The Voice ofPan-African Presence

In May this year my wife and I called a few friends to our house in Orange in New Jersey, to celebrate the arrival of our daughter born at the end of April. Among them was Kamau Brathwaite who later rose to read a poem to honour the new arrival. The poem had lines that repeated the name of our daughter, Mũmbi, Mũmbi, Mũmbi, Mũmbi, almost like a religious chant. Now Mũmbi means creator and we gave her the name because she is in fact my mother, Wanjikii, who died in 1989, but now reborn in Mũmbi. Her full name then is Mũmbi Wanjiku, creator of my mother. Mũmbi is also the name of the original mother of all Gikiiyii people. In thinking about the evening afterwards, I was struck anew by Kamau Brathwaite’s invocation of the name.

My thoughts took me back to 1972 when Kamau, then Edward Brathwaite came to the Department of Literature in Nairobi University, Kenya, on a City of Nairobi Fellowship. The department was undergoing tremendous changes. We were trying to break away from the old colonial tradition that emphasized our colonial connections to Europe as primary but not our natural connections to Africa and the rest of the world. We are all familiar with the often told stories of African children having to learn all about daffodils and snow long before they are able to name the flowers of their own lands. Rebellion against this was the basis of the 1969 Nairobi declaration calling for the abolition of the English Department as then constituted and for its restructuring on entirely new lines. By 1972 we had started breaking away from the centrality of English literature in our syllabus to a new dispensation that emphasized the centrality of the African experience at home on the continent and abroad in the Caribbean, Afro-America and other parts of the world. We wanted a dialogue among all the literatures of the entire Pan African universe and between them and those of South America, Asia and Europe in that order. Central to the enterprise was orature, the long tradition of verbal arts passed from mouth to ear in both their classical and contemporary expressions. Other needs arose from the new centrality. For instance, instead of inviting Shakespearean scholars from England we now wanted scholars from the rest of Africa, from the Caribbean and from Afro-America.