Narrativizing Kenya’s Historiography Through Selected Popular Fiction

Abstract

The paper is premised on the intersection of popular fiction and history through narrativizing events. Language plays an important role in the revelation of a country‘s historical transformation. Writers use elevated language to foreground Kenya‘s historical transformation. Fictionalization of history is one mode the society is read and interrogated. The focus of the discussion is narrative techniques and how they interweave historical concerns within the Kenyan context. The paper is premised on the exploration of historiographic dimension as narrativized in selected popular texts. The major contention is that popular literature narrativizes the country‘s historical moments. The paper locates itself within New Historicist and Formalist theoretical frameworks. New Historicism as propagated by Greenblatt and Montrose indicates that texts are historical documents entrenched and located in culture and portrays of historical processes in a society. Formalism, as propounded by Victor Shklovsky examines the literariness of a text in the evaluation of ideological concerns; socio-historical, political and cultural issues notwithstanding. Narrative technique is one literary mode that mediates between history and fiction. Through purposive sampling, the texts Wahome Mutahi‘s Three Days on the Cross, Kinyanjui Kombani‘s The Last Villains of Molo and Muroki Ndung‘u‘s A Friend of the Court were arrived at because they are pregnant with fictionalized history. Qualitative research method that is library based was used to excavate and chisel out data that that was required for analysis and interpretation. An interpretivist research design was used. The study aims at establishing that literature has affinity to history since there is interconnectedness. The study adds up to the dialectical polemics on both fictionalization of history and historicization of fiction; a debate that still bombards the literary scene.