Staging Nation Statist Self-Identity in Jaramogi Odinga’s Not Yet Uhuru (1967)

Abstract

This article argues that an autobiographer, at the time of writing about self, is aware of existing public perception about who s/he is. The construction of self in the autobiography is therefore a form of staging self as an interplay between knowledge of self against nuanced public understanding of the autobiographer and circumstances which produce him. The paper employs Istvan Dobos’s argument on autobiography as a staging of self to analyse how Oginga Odinga constructs self in his Not Yet Uhuru. The paper is also informed by Craig Calhoun’s theory of nationalism particularly his arguments on the construction of civic nationalist identities. The paper relied on close reading of the text to evaluate how the autobiographical self-constructs self-relative to his thematic thrust a well as relative to other characters in the text. However, insights of the context which informed the autobiography were gleaned by extrapolating other secondary texts.