Above the age of eighteen, whether you love reading or haven’t read in a while, we have all encountered literary fiction in our lives, especially here in Kenya. The title, ‘The Superiority of Literary Fiction’ came to me because of the booktok, bookstagram, argument where many literary influencers have arisen to defend literary fiction against the claim that there is no substance in literary fiction.
The Kenyan education system, as of 8-4-4 has had a cycle of setbooks being studied by highschool students in languages offered in school. This happens from form one to form four where prose is presented to the student in every exam. Books that have been studied in the final exams of KCSE range from ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by John Steinbeck to ‘The River Between’ by Ngugi wa Thiong’o – this happening from before the colonialists left to when I was in high school a little bit over about a decade ago. In the American and IGCSE system, they too have studied books such as ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee. In these books, there were themes that we were all taught to identify, analyse and have independent opinions about for the exams that were coming. This is where I shall begin my argument. In the beige classrooms of the education system.
Before, I continue, I do have to establish two things. Reading is 100% political and a political matter as well as books being part of the ecosystem of the arts. Authors as well as well as artists write from what they know. They write from what they experience and what they feel. In each book, there is truly a lot of pain and writing is a way for writers to reveal the pain within themselves, others and society. And because authors write books within a society, they reflect the same society’s that they live in. The reflect the pain points of themselves and others. From here rise the themes present in the literary fiction that we read. For example, in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by John Steinbeck, the reader explores what it means to live in a country divided into the rich and the poor. Social class is introduced to the reader from earlier on as the main underlying theme and is expounded on thoroughly, leaving the reader in the throws of their emotions as they move with the characters.
In Precolonial Africa, the griot was a member of the Traditional African Communities and societies who would pass down knowledge of the community from generation to generation teaching their community the lessons that they had learned from their fathers and their fathers before them and their fathers before them. They were an integral part of the community as this was how knowledge about culture was carried on. Africa’s oral tradition existed in the minds of these griots who would keep the knowledge of the community safe.
Fast forward to the colonial/post-colonial African authors writers and poets, they were the modern day griots of an Africa that had undergone a merciless erasure of her culture.
When books written by Kenyan authors were introduced to the Kenyan education system, literature stopped being about the global conversation that was mostly happening in the West. Specificity was instroduced and now we had Kenyan teenagers being taught by Kenyan authors/storytellers about the society they lived in – modern day griots. ‘The River Between’, the setbook I studied, was also studied by my father, just after Kenya got her independence.
Oral literature about African culture has been passed down through literary fiction through the works of African writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, Kithaka wa Mberia and Said Ahmed Mohamed. Through their books, their explores the landscape of Africa at her point of a nation transforming from a colonial land to a neocolonial land uncovering the attitudes of those in Africa as well as the personalities that had arisen because of this transformation.
To any Kenyan, the toil of a setbook, in retrospect, has imparted on each of every one of use, a view of society that was previously vieled to us. Through African literary fiction, we evolved and understood the environment we were in as well as the history that the colonial governments tried so hard to cover up. Themes in these books, such as in ‘Mshtahiki Meya’, a play written by Timothy Arega, reveal the workings of the political class in Kenya and the injustices that lie underneath the veil of what they preach. The chants in the protests that began in 2024 have the children of ‘Damu Nyeusi’ and ‘Utengano’, quoting their authors in the streets as they now see the symbolism and literary language that was used in those books, generations apart.
The Western audience may not participate in literary fiction like the African or Person of Colour. For one, their culture and their history has been very clearly documented, although biasedly. This superiority has come about because of the erasure of our own systems of storytelling and also through their very determined miscommunication of Third World culture. This is why we have books being banned in the state of Florida and all over the USA, for example, that threaten to uncover the existence of other cultures’ knowledge and stories. Books such as ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and ‘Songs of Solomon’ narrating the truth of racism and segregation and discrimination in the USA have been challenged continually and removed from school libraries. Western centric literature has sought to clump together the existence of the African, the Black and the Person of Colour, a people into one narrative. Literary fiction on the continent of Africa, in Kenya removes the cloak that makes us one and the same and returns individuality, identity as well as community and history to the African. Readers of ‘Things Fall Apart’ by Chinua Achebe remember how very tangible the story of Okwonkwo was to them. Those reciting the poem ‘Atieno Yo’ carry with them the pain of Atieno each time they revisit the poem or revisit the days of performing the poem at the Drama Festivals.
The notions of literary fiction being dry or modern day fiction being empty is a removal of how cultures tell their stories in the post slavery, post colonial world, through generations as they evolve in the modern world as well as it being a revelation of the sudden rise and uncovering of the societies that exist outside of America and Europe where although, in some areas, little to no development has taken place and no erasure of colonially has taken place, writers have existed in these societies and broken through the veil of the western perspective in literature to tell stories of the African, Kenyan, living on the continent the West once desired to completely own. The seedlings that were the modern day griots’ literary fiction students, have now grown into trees and are the new storytellers of Africa, holding her culture and history.
Therefore, the argument (also being debunked by avid readers in the same America’s and Europe) that literary fiction is bland, dying or empty, should continue this argument without the important voice of African writers.