Violent Upheavals in Kenya: A Literary Historiographical Analysis of Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo.

Abstract

This paper is premised on a critical paper of Kinyanjui Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo (2012) as fictionalized account of Kenya’s human conflict that has its genesis in the fight for political supremacy. Human conflict is often an ingredient of any literary text. The Last Villains of Molo is, in this paper, examined as repository of the political conflicts that end in the battle field. The primary text is augmented by relevant secondary materials. Data was extracted through qualitative research methodology that was library based. Close reading was done and extracted data was exposed to analytical research design. The paper focused on the intersection of history and fiction in the revelation of politically instigated wars. The paper relied on New Historicism theoretical framework. The theory, as propagated by Greenblatt, Montrose and Butler among others, examines literary texts as embedded in culture and as portraits of socio-economic realities of a society. It elevates history as a sub-text that can be fictionalized. The boundary between fact and fiction, history and fiction dissolves and are merged as manifestation of happenings that mirror the on-goings in society. This paper examines how the writer approximate history revealing the extent to which political profligacy cause untold misery and suffering on the populace. Through purposive sampling, Kombani’s The Last Villains of Molo (2012) was selected as the core text since history of ethnicity bulks in it. The paper shows that history and literature have a symbiotic interconnectedness. The text epitomizes ethnicisation, balkanization and repression as tropes of the troubled political history of Kenya.