The soft things of life: detection and manhood in south-eastern Africa
The soft things of life: detection and manhood in south-eastern Africa
This article seeks to address the invisibility of Zambian literature in African literary studies and, more broadly, of much locally-published African writing in international literary Postcolonialism. It also hopes to contribute to the construction of an argument in favour of postcolonialising and localising the notion of genre, by asking questions about a group of locally-circulating narratives concerned with reproducing patriarchal masculinities. I scrutinise two detective stories by Henry Mtonga, a member of the Zambian police criminal investigations department and a contributor to the literary movement around the journal New Writing from Zambia during its “golden period” in the early 1970s. The stories (“Soft Things of Life”, 1970, and “Hot Matter”, 1971) detail the exploits of private detective Ozi (Lusaka’s “famous crime buster”) and his partner Zombe. The article reads them: as textual symptoms of repressed desire, as allegories of a patriarchal Christian nation, and (most significantly), as successive episodes of a potentially endless chain, as key nodes in a regional continuum of fictional forms that spans adventure-based narratives of male sexual maturing such as Gideon Phiri’s Ticklish Sensation (Lusaka 1973), Bill Fairbairn’s Run for Freedom (Lusaka 1984), Shimmer Chinodya ‘s Farai’s Girls (Harare 1987) and Omondi Mak’oloo’s Times Beyond (Nairobi 1991)
100-110
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
2013
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
Primorac, Ranka
(2013)
The soft things of life: detection and manhood in south-eastern Africa.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49 (1), .
(doi:10.1080/17449855.2012.743738).
Abstract
This article seeks to address the invisibility of Zambian literature in African literary studies and, more broadly, of much locally-published African writing in international literary Postcolonialism. It also hopes to contribute to the construction of an argument in favour of postcolonialising and localising the notion of genre, by asking questions about a group of locally-circulating narratives concerned with reproducing patriarchal masculinities. I scrutinise two detective stories by Henry Mtonga, a member of the Zambian police criminal investigations department and a contributor to the literary movement around the journal New Writing from Zambia during its “golden period” in the early 1970s. The stories (“Soft Things of Life”, 1970, and “Hot Matter”, 1971) detail the exploits of private detective Ozi (Lusaka’s “famous crime buster”) and his partner Zombe. The article reads them: as textual symptoms of repressed desire, as allegories of a patriarchal Christian nation, and (most significantly), as successive episodes of a potentially endless chain, as key nodes in a regional continuum of fictional forms that spans adventure-based narratives of male sexual maturing such as Gideon Phiri’s Ticklish Sensation (Lusaka 1973), Bill Fairbairn’s Run for Freedom (Lusaka 1984), Shimmer Chinodya ‘s Farai’s Girls (Harare 1987) and Omondi Mak’oloo’s Times Beyond (Nairobi 1991)
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e-pub ahead of print date: December 2012
Published date: 2013
Organisations:
English
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Local EPrints ID: 346521
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/346521
ISSN: 1744-9855
PURE UUID: 1495ec0f-290e-4e3f-b9e8-6ccff48900b5
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Date deposited: 03 Jan 2013 11:39
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:33
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