Memory in Translation: "Mau Mau Detainee" and its Swahili Translation

This article, by focusing on Josiah Mwangi Kariuki’s autobiographical work “Mau Mau” Detainee (1963), and its Swahili translation by Joel Maina, entitled Mau Mau Kizuizini (1965), will give a close look at post-independence Kenyan translation activity into Swahili. This is directly interrelated with its Tanzanian equivalent but also shows some peculiarities linked to the particular socio-political and literary context. On the one hand, the ideological discourses of independent Kenya were articulated around, or responded to, Kenyatta’s ‘narration of the nation’, without excluding the tensions arising around the role permitted to the memory of the anti-colonial struggles. On the other hand, the status of English vis à vis Swahili in Kenya, unlike in Tanzania, was substantially in continuity with colonial times, a situation which stimulated a huge production of Kenyan Anglophone literature and non-fictional writings, such as autobiographies and essays, some of which were later translated into Swahili. As will be shown through the case of “Mau Mau” Detainee, where Kariuki inserts Gĩkũyũ and Swahili into the text, the process involved in the creation of these English-language works by Kenyan writers may be understood as a form of translation in the sense of intercultural and multilingual practice which has been expressed by Bassnett & Trivedi (1999: 2) and Bandia (2014: 13). The paper will then address interlingual translation, and take into consideration Mau Mau Kizuizini, the Swahili edition of Kariuki’s self-narrative of his long stay in Mau Mau’s detention camps, which perfectly condenses the interconnections between memory, language and translation in post-independence Kenya. The analysis will elaborate on the categories of foreignisation and domestication as formulated by Venuti (1995: 20) in order to highlight a number of editorial interventions on the paratext and some of the translator’s strategies which act together to mediate Kariuki’s remembering of the Mau Mau years to the Swahili-speaking audience.