A Discussion on Kitereza at the University of Minnesota

Today, at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Charlotte (Shoonie) Hartwig and I discussed Aniceti Kitereza, a distinguished writer who is, however, not well known. Shoonie has been writing a book, and the presentation today centered on this project.

Kitereza was born in 1896 on Ukerewe Island in the Tanzanian part of Lake Victoria. As he grew up he became passionate about recording the traditions and culture of his people. As part of this process, he wrote a great novel in Kerebe, his mother tongue, completing it in early 1945. It is a detailed account of the traditional Kerebe way of life which Kitereza chose to present in fictional form in order to make it interesting to read.

After a protracted and fruitless search for a publisher, and following the advice of his American friends, Kitereza translated his novel into Swahili. Still, he waited many years before the novel was published in 1980 as Bwana Myombekere na Bibi Bugonoka na Ntulanalwo na Buliwhali.

Shoonie is uniquely qualified to talk about Kitereza since she and her husband, the late Dr. Gerald Hartwig, knew him well, having first met him in 1968 in Ukerewe. They had extensive correspondence with him to the end of his life. Kitereza was a prolific letter writer. In today's presentation, Shoonie shared an overview of Kitereza's life and work, illustrated with slides. She stated that Kitereza worked tirelessly to preserve the traditions of his people, guided by a question that he himself posed: "What must we teach our children?"

I gave a brief overview of Kitereza's work from my perspective as a literary scholar and folklorist. I highlighted several key issues that feature in discussions of African literature, especially writing in African languages and translation. I noted how Bwana Myombekere might affect the way we conceptualize the evolution of the African novel and how Bwana Myombekere might be seen in relation to the work of writers like Daniel O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola of Nigeria, Gakaara wa Wanjau of Kenya, and Shaaban Robert of Tanzania. This would be a study in comparative literature.

I have read Kitereza's Swahili translation of his novel. His Swahili, though different from standard Swahili, has the flavour of oral storytelling in a Bantu language such as my own Matengo. I liked it for this reason. Kitereza's novel has been translated into French and German, but according to Professor Gabriel Ruhumbika, a native Kerebe speaker and well-known translator, those translations have unnecessary deficiencies.

Professor Ruhumbika has translated Kitereza's original Kerebe novel into English and published it as Mr. Myombekere and His Wife Bugonoka, Their Son Ntulanalwo and Daughter Buliwhali. Having read it, I find it as engaging as Kitereza's Swahili translation. It deserves to be widely read. I will say the same thing about Shoonie's forthcoming book, a personal account laden with information hitherto not available to the world.

A Discussion on Adichie's "Purple Hibiscus"

This evening, we had a discussion at St. Olaf College on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, organized by Professor Joan Hepburn f the English Department. She had lined me up as discussion leader together with herself.

I started the discussion by giving the context of Adichie's life and work. I stated how she fit in the tradition of African Anglophone literature which goes back to the days before independence as is exemplified  in Nigeria by writers like Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Cyprian Ekwensi.

I then discussed Adichie, her upbringing on a university campus in Nigeria and her travels abroad, including her time as a student in the USA. I emphasized the cosmopolitanism in both her life and writings. I talked about her writings, highlighting her novels and short stories and giving an overview of her key themes. I mentioned her TED lectures as well.

After my presentation, Professor Hepburn led a discussion of Purple Hibiscus, which moved through key themes such as family, religion, and politics. We dwelt at length on the theme of religion and its peculiar effects on characters like Papa. We probed these themes in depth and discovered the complexity with which they are realized.

I Am Teaching Leila Aboulela's "Minaret" Again

This week, in my African Literature summer course, I am teaching Leila Aboulela's Minaret. We started the course with Ama Ata Aidoo's Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, went on to Athol Fugard's Valley Song, then Mia Couto's The Tuner of Silences, then Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

I am teaching Minaret for the second time, having first taught it in the spring. As I did then, I have started with an introduction to Islam, because Minaret deals with the lives of Muslims. I also feel privileged to talk about Islam in view of the widespread ignorance of it in American society. Having been born and raised in Tanzania, about half of whose people are Muslim and about half Christian, living in relative harmony, I enjoy sharing with students my experience of Islam and Muslims.

