Fiction as National Memory in the Age of Mass Protests

Considering the 2024 Kenyan Gen Z protest, and the rising discontent among African youths, can literature play the role of lens in times of moral crisis, that too for a population that doesn’t read?

Written by Hassan Kassim

Aug 18, 2024

Collage by Dami Mojid for THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Photo 1 - South Sudanese writer, Professor Taban Lo Liyong / TABANLOYONG. Photo 2 - #TotalShutDownKE Femicide Protesters in Nairobi, Kenya, 2024. GEORGE MURIAMA / FLICKR.

This essay features in our forthcoming print issue, ‘The Enduring Voice of Wole Soyinka’. Pre-order the magazine at our 20 per cent advance discount, here.

Kenya has no recollection of its past. Michela Wrong, mostly known for It’s Our Turn to Eat, in fact, posits in the 2009 book that Kenyans have been disallowed from looking into their past. The collective national psyche could be easily diagnosed as a case of historic amnesia, ‘blindspotting’ all the compounded experiences of what came before. If tradition really is the handing of all that is deemed worthy of handing over, the Kenyan man is an uncultured man, unearthed by any firm roots, a bobbing insular individual in this liquid modernity.

This lack of history could attribute an upside to it, that kind of inbred Kenyan exceptionalism in the spirit of our populace. That confounding positivity. There’s nothing that cannot be done for a Kenyan, and it’s exhilarating the frontiers that this has opened up. Kenyans excel tremendously compared to many African nations in matters of technology and have become one of Africa’s entrepreneurial mainstays.

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About the Author

Hassan Kassim

is a writer and Swahili literary translator based in Mombasa, Kenya.

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Fiction as National Memory in the Age of Mass Protests