Gikandi Creative Writing- Translation, Bookkeeping, And The Work Of Imagination In Colonial Kenya (review)

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Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya By Derek R. Peterson Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004. vii + 289 pp. ISBN 0-325-07131-4 paper. This is a book on the interplay of texts and contexts in the making of colonial society in Central Kenya. Using extensive archival and oral sources, Peterson sets out to re-examine the colonial encounter between the British and the Gikuyu in the twentieth century and to probe the role of writing and reading in the imagination of communities against the pressures of Protestantism and colonial rule. Derek R. Peterson’s goal, stated rather modestly, is to examine how colonial texts shaped the terms by which the Gikuyu negotiated their modernity and in turn how their idiom and moral economy shaped the emerging colonial library as it sought to account for African experiences. But this book is more than the textual negotiation of colonial encounters: It constitutes a major revision of the nature and grammar of colonialism in Kenya and provides a model for rethinking colonial relationships elsewhere. The social and intellectual history that Peterson presents in Creative Writing, in meticulous detail and elegant prose, is one in which a Gikuyu grammar of selfhood was retooled to meet the moral challenge of Protestantism. In the process, central categories in Gikuyu cultural grammar came to be translated in order to fit into the moral order authorized by the Christian missions. But the translation of Gikuyuness to fit into the idiom of Protestantism was not a one-way process. Indeed, the most original moments in this book are the ones in which Peterson traces how Gikuyu athomi (readers) translated colonial texts to fit into their own shifting moral and economic interest and how they remade the language of politics and intellectual debate. Each of the chapters in this book takes up a key moment in which texts entered into a dialectical relationship with the rapidly changing context of colonial rule.Using the Church of Scotland Mission at Tumutumu as his case study, Peterson addresses important theoretical and political issues in colonial historiography, including the role of comparative religion in the shaping of moral geography, the work of translation in the making of colonial subjectivities, gender and oral politics, Mau Mau, and •  REsearch in african liter atures, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer 2006). © 2006  •

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Ngugi’s later day intervention in debates on writing and orthography. Peterson had unprecedented access to the Church of Scotland archive, but what makes his book pioneering in the history of Protestantism in East Africa is his unique interpretation of the colonial library. The archive Peterson deploys in his book was already evident in previous works on the encounter between Scottish missionaries and Africans, most notably Brian McIntosh’s 1969 PhD dissertation, “The Scottish Mission in Kenya, 1891–1923) and R. Macpherson’s The Presbyterian Church in Kenya, (1970), but Creative Writing stands out in two senses: the first one is Peterson’s competency in Gikuyu, which enabled him to access the intricate idiom that was crafted to respond to the demands of colonial translation; the second one is his ability to unlock the memories of local Tumutumu families and their alternative versions of colonial modernity. As a good social historian Peterson follows the evidence where it leads him and this holds him back from pushing his narrative beyond the tangible; the literary scholar in me craves for more speculation. At the same time, however, it is because he is so closely guided by the evidence that Peterson is able to question some longstanding assumptions about the colonial encounter in Central Kenya. Creative Writing will be of seminal interest to literary and cultural historians because it questions two key assumptions that have hitherto driven the debate on language and colonialism in Kenya. It has been argued, for example, that colonialism privileged English, as the subject of instruction in schools, and thus alienated the African child from his or her natal landscape. This is a central claim in Ngugi’s Decolonising the Mind. The story Peterson tells here is a different one: He shows that questions of language were at the center of Gikuyu grievances against the British in the 1920s and 1930s, but the colonized were not fighting to retain their language, which they had not lost by any measure, but to resist the colonial attempt to differentiate Gikuyu from English and other modern languages. Nationalist linguists resisted the attempt to adopt an orthography that would turn Gikuyu into an ancient, rather than modern, language; they wanted their vernacular to have the “feel of English.” Furthermore, Peterson shows that the politics of cultural nationalism were not driven by a desire to retreat into a vernacular as the source of a nonalienated identity. When in 1929 the colonial government set out to replace English with Swahili, as the language of instruction in schools, Gikuyu independent schools fought to retain the colonial language at all costs. Intellectuals of the independent school movement, most prominently Mbiyu Koinange, graduate of Lincoln University and the Columbia School of Education, argued that an education in Swahili was part of a plot to steal Gikuyu land: “Swahili made Gikuyu forgettable in the British mind” (147), while a mastery of English retained their identity as the protagonists in the struggle over land and rights. A second revisionist move in Peterson’s book regards the still vexed question of Mau Mau. As is well known, the British colonial government, with the aid of psychologists, missionaries, and anthropologists, left behind an extensive archive in which Mau Mau was demonized as an atavistic, unchristian, immoral, millennial movement. The Mau Mau of the popular European imagination was antithetical to religion, a fact reinforced by one of the most influential books of the 1950s, T. F. C. Bewe’s Kikuyu Conflict: Mau Mau and the Christian Witness. Peterson’s book presents a more complicated picture, one in which the binary opposition between Mau Mau and Christian, even Mau Mau and Homeguard (Colonial Royalists), is nullified in the face of archival evidence and the testimony of witnesses. He shows, for example, that in the region around Tumutumu, members of Mau Mau spoke a grammar in which the idiom of Gikuyuness was coached in the language of Protestantism.

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At the height of the conflict in Nyeri, Tumutumu was encircled by a battalion of Mau Mau fighters, but local historians have been puzzled by why the mission, a symbol of colonialism in Kenya, was never attacked. Peterson quotes witnesses and government documents that show a deep relationship between the Mau Mau and its assumed protagonists. By encircling Tumutumu, Mau Mau fighters may have protected the mission from destruction by enemies of the mission; similarly, the encircling battalion was fed by members of the women’s guild. Peterson even suggests that at one point that the Mau Mau and the Homeguard shared a set of beliefs. Peterson quotes government documents showing that members of the Homeguard sat in Dedan Kimathi’s war council. This would appear to be a startling claim for those who have come to see the two sides as structurally and ideologically opposed; still, even when they diverged in means—and often ends—the two sides were products of the same institution. Peterson reminds us that Kimathi had been a reader at Tumutumu in his youth and that General China, the leader of Mau Mau forces in the Mount Kenya forest, and his family were prominent members of the Scottish Church. The history of nationalism in Kenya, already imprisoned by postcolonial disputes, is in desperate need of this kind of revisionism.

—Simon Gikandi P rinceton University

Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies Ed. H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 282 pp. ISBN 0-8130-2776-04 cloth. $65.00.

Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World By Richard Watts Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. ix + 189 pp. ISBN 0-7391-0856-5 paper. The emergence of a specifically “francophone” field of postcolonial enquiry may seem unnecessary and even hazardous, especially given the French-language origins of much postcolonial thought and the risks of fragmentation that such monolingual approach may seem to imply. The manoeuvre nevertheless serves a two-fold purpose, strategic and provisional, challenging the anglophone emphases of much postcolonial criticism while at the same time permitting “francophone studies” itself to develop (much in the same way as “Commonwealth studies” moved on a decade or so ago). Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies is the latest in a series of volumes to map the francophone postcolonial field, its specific aim being to explore the