Kenya: Poetry Anthology Lashes Out At Pretentious, Hollow Writers

27 February 2014

Long before British author Michela Wrong used the nefarious phrase "it's our turn to eat" in 2009 to describe the avarice of political executives who dented President Mwai Kibaki's first years in office, the celebrated Kenyan literary scholar and critic Prof Chris Wanjala had used the ubiquitous word "eat" as it is used in literary texts today to capture this infamy in a foreword to a poetry anthology, Imagination of Poets, published in Nigeria in 2005.

Prof Wanjala wrote: "Africa is a continent where the fervour to eat from state coffers thrives like the luxuriant vegetation, the impenetrable, dense and tangled thicket of the continent."

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