Why our teaching of literature must go beyond criticism

In a few weeks, thousands of Kenyan students will sit for their final literature exams in Form Four. They will answer questions on Fathers of Nations, The Samaritan, The Artist of the Floating World and Parliament of Owls. They will also respond to questions on poetry and oral literature scattered in three papers of the English examination.

These learners have been trained to identify themes, stylistic devices, character traits, and authorial intentions. They will write essays explaining irony, symbolism, satire, and other literary devices. We all seem to think that this is the right and normal thing for a standard literature examination. It is not. It is abnormal.

Let me clarify this abnormality before you accuse me of intellectual heresy. Nowhere in these examinations are our students invited to create, to imagine, to write a poem, a story, or a dramatic monologue inspired by what they have read. Why have we accepted a system that celebrates those who explain stories but not those who can tell them? Our education system measures how well a learner can dissect another person’s imagination, not how courageously they can explore their own.

This is not a minor oversight. It is deliberate, a philosophical flaw at the heart of how we teach literature in Kenya and across much of Africa. When I examined the CBC designs for Grades 10 and 11 to see whether this distortion had been corrected, I discovered that nothing had changed. Why are we so hesitant to break away from the colonial legacy?

When literature was first introduced into African schools and universities, it came clothed in the colonial robe of English Studies. The aim was to produce interpreters of Shakespeare, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Wordsworth, not successors. Literary study was treated as an intellectual exercise, not a creative pursuit. Students were trained to analyze texts, not to craft them.

Thus, criticism became the dominant arm of the discipline, while creativity was pushed to the periphery and viewed as something marginal and even unserious. That is why, in our universities, one who creates great works of art rarely gets promoted, while one who writes about those works easily climbs the academic ladder. What, then, is the Commission for University Education (CUE) telling us through such a structure?

The result is a generation of bright, sensitive students who can write pages about Okonkwo’s tragic flaw but cannot compose a single paragraph of an original short story. We train readers who cannot imagine and thinkers who cannot dream. In the end, we graduate critics without creators! Why then should we wonder why our literary landscape feels thin?

The truth is that literary criticism and literary creativity are not rivals. They are two arms of the same body. Criticism sharpens the intellect and creativity nourishes the soul. The critic explains how a poem works while the creator makes the poem sing. When we separate the two, we amputate the very discipline we claim to love.

Part of our problem lies in our obsession with standardization. Criticism fits neatly into the examination system; you can mark an essay on themes or characterization with a red pen and a marking scheme. Creativity, on the other hand, resists such rigidity. It defies rubrics and spills beyond lines. How do you mark imagination? How do you grade a spark? Because we fear the subjective, we retreat to the comfort of the measurable.

Literature indeed loses its vitality when it is reduced to theory alone. When we confine it to critical analysis, we strip it of the very life it seeks to illuminate. To study literature only through criticism is like studying anatomy without ever feeling the heartbeat. You may know the names of the bones and muscles, but you will never sense the pulse that makes the body alive.

Literature is not merely an object to be dissected; it is a living experience to be felt, imagined, and re-created. The best teaching of literature must therefore bring both the scalpel and the song, the precision of analysis and the beauty of artistic expression. The scalpel allows us to understand how a story works, but the song helps us to feel why it matters. Without the song, the study becomes mechanical; without the scalpel, it becomes shallow. True literary education must marry the two; the intellect that examines and the imagination that creates.

Imagine a classroom where students read Fathers of Nations and are then asked to write an alternative ending. Imagine an exam that invites them to compose a monologue from the perspective of a silent character, or a short poem capturing the moral crisis in The Samaritan. That would be literature in its truest form, a living, breathing dialogue between text and imagination.

Universities, too, must share in this reawakening. For too long, literature departments have privileged theory over creativity because theory is easier to assess and justify to administrators. You can grade a critical essay with confidence; you cannot quantify the mystery of a poem or the rhythm of a play. Yet that mystery is precisely what makes literature vital as the heartbeat of the human experience.

We must, therefore, rethink the balance. Let our universities create spaces for creative writing workshops, campus journals, and student anthologies. Let students read Egara Kabaji and then write their own short stories about Africa. Let them analyze Song of Lawino and then write their own songs of protest and love. That is how literature lives on, through the act of creation.

If we are serious about nurturing a generation that can tell Africa’s stories with authenticity and power, we must teach our students to create, not merely to comment. Criticism without creativity produces sterile minds. Creativity without criticism produces undisciplined minds. What we need is the marriage of both: the analytical mind guided by the imaginative spirit.

I hope that when the next generation sits for their literature exams, we will not only ask what themes appear in Fathers of Nations, but also: What kind of nation can you imagine?

Prof Egara Kabaji is a writer, educationist, and researcher based at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology. He is also the Vice President of the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Chancellor of Mount Kigali University, Rwanda.