted the same experience in his Dreams from my father.

Poverty determines convenience or hardship of marriage. This is mirrored by Garcia Marquez in his marriage to Mercedes Barcha.  An early childhood play-mate and neighbour in 1958. In appreciation of his marriage, Marquez later wrote in his memoirs that it is women who maintain the world, whereas we men tend to plunge it into disarray with all our historic brutality. This was a connotation of his grandmother in particular who played an important role during the times of childhood. The grand mother introduced him to the beauty of orature by telling him fabulous stories about ghosts and dead relatives haunting the cellar and attic, a social experience which exactly produced Chinua Achebe, Okot P’Bitek, Mazizi Kunene, Margaret Ogola and very many other writers of the third world.
Little Gabo as his affectionate pseudonym for literature goes, was a voracious bookworm, who like his ideological master Karl Marx read King Lear of Shakespeare at the age of sixteen. He fondly devoured the works of Spanish authors, obviously Miguel de Cervantes, as well as other European heavyweights like; Edward Hemingway, Faulkner and Frantz Kafka.
Good writers usually drop out of school and at most writers who win the Nobel Prize. This formative virtue of writers is evinced in Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, John Steinbeck, William Shakespeare, Sembene Ousmane, Octavio Paz as well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After dropping out of law school, Garcia Marquez decided instead to embark on a call of his passion as a journalist. The career he perfectly did by regularly criticizing Colombian as well as ideological failures of the then foreign politics. In a nutshell he was a literary crusader against poverty. This is of course the obvious hall marker of leftist political orientation.
Garcia Marquez’s sensational breakthrough occurred in 1967 with the break-away publication of his oeuvre; One Hundred Years of Solitude which the New York Times Book Review meritoriously elevated as ‘the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. The position similarly taken by Salman Rushdie. Marquez often shared out that this novel carried him above emotional tantrums on its publication. He was keen on this as his manner of speech was always devoid of la di da.so humble and suave that his genius can only be appreciated not from the booming media outlets about his death, but by reading all of his works and especially his Literature Noble price acceptance speech delivered in 1982.

Ekhafu ya kamevele niyo ekamayanka elurende!
It goes a Bukusu saying, from Kenya,
It has it English equivalence as;
The most productive Milch- cow
is the one that often dies at the creek,
And truly Proffessor Ali A.  Mazrui
Africa’s global intellectual Milch-cow
Has died today from his drinking creek,
At Birmingham hospital in New-York,
His death is a deep wound
To the world of knowledge,
An impeachment to the voices
Subscribing to classical reasons,
An old wine skin to the new wine
Of nothing but global democracy,
I mourn you Mazrui in this solemn dirge,
I grieve for you deeply from my heart
I grieve for you as you grieved Okigbo,
When the bullet took his youthful life
at Nzuka battle front during the Biafra,
My mind’s eye is seeing you,
Like my Mr. Giraffe the driver
In your political epic
That tried Christopher Okigbo,
Mazrui the global son
Sired in the neoclassical times
We shall miss you,
As there is no whence
That cometh another Mazrui
From all the four corners of the earth
Rarely will he come one more Mazrui,

You failed your O’level exams at Mombasa Sec School
As you humbly basked in Muslim poverty, in 1943
Not because you were a stooge
But a genius of cultural radicalism,
Refusing to answer a history question;
Who is the Archduke of Canterbury?
Dismissing it as academic sham,
For what value has Archduke of Canterbury
to an African, Asian or Mexican boy?

You were denied a chance to study
At the then colonial Makerere University,
You sublimated to Edinburg and Oxford,
You come back into its deanry of political science
You met Milton Obote face to face,
When he was an African-English song bird of Gulu
You shouted loud when Id Amin plotted to **** Okello Oculli
You were then detained for this noise of humanity
You voice was heard,
And you were exported to southern Tundra
As an exhibit for non-white intellectual
Mazrui let me mourn you for the efforts
That sired intellectual democracy in Uganda,

When I reminisce of you Mazrui,
Pages of African Conditions open
Widely before my mind’s eye,
I see your intellectual pilgrimage
From Rudyard Kipling to Julius Nyerere
As you made your Al Hajji stone
at the graveyard of  Shakespeare the bard,

You met Daniel Moi face to face
Daniel Moi the Kalenjin Cow of Dictatorship
And black Maestro of ethnic terror
You took this despotic Moi cow to the well,
You pleaded for it to drink politics of reason
But Mazrui I pity, you were unlucky;
Kalenjin cows never drink whatsoever
From the democratic wells of political reasons,

