Though not a Kenyan, Prof. Taban Lo Liyong of South Sudan and Uganda

Though not a Kenyan, Prof. Taban Lo Liyong of South Sudan and Uganda is hard not to celebrate. In the sixties, he famously or infamously remarked that East Africa was “a dry, desolate, barren stretch of wilderness where literature has simply refused to sprout.” While the assessment was true at the time, it continued to echo for decades. I remember as recently as the early 2010s encountering this sentiment in nearly every issue of the Saturday Nation. Thankfully, the burgeoning independent publishing industry has put paid to such observations.

My first encounter with his work was a short story known as "The Old Man of Usumbura", an experimental piece that I was unable to appreciate until I was eighteen years old which is when the power and beauty of the repetition used throughout the piece became apparent. Later on I would read Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha" and in it see the literary tradition Prof. Taban's story belonged to.

His most recent book is an epic poem titled "After Troy", an imagining of Odysseus's return to Ithaca after 20 years away, first ten in the Trojan War and the other ten in accursed wandering. When launching the book in Nairobi two years ago, the Prof officially declared the literary barrenness of East Africa to be over.

#kenyanliteraryhistory