Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (review)

Derek R. Peterson. Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2004. Social History of Africa Series, xiii + 289 pp. Maps. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $63.95. Cloth. $27.95. Paper. At a moment when Gikuyu and Mau Mau historiography has reemerged as a subject of intense scholarly focus, Derek Peterson's Creative Writing demonstrates how innovative methodology can still produce fresh approaches to this much-researched aspect of Kenyan history. In this intellectual study of the Gikuyu, Peterson argues that generations of Gikuyu used texts of various types as scripts to motivate others to political action. Gikuyu invested these texts-missionary translations of Christian literature, Gikuyu orthographies, bureaucratic records of Mau Mau Fighters, and others-with meanings that often had little to do with the original intentions missionaries and colonial administrators imagined for them. Instead, Gikuyu men and women interpreted these ostensible instruments of colonial power in their own culturally and historically informed ways. Since Kenya's independence, the Gikuyu-language novels of Ngugi wa Thiong'o have served similar purposes, calling on Gikuyu to "found a moral community" (222). These texts became weapons in generational, gender, and intellectual conflicts-violent and nonviolent-that Gikuyu fought to achieve specific political ends and to proclaim their cultural singularity. Peterson shows that these acts were much more than simple appropriations of literacy and colonial texts. Rather, "innovators" recast these texts within a specific Gikuyu idiom and intellectual history which emphasized community values traceable to the nineteenth-century period of profound "moral and political transformation" known as the itutka, or "the breaking." During this devastating period of ecological change and famine, the irungu ("straighteners") struggled to reassert Gikuyu well-being against the elders they judged incompetent, ushering in the utheri, or "cheerful" period (15). As Peterson puts it, "Their textual work was also the work of political imagination. It helped uphold communities of principle" (244). These communities of principle were not merely a stage from which Gikuyu unleashed expressions of displeasure with missionary or colonial actions. Peterson shows in a series of thematic chapters that Gikuyu also struggled among themselves over the meanings of texts and the ramifications of cultural change brought on by their interpretation and implementation. Thus the "female circumcision crisis" of 1928-30 was as much an intra-Gikuyu clash over community ideals, local political autonomy, and morality as it was a confrontation between missionaries and Gikuyu over "civilized" behavior. In another case study, Peterson shows how the "wordy women" (and men) of the Christian Revival of the 1930s and 1940s shored up failing community standards of householder accountability by "creat[ing] a new grammar of Christian faith" through the practice of public confession (178-79). These converts met with disapproval from church elders, who viewed the Revivalists as lacking in social discipline. Peterson threads this idea of the contentious nature of local politics throughout the text, reminding us that Gikuyu interests and identities were hardly unified. Peterson also offers a thoughtful critique of the disciplinary boundaries between literary studies and social history. …