09:00 - 10:30
Room: Arts – Lecture Room 5
Stream: Text, Paratext and Context in African Autobiographical Narratives
Chair/s:
Dina Ligaga
Perspective on Life Writing in Kenya: Visions and Omissions
Godwin Siundu
University of Nairobi, Nairobi

Kenyan Poet Pheroze Nowrojee’s autobiography, A Kenyan Journey (2014), joins a growing body of life narratives by Kenyans of South Asian ancestry, whose reflections contest or affirm, as other works of fiction do, certain aspects of national histories from the early colonial period to contemporary times. And while earlier novelistic / autobiographical texts focus on the human experiences of marginalisation from a political perspective, Nowrojee’s memoir suggests yet another oversight: the tendency by such writers to overwrite institutional and architectural artifices associated with South Asians in East Africa by reifying the Kenya Uganda Railway as the most important, and sometimes the only, emblem of the immigrants’ conquest of geographical and historical spaces in Kenya. Yet, as Nowrojee demonstrates by pictorial and narrative focus on South Asian heritage in Kenya and Uganda, the available literary terrain has subsumed many institutional, architectural, and other monuments that collectively attest to the making of contemporary national histories, which can be read from alternative perspectives as material cultural pointers at a larger heritage. Using Nowrojee’s A Kenyan Journey as the beginning point, I propose to examine how life writings by Kenyans of South Asian ancestry engage with the slippery question re-presenting institutional or architectural markers of the community’s heritage in the region.


Reference:
Th-A41 Autobiography 4-P-003
Presenter/s:
Godwin Siundu
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Arts – Lecture Room 5
Chair/s:
Dina Ligaga
Date:
Thursday, 13 September
Time:
09:30 - 09:45
Session times:
09:00 - 10:30