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THE FOCUS OF THIS CHAPTER is on Kimenye and Macgoye's writing for children and young adults and their subsequent transgression of boundaries through the process of Signifyin(g) therein. However, it is pertinent to begin with an analysis of the literary and publishing context from which their writing arises. Thereafter, I focus on how they employ children's stories as a way of finding a voice and identity for the woman writer, while both conforming to and subverting their normative status as African women.
Situating Kimenye and Macgoye in the East African Literary and Publishing Context
I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to leam how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.1
The most obvious interpretation of Olaudah Equiano's statement here relates to his naivety in believing that the act of reading for Europeans involves a dialogue between text and reader. Yet it can also be interpreted as signifying that African readers and writers are unable to discover any recognizable self or environment in books written by European writers.
With regard to what was once considered the somewhat radical notion of Africans participating in the act of writing, during his school years the Kenyan writer and publisher David G. Maillu was so unsure about such a prospect that he remembers asking his teacher if it was possible. The potentially disillusioning response was that his teacher thought he had once read a book written by a West African.2 Similarly, Bemth Lindfors opens Mazungumzo (1976), his collection of interviews with East African writers, publishers, editors, and scholars, with the reflection that "twenty years ago East Africa was considered a literary desert."3 Maillu confirms this, saying that before the 1970s, while some writers tried to get published, "it was assumed that only English people wrote."4 Similarly, Nancy Schmidt states: "before the decade of African independence in the 1960s, almost all literature for African children was published in Europe."5 This state of affairs continued into...