Bodil Folke Frederiksen

Joe, the sweetest reading in Africa: documentation and discussion of a popular magazine in Kenya

For urban Africans an ordinary, comfortable everyday life, free of misery and harassment is the adventure. The opposite is the norm. The implications of this state of affairs for popular literature are that what is regarded and dismissed as fairly drab descriptive realism in highly developed countries, is fantastic in an African context. Many popular novels from Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria may best be seen as realistic fantasies, meticulously describing the lives of the fabulously rich. Or the lives of the not so rich in terms of their efforts to grab and enjoy a modem lifestyle, closely associated with consumer goods, amenities and leisure, but also with regular work and ability to afford school fees.

Ethnicity, Gender and the Subversion of Nationalism

This volume explores the politics of identity by analysing the intersections between ethnicity, gender and nationalism in developing societies. These markers of identity are not understood as constituting essences, but as springing from peoples core experiences, yearnings and strategic life plans in a context where resources are scarce. As such, identities may be, and are, contested. The intersections are traced across three areas: social and cultural reproduction; ideologies, stereotypes and practices; and nationalist politics and discourse which has tended to remove women from the public arena and construct an ideal of womens domesticity.

African Women and Their Colonisation of Nairobi: Representations and Realities

This paper argues that African women were among Kenya’s true urban pioneers; that Kenyan women had a decisive influence on informal urban structures and institutions, and came to influence African ideas of what constitutes a town. The argument is not new. In the case of Nairobi researchers have documented the central role African women played in servicing and reproducing the urban population. This research has not, however, transformed either the representation (and commonly held view) of the city as an immoral space, or reversed the negative image of urban women as a social category. These disparaging attitudes towards urbanism in Kenya are rooted in the patriarchal mindsets of African men and British colonialists. The influence of such attitudes is apparent in both the scholarly literature and in Kenya’s popular literature and culture. By sketching the roles, activities and social relations of women in a particular Nairobi neighbourhood from 1920 onwards, this paper seeks to counteract such representations. Women are discussed as the urban pioneers they were and as centres of activity – domestic, social and economic – and it is argued that many urban women created respectable and productive lives for themselves and their families. Prostitution has been portrayed as being emblematic of the economic and social role of African women in Nairobi during the colonial period. 1 Meanwhile, production and trade by African women has received increasing attention from historians of the city. 2 Thanks to the work of such authors it is well established that a class of African women struck roots in colonial Nairobi by acquiring property and renting out rooms and houses. These women were able to let their daughters or adopted daughters inherit their property, creating a de facto matrilineal succession of matriarchal families in the city. They also

Writing, Self-realization and Community: Henry Muoria and the Creation of a Nationalist Public Sphere in Kenya

Abstract This paper traces the career of the Kenyan publicist and intellectual, Henry Muoria (1914–1997). Muoria was an active journalist, a friend and press secretary of Kenyas future president Jomo Kenyatta and, from 1945 to 1952, the editor of a nationalist newspaper Mumenyereri, written in Gikuyu, one of Kenyas major languages. In October 1952, when the British declared the Emergency in Kenya in order to quell the Mau Mau rebellion, Muoria was visiting London. He stayed there for the rest of his life, but continued pursuing his writing career. He finished more than ten full‐length autobiographical, philosophical and political manuscripts, but not one was published. East African Educational Publishers in Nairobi brought out his I, the Gikuyu and the White Fury in 1994. This book and his unpublished autobiography from 1982, The British and My Kikuyu Tribe, are used in discussing Muorias debt to his ethnic community, the Gikuyu, his successful attempts to contribute to the creation of a nationalist public sphere in colonial Kenya, and his authorship in exile. The declaration of the Emergency put a stop to Muorias hopes for the recognition of his work, based as it was on a desired continuum between self, community and nation.