Browsing by Author "Andindilile, Michael"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
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    African Anglophonism, Translation and the Teaching of Ngugi’s Works
    (Modern Languages of America, 2012) Andindilile, Michael
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    ‘All Men Are Created Equal’: Walker, Delany and the African Colonisation Bigotry
    (TTI Publishing Ltd, 2010) Andindilile, Michael
    This essay examines two historical documents—David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World and Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People published in 1929 and 1952, respectively—to stress the rhetorical astuteness of African-Americans writing from the margins in hostile antebellum America. The essay argues that, rhetorically these documents expose America’s weaknesses and contradictions between the principles of freedom that motivated the country’s founding fathers and the compromises that recognised and permitted the continuation of slavery. Specifically, these rhetoricians exploit and subvert Thomas Jefferson’s paradoxical, if not conflicting, thesis on the status of African-Americans in America to advance their argument. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
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    Beyond Nativism: Translingualism and Ngũgĩ's Engagement with Anglophonism
    (Taylor & Francis, 2014) Andindilile, Michael
    In the face of the controversies surrounding the writings of the East African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, this article contends that his Gikuyu fictions (also in English translation) are as much an integral part of Ngũgĩ's engagement with the Anglophone tradition as his earlier works published in English. Negotiating through various critical issues raised on Ngũgĩ and his articulations on the language of African literature, the paper uses his works to show that those originally written in English and those in Gikuyu benefit from similar processes of translingualism. It addresses the subject of the relationship between translation and minor languages, arguing that translation involves an inevitable and continuous manipulation of texts in which the words' subjectivity, ideology, visibility and power complicate the very process of translation and reception of texts from minor languages to major languages. Finally, the paper shows that Ngũgĩ's Anglophone and Gikuyu novels (in translation) are complementary in the exploitation of various manifestations of translingualism, despite arguments to the contrary.
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    English, Cosmopolitanism and the Myth of National Linguistic Homogeneity in Nuruddin Farah's Fiction
    (Oxford University Press, 2014-06-24) Andindilile, Michael
    This paper analyses the intricacies of using English in a traditionally non-English context such as Somalia through the work of its foremost anglophone writer, Nuruddin Farah. Farah uses English to re-imagine the nation and promote intra-, pan- and transnational discourses within and outside Africa. The analysis of Farah has been informed by the articulations of Ernest Renan, Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, within the view of Somalia's now-contested exceptionalism. In Farah's hands, English becomes a vehicle for bringing together diverse linguistic, literary, cultural and religious expressions into a genre that facilitates transnational discourse. The paper argues that the anglophone African literary tradition that Farah embraces gains the capacity to transcend national boundaries and broadens – rather than limits – the scope and coverage of national and transnational literatures.
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    ‘Imagine Someone Speaking as They Speak’: Linguistic Divide and Convoluted Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nadine Gordimer’s Apartheid-Era Work
    (2013) Andindilile, Michael
    Nadine Gordimer’s delicate, perceptive, and oftentimes idiosyncratic treatment of controversial issues has received a lot of critical enquiry. Scant attention, however, has been paid to how Gordimer’s critical appraisal of apartheid policies emerges from her attempt to concretely embody African languages, discourses, and cultures in her fiction. This essay, therefore, revisits Gordimer’s apartheid-era fiction to examine how the representation of a range of discourses in Gordimer’s fiction constitutes a means through which she appraises apartheid power relations and the effects of divisive policies. The paper argues that Gordimer’s treatise on apartheid and its divisive policies is manifested in her attempt to embody African discourses in her apartheid-era fiction. In this paper, I rely on Foucault’s definition of discourse as “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them . . . [d]iscourses [that] are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. . . . They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern” (qtd. in Weedon 108). They are also “a form of power that circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance” (qtd. in Diamond and Quinby 185). Both of these definitions refer to discourse not as an innocent act, but one that conditions subjects in their social, cultural and economic interactions.
