African Literature Question Paper

African Literature

Course:Bachelor Of Arts In Literature

Institution: Kenyatta University question papers

Exam Year:2009

KENYATTA UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS 2009/2010
FIRST SEMESTER EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF
BACHELOR OF ARTS AND BACHELOR OF EDUCATION

ALT 401: AFRICAN LITERATURE

DATE:
Wednesday 23rd December 2009 TIME: 11.00am ? 1.00pm

Page 1 of 7

3.
Basing your response on any story from Yusuf Idriss? The cheapest Nights

discuss the effect of Islam on the development of literature in North Africa.

J Ruganda
REPLY TO OKOT P?BITEK?S ?LAWINO?
I
I can?t return to the village
I own no homestead there
I own no homestead at all
I have no roots
I posses no roots
In any homestead
Rats form distant homesteads
Gnawed the roots
Entirely
While the elders hunted hogs
And women gathered firewood.

Now I live in a swaying web
Cut by invisible knives
The strands give way
Snap by snap
But while the last holds
I?ll cling to it
Like a desperate spider.

II
I can?t return to the village
Let government tractors
Uproot pumpkins in homesteads.
I don?t care
I don?t bother
Page 2 of 7

Provided I live
Here in town
Drifting form garbage bin
To another shebeen
Like the July smoke
In a whirl-wind

Those whose toes
Can break the colds beads of dew
Let them trek back to the village
To gather monuments of ash
To clean their electric cookers
And monuments for foreign friends
At Christmas time.

III
Let them trek back to the village
To gather drops
of lost childhood urine
Ash and dung
Like herdsmen of broke fortunes
Let them go intermingle
With village gossip
And offenders of tribal totems
With those that see witchcraft
In the eyes of the young
Day and night.

Let them go
Let them go count.
Menstruation stains
Behind bark-cloth covered
Page 3 of 7

Buttocks
Of village women
Who have no time for under-things
And of men?s buttocks
Shrivelled dry by jiggers.

IV
Those that can create time
To spare
Let them go mourn the dead
With sordid ineffectual tears
And bewail the ever-dying
All day long
Over big pots of pombe
Let them
Let them trek back
But refuse to go
I can?t arrest time
And churm it in ekyanzi
To appease the ash heaps
Of the village.

V
I have seen great government tractors
Plough away our homestead
Plough down the central pole
Where umbilical cords of our childhood
Dangled confidently
I have seen them crush calabashes.

Mutilate mortars
Like clumsy drunken doctors
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And engrave Bamya?s corpse
My grandpa?s corpse
Like cannibals
And scatter his broken bones
Round and round, round and round about
As satiated dogs do to bones
His ghost dangles down
Electric wires
Roasting with current

I have seen this
And I have seen more.

V1
I have seen government tractors
Shallow Kaikara?s shrine
Like the flames of wild fires
And charge at little plantains
Like ferocious lions
And vomit amputated stems
And tears them to flecks and fritters
I can?t return to the village
I own no homestead there
I own no homestead at all
I have no roots
I posses not roots
In any homestead.

VII

True
I was not born in town
Page 5 of 7

I smell the soil and the rain
Like any boy in the Republic does
True, very true
I had bark clothes for my bibs
Maggots for my toys
And rats for my playmates
But I repeat:
No village for me.

VIII

I?ll stay in town
Drifting form shebben
To garbage bins
Like smoke in the wind
I?ll stay and talk of hikes in taxes
And of the drop of wages
Dropping like an avalanche
I?ll talk of ?Hakuma Kazi? posters
That blast my face
And haunt my day dreams
As I roam the streets
In search of another shebeen
Another garbage bin.

IX
I?ll talk of saucy policemen
And tough sons of guns
That guard state banquets

Jealously
Banquet I never attend
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Banquet I cannot attend
I am not expected to
Because I?ve not grown
A pot belly
And puffed up cheeks as yet.

X
I?ve seen all this
And more
Done in my name
While I lodge between
Shebbens and garbage bins
But I say
A whirl wind
Has swept across
The footprints of my childhood.

I?ll never return to the village
For I cannot mount
The elephant dung heaps
That bestrew the footpaths\\to my Homestead that was
And is no more.

Discuss the nature of ?black history? alluded to in this poem.

Page 7 of 7

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