This time around, having talked about the origins and the five pillars of Islam, and about the Qur'an and the hadiths, I have started focusing on the novel, intending to go through it at a measured pace, in order to explore it as well as possible.

With its opening words, "Bism Allahi, Ar-rahman, Ar-raheem," Minaret inducts the reader into the world of Islam. In class today, I dwelt on this phrase, which means "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful," and explained its significance in Islam and in the daily lives of Muslims. I went on to explain other references to Islam featured in the first several pages of the novel. I have no doubt that my students will both enjoy and learn much from this novel.

On my part, especially today, I have been thinking about other works of fiction I have taught, written by African Muslim women. These are Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter, Alifa Rifaat's Distant View of a Minaret, Nawal el Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero and The Fall of the Imam. I am dreaming of someday creating a course on writings by Muslim women. As Muslims say, Insha Allah, God willing.

We Have Finished Reading "Americanah"

Today, in my Post-colonial Literature class, we finished discussing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah. I have always told my students that though we say we have finished reading a work of literature, we are deceiving ourselves. If we read such a work again, we discover how much we missed the first time around. We discover new ways of seeing aspects of the text. The process is virtually endless.

It has taken us many days to go through this novel, but that is what I wanted. I believe we have to accord literature the honour it deserves as an expression of the human condition.

As a result of taking our time on it, we have gained a good understanding of the lives of the characters in Americanah, such as Ifemelu, Obinze, Aunty Uju, Blaine, and Dike. We have gained an understanding of their experiences at home and abroad, and their relationships.

Adichie's exploration of themes such as the lives of Africans in the USA, race and racism, cultural differences, and the contemporary Nigerian middle class, sparkles with insight and sensitivity. She portrays human beings, not stereotypes.

Adichie is a gifted storyteller; she enchants the reader with her mind-boggling narrative skill and truthful dialogue. Rarely have I read a long novel such as Americanah with such joy and eagerness, from the beginning to the very end.

J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee is one of the writers whose works I have been teaching, in the context of Post-colonial literature and also as part of my new course on South African Literature. I have taught Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country, Disgrace, and Foe, and, lately, Waiting for the Barbarians.

Whenever I teach my literature courses, I like to include some works I have not read before, so that I can explore these works with the students. I enjoy the risks this entails, such as lagging behind the students in reading the text. A convert to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I feel that this somehow empowers the students.

As part of my South African Literature course this semester, I have been teaching Waiting for the Barbarians, a haunting narrative whose very first sentence catches your attention: "I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire."

Waiting for the Barbarians can be read on many levels. On the surface, this is a novel about a frontier town--at the farthest end of an Empire--anxious about an invasion by barbarians who live just beyond. The fear of the barbarians and the actions the rulers take to confront that threat invests this novel with allegorical significance, even for our time. The fear of evil forces, of enemies, is quintessentially human, and Coetzee explores the impact of this fear on the people who run the Empire as well as on their subjects.

Trying to decode Coetzee's novel, I have invoked works as disparate as Kafka's The Trial and the powerful play, Fire on the Snow, by Douglas Stewart of Australia. I have invoked theories of alienation and the absurd as articulated by existentialists and other philosophers. I even made my students read Ward Churchill's controversial essay, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Waiting for the Barbarians is its lack of geographical specificity. We don't know where on earth the story takes place. It could be anywhere. History is replete with examples of the workings of Empire as described in this novel, examples of what happens when rulers use the idea of enemies--real of imagined, domestic or foreign--to whip up xenophobia and clamp down on the population. The siege conditions and mentality Coetzee describes so insightfully has something in common with the story Albert Camus tells in The Plague.

With its spare storyline, flowing like a silken thread, Waiting for the Barbarians is a masterful depiction of the dark side of the human condition. We might be unwilling to take a pessimistic view of ourselves, but history, unfortunately, yields unforgettable examples of the kind of truths Coetzee tells. We so readily believe dire warnings about enemies being out there, waiting to harm us, that we succumb to manipulation by those who claim to be safeguarding our security. We are, perhaps, our own worst enemies.