Blossoms of the Savannah by HR Ole Kulet
Annie Gagiano
Copies of this novel may be hard to get hold of outside Kenya, where it was published by the Sasa Sema imprint of Longhorn Publishers in Nairobi, winning the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2009. Henry Ole Kulet is quite a prolific author and writes in English, often in his novels depicting the Maasai culture, the frame also for this narrative. In this text, Kulet addresses the tricky topic of the practice referred to either as female genital cutting or as female genital mutilation (abbreviated FGC or FGM), depending on one’s attitude – neutral or severely disapproving – towards this ritual, which is still practised in many parts of the continent, even in countries like Kenya where it has been formally outlawed. I chose this novel for discussion because it is an example of what one might term “good popular writing” in contrast with trashy and sensationalist pot-boilers at the low end of popular writing, while not exactly falling within the category of high literature. Good African popular writing often functions (as this text does) to address serious social issues which need to be brought out of the rather isolated scholarly circuits of sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies and the like, and such texts can be seen as contributions to public debate uncompromised by discernible political affiliations or pompous officialese. Blossoms of the Savannah is also interesting because it addresses a topic more usually taken up by women than (as here) by a man and a father, and often perceived as a cause “Western feminists” are vociferous about, while lacking the kind of local, insider’s knowledge that an author like Ole Kulet manifests. The tricky and (in societies that enshrine the practice of cutting the female genitalia during adolescent initiation) hugely controversial topic of FGC/FGM is handled in an impressively direct, yet culturally sensitive, way in this novel, and is recognised as...