Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author and academic, who has been described as "East Africa's leading novelist". He began writing in English, switching to write primarily in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright has been translated into 100 languages.
Es'kia Mphahlele was a South African writer, educationist, artist and activist celebrated as the Father of African Humanism and one of the founding figures of modern African literature.
Oral literature, orature, or folk literature is a genre of literature that is spoken or sung as opposed to that which is written, though much oral literature has been transcribed. There is no standard definition, as anthropologists have used varying descriptions for oral literature or folk literature. A broad conceptualization refers to it as literature characterized by oral transmission and the absence of any fixed form. It includes the stories, legends, and history passed through generations in a spoken form.
Taban Lo Liyong is a poet, academic and writer of fiction and literary criticism from South Sudan. He was born in Kajo Kaji, Acholiland, in the Equatoria region of southern Sudan, but taken to Uganda at an early age. His political views, as well as his outspoken disapproval of the post-colonial system of education in East Africa, have inspired both further criticism as well as controversy since the late 1960s.
Makerere University is Uganda's largest and oldest institution of higher learning, first established as a technical school in 1922, and the oldest currently active university in East Africa. It became an independent national university in 1970. Today, Makerere University is composed of nine colleges and one school offering programmes for about 36,000 undergraduates and 4,000 postgraduates. The main administrative block was gutted by fire in September 2020 and the cause of the fire is yet to be established.
In June 1962 a conference of African literature in the English language, the first African Writers Conference, was held at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. Officially called a "Conference of African Writers of English Expression", it was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Mbari Club in association with the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of Makerere, whose director was Gerald Moore.
Peter Nazareth is a Ugandan-born literary critic and writer of fiction and drama.
Grace Emily Ogot was a Kenyan author, nurse, journalist, politician and diplomat. Together with Charity Waciuma she was the first Anglophone female Kenyan writer to be published. She was one of the first Kenyan members of parliament and she became an assistant minister.
Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing. His father is the author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution.
African literature is literature from Africa, either oral ("orature") or written in African and Afro-Asiatic languages. Examples of pre-colonial African literature can be traced back to at least the fourth century AD. The best-known is the Kebra Negast, or "Book of Kings."
Elvania Namukwaya Zirimu was a Ugandan poet and dramatist. She formed the Ngoma Players, with the policy of writing and producing Ugandan plays, and was actively concerned with the National Theatre. She belonged to the early generation of English-language Ugandan writers and playwrights that includes novelist Okello Oculi, playwright John Ruganda, and novelist Austin Bukenya. Her best-known work is the one-act play Keeping up with the Mukasas, included in David Cook's 1965 anthology of East African plays, Origin East Africa.
Kenyan literature describes literature which comes from Kenya. Kenya has a long oral and written literary tradition, primarily in English and Swahili, the two official languages of the country.
Jonathan Kariara (1935–1993) was a Kenyan poet who wrote works including "A Leopard Lives in a Muu Tree". He was born in 1935 at the Church of Scotland Mission, Tumutumu, in Nyeri County, Kenya, in 1935.
Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo was a Kenyan professor, playwright, author, activist and poet. She was a literary critic and professor of Literature, Creative Writing and Research Methods in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. She was forced into exile in 1982 from Kenya during the Daniel Arap Moi dictatorship for activism and moved to teach in the United States, and later Zimbabwe. She taught Orature, Literature, and Creative Writing.
David Cook was a British academic, literary critic and anthologist. As a professor of literature at the Universities of Makerere and Ilorin, he played an important role in encouraging literature in East Africa.
The Black Hermit was the first play by the Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, and the first published East African play in English. The travelling theatre of Makerere College was the first to produce the play, putting it on in honour of Ugandan independence at the Ugandan National Theatre in Kampala in November 1962. The play was published in a small edition by Makerere University Press in 1963, and republished in the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1968.
Gabriel Ruhumbika is a Tanzanian born novelist, short story writer, translator and academic. His first novel, Village in Uhuru, was published in 1969. He has written several subsequent novels in Swahili. He has also taught literature at a number of universities, and, until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in the USA.
Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, by the Kenyan novelist and post-colonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ's best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a preeminent voice theorizing the "language debate" in post-colonial studies.
Herman Cornel Lupogo was a Tanzanian military officer and government administrator. After graduating from Makerere University, he enlisted in the Tanzania People's Defence Force in 1965. He held various positions in the army, including head of the National Leadership Academy, and served as a brigadier during the Uganda–Tanzania War of 1978 and 1979. He retired with the rank of major general in 1992, and subsequently worked as a government administrator. He chaired the Tanzania Commission for AIDS from 2001 until 2007, and died in 2014.
The Emergence of African Fiction is a 1972 academic monograph by American scholar Charles R. Larson. It was published initially by Indiana University Press, and again, in a slightly revised edition, in 1978 by Macmillan. Larson's study has elicited very different responses: it was praised as an early and important book in the study and appreciation of African literature in the West, but for others it remained stuck in a Eurocentric, even colonizing mode in which Western aesthetics were still the unspoken standard for artistic assessment.
