Browsing by Author "Wakota, John"

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    Houseboying: Negotiating the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class and Age in Selected Fiction
    (Dar es Salaam university College of Education, 2016) Wakota, John
    Tracing a thread from the fictionalized pre-colonial to the post-independence period, this paper analyzes the representation of houseboying by locating it at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Reading the representation of domestic service against a backcloth of a discourse that constructs the houseboy as a primitive being, the paper analyzes houseboying as a process of civilization; a form of power relations; and a site where social inequalities and social differences are produced; contested; negotiated; and renegotiated. Since houseboying requires servile postures and is stereotypically based on reversal of gender roles, the question this paper asks is how does the houseboy acquire them given that his background is portrayed to be patriarchal per se where even boys are groomed to be prospective paterfamilias? In analyzing the portrayal of how the houseboy’s masculinity is compromised and how he deals with the resultant societal stigma associated with his work, the paper also examines how, ironically, the houseboys are portrayed to be complacent in sustaining and occasionally enforcing the asymmetrical master-servant relationship. It argues that the houseboy’s ‘slavish’ posture is only situational—a performance and a strategic adaptation to the demands of domestic service.
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    Metaphors of Resistance: Nicknames in Tanzanian Fiction
    (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, 2016) Wakota, John
    This chapter explores the fictional representation of Tanzania’s colonial history, especially the relations between the indigenous people and the colonists that are conveyed through the nicknames used in selected fiction. It proposes that nicknames in Tanzanian fiction that span the colonial period are some of the most straightforward ways of understanding relationships between the colonised indigenous people and their colonisers. Through the decoding of these fictionalised nicknames, the essay seeks to demonstrate the extent to which these nicknames can be considered as storehouses that offer a glimpse of social relations.
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    Ujamaa's Villagization and Gender Dynamics in Selected Tanzanian Fiction
    (Taylor&Francis Group, 2016) Wakota, John
    Between 1967 and 1975, Tanzania implemented an ambitious project of Ujamaa villagisation. According to official discourse, villagisation was both a resettlement and production project, through which villages were to become schemes in which people lived and worked communally. This paper analyses the representation of Ujamaa villagisation and gender dynamics in Gabriel Ruhumbika’s Village in Uhuru (1969) and Severin Ndunguru’s The Lion of Yola (2004). By placing the texts in their historical contexts, reading them against the official discourses about villagisation, and situating villagisation within the state’s fascination with modernisation, the article examines the representation of gender dynamics against a backdrop of Ujamaa’s core principle of equality of all human beings. It argues that the two novels portray gender relations in the fictionalised Ujamaa villagisation period as both monoglossic (in that they reflect the state and Ujamaa’s ideal of human equality in some aspects), and heteroglossic (because they show contradictory relationships to Ujamaa’s ideal of human equality). The novels suggest that this ‘doubleness’ leads to rural modernisation that is contradictory in terms of gender relations.