- Together with the late Prof Zirimu, he is credited with the introduction of the concept of ‘orature’ in the study of oral literature. This term has been accepted globally.
- He is known to many of the youth of Kenya as a leading Kenyan English textbooks developer attached to the Oxford University Press for over 40 years.
Image: JUSTUS MAKOKHA
There are two passions that define the life and times of the most erudite professor of literature in East Africa, Austin Bukenya: devotion to the creative arts and passion for languages.
These are the two areas that he has invested 50 years to teach, popularise and celebrate through his polymath mind, eloquent tongue and fecund pen.
On Saturday, February 10, he turned 80 years old and his former work-station, Kenyatta University, rolled out the red carpet for him in a unique celebration attended by over 100 scribes, scholars, students performing artistes and the media fraternity.
The event was co-organised with Twaweza Communication, Santuri Media and Kenyatta University under the deanship of Dr R M Wafula, a renowned Swahili literary critic, in Room 14 of the palatial BSSC Complex.
Prof Augustine Lwanga Bukenya, born in Masaka, south of Kampala, in Uganda in 1944, contributed immensely during his tenure of 20 years at Kenyatta University, where he served as a faculty member in our Department of Literature from 1978 to 1998. He taught core units in Stylistics, which I teach today, Theatre Arts, African Literatures and Creative Writing.
The Ugandan poet, playwright, novelist and academic administrator was the first person to graduate with the first class honours degree in Linguistics, Language and Literature from the University of East Africa. He also studied Orature and French at Universities in Uganda (Makerere), Kenya (Kenyatta), Madagascar and the UK.
He has taught languages, literature and drama at the prestigious Makerere University in Uganda and universities in the UK, Tanzania and Kenya since the late 1960s. He has also held residences at universities in Rwanda and Germany.
Here in Kenya, professor contributed immensely during his tenure of 20 years at Kenyatta University, where he served as a faculty member in the Department of Literature where I am based.
Notably, he founded and directed the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts in 1993 and played a pivotal role alongside the late Dr Luka Wasambo Were, the late Prof Francis Imbuga, Dr Waveney Olembo, and Dr Kisa Amateshe in conceiving the now 30-year-old, renowned annual Kenyatta University Culture Week Festival. This has birthed hundreds of our local youth talent now serving the entertainment, performing arts and media sectors across the country.
Presently, Prof Bukenya holds the distinguished title of Emeritus Professor of Literature at Makerere University in Uganda.
****
To this day, Prof Bukenya is a household name in Kenya where he runs a weekly literary discourse column in the Saturday Nation newspaper. He is known to many of the youth of Kenya as a leading Kenyan English textbooks developer attached to the Oxford University Press for over 40 years.
Earlier in the 1980s, Prof Bukenya was one of the founders of the movement that led to the establishment of the Kenya Oral Literature Association (KOLA) in 1985. At that time, he was still based here at Kenyatta University in the Department of Literature.
In fact in 1983, working with his KU colleague, Jane Nandwa he published with Longman Kenya the influential textbook, African Oral Literature for Schools. This book became a central text for the teaching of Orature across Kenya in the new 8-4-4 curriculum back then.
In 1998, through Longhorn Publishers, he wrote two new secondary school guides in the teaching and learning of Orature. The two books are: Oral Literature: A Junior Course and Oral Literature: A Senior Course. These important books he wrote with the late Prof Muigai wa Gachanja who unfortunately died last month at the age of 70. We buried him in Gatanga, Murang'a county.
Pioneers of the teaching of Orature in Kenyan schools and at Kenyatta University are Bukenya, the late Gachanja and the late HoD Nandwa. We thanked them for laying the foundation for many other latter-day eminent scholars and alumni of KU who they mentored at Kenyatta University including: Prof Michael Wainaina, Prof Egara Kabaji, Prof Catherine Ndungo, Dr Mshai Mwangola, Dr Evans Mugarizi and the eminent Ubuntu scholar Garnette Oluoch-Olunya. Bukenya is the epitome of Ubuntu. To him, he exists for others.
This event marked, for us here at KU, a homecoming of one of our own. Bukenya raised his family here at the staff estate in KU. Here he personally taught his children, who now live in the USA, tennis – a sport he loves so.
Saturday marked a significant milestone in his extensive career, characterised by prolific contributions to the field of Literature through his works encompassing plays, poems, novels, critical essays, and regular columns in the newspapers of the East African Community member state.
Mwalimu Bukenya is a poet, playwright, novelist and academic. He is the author of the novel The People’s Bachelor, which I use here to teach the ALT 200 (East African Prose) unit to our sophomores. His plays The Bride and A Hole in the Sky, I use in our PhD unit on Advanced Techniques of Literary Practice.
This guru, an accomplished stage and screen actor, has performed in theatres and on television, taught and mentored many students on creative arts. He performed numerous television plays in the 1970s and 1980s, notably in the Theatre Special series on Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.
****
My teacher Bukenya has left many marks in our intellectual lives as East Africans. In terms patenting, together with the late Makerere Prof Pio Zirimu, Bukenya is credited with the introduction of the concept of ‘orature’ in the study of oral literature. This term has been accepted globally.
Recently, Mwalimu Bukenya has been in the forefront in promoting Kiswahili in East Africa and in 2012-2013, he represented Uganda as a member of a Task Force that developed the protocol for the Establishment of the East African Kiswahili Commission.
His mentee, Dr Caroline Asiimwe from Uganda, is the current executive secretary of the influential regional think-tank, East African Kiswahili Commission based in Zanzibar. She attended the birthday celebration and reiterated his perpetual call for mainstreaming of Kiswahili in East Africa for regional integration and sustainable development.