ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how stories about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have been filtering into the works of Kenyan writers since the turn of the century. In Rwanda Genocide Stories, Nicki Hitchcott states that all those writing about genocide can be understood as witnesses insofar as each text becomes a kind of testimony, albeit a fictional one. In order to comprehend and to make meaning of this kind of testimony, she further suggests, need to understand and acknowledge how positionality works both inside and outside the text. The notion of displaced witnesses or displaced witnessing in literary studies has been used to address the legacy of conflicts, of mass violence and persecution under violent regimes. In 2002, Binyavanga Wainaina first published the short story ‘Discovering Home’, a first-person narrative relating loosely connected episodes of the author’s first return to Kenya after years spent as a student at the Transkei University in South Africa.
