Department of Literature

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African Anglophonism, Translation and the Teaching of Ngugi’s Works
(Modern Languages of America, 2012) Andindilile, Michael
‘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This essay examines two historical documents—David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World and Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, and Destiny of the Colored People published in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.
Alterity in Hybridity:Examining the Impact of Globalization on African Children's Literature through the Works of Tololwa M. Mollel
(Sankofa: A Journal of African Children's and Young Adult Literature, 2012) Mpale Yvonne Mwansasu Silkiluwasha
The articles examines the stereotype of the younger generation holding decision-making power over adults in three picture books by Tanzanian author Tololwa Mollel, namely “Song Bird”, “Orphan Boy”, and “Shadow Dance”. It demonstrates that the author compromises the interests of Africans by striving to adopt Western values. It explores the theory of hybridity by Homi Bhabha, which calls for the construction of new identity for immigrant writers who live in Western countries.
Art and History: Ebrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile
(The Department of History and Archaeology, University of Dar es Salaam and The Historical Association of Tanzania, 2009) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
Beliefs and the Spiritual World: Socio-cultural and Material Conditions of Tanzania’s Occult Fiction
(Taylor and Francis, 2018) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
This paper examines how traditional beliefs and spirituality inform and are represented in A. M Hokororo's Salma's Spirit (1997), A. S. Mmasi's Satanic Tortures (1998) and I. Yohana's Tears from a Lonely Heart (2013). The paper proceeds from the assumption that these works expose the link between beliefs and the spiritual world on the one hand, and social and historical conditions on the other. Using an eclectic approach due to the multifaceted and multi-disciplinary nature of issues covered in the works, the paper explores how these beliefs serve as a source of the authors' materials and inform the thematisation and characterisation of their works. Specifically, the paper looks at how local beliefs influence characterisation and thematisation in Salma's Spirit, Satanic Tortures and Tears from a Lonely Heart. It argues that the authors use beliefs to account for the actions of characters and concretise the themes behind the novels’ rhetorical agenda.
Betwixt and Between: Negotiating Parental Abandonment and Family Life in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This
(University of Dar es Salaam, College of Humanities, 2018) Ng'umbi, Yunusy Castory
Using African feminist and post-colonial theories, this paper examines the representation of the institution of family in Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This, in order to explore the character’s creation of a third space – one that is ambivalent and traumatic – in her context of divorce and family abandonment. As depicted in the narrative, a major reason behind such family tragedies is an overlap between patriarchy and the postcolonial state. Thus, through the protagonist’s troubled identity and traumatic experience due to her family’s dynamics, the narrative questions the role of a child in reconnecting fragmented family bonds. This heroine’s traumatised hatred of her culture and of the institution of motherhood raises questions about the future of African feminism. If this ideology marginalises culture and renders motherhood as an institution no longer centrally important to contemporary African women, then it requires critical engagement. I explore how the literary genre inspired by African feminism enters established socio-cultural spaces critically and interrogates family dynamics ruthlessly. And I query whether it offers any solutions to the dilemmas of women that are uncovered and illuminated thereby. I will argue that the child protagonist in this narrative is presented not merely as a victim of circumstance – existing as she does betwixt and between family identities that are simultaneously familiar and strange – she is also depicted as attempting valiantly to reconnect the fragmented family bonds.
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.
Can't a Girl have it All? Interrogating Gender Paradigms in Ama Ata Aidoo's The Girl Who Can and Other Stories.
(Tanzania Journal of Population Studies and Development, 2015) Mpale Yvonne Mwansasu Silkiluwasha
This article seeks to explore Ama Ata Aidioo’s (2002) work for the purpose of interrogating how African feminists and/or women writers represent challenges facing African women, as well as suggested or implied solutions to their problems. The analysis interprets four stories: “Lice”, “Comparisons”, “The Girl Who Can”, and “Heavy Moments” in an attempts to identify elements of women’s oppressions under patriarchy rule, and to what extent women can challenge that system. Although some female characters in these stories have proved to challenge the system and subverted men’s hierarchy, the underlying implications as to what a woman ought to do to overcome the oppression leaves a lot to be desired. The article attempts to disentangle Aidoos’s narratives, and in the process of disentangling it demonstrates newly established feminist constructs that ought to be subverted.
Democracy and Good Governance in PB Mayega’s ‘The People’s Schoolmaster’
(JOAAG, 2011) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
This essay uses P.B. Mayega’s The People’s Schoolmaster, which exposes the true face of democracy in many African countries. The essay focuses on Mayega’s fictional account because fiction in Africa tends to paint a more realistic picture about democracy in Africa. It is commonly accepted that democracy and good governance are necessary development tools, whether in a developed or developing country. Whereas there is ample evidence in the Western world to illustrate that this democratic principle does actually work when put into practice, in developing countries, especially in Africa, evidence on the ground demonstrates otherwise. Though many African countries profess and market themselves as democratic nations, they fail to implement democratic principles. The kind of democracy practiced in many African countries is largely symbolic and cosmetic and stifles rather than promote democratic principles.
