XXXII Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 26–28 апреля 2023 г.

502 XXXII Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Секция XIII different both from the original local ones and from the original ones brought in.Africans have managed to preserve their cultural image and traditional adaptive functioning. At the same time, the colonial policy of the European Powers and their practice of governing the colonies contributed to the formation of political nations, and the emergence and strengthening of idea of a unified Sub-SaharanAfrican civilization amongAfricans. Rinkanya Alina (University of Nairobi, Kenya) Image of the city in Kenyan women’s literature after 2000 As stated by Roger Kurtz (1996), Kenyan novels written in the last century, especially those by women writers, “suggest that the city… can be a place where women are able to create some measure of personal emancipation…it is a complex enough place to allow some maneuvering room for women”. It seems that since that time the visions of the city in the works of Kenyan women writers (in case of this paper, of English expression) have undergone considerable developments. On the one hand, women’s writing in Kenya has to a high extent really become an urban literature. Moraa Gitaa’s heroine Lavina, sighing about “polluted air of Nairobi”, nevertheless confesses that she is never “going to change from being a Yuppie, you know, Young Urban professional Person”. In fact, many women writers portray urban environment as not only preferable, but simply natural and almost the only possible for their modern, empowered, self-conscious and highly urbanized heroines. On the other hand, many works of women writers in Kenya after 2000 depict slum life as the most common urban experience for Kenyans en mass and Kenyan women in particular. Slum life runs as one of the main motifs, contrasted to the middle class life and shown from different angles, through the novels by Margaret Ogola, Florence Mbaya and some other women writers. Finally, some works depict the city on a highly generalized symbolic level. In Sacred seed (2003) by a veteran Kenyan writer Rebecca Njau the city (Raiboni), the city is a cursed place that twists people’s bodies and minds and whose curse cannot be escaped by neither rich nor poor; it symbolizes the destructive power and is opposed to the utopian forest sanctuary, whose inhabitants lead a perfect life. The paper also outlines some theoretical perspectives related to the evolution of the depiction of the city in Kenyan women’s novel after 2000 — namely, it treats the dichotomy between the vision of city as a symbol of emancipation and a symbol of destruction as an embodiment of one of the most general trends in modern Kenyan writing and, on a wider scale, in modern Kenyan thought and reality, the contradiction between official government-supported course of industrialization and its real and current consequences, such as the growth of poverty (especially urban), depletion of natural riches and demolition of social infrastructures.