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    Radio Communication for Forest Conservation in Tanzania: a SWOC Analysis
    (The BRILL, 2020-05-23) Zacharia, Malima; Andindilile, Michael
    This study investigated the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges (SWOC) associated with the power of radio in communicating forests information to enhance community responsiveness to forest conservation in Tanzania. Data collection entailed the analysis of the content of a series of Urithi Wetu (Our Heritage) programme produced and aired by the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation (TBC) radio, conducting interviews with key informants, administering questionnaires with citizens living adjacent to forests, and holding focus group discussions (FGDs) with the villagers in the study area. The study established that, to some extent, radio presents some opportunities for easy communication of forest conservation information in a bid to influence communities to take the intended conservation action. On the other hand, the study found that factors such as poor packaging of forest information, lack of participation of the rural-based citizens in the programmes, and poverty among community members limited the power of the radio to influence effectively citizens to conserve forests.
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    Reimagining African Communities: Achebe, Ngugi, Gordimer, Farah and the Anglophone African novel
    (2007) Andindilile, Michael
    This dissertation examines the novels of Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, and Nuruddin Farah, paying special attention to the relationship between language and nation, nation and race, as well as culture and language. The study explores how each of these contemporary Anglophone African writers uses modified versions of English to help build cross-cultural bridges in an increasingly trans-national world. It examines how the various manifestations of the English language in the traditionally non-English speaking nations of these writers constitute an anglophone African literary-linguistic continuum. This anglophone African literary-linguistic continuum provides the point of reference for examining how diverse linguistic, literary, cultural, as well as religious expressions converge into a discourse that facilitates intra-, pan- and trans-national communication within and outside the continent. The dissertation establishes that the works of these four authors—from four different parts of the African continent—affirm the plurality of Anglophone African writings, a plurality which continues to defy a unified theory, mainly due to the literary-linguistic and cultural circumstances of the authors and their respective nations. It also affirms that any language—foreign or indigenous—can help subjects reimagine their nation, regardless of their ethnic background, race or religious affiliation, so long as they make that language relevant to their literary expression. The dissertation emphasizes how the many manifestations of English help rather than harm cross-cultural national and transnational discourse. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the English language embodies the various discourses of sub-Saharan anglophone Africa in an attempt to enable cross-cultural, intra-national and transnational literary discourse
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    When ‘the Centre Cannot Hold’: Achebe and Anglophone African Literary Discourse
    (TTI Publishing Ltd, 2011) Andindilile, Michael
    Extending Derek Bickerton’s pioneering study on the Creole Continuum; this essay argues that English, a former colonial language, serves as an arbiter in the reimagining of diverse African communities. The essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s fiction to examine the relationship between literary English and the indigenous languages, and cultures it imaginatively and concretely embodies in traditionally nonnative universes of discourse. The essay considers how Achebe’s literary English embodies the local cultural-specific literary elements to illustrate that anglophonism can thrive in the national discourse of a non-native English environment if it has both a functional and utilitarian value, an integral part of Achebe’s theory on the language of African literature. Achebe’s works show that English serves as a linguistic bridge in the complex multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Nigeria. Finally, the essay establishes that the local aspects introduced into literary English do not necessarily represent a break from the main Anglophone literary-linguistic tradition, but rather a manifestation of an anglophone African literary-linguistic continuum with peculiar characteristics and divergences imposed by a localised context.
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    You Have No Past, No History: Philosophy, Literature and the Re-Invention of Africa
    (Academic Journals, 2016-08-31) Andindilile, Michael
    Africa has been a victim of misrepresentation since the advent of colonialism. This paper, which is largely based on textual analysis, examines how African philosophy and literature intersect in an attempt to bring about a better understanding of Africa in both the West and Africa itself. The study argues that the intersection of literature and philosophy in African literary discourse we witness is an inevitable consequence of the historical events (including colonialism) that conspired to condemn the continent—as a body—to subjection in the Western world of thought, and the response that this reality solicited from Africans facing the challenges of the Western engineered modernity. The study examines the writing of some of the pioneering modern African writers who have tried to undermine ideas propagated by philosophers such as Hegel—in a typical Eurocentric tradition—to undermine Africa, a continent they hardly understood. The objective is to show that through literature, African writers were able to reveal more about African thought than what has been readily acknowledged.