Browsing by Author "Kahyana, Danson Sylvester"

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    Depiction of African indigenous education in Akiki Nyabongo’s Africa answers back (1936)
    (CSSALL, 2016) Kahyana, Danson Sylvester
    This paper examines the depiction of African indigenous formal and informal education and instruction in Akiki K. Nyabongo’s novel, Africa Answers Back (1936), and how his African characters try to protect what they have learnt from their elders (norms, customs and beliefs) at a time when they are threatened by the activities of European missionaries.. I examine how Nyabongo portrays the threats, mostly through confrontations between his main character, Mujungu (the Chief’s son and heir apparent) and Reverend Jeremiah Randolph Hubert (the missionary who propagates Western notions with the aim of destroying African indigenous ones). The major finding of the paper is that while Nyabongo sees Western education as a threat to the survival of African indigenous education, as well as the norms, customs and beliefs it passes from one generation to another, at the same time, he presents this hallmark of Western culture as having something positive that African people need to acquire in order to improve their living standards, that is to say, Western medicine.
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    From a habit to a husband : representation of the intersection between religion and masculinities in John Ruganda’s play, The Burdens (1972)
    (Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, 2020) Kahyana, Danson Sylvester
    This paper examines how John Ruganda represents the intersection between religion and masculinities in his play, The Burdens (1972), which imagines an ex-Catholic nun marrying and bringing up a family. It argues that literary texts are an important avenue through which the intersection between religion and gender can be explored, leading to a rich harvest of nuanced insights. Data is collected through a close reading of the play under analysis, within the socio-political context in which it was written and produced, that is, the politically turbulent decade following Uganda’s flag independence in 1962, characterised – among others – by events like the abolition of kingdoms by the Prime Minister, Milton Obote, and his ouster in a military coup by his army commander, General Idi Amin, on 25 January, 1971. The analysis of the text is guided by insights drawn from selected scholars of masculinities featured in Helen Nabasuta Mugambi and Tuzyline Jita Allan’s edited volume, entitled Masculinities in African and Cultural Texts (2010).
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    Negotiating (trans)national identities in Ugandan literature
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Kahyana, Danson Sylvester; Steiner, Tina; Spencer, Lynda Gichanda; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines how selected Ugandan literary texts portray constructions and negotiations of national identities as they intersect with overlapping and cross-cutting identities like race, ethnicity, gender, religious denomination, and political affiliation. The word “negotiations” is central to the close reading of selected focal texts I offer in this thesis for it implies that there are times when a tension may arise between national identity and one or more of these other identities (for instance when races or ethnic groups are imagined outside the nation as foreigners) or between one national identity (say Ugandan) and other national identities (say British) for those characters who occupy more than one national space and whose understanding of home therefore includes a here (say Britain) and a there (say Uganda). The study therefore examines the portrayal of how various borders (internal and external, sociocultural and geopolitical) are navigated in particular literary texts in order to construct, reconstruct, and perform (trans)national identity. The concept of the border is crucial to this study because any imagining of community is done against a backdrop of similarities (what the “us” share in common) and differences (what makes the “them” distinct from “us”). Drawing from various theorists of nationalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism and gender, I explore the representation of key events in Uganda’s history (for instance colonialism, decolonization, expulsion, and civil war) and investigate how selected writers narrate/sing these events in their constructions of Ugandan (trans)national identities. My analysis is guided by insights drawn from the work of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia. His proposition that the novel is a site for the dialogic interaction of multiple languages (say of authorities, generations and social groups) and of speeches (say of narrators, characters and authors) each espousing a particular worldview or ideology enables me to create a correlation between literary texts and the nation (which contains a multiplicity of identities like races, ethnic groups, genders, religious denominations and political affiliations with each having its own interests and ‘language’), and to argue that Ugandan national identity is constituted by the existence of these very identities that overlap with it. By paying attention to the way selected literary texts portray how these disparate identities dialogue with the larger national community in different situations and how the national community in turn dialogues with other nations through cultural exchanges, migration, exile and diaspora, this study aims at unravelling the dynamics involved in the negotiation of (trans)national identities both within the nation and outside it.