Literature, Law, and Oral Culture in East Africa

I begin my dissertation by recognizing the simple but profound fact that in many African societies, orature is law. The myths, stories, songs, and proverbs that form oral traditions archive normative wisdom and are used in legal procedures. Focusing on East Africa, my dissertation examines the dynamic history of orature-as-law from its initial contact with colonial culture to post-independence struggles to define nationhood and the rule of law in the literature of Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia. In the opening chapter, I examine Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937) alongside Montagu Slater's The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta(1955). I show how representations of oral culture in colonial non-fiction reveal anxieties over orality's potential to undermine colonial law. Oral culture united Africans through a communal idiom of traditional law that resisted conformity to colonial institutions by adapting to changing circumstances and to new forms of technology (i.e., to electronic culture).;Following independence, colonial law lived on in the hands of neo-colonial rulers, and many authors recognized orature's continued promise as an alternative source of law. Okot p'Bitek, for example, insisted that traditional African poets are law makers. My second chapter argues that Okot's lengthy song poems incorporate principles of Ugandan oral law in order to demonstrate how the self-destructive tendencies brought on by residual colonial culture can be reversed through the restorative procedures of traditional law. In chapter three, I illustrate how Ngugi wa Thiong'o's activist work in rural Kenyan theater stages a particular concern with oppressive labor laws. Ngugi's own creative labor becomes increasingly collaborative as he composes orature-infused plays with illiterate peasants and workers, using mode of production that poses a democratic alternative to the autocratic labor model of the Kenyan State. I conclude in chapter four with a reading of Nuruddin Farah's trilogy of novels Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, which demonstrate the sinister possibilities of orature when it is appropriated by a Somali dictatorship. Farah then explores further revolutionary adaptations of orature in relationship to the written word and electronic media as a way of countering the propagandistic language of African dictatorships.