ABSTRACT
The Kwani?05 twin edition of 2008 is a literary interrogation of the violence that erupted in Kenya after the general elections in December 2007 and thus represents an important contribution to the Kenyan archive of atrocity. Published in the immediate aftermath of the violence, the twin edition represents an archive that questions and suggests how to integrate this episode in Kenyan history. Based on three selected literary texts from the twin edition, the chapter examines how the Kenyan social imaginary is shaped and negotiated with respect to the global imaginary of Kenya and “Africa”, on the one hand, and local perceptions of the Kenyan nation and ethnicity, on the other. The author argues against the common perception that Kenya is a largely stable nation in the East African region and on the continent as a whole as the writers in the journal use the post-election crisis as an angle to access and negotiate the violent history of Kenya since independence. The widely used term “post-election violence” “legitimizes the idea that the 2008 atrocities were perpetrated purely because of the elections, a line of thought that is clearly vacuous given its refusal to acknowledge historical facts” (wa-Mũngai and Gona 20). The narratives analysed here contest this ahistoricism and examine the complex injustices of the past and present that led to the violence in 2007 and 2008.
