Ngugi at 70: Reminisces of an African literary icon

Write, write and write gain, and you will get it right!” This is the advice Ngugi wa Thiong’o has for young writers trying to break into the world of creative writing, especially those whose efforts have not yet borne fruit.

Ngugi marks his 70th birthday this year. A globally recognised scholar of literature and languages, he is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as the Director of the International Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine.

Ngugi is Kenya’s most renowned writer and literary theorist and an African giant in the league of Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz and Sembene Ousmane.

He started writing seriously when he was in college in the late 1950s, and he is still going strong. He is currently working on a collection of lectures he gave at Harvard in 2006. The resulting book, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, will be published by Basic Books in New York later this year.

Indigenous languages

Ngugi is best known internationally for his advocacy of writing in indigenous languages, especially after the publication of Decolonising the Mind in 1986.

This book is an impassioned critique of African writing in European languages and calls for writing in the indigenous languages of Africa as a means of combating colonial domination.

Life as a political writer has not been smooth. Ngugi’s politically engaged community theatre led to his detention without trial in 1977-78.

Although he had previously dealt in novels with the same themes he presented in his drama, the government and ruling elite were not amused by theatre in local language and feared the power of popular art in revolutionary politics. Following threats on his life in 1982, the writer fled Kenya and spent the next 22 years in exile.

During that time he has taught in many of the world’s important universities. But literary success did not come easily. Like many a budding writer, Ngugi initially received a rejection slip.

But he did not brood or curse the publishers; he took the bad news in his stride and rewrote some of the sections of the rejected book to produce one of the most acclaimed collections of African short stories.

“The first manuscript that I ever sent to a publisher was a collection of short stories. It was in or around 1962. But while the collection had some good stories, it also contained some juvenilia,” Ngugi told Lifestyle.

“I am glad that Hutchinson Publishers turned it down.”

He says the rejection letter contained some encouraging words. “They wanted me to show them a novel manuscript if I ever wrote one.

Some of these stories later became part of Secret Lives,” he said.

Born in 1938, Ngugi is the author of many books, including seven novels. His latest work is Wizard of the Crow, a satirical masterpiece about the abuse of power by African leaders and a celebration of the will of the people to remove bad rulers from power.

The voluminous novel was first published in three instalments in Gikuyu as Murogi wa Kagogo. It is believed to be the longest novel in an African language.

In Murogi wa Kagogo Ngugi’s objective is, in part, to demonstrate that African languages are sophisticated enough to carry the burdens of modernity and even post-modernism.

Indeed, those who can read the novel in Gikuyu and English will attest to the fact that the Gikuyu version is both more complex and more playful, handling themes such as Internet domains and subversive sexuality that don’t seem to come across in his English translation.

Praised abroad, Ngugi has, like the proverbial prophet, been vilified at home. While young writers in Nigeria align themselves with their great artists like Achebe and Soyinka, who reciprocate by endorsing the little-known writers in international venues, some of Kenya’s wannabe novelists are defined by a malignant anti-Ngugi attitude, probably inculcated by the anti-intellectual 8-4-4-school system created during the Moi era.

Literary upstarts

Little do the young literary upstarts realise that any half-baked anti-Ngugi polemic comes through to the world as part of a grand Western scheme to “recolonise the mind” of young Africans through funded trips to Europe and other small treats like a few dollars to buy hamburgers and Giorgio Armani sunglasses the next time they visit a Western capital.

Fortunately, Ngugi’s works have been reintroduced in Kenyan schools, giving young people a chance to savour the best that has been said and thought by a Kenyan.

His best-known novel in Kenya, The River Between, is being taught as a set book in secondary schools and treats the ever-relevant theme of the conflict between westernisation and African traditions.

Without portraying pre-colonial Africa as a romantic paradise, Ngugi invests a culture devalued by colonialism with positive value that would make Africans proud of themselves.

In the novel, he does not support retrogressive traditional practices in Africa like female genital mutilation. The novel openly states it would be a taboo for anyone to circumcise a woman forcibly.

It negatively portrays supporters of the practice like Kabonyi as demagogues who hate change. It further departs radically from Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya by showing the future of the nation is embodied in Nyambura, who has not gone through this rite of passage.

In Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta abandoned his earlier moderate position and rooted for female circumcision. Although it mines Kenyatta’s anthropological treatise for details on Gikuyu culture, Ngugi’s novel is sceptical towards Kenyatta’s nationalistic posturing in regard to female circumcision.

However, the novelist does not support the colonial administrators and missionaries who invoked the practice as an example of barbarianism and to justify colonialism.

In The River Between, Ngugi uses plain English words and sentences to evoke the superficial simplicity of life in pre-colonial Africa. Yet beneath this simplicity is a complex, self-sustained way of life.

He peppers the English with African words to indicate the complexity of African languages and to suggest possibilities of mixing Western and African values for progress.

African words

The use of African words in The River Between captures the rhythm of local speech because the narrator and the characters are speaking a Kenyan language although the novel is in English.

Some readers might find Ngugi’s novels and essays too angry because of his uncompromising stance towards colonialism and neo-colonialism. He has no apologies to make.

“Anger at social evil is a positive emotion. It has however to find a creative outlet. Human beings should be united against the forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism,” he told Lifestyle.

There have been exciting moments. “The most exciting time was the sixties of the last century,” he says. “I was a student of English at Makerere. All around was the energy generated by the forces of anti-colonialism. There was a sense that a new world was about to be.

The organised actions of ordinary man and woman were making that vision seem possible. This energy and optimism were what made me a writer.”

Unfortunately, this euphoria was short-lived. His novel, A Grain of Wheat, captures the disillusionment with post-independence Africa where the new rulers have become as oppressive as the colonialists. This theme runs through Ngugi’s later novels, in which we are shown the readiness of the ruling elite to mortgage their motherland to the West.

The most painful part of Ngugi’s life does not come from his personal experiences at the hands of government tormentors but from the deplorable developments in the nation at large. “Last elections in Kenya,” he said, were the saddest experience he’s ever had.

“It was painful to see the political elite of the different communities literally egging on ordinary men and women to commit ethnic cleansing against other men and women in the same identical social position as workers, small farmers, fisher-people, the landless and the jobless.
‘‘I have always believed that it is in the unity of the people that a new Kenya and Africa can be built. It is also sad to see how money has taken over politics,” he told Lifestyle.

Brutally attacked

When he returned to Kenya in August 2004, he was brutally attacked and his wife Njeeri raped. But his family has put all that behind them. “At a personal level, the cruel attack on my wife and I at the Norfolk apartments in 2004 after 22 years of exile was very hard to take. But we cannot give comfort to those who engineered the attack by not getting on with our lives.”

Perhaps the greatest lesson from Ngugi’s career is that one can be a successful writer without having to pander to the whims of the liberal market or having to cavort with the imperialists who control publishing outlets and donor funding.

Even in the most adverse of situations, Ngugi has remained steadfastly anti-colonial and pro-African.

Further, although he handles erotic themes in all his writing, it is with utter sensitivity to women and the wider public. You won’t hear in his stories the kind of prurience being spewed by Kenyan FM radio stations in the name of entertainment.

I salute Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He is the most creative Kenyan who ever wrote.