Our shared East African story is bigger than borders

There is a course we teach all our literature students at the university that I find particularly interesting.

It is called East African Literature. Some may wonder why universities should require students to study the literature of a region that, on the map, is divided into different countries. For me, the answer is simple.

We teach it because literature tells us something that politics sometimes makes us forget: we are one people.

When our students read the literature of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they begin to discover how much we share.

They encounter similar histories, traditions, anxieties, aspirations and discover that the borders drawn on our maps are not always reflected in the imaginations of our people.

This togetherness is also reflected in our East African Anthem.

When we sing about building and preserving our community, we are not merely performing a ceremonial ritual. We are expressing an aspiration.

In essence, we are saying that there is something larger than the individual nation-states that should bring us together.

More significantly, we carry an East African passport.

This is quite remarkable. It tells us that our identity is not confined to the borders of the country in which we were born.Let me confess today.

I have a personal dream. I pray that I will live long enough to witness a full federation of the United States of East Africa before I join my ancestors, in about forty years from today. I mean it.

I would like to see a generation of East Africans for whom crossing from Kenya to Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, or South Sudan is as ordinary as travelling from one county to another.

Allow me to explain why this matters to me from my own experience.

 When I was a student at Vihiga High School, then Chavakali High School, I was taught literature by Ugandan and Rwandan teachers.

Many people of my generation can attest to this.

At that time, Idi Amin had unleashed his reign of terror in Uganda, forcing many intellectuals and professionals to flee the country. Some of them came to Kenya and became our teachers.

 Let us think about that for a moment. A tragedy in one East African country enriched the education of children in another.

Those Ugandan teachers did not become less African because they crossed the border into Kenya.

Neither did we become less Kenyan because we learnt from them. Years later, I had an opportunity to teach literature in Kigali, Rwanda.

I accepted the assignment almost as an act of worship.

I felt that I was paying back a debt. Someone from another East African country had once come to Kenya and helped educate me.

Now I was going to another East African country to teach.

In 2022, I had another opportunity to teach literature at Kabale University in Uganda. I did it partly as an expression of gratitude. I

 have had the privilege of mentoring writers there, and it gives me enormous satisfaction to see some of them doing very well.

 My relationship with East Africa has also entered my writing. Many of my works are rooted in the region.

My poetry anthology, Wonders and Worries, was used in Rwandan primary schools about fifteen years ago. My dystopian novel, Beyond the Dark Clouds, was partly inspired by Rwandan history.

My stories Letter to God and The Slave Child are set in Uganda.

Today, I serve as Chancellor of Mount Kigali University in Rwanda. I do this work with dedication partly because I do not see Rwanda as a foreign place.

I see myself as an East African working with fellow East Africans. I have never visited Juba, the capital of South Sudan.

Yet when I had to write an important chapter of my novel Shadows of Love, I called friends working in South Sudan.

I needed them to help me fill the gaps in my imagination. They became my eyes and ears.

Through their experiences, I could transform a reality I had not personally witnessed into narrative.

This is precisely where my Narrative Transformation Model (NTM) becomes relevant. Writers transform reality into narrative. But our reality does not stop at the border.

The East African writer has an enormous region from which to draw experiences, encounters, memories, languages and landscapes.

I have met small-business people from Kenya in Bujumbura, Kigali, Dar es Salaam, and Goma.

They are there working, trading, and creating livelihoods.

Kenyans work and do business in South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. East Africans are already living the integration that politicians sometimes struggle to articulate.

In Nairobi, I see this every time I visit a car wash managed by friendly young men from Burundi. I enjoy speaking Kirundi with them, which is a language similar to Kinyarwanda, a language I fell in love with when I worked in Rwanda a quarter of a century ago.

And then there is music.

I have never hidden the fact that I love rhumba. Congolese musicians have been entertaining East Africans for generations.

Their music crossed borders long before politicians began giving speeches about regional integration. Congolese musicians have filled our cities and villages with their songs.

So please do not tell these musicians to go away on the assumption that I will suddenly start spending all my evenings at concerts featuring only Kenyan musicians. No. I will continue enjoying rhumba because the music tells me of something that politics sometimes forgets: we are one people.

This is why I become concerned when I hear statements that appear to undermine the freedom of movement and provision of services that East Africans have been working for decades to establish.

The East African Community has created frameworks intended to facilitate the movement of people, labour, goods, services and capital across the region.

These arrangements are not accidental.

They are part of a deliberate attempt to build a community in which East Africans can live, work and do business across national boundaries.

 

Look. We have been here before. In 1970, the East African Literature Bureau was established to produce and distribute literature for East Africans.

 

The idea itself was profoundly regional. Literature was being treated as something that could help create a shared East African cultural space.

Unfortunately, the first East African Community collapsed.

East Africans were let down by their leaders. Period. But the dream did not die.

 It survived in our literature, music, languages, the movement of our people, and in the friendships created across borders.

More significantly, it survived in the small businesses of people who crossed national boundaries looking for opportunities and teachers who moved from one country to another.

It also survived in writers who found stories beyond the borders of their birthplaces.

That is why we should be careful about populist statements that appeal to our basest instincts.

If we keep telling people that their fellow East Africans are foreigners who should go home, we may eventually create a problem much bigger than the one we imagined solving. We have seen what xenophobia can do elsewhere on the continent.

We should never allow ourselves to reach a point where an East African begins to fear another East African. For God’s sake, let us not kill the East African spirit but create an imaginative East Africa.

Prof. Egara Kabaji is a writer, educationist and researcher based at Masinde Muliro University. He is also the Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Chancellor of Mt. Kigali University, Rwanda. [e-mail]