Erotic literature sells. I made my own bones in poetry by writing some rather explicit stuff. That means if I ever run for President, I might need to lie that Dr Stella Nyanzi hacked my account and made me err on the side of eroticism. That’s after picking up all the royalty cheques, of course.
Sex in literature indeed sells. In Uganda’s case, erotic literature is enjoyed from its explicit descriptions to the subtle ones. However, it’s all about time and place. In the secrecy of one’s home, Ugandans love the explicit sexual content. In public, it’s a whole different ball of wax, so to speak.
Ugandans prefer more subtle eroticisms when it public, eroticisms tinged with witticisms and innuendo. While reading this variant of sexual content, they are also likely to condemn the explicit use of language as un-African and Nyanzified to a degree sure to raise rancour where quiet appreciation would do. Poets and writers in Uganda have not yet understood sex scenes and sexual come-ons as revelatory of a deeper purpose, revealing character and emotion rather than focusing on titillation. Our literati are thus shock jocks when it comes to writing about carnality. Yet the possibilities with sex spill over into their utility as symbols for larger concepts like relationships or societal dynamic. Beyond the pelvic thrusts and pillow talk, there’s ‘real talk.’
This is what Kenyan author David G Maillu understands and thereby transmits this understanding to his book, After 4:30. He wrote and published it in 1974. That does not stop it from making references to computers instead of typewriters, an evident attempt at revising and updating the book that fell flat. The language is graphic, racy and swelling with the libido of the ages. However, it is also a social critique attempting to address (in full psychic undress) and specifically sensitise the upcoming urban and working girl with regard to women’s rights within the imported predatory capitalist social structure.
The title After 4:30 was based on the office working time before Saturday was abolished as a working day for civil service. Kenya’s independence was barely 10-years-old from the British colonial administration that came to an end in 1963. Following a prolonged cultural plunder lasting 70 years. In After 4:30, Maillu creates a dramatic story played mainly by four characters. The first player is an underpaid single mother in her struggle for living. She is haunted by her broken love affairs and her subsequent relations with the so-called modern man. The second player is the educated sister of the first character and works as a secretary.
She is subjected to seduction to subscribe to her boss’ infidelity. Also on the stage is the wife of the boss, demanding her conjugal rights. The book is told within the turbulent background of the new nation’s struggle for identify, resurrection and restoration of African values that had been thrown overboard by the 70-year-old colonial ships which had carried Kenyans, apparently from somewhere to nowhere. The result was the freedom fighters hijacked the ship and commandeered it to be docked. When the ship docked in no-man’s land, the victims rushed out and ran offshore looking for where, once upon a time, they had been taken as captives by the British.
In the telling of this story, written in verse, we see personal relations and relationships as microcosms of a wider society. Sex is expressed, as well as sublimated by the characters day-to-day interactions with one another and their context, both overarching enough to bestir gasps of panic and propriety. Most importantly, the story draws you in and burns something into your conscience that will make you question your own idea of what is right and what is wrong.