Introduction 1
Notes Introduction 1. Yvonne Owuor received the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003; Monica Arac de Nyeko received the same prize in 2007. Margaret Ogola and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye were awarded the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 1995 and 2006, respectively. Other FEMRITE and Kwani Trust members have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writ- ing. For a complete list of literary awards received by FEMRITE members, see the organization’s website (<http://www.femriteug.org/?view=7/>). 2. The recent collaborations between Kenyan and Ugandan writers, and especially the contributions of Ugandan writers to the activities of Kwani Trust, revive historically earlier models, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, united East African universities, publishers, and literary magazines as part of the East African Community (Gikandi, “Introduction” 15). Of course, Gikandi and Mwangi’s encyclopedic survey of East African literature in English also emphasizes the regional character of Kenyan, Tanzanian, Ugandan, and, in this case, Somalian and Ethiopian, literatures. Given the concern of Ugandan and Kenyan women writers with historical events in Rwanda and the Congo, and especially the displacement of local popula- tions as a result of civil war and genocide, the geographical focus of my study further expands into the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa. As I will explain in greater detail elsewhere in this introduction, the liter- ary journals of Kwani Trust and FEMRITE devote sustained attention to events in the Great Lakes region. A conference in October 2009 at the University of Witwatersrand on “Eastern African Literary and Intellec- tual Landscapes” also employed a comprehensive definition of the region when including papers on Somalia and Rwanda.
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