Garden Imagery in East African Anglophone Literature from the Mid-1960s to the Present

This article examines garden imagery in East African Anglophone literature through contemporary literary sources, and sixties-seventies poetry from two East African literary journals. After exploring East African examples of Foucault’s “oriental garden”, I focus on the colonial English garden in East Africa and its transformation into a coveted status symbol after Independence. Drawing on MacKenzie’s “Empire of Nature” and Quijano’s “coloniality of power”, I employ literary sources to read the garden as a locus of Huggan and Tiffin’s “postcolonial ecocriticism” where practices of hope and power dynamics are played out in ways that are as meaningful today as they were in the sixties.