Browsing by Author "Ndlovu, Isaac"

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    An examination of prison, criminality and power in selected contemporary Kenyan and South African narratives
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-12) Ndlovu, Isaac; Roux, Daniel; Samuelson, Meg; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis undertakes a comparative examination of South African and Kenyan auto/biographical narratives of crime and imprisonment. Although some attention is paid to narratives of political imprisonment, the study focuses primarily on autobiographical accounts by criminals, confessional narratives, popular fiction about crime and prison experience, and journalistic accounts of prison life. There is very little critical work at this moment that refers to these forms of prison writing in South Africa and Kenya. Popular prison narratives and to a certain extent the autobiographical in general are characterised by an under-theorised dialecticism. As academic concepts, both the popular and the autobiographical form are characterised by an unstable duality. While the popular has been theorised as being both a field of resistance to power and of consent to its demands, the autobiographical occupies a similar precariously divided position, in this case between fact and fiction, a place where the „I‟ that narrates is simultaneously the subject and object of the narrative. In examining an eclectic body of texts that share the prison as common denominator, my study problematises the tension between self and world, popular and canonical, political and criminal, factual and fictional. In both settings, South Africa and Kenya, the prison as a material and discursive space does not only mirror society but effects shifts and changes in society, and becomes a space of dynamic adaptation and also a locus that disturbs certain hegemonic relations. The way in which the experience of prison opens up to a fundamentally unsettling ambiguity resonates with the ambivalence that characterises both autobiography as genre and the popular as a theoretical concept. My thesis argues that during the entire historical period covered by the narratives that I examine there is a certain excess that attends on the social production of criminality and the practice of imprisonment, both as material realities and as discursive concepts, which allows them to have a haunting effect both on individuals‟ notions of „the self‟ and the constitution of national identities and nationhoods. I argue that the distinction between the colonial and the postcolonial prison is hazy. Therefore a comparative study of Kenyan and South African prison literature helps us understand how modern prisons and notions of criminality in contemporary Africa are intertwined with the broad European colonial project, reflecting larger issues of state power and control over the populace. In relation to South Africa, my study begins with Ruth First‟s 117 Days (1963), and makes a selection of other prisons narratives throughout the apartheid era up to the post-apartheid period which was ushered in by Mandela‟s Long Walk to Freedom (1994). Moving beyond Mandela, I examine other forms of South African crime and prison narratives which have emerged since the publication of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela‟s A Human Being Died that Night (2003) and Jonny Steinberg‟s The Number (2004). In Kenya, I begin with Ngugi wa Thiongo‟s Detained (1981). I then focus on popular narratives of crime and imprisonment which began with the publication of John Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Crime (1984) up to the first decade of the 21st century, marked yet again by the publication of Kiriamiti‟s My Life in Prison (2004). Besides Kiriamiti‟s two narratives, the other Kenyan texts which I examine are John Kiggia Kimani‟s Life and Times of a Bank Robber (1988) and Prison is not a Holiday Camp (1994), Benjamin Garth Bundeh‟s Birds of Kamiti (1991), and Charles Githae‟s, Comrade Inmate (1994).
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    An examination of the satiric vision of Ahmadou Kourouma in 'Waiting for the wild beasts to vote'
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2008-03) Ndlovu, Isaac; Goodman, Ralph; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis examines Ahmadou Kourouma's Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, a novel that mainly satirizes post-colonial African dictatorships. Kourouma entrusts his narrative to a satirical griot-narrator, and the novel adopts a mock-epic mode. This complicates the novel's narrative, and allows the reader to compare the satiric and griotic forms in the examination of Kourouma's overall satiric vision. In his satirization of post-colonial African forms of governance, Kourouma puts to maximum use oral literary techniques such as proverbs, repetition, and song, as satiric tools for mocking, criticising and attacking human folly and wickedness. Both satire and the mock-epic modes' affinity with parody, fantasy, and myth are extensively explored in this thesis. This thesis argues that the combination of griotic and satiric methods that characterizes Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote make it a questioning, demystifying, and subversive novel, giving it a magical realist and post-modernist flavour. In examining Kourouma's literary methods, this thesis uses Thomas Hale's extensive work on the griotic roles in West Africa. This, it is hoped, will further illuminate Kourouma's satiric vision. Hale calls griots masters of the spoken word. This is an important observation since this thesis argues that Kourouma' s use of language in the construction and deconstruction of social power relations elevates him to a position of a literary griot in the modern post-colonial setting. The other similarity between the griotic and satiric methods that is explored at length in this thesis is the satirist and griot's predilection for historical and moral issues. Kourouma's mythicization of Africa's recent history is examined through what Paul Ricoeur calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the "hermeneutics of affirmation'', which refer to the unmasking of myth with the intention of extracting its positive value as a symbolic tool for the exploration of human future possibilities. Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque is also utilized in illuminating Kourouma's use of the donsomana, or purificatory tale, which this thesis argues is comparable to the European medieval carnivals. Both the donsomana and the carnivals are not just occasions for harmless fun, but they can be seen as opportunities for the inversion of social hierarchical roles with the aim of bringing about social change, if not a total revolution in social and political systems. Bakhtin also claims that 'the bodily grotesque' can be used ambivalently as an image of permanent degradation, or as an image of debasement with regeneration in view. This notion is used in this thesis in examining the appropriation of the images of the bodily life by both the griot - narrator and the post-colonial dictators. This thesis argues that the griot uses these images for their positive symbolic effect, while the dictators use the same images for the sinister purpose of degrading victims of their cruel rule. This thesis also looks at the way Kourouma contrasts nationalist anti-colonial struggle with the so-called democratic anti-dictatorship struggle, as a way of showing that ideal solutions to Africa's leadership crisis do not work. Finally, this thesis suggests that Kourouma's pessimistic satire, although specifically targeting post-colonial African governance, is ultimately about the cruel and ineffective leadership that has characterized political affairs since the dawn of human history.