The University of Nairobi has served as the intellectual epicenter of Kenyan literary production since its founding, housing a Department of Literature that became one of the most influential sites of cultural decolonization in Africa. From Ngugi wa Thiong'o's campaign to abolish the English Department to the literary journal Busara and the explosion of student writing that challenged both colonial mentalities and postcolonial authoritarianism, the university's literary culture has shaped Kenya's national imagination and contributed major works to the canon of African literature.
The university began as the Royal Technical College in 1956, became the University College of Nairobi in 1963, and achieved full university status in 1970. Its English Department, modeled on British university curricula, initially taught the standard canon of English literature - Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics - with African writing treated as a marginal supplement. This curricular arrangement was challenged in 1968 when Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban lo Liyong issued their famous position paper "On the Abolition of the English Department," arguing that the study of literature in an African university should be organized around African oral traditions and written literatures, with European and other world literatures studied in relation to the African experience rather than as its center.
The resulting Department of Literature - reconstituted along the lines proposed in the position paper - became the institutional base for a literary culture that extended far beyond the classroom. Ngugi, who joined the faculty after publishing Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), used his teaching position to develop a critical practice that connected literary analysis to questions of land, class, and political power in postcolonial Kenya. His courses attracted students who would themselves become significant writers and intellectuals, creating a generational chain of literary influence rooted in the university.
Busara, the literary journal founded at the university in 1968, provided a publication venue for poetry, fiction, criticism, and polemical essays by both established and emerging writers. Under successive editors including Ngugi and other faculty members, Busara published work that engaged with the political disillusionment of the post-independence period, the persistence of neocolonial economic structures, and the cultural politics of language choice in African writing. The journal's pages reflected the broader debates animating African intellectual life - whether to write in European languages or indigenous tongues, how to create literary forms adequate to African experience, and what role the writer should play in societies struggling with poverty, corruption, and authoritarian governance.
Student literary activism at the University of Nairobi was inseparable from the broader student political movement that challenged the Moi government's authoritarianism. The student magazine Mwangaza and various drama groups produced work critical of government corruption, ethnic patronage, and the suppression of democratic freedoms. Ngugi's own trajectory illustrated the risks: his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), performed in Kikuyu language at Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, led to his detention without trial by the Kenyatta government, ending his university career and beginning a long exile. The detention demonstrated both the power that the state attributed to literary culture and the university's vulnerability as a site of political dissent.
The literary community that formed around the University of Nairobi included figures who achieved international prominence: Grace Ogot, Kenya's first published woman novelist; Micere Githae-Mugo, poet and dramatist; Meja Mwangi, novelist of urban working-class life; and Ngugi himself, whose subsequent career - including the turn to writing in Gikuyu and the theoretical work Decolonising the Mind - continued the decolonizing project initiated in the university's literary culture. The Department of Literature trained generations of secondary school teachers who carried its critical perspectives into Kenya's education system, extending the influence of university literary culture far beyond the campus itself.
See Also
Sources
- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Taban lo Liyong, and Henry Owuor-Anyumba. "On the Abolition of the English Department." In Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 145–150. London: Heinemann, 1972.
- Kurtz, J. Roger. Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears: The Postcolonial Kenyan Novel. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998.
- Mwangi, Evan. Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009.
- Ogude, James. Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation. London: Pluto Press, 1999.
- Amoko, Apollo Obonyo. Postcolonialism in the Wake of the Nairobi Revolution: Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Idea of African Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Gikandi, Simon. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.