Unbeknown to me, when I bought African Love Stories, an anthology I had purchased Monica Arac de Nyeko’s Jambula Tree. What a pleasant surprise!
The story is told in first person narrative by one of the main protagonists Anyango. This creates a strong sense of intimacy and familiarity between the reader and the speaker. As the story unfolds the reader becomes aware that the speaker, Anyango is addressing her childhood friend Sanyu. Sanyu, it is rumoured is about to return.
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Anyango it seems is reliving their past. What she recounts is humourous but always tinged with a little sadness at the life around them. The tale is more than a forbidden love beneath the Jambula Tree; it is also about broken hearts, forgotten dreams and the reality of poverty.
Mama Atim is one such tragedy. She, who is the neighbourhood gossip and the whistleblower of their love, is described to have a mouth that ‘worked at words like ants on a cob of maize.’ She spends her days waiting for her husband to bring home the bacon while she sits by idly, bleached skinned and gossiping with the many other Mama Atims on the Nakawa Housing Estate. One gets the feeling however, that she would not have anything else to do except face the fact that her life has remained unchanged as other people’s stories unfolded around her.
Other characters with broken dreams are Anyango’s lonely mother, who longs for the love of her husband as she toils for her children. Or Sanyu’s mother who is wealthier and appears to be happy. They both wear veils of hope in order to cope with their lives and the truths they do not want to face.
In a way, the two girls’ friendship is a kind of hope, a dream of something better than the path that leads to Mama Atim. It is a rich tale and not a little powerful and engaging.
3 Comments
January 6, 2008 at 6:28 pm
When I was young, a child to be precise, we lived and grew up with rich African stories folk lores, spiced with idioms, imagery and all.
The heroic story tellers of the Character moulding stories of those days left us asking for more, soon as the evening shades prevailed.
I cannot remember immoral or sensual references in those stories.
I wonder why today’s heroes and heroines of African litereature have chosen to create so much room to celeberate such non traditional themes as African teens promiscuity, homosexuality, lesbianism etc. I think we all must rise up to a constant subtle invasion of the original labrynth of African tradional matrix..This is not meant to question Monica Nyeko’s freedom to nose at what she called ‘the gospel according to St Morality’ – whatever that is!
However since it has suddenly become customary to eulogise western moral standards in order to receive applause from the white man, it is important that the rest of us who feel strongly about the beauty of purity as part of our up bringing ; we should begin speaking out against some of these literary vices.
Granted these writers smile to western banks to get western money for celeberating themes our parents would have condemmed in their quest to shape the true African image, nvertheless our effort today can save African litereature from drifting too far in an ocean of ideological conflicts where values have become the victims.
July 1, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Like the proverbial ostrich, nkem chima buries his head in sand and hopes that by the time he unburies it, there will be no more lesbianism, homosexuality or other ‘western’ themes.
Nyeko’s writing is surely excellent, her story even more so. Acknowleding this does not mean accepting non traditional themes as African teens promiscuity, homosexuality, lesbianism etc.
it encompasses all that a great story must have.
January 15, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I do not question the excellence of modern writers of African litereature like Monica Nyeko. They have done us proud anyway. However, I urge Mona to think deeply about the kernel of the true African culture of story telling from which we all emerged. It was devoid of today´s unrestricted explicit sexual themes of bestiality, orgy and lesbianism. Even the early masters of african litereature as told in written english were careful to preserve what was TRULY african in their various themes.
Achebe saw this cultural invasion ahead of us all and warned that the ´centre can no longer hold´ The white man came and his coming upturned every thing…´ In the process many heads rolled; new words, new usages and new applications gained entrance into men´s heads and hearts and the old soceity gradually gave way. The process continued even till today..´ and then he went on in Things Fall Apart ´..I fear for you, I fear for the clan…´
In the ongoing conflict of cultures we Africans must be willing to slow down the invasion from the western world. This is my position, that the ship of African civilization is already wreacked.
What we must do is to rescue as many as we can save before it finally sinks. This is what we owe mother Africa and it does not make any of us an ostritch.