Books & arts

Under Whose Name? Plagiarism and the African Arts, Part Two

Shailja Patel

2006-05-31, Issue 257

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/34713

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This is the second of a two-part article that addresses plagiarism in the context of social justice in Africa. It was sparked by the discovery that an article I wrote for this column was plagiarized by the Kenya Times. Part 1, published last week, looked at the dimensions of plagiarism, through several recent prominent cases, both on and off the African continent. Part 2, this week, will explore why it is relevant to social justice.


When I was in primary and high school in Nairobi, our English compositions were peopled by white European characters, with English names. We set them in European or American cities and schools, and inserted ourselves into those landscapes. Our plots were imitations or direct copies of what we read in Nancy Drew mystery novels or Enid Blyton boarding school tales. Or we stole freely from American TV imports – Good Times, Dallas. One of my classmates, in an essay on “The Dangers of Hitchhiking” reproduced, blow by blow, an episode of the American sitcom, “Diff’rent Strokes” which had run the previous night on Kenyan TV. She didn’t even change the names of the characters – she simply cast herself in the starring role. The English teacher commented: “You should use your own ideas in future!” – and gave her a mark of 75%.

In all those years, only one teacher ever challenged this slavish postcolonial erasure of our own lives. Ironically, he was a British expatriate. He asked my Standard Seven class why we used English and American names, locations and plots in our compositions, instead of Kenyan ones. We stared at him, confused, a classroom of 11 year olds, who had never been told that our reality had any place in literature. Finally, one girl raised her hand: “That’s what is in the books we read.”

Generations of Africans have grown up consuming media and culture from which they are absent. Believing that “real” writing, “real” music, “real” art must imitate, or even better, reproduce, what is imported. That the language spoken on the streets of Harare or Lagos has no place in newsprint. The dramas enacted daily in Nairobi matatus scrums, Cairo markets, Freetown suburbs, do not belong on our TV and movie screens. Is it any wonder then, that journalists on the continent routinely plagiarize work from multiple sources? That editors run it without question?

There is a political dimension to this trend. Authentic voices are also voices that question and challenge the status quo. Threaten those in power. Growing up, I watched several original TV dramas, piloted in Nairobi, shot down at birth by protests in Parliament that they were “immoral” and would “corrupt our youth.” Their crime was to deal honestly with the economic, social and sexual realities of a generation facing 70% unemployment in a country ruled by oligarchs. I never heard similar protests raised about the soft-porn American films that certain Nairobi cinemas specialized in. Or the imported soap operas that were the most exciting offering of the state-monopoly TV station.

So many journalists, aspiring writers and artists, never learned how to report the world through their own eyes. To trust their own perceptions and the language available to them. A perfect demonstration of the fear that authentic voices induce in the establishment was the reaction to Kwani?. Kenya’s first journal of homegrown writing broke new ground by carrying pieces in Sheng, the street language of Nairobi. A University of Nairobi literature professor actually tried to ban his students from reading Kwani?. One can only speculate on the source of his unbearable discomfort with an idiom outside his academic authority being presented as valid living literature.

The theft implicit in plagiarism impoverishes us all. It is no secret that how we receive any message is shaped by the perceived source. The voices most likely to be silenced through plagiarism in Africa are those of marginalized groups – women, youth, ethnic minorities, those outside the formal education system. Several African women writers have shared stories with me of submitting their work to national magazines and newspapers, receiving no response, then seeing it turn up a few months later under the byline of a male staff journalist. Each time this happens, it feeds the myth that women, or African Asians, or youth in the informal sector, are not a part of the public discourse, have nothing to contribute to the cultural and political life of our societies.

In “Purple Hibiscus”, the brilliant debut novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a teenage Nigerian girl refuses to take the customary English name for her Confirmation into the Catholic Church. She argues cogently that English names are no more Christian than Nigerian ones, and her spiritual coming of age is not an occasion to disown her own identity.

There is a way in which all of us who came of age on the African continent in the last three decades have been taught to disavow our creative identities. To be ashamed of our own thoughts and language. To hold them up against the BBC, the New York Times, CNN, and find them lacking. The shame is reinforced by editors who will not take risks on original writing, by repressive political regimes that allow only parroted sycophancy in the place of real writing.

In my article plagiarized by the Kenya Times, I wrote:

“What can poetry do, right now, in Kenya? […] Inspire us to trust our own intelligence and passion, our hunger for art that is real and hard and truthful; messy and complex and bloody. Above all, art that is ours. Trust that our own voices are the thick grain, the juicy greens, we have been hungry for.”

It’s time for us all to refuse to be robbed further by unchallenged plagiarism.

* Shailja Patel is a Kenyan poet, writer and theater artist. Visit her at www.shailja.com

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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