Diasporic Post-Colonial African Children's Books and the Logic of Abjection
(Marang: Journal of Language and Literature, 2015) Mpale Yvonne Mwansasu Silkiluwasha
Lacan's mirror stage points out to the human tendency in desiring wholeness while objecting what is considered to be the lack, and in this article whiteness represents the desired wholeness. using children's books written by diasporic writers I demonstrate the logic of abjection while analyzing the inability of these writers to establish the symbolic identity.
Disciplacement and Identity Formation in Allen Sawaya's Destined to Fame
(Global Journal of English Language and Literature, 2016-09-16) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
This paper explores the search for identity, displacement and belonging in Allen Sawaya’s Destined to Fame. The novel destined to fame depicts the world as a site of horror and interrogates the way the notions of identity, displacement and belonging affect an individual. In the novel, Sawaya emphasizes that the notions of identity, displacement and belonging are shaped by social and political situations which in turn result into emotional experiences or attachment to the affected individual. Through the protagonist William Forster- an African adopted child living in the UK, this paper argues that even though an individual can belong to the world but that individual can not belong home. This paper uses the postcolonial theory because the issues of identity, displacement or unhomliness and belonging are central topics in postcolonial thoughts.
Dramatizing Aborted Ritual: Postmodernist Imaginings in Wole Soyinka's Death and the Kings Horseman
(UNISA, 2017) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.; Omigbule, Morufu B.
Death and King’s Horseman showcases a condition of cultural rupture. Wole Soyinka’s manner of realizing this is through theoretical adventure that reveals his own very postmodernist imaginings, perhaps prior to the play’s composition but certainly at “the creative furor”. Recognizing and focusing on an overriding theoretical influence in a composite artistic production such as Death would significantly defuse the burden of interpreting Death which on its own constitutes a distinct unit in Soyinka’s repertoire of creative writings labelled as complex and obscure. The present study reveals the play’s robust discursive worth by identifying and exploring its postmodernist constitutive parameters. As the study further reinforces the claim that the playwright is cultural analyst of the avant-gardist category, the postmodernist figuration of the play deserves to be noted for all it entails and should inspire renewed criticism of the text, whose canonical status promises a prolonged regime in African and world literary studies.
Edwin Mtei's From a Goatherd to Governor and the Politics of Representation
(Galda Verlag, 2016) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
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.
Fasihi ya Kiswahili na rushwa Tanzania: Thomas A. R. Kamugisha na Kitu Kidogo Tu
(Idara ya Kiswahili, Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, 2006) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
Makala hii inajaribu kuelezea mchango wa fasihi ya Kiswahili katika kuijadili rushwa. Kwa kurejea kwenye Riwaya ya Thomas A.R. Kamugisha Kitu Kidogo tu! makala hii inasawilisha miongo takribani mitatu ya dhana ya “kitu kidogo” na athari zake kwa jamii ya Tanzania. Kwa kuijadili riwaya ya Kitu Kidogo tu! makala hii inajaribu pia kutoa picha ya Tanzania ya leo na kesho.
Fictional reconstruction of history of Kilwa in M.G Vassanji's The Magic of Saida
(Tanzania Zamani: A Journal of Historical Research and Writing, 2019) Emmanuel, Emmanuel; Emmanuel, Lema
This paper explores M.G Vassanji’s novel, The Magic of Saida (2012). It draws on the idea of reconstruction of history used in anthropology and utilizes it as an approach in carrying out textual analysis of the novel and exploring how the novel reconstructs the history of Kilwa. Additionally, it employs Stephen Greeblatt idea of New Historicism, whereby, appreciation of the text history and textuality of history is done on the assumption that the novel is a closely-knit fabric composed of both historical and literary threads. The paper argues that Kamal Punja’s story about his return to Kilwa to look for his childhood lover, Saida is well intertwined with accounts and varying versions of stories of old Kilwa, slavery and slave trade in Kilwa, German intervention in Kilwa and African resistances. It is further argued that Vassanji is not only writing Kamal’s story but also allowing Kamal to revisit his past and reconstruct the history and in that way through the novel fiction and history have been used by Vassanji to propose a view that there are differences between actual historical events, varying perceptions of the events and the histories about the events, thus Vassanji has provided readers with a room to question the process by which we represent ourselves and our world and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct our history.
German Colonialism, Memory and Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile
(IISTE, 2014) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.
This paper examines how Ebrahim Hussein in Kinjeketile uses memory of German colonial rule in the then Tanganyika, a part of German East Africa to interrogate the encounter between the coloniser and colonised. Hussein’s play largely deploys the African belief system to represent a moment of great conflict between the German colonial administration and native Tanganyikans as the locals struggle to build national consciousness under nascent nationalism. The paper uses a new historicist approach to determine the discrepancy between fact and fiction, much as the play is based on an actual event that took place in the 1905-1907 period. It argues that the reconstruction of the Maji Maji rebellion is geared towards evoking the memory of the past to teach the present and the future generations rather than present a historical fact. Thus the paper demonstrates the power of memory in invigorating the present in relation to the future.
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.
‘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.
Individualism and Collectivism in Ebrahim Hussein's Plays
(Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili, Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, 2012) Mwaifuge, Eliah S.

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