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 Tiffi n’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.