Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde | 2021
Introduction: Commemorating the 50th anniversary of East African literature as an academic discipline
Abstract
In looking back over the historical period from the 1950s to the early 1980s, Chris Wanjala (“The Growth of a Literary Tradition in East Africa”) identifies the various approaches that had by then emerged in the East African region in regard to creative writing and the study of literature. In so doing, Wanjala examines how a literary tradition that is particular to the region was established. From Wanjala’s study, the first thing that becomes evident is that the approaches that were used in the early stages of developing a tradition in regard to the production and the study of East African literature were formulated within the English Departments of the University of East Africa, which was by then a brand-new formation to the region. The University of East Africa had been established in 1963 as a federation of colleges from the three countries that comprised East Africa after independence, namely, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya (Hyslop). The three constituent colleges that made up the federal unit of the University of East Africa had distinct histories, with Makerere College having the longest. Indeed, it was developed from Uganda Technical College, which was founded in 1922, and then transformed into Makerere University College in 1949, which would exist as an affiliate of the University of London. University College Nairobi, on the other hand, was developed from The Royal Technical College of East Africa, which was founded in 1951. This college was converted from a technical college into a university college in 1961, becoming the Royal College, Nairobi. Dar es Salaam was the youngest of the three, having been established in 1961 as a university college. With the establishment of the University of East Africa, by 1965 University College Nairobi had joined its sister unit in setting up an English Department, with a curriculum that was similar to that in use at Makerere. This, together with an increased student and staff mobility across the region, led to the birth of what we refer to today as East African literature. Wanjala goes on to describe how the first of the three English Departments of East Africa that was established at Makerere University College created a platform that generated the foundation of writing and criticism in East African literature. He refers to it as the Makerere School of English. The approach to literature within this school was that of liberal humanism, and the “literary education of [students from this school] was based on the writings of the English tradition” (“Growth” 125). This was evidently due to the fact that the students were taught by expatriate lecturers from the metropole, and also because the curriculum at the time was based on an education that was somewhat similar to that being offered at the University of London at the time. It was thus steeped in the tradition of the Cambridge school of criticism whose leading lights were I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. The duo is known for engaging in the methodology of practical criticism of literary texts as a mode of teaching literary criticism. Although Leavis did not himself write essays on his cogent philosophical thought, he is known to be the most influential British critic of the 20 century through his work as a professor at Cambridge, his editing of the literary journal Scrutiny for twenty years, and especially for his numerous essays on English literature. Leavis displayed the influences of T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold in his thought and writing. The text that Leavis is most famous for is The Great Tradition (1948) through which he establishes a literary canon of Western writers that he finds worthy of study. These writers are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad who Leavis perceives as having written texts that could be seen as representative of a founding tradition in the past, and D. H. Lawrence who Leavis perceives as the only contemporary writer that is worthy to stand for a continuity with that past. It is evident, therefore, that Leavis’ critical ideology strives to suspend contemporary or modern culture and thought in an effort to preserve a tradition that he finds may have