Imagining cultural antecedents in constructing autobiographical self: Duncan Ndegwa’s Walking in Kenyatta Struggles: My Story (2006)

Abstract

This article argues that autobiography is a site in which cultural antecedents can be retrieved in the construction of the autobiographical self. The article relies on exploratory research design by interrogating literature related to the recollection and retrieval of the autobiographer’s past to situate self in time and place. The article analyses Walking in Kenyatta Struggles: My Story as an insight stimulating example and demonstrates that the author retrieves the provenance of his community, the Agikuyu’s cosmology to construct an autobiographical self whose engagements in private and public spaces is highly motivated by the cultural history of his people and the primordial patterns of governance and social justice. The article argues that autobiographical writing is an important practice in which thinkers and practitioners of Africa’s modern day’s socio-cultural spaces can engage in the process of (re) production, circulation, consumption, archiving and retrieval of past African knowledges and cultural spaces in view of their significance in the modern world. This process would be important not only to restore the pride of place of traditional institutions of governance and social justice but also to assure that these past institutions remain relevant in the present and the future imagination of Africa’s socio-cultural spaces.