ABSTRACT
Francis Davis Imbuga is among the most productive and respected of Kenya’s contemporary writers and scholars. He is a leading member of a “second generation” of postcolonial writers, coming shortly after and having been influenced by such first-generation figures as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Grace Ogot, and Leonard Kibera. Although he is most widely recognized for his active involvement in Kenyan drama during the decades since independence, Imbuga’s prodigious creative energies have also encompassed other genres such as poetry, narrative, and television, in addition to his work as a teacher, scholar, and administrator at Kenyatta University. Despite the variety and volume of his output, there is in all of Imbuga’s work a notable recurrence of social criticism, a concern with issues of cultural identity, and above all a powerful sense of sympathetic humor in dealing with the vagaries and ironies of life in a postcolonial African setting.
