Ngomeni, Fort Jesus: A Digo home, not a Portuguese fortress 1

Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues that the lower esteem with which oral material was historically treated became ‘the basis for expelling some cultures from history and complex thoughts, consigning them to a place in hell.’ Moving beyond this much discussed albeit inconclusive debate on the tension between orality and literacy, this paper takes a more productive path, asking, what happens to theories of community formation when previously hidden, ignored, and suppressed oral knowledge is unearthed? More categorically, this paper builds on Anderson’s notion of imagined communities in which he defines ‘the nation [as] an imagined political community’ because ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’ In Anderson’s formulation, the nation is imagined in a singular, dominant language which is the language of instruction and writing. For instance, in Europe, Latin was until the 16 century ‘the language of the pan-European high intelligentsia’. By the end of the 18 century, however, English had taken over as ‘the pre-eminent world imperial language,’ in response to the demands of the readership. However, it was soon clear, especially outside Europe, that this locked out other vernaculars and the imaginations they carried, a subject that this paper dwells on. I attempt an application of Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ from a multilingual perspective by destabilising the dominant space English has occupied, from a literary and oral history standpoint.