Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Why I returned to my mother’s tongue

The seed that would eventually grow into the mugumo (fig) tree that Ngugi wa Thiong’o crusade for African languages would seem to have accidentally dropped into the soil in 1966 somewhere in New York, the renowned author and champion of “African Voices” revealed on Monday this week.

In his acceptance speech at the PEN/NABOKOVE Award ceremony, Ngugi said that the journey back to his native language began at a writers conference in 1966 when a panelist made a snide remark about Bantu languages.

“The seed of my return to Gĩkũyũ came from that PEN conference, New York, 1966,” he said.

As he sat in the crowd listening to a panel discussion by two authors, Pablo Neruda of Chile and Ignazio Silone of Italy, though he can’t remember the details, he heard the latter claim that “Italian was not like one of these Bantu Languages with one or two words in their vocabulary.”

Cut to the quick, Ngugi, then a student at Leeds University, stood to protest the remark and extol the virtues of African languages.

Significantly, this happened while he was writing his third novel, A Grain of Wheat, which he realised after the incident that he had been writing in English, the language of the colonial imperialists. Was it a case of two grains, one a spawning seminal novel and the other sprouting a seismic shift in the languages high table?

Read: Of Ngugi winning the PEN award and comparisons with the Russian giant

And so on Monday this week, 56 years after the incident, Ngugi was in New York to receive the prestigious PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. Ngugi was early last month declared the 2022 winner of the award for his “greatly honest and sensitive” works that have transformed African literature.

Though he did not attend the ceremony physically at the New York City Town Hall, the doyen of Kenyan literature sent a recorded speech delivered, first in Gikuyu and then in English. Four of his children, however, attended the event.

The Award is sponsored by the PEN America Literary Awards in conjunction with the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation and is given annually to a living author whose works, written in or translated into English, demonstrate enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. It was started in 2016 in honour Vladimir Nabokov, an American novelist, poet and translator of Russian origin.

Pen America is the same institution that had organized the 1966 conference.

The prolific author recalled that upon returning to England, he resolved to write his works in Gikuyu. And the first off the pen was Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will Marry When I Want) a play that he had helped to write. This was the work that earned him detention from the government in 1977, an incarceration that further solidified his resolve to return to his “mother Wanjiku’s tongue.”

He says that he now uses Gikuyu in all his fiction, poetry and drama.

“Let every language in the world express its unique musicality,” he says.