Mazrui Maalim the star of Islam,
I envy your for your elonguence
I envy you for the unique power of ideas,
I envy you for unique intellectual bravery,
I envy you for constant intellectual dynamism
For your firm stand against utopian socialism
For your intuition into Nkrumah’s Leninist czarism,
And Senghorean cultural despair in paradoxical negritude,
For your firm stand against Ngugi’s literary tribalism,

Mazrui the stellar saint of Swahili Nation
I remember your glowing tribute
In eulogy of Julius Nyerere the swahilist,
When you held the world stand-still
With your cadence in tribute to Mandela
You have used every English word in your scholarship,
Indeed Mazrui you are the African sky
that cannot be vilified by any  ***** mouth,


Mazrui the angel of good thought
You cautioned Wole Soyinka in 1988,
When he embarked on his racist mission
That made him to call you a white African
Or a non- African African, An African Arab
In his blurred thoughts in dint of bigotry
Emanating from your Jekyll and Hide
Vintageously Serialized at Albert Schweitzer,
You sang to him ballads of the scholar
On the African of the soil and African of the blood,

Rest in peace Mazrui at the Fort Jesus
Let your glorious name and teachings
Remain permanent to the future people
As the stubborn stones of the Fort Jesus,
As your name takes the official knighthood
Of the leopard skin on death of the leopard,

Let me start by appreciating Austen Bukenya’s stand on the challenges that boggle young African writers. He recently published in the literature pages of Saturday Nation. In which he argued that before one can be declared a bad writer we must see his or her writings first. Good. I agree with Professor Bukenya.And I also argue yes, bad writers can also survive. In fact they can thrive alongside good and popular writers. Thus the way forward is to take a pen and write. But not to surrender to the torture by internal fear that you may write a bad book or a worthless script.
Charles Darwin also toyed with an idea of presenting his manuscript of Origin of species for a decade. He also feared that may be he had written a worthless book. But when he presented the book, it was suddenly published and became a spell binder in diverse respects. Same thing to Richard Wright, the Author of the Native Son. He similarly feared presenting the Manuscripts to the publishers on the basis of fear that he was only a ***** and not formally educated. But when he presented the manuscript, it was published and became the most influential book on race relations and civil rights movement in America of those days.
Thus, the first thing is to break fear of self doubt and begin writing. If whatever you write will be bad, just keep on as you may end up surviving as a bad writer. History of written literature has a lot of bad writers who have survived to extreme. And even succeed through persistent writing regardless of their sorry state of popularity. The glowing example can be seen in the case of Patrick Mondiano the winner of 2014 literature Nobel Prize. Mondiano was not popular and has been the least read writer until the time he won the prize. In fact by the time he won the prize he had less than fifty followers on his face book page. Meaning he was not known as a writer. But he emerged the winner of the Nobel Prize against titans of Literature like Phillip Rooth, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, Yarn Mattel and Haruki Murakami.The fact is that Mondiano’s books are not lively. But he has kept on writing alongside the discouragingly insignificant consumption of his literary workmanship.
Other writers that have persisted to write even if their works don’t excite readers are; Eric Ambler, Louis D’Amour, **** Francis and Alistair Maclean. They are all from America and they have persistently written for the past three decades. Thomas Mann also tastes to me as a very boring writer. I have read his short stories entitled Death in Venice. They proved so boring that I have gone back to read him again. But remember, this is the very book that earned him the Literature Nobel prize.
The African writers’ series has Nkem Nwanko the Author of Danda, Francis Salomey the author of the Narrow Path and Tayeb Saleh the Author of Wedding in Zayen.These are boring writers and as well their books are replete with technical mistakes of structure and grammar. But they have prospered to be known as African writers. Another supportive experience is evident in the writing career of Ayi Kwei Arma; Wole Soyinka dismissed Ayi Kwei Armah’s Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born. Soyinka argued that Arma’s book is substandard inspite of author’s command of good English. He went a head to declare Arma as an incompetent writer. But to day every one knows that Ayi Kwei Arma is a saint of African literature.
So, writing is expression of individual ability but not excellence of education.And human ability varies from person to person. Therefore, there must be bad writers and good writers. Not every person can writer like Shakespeare. So don’t fear to write because you fear that you will not write like Shakespeare.

Alexander K Opicho
Eldoret, Kenya.