Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

 Michael – Alternate Thursdays

At a time when writers are inevitably thinking about the meaning of their roles in the world, it’s appropriate to note the passing of the great Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 

"Ngũgĩ ... stands as a revolutionary whose pen served as a weapon of resistance against injustice and illegitimate political power."

He was christened James Ngũgĩ, but in later life changed his name to the traditional Gikuyu structure reflecting a patronymic. He was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938 and grew up through the last of the colonial years and the Mau Mau uprising against the colonial government. That period affected him deeply and motivated his early writing.

He studied at Makerere University in Uganda – the premier University in East Africa at the time, and says he found his voice as a writer there. "The novels The River Between and Weep Not, Child were the early products of my residency in the country of my educational migration. Uganda enabled me to discover my Kenya and even relive my life in the village. I discovered my home country by being away from the home country."

Weep Not, Child, set during the Mau Mau period, shows the era through the eyes of a young boy, and was published in 1964. It was the first novel in English written by a black East African. The next year saw the publication of The River Between, reflecting the clash of colonial and traditional cultures around religion.

For ten years Ngũgĩ lectured at the University in Nairobi. In 1977 he published Petals of Blood. It represented a new phase in his writing, highlighting the struggles of ordinary people in the post colonial period. A play he cowrote in the same year was highly critical of the inequalities and injustices of the current Kenyan society. Ngũgĩ was only willing to write what he saw and experienced, not what was politically correct or advantageous. He was arrested and held without trial for nearly a year. Amnesty International named him a Prisoner of Conscience and secured his release at the end of 1978. Nevertheless, the Moi government banned his books and hounded him wherever he went.

He wrote a diary Detained over that period and a novel (translated as) Devil on the Cross writing on toilet paper. When he was released, he found that the recognition of his work had grown internationally and he spent many years writing and teaching in the US. He was shortlisted for many prizes and apparently considered seriously for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010.

While in prison, Ngũgĩ focused on language itself as an issue of colonialization – obviously fluent in English but wishing to write and be read in his home language of Gikuyu and Kaswahili.  Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature summed up his views on the importance of language to culture. He was by no means anti-English. He translated several of his later novels into English himself. The point was the inherent encapsulation of culture in language.

His last published novel was The Perfect Nine, originally written and published in Gikuyu in 2019, was translated into English by Ngũgĩ for publication the following year. Fiona Samson writing in The Guardian said of the book: "a beautiful work of integration that not only refuses distinctions between 'high art' and traditional storytelling, but supplies that all-too rare human necessity: the sense that life has meaning."

Ngũgĩ passed away on the 28th of May at the age of 87. Rest in peace after a job well done.

For a more personal perspective of Ngũgĩ, read AlexandraWillis’s tribute in the Daily Maverick.