Popular culture and false consciousness

Abstract

This paper examines the concern by the early African critics that popular Culture was an example of false consciousness. In essence, it explores the popular cultural productivity which until recently is still assigned a marginal position in scholarship on the East Africa arts. This debate is enhanced by Owuor Anyumba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Taban Lo liyong, Chris Wanjala, Henry Chakava and Elizabeth Knight who castigate popular works for their irreverent content. They seek to distinguish between elite literature and popular literature in terms of themes and formal stylistic features. Some of these critics argue that popular writings are wholesale replicas of western pulp fiction because most of it tap themes like crime, sex, prison, local politics and local intrigue other than enhancing the African ethos. This study is qualitative, employing discourse data obtained from a close reading of the text, and guided by post-colonial theory in the process of its enquiry.