ABSTRACT
Peter Nazareth belongs to what has come to be known as the “first generation” of Anglophone fiction writers from East Africa. A contemporary and schoolmate of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Jonathan Kariara, Rebecca Njau, David Rubadiri, and other pioneers of East African literature, Nazareth studied at Makerere University in the late 1950s, when it was the leading higher-education institution in sub-Saharan Africa. For five years he served as an editor of Penpoint, Makerere’s literary magazine, and he was a regular contributor to the early editions of Transition and other East African literary journals. Today, Nazareth is best known as a critic, novelist, and educator, and although his personal and professional paths have taken him far afield since his early days—from Uganda to Leeds and Yale, and eventually to the University of Iowa—his work is best understood as being rooted in that early East African milieu.
