The Textual History of Dede Kamkondo’s The Flying Saucer

Abstract

The Flying Saucer by Wisdom Dede Kamkondo was first published in Malawi in 1989 by Popular Publications, Montfort Press. It is now out-of-print,  but rare copies can be found in the archives in Malawi, at Chancellor College Library, and in America, at Yale University Library. This article presents a reading of the textual history of Kamkondo’s novella. By means of partial comparison between two copies of the text, the main argument is that the materiality of The Flying Saucer has appropriated its textual meaning. This manifests in a number of ways. The article firstly discusses the  materiality of the physical text as it is now found in Chancellor College and Yale archives, before providing an analysis of The Flying Saucer’s traditional paratext. It then goes on to acknowledge the traces of Kamkondo’s book in various textual archives in order to draw attention to the silences that contribute to its textual history. Ultimately, the article sheds new light on the ways in which the speculative fiction novella, and perhaps the genre more generally, has been made to perform. In advancing the notion of “rhetorical accretion”, I also argue that the layers of paratext are a
valuable means through which to read particular literary histories.

Keywords: Kamkondo, Malawi, materiality, paratext, rhetoric, speculative fiction