Representations of Ethnicised Violence in Kenya

The Case of Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo

Abstract

This paper examines the twin notion of amnesia and complicity as evidenced in literary representations of ethnic violence in post colonial Africa. Starting from the premise that the relatively large body of writing based on the occurrence of this type of violence is by itself an affirmation of the way literature as a cultural product is tied to the social circumstance within which it is created, we look at how the literary works reconstruct narrative structures and characters to represent the traumatic experiences of the recent past. In dealing with the violent encounters the acts of perpetration and victimhood form an axis upon which the writing negotiates or mediates the post traumatic memory. The paper focuses primarily on Kinyanjui Kombani’s “The Last Villains of Molo”, a 2004 novel based on the 1991 ethnic violence in Kenya but which in a sense predicates the subsequent and even more violent encounters of 1997 and 2008 which took Kenya to the brink of a failed state. “The Last Villains of Molo” bears a similar burden as that of works such as Gatore’s “The Past Ahead”, Ndwaniye’s “The Promise I made my Sister”, Courtemanche’s “A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali”, Combre’s “Broken Memory” and Kyomuhendo’s “Secrets No More”, among others. In all these works which deal with the violence and genocide that has been a resident evil in Eastern Africa for the last two decades, often the problem has been how to present or bear witness to the entrapment of the society in some terrible and haunting memory that results from a traumatic disorientation. We employ a range of ideas which have trauma and loss as their concern, such as Freudian psychoanalysis and trauma theory especially from Caruth (1996a), to analyze the complexity of narration of violence, genocide and dislocation.