Literary colossus: Loathed by authorities but loved by the world

I discovered Ngugi wa Thiong’o in my last year of Primary School, in 1972. It was the start of a journey that would see the curious reader with grubby little hands, eager for a good book, morph into Ngugi’s critic, publisher and even a friend, under the tutelage of the late Henry Chakava.  

The reading of Weep Not, Child quickly gave way to The River Between. A Grain of Wheat followed in 1977, when it came up as one of the East African Advanced Certificate of Education set books. The rest would follow. Across the distance and spaces, Ngugi remained the great teacher. He taught Chakava at the University of Nairobi, and me in the school of life and professional publishing. I fed on this great mind from fresh manuscripts and from finished works, as well as from sitting at his feet and listening.  

Interacting with the icon and his works in various stages of their development is one of the rewards a publishing editor enjoys. You, especially, encounter the work before it becomes a book. You discuss its various aspects with the creator, long before the world knows about it. And sometimes you will persuade him to change some things.  

Chakava would go on to write about his tour of duty with Ngugi, “Publishing Ngugi is a pleasurable and enriching experience. My direct publishing with him dates back to 1975/76, when we worked together on Petals of Blood. Contrary to popular belief among academics and other creative writers, who think that we automatically accept Ngugi’s books for publication, the script of Petals of Blood, then under the titles of Wrestling with God, and Wrestlers with God, was sent out for readers’ reports in the normal way. I personally gave it an in-depth house report.  

“Although all the reports recommended publication, they raised serious issues about the timing, movement, and content of the story. They noted constant repetition, felt that certain scenes had been contrived to achieve certain desired effects, and decried the predictability of the storyline,” Chakava wrote in Publishing in Africa: One Man’s Perspective (1996).

He wrote further: “Ngugi took all these criticisms seriously, and with great humility. He retrieved the script and reworked it for a long time, constantly coming back to seek clarification about some of the readers’ criticisms. He listened to, and even solicited, every comment, however casual.”  

Such was the great man of literature, who passed on this week. He was the peaceful philosophical warrior, who wrestled in the battleground of ideas. Ngugi will be remembered as the philosopher king who reigned in the parliament of knowledge. He floated to us great possibilities that we often spurned, in our time. He belonged to the tradition of the capstone that the builders rejected. “Now he belongs to the ages.”  

Christendom has told us in Psalm 118:22, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the capstone.” Was Ngugi the African literary cornerstone that was rejected by a succession of Kenyan national authorities, even as he was feted elsewhere? His works were at once didactic and even prophetic. They were examined in schools all over Africa and elsewhere. Yet, Kenyan authorities veritably banned them. They were not featured on school lists after 1978. This was a ban, even if it was not declarative.  

International jurors in the Nobel Peace club, for their part, ignored Ngugi, much the same way they ignored Chinua Achebe. What was common between Ngugi and Achebe, beyond being rejected at home and discriminated against by Nobel panellists? Never mind that they wrote books that have become household titles in contemporary world literature. Never mind, too, that they taught in distinguished American universities. Both writers were exiled from their countries because the political dispensations could not tolerate their great minds. And both kept being teased, year in and year out, with the possibility of the Nobel Prize for Literature. They never got it.  

Achebe was, without a doubt, Africa’s lead literary prophet. But Ngugi rode with him in the same chariot. Achebe’s 1966 novel, A Man of the People, profiled a fictive corrupt African country that falls to a military takeover. The putsch is followed by violent turmoil and bloodletting. As if Achebe had a telescope that saw into the future, Nigeria’s civilian government fell to the military as his book was rolling off the printing press. 

A decade of turmoil followed; some would even say more than two decades. A strand of this disorder was the Biafra cessation of 1967–1970. Achebe narrowly escaped lynching in Lagos. At the end of the war, he left Nigeria, to re-establish himself in the United States. He ruled the world of ideas from there; revered in foreign lands, counting for little at home. 

Ngugi, for his part, failed to escape the Jomo Kenyatta dragnet in 1977. He was detained for taking national theatre to villagers, in a language they understood. He addressed the venality of the independent Kenyan State in the 1970s. Dictatorship. Anxieties over land, and theft of the earth by the ruling class. Lavish splashing of opulence by a few, amidst crippling poverty and sky-rocketed cost of living for the majority. Kenyatta locked him up in Kamiti for one year. When he came out, he published a prisoner’s diary titled Detained (1981). The previous year, the Gikuyu novel Caitani Mutharabaini was issued. Ngahika Ndenda, written in 1977, was published at this time. It was shortly afterwards issued in English and even Kiswahili.  

Ngugi would soon discover that to marry when you wanted was easier said than done. Because of his literary work, the Government would not give him back his job at the University of Nairobi. And the State often confiscated his books from the warehouse and from bookshops. It destroyed printing plates, films and dead manuscripts. It taunted and harassed the publishers. We, his publishers, lived in fear. But we continued to publish him, nonetheless. Our courage was not the absence of fear. To publish was our duty. Fidelity to duty was greater than fear of the State.  

In July 1982, Ngugi was in London to promote Devil on the Cross, the English edition of Caitani, when he learned that the authorities in Nairobi planned to detain him yet again. After much soul searching, he resigned himself to the reality of confinement in the icy corridors of silence, in exile. He was marooned in the same league with other writers like James Joyce of Ireland, Katherine Mansfield of New Zealand, and V.S. Naipaul of Trinidad. In the chapter titled “Corridors of Silence: The Exile Writes Back,” Ngugi recalls the agony that informs the mind of the exiled artist.

Taken from Joyce’s quasi autobiography, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he writes: “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use silence, exile and cunning.” 

The distinction between the decadent regime and the country is clear. The political class often characterises criticism against it as an absence of patriotism. Hence, Kenyan youth were in the ‘90s encouraged to burn, in the streets of Nairobi, effigies of Ngugi and other exiles. They were accused of treachery against the motherland. But was this indeed the case? 

The revered Mark Twain defined patriotism as a form of worship. But it is worship not of the State, but of your country. It is love and honour for the nation and its institutions. It is not a blind and docile devotion to any scoundrel in power. Just the fact that some corrupt and oppressive individual occupies the seat of power does not compel citizens to toe the line the miscreant defines. This is one abiding lesson from the men of genius that were James Joyce and Ngugi. They would use their pen, cunning and, if need be, exile to fight oppression, albeit in lonely corridors. 

But Ngugi had also discovered before 1982 that there were other guises of corridors of silence, even for the writer who appeared to be free. Was he locked up in a lonely cage, writing eloquently about people who couldn’t access the substance in the eloquence? Was language a barrier? Was he a latter day futile Prometheus? This Prometheus was sent by his people to wrestle for them fire from the gods. But Prometheus had instead chosen to warm himself at the fireside, with the gods.

Sometimes, however, such a fire may arrive. Yet it came locked up in packages with codes that the people could not crack. This was where the language debate came in. In which language should the African write? Who does he write for? To write about people who could not read what you wrote was to slander them, a great betrayal, Ngugi argued. And so he offered the Compulsive Caitani Mutharabaini. Others followed. They included a series of children’s stories centered around a child hero named Njamba Nene. 

But why have I called Ngugi a prophet, like Achebe? Not just because they were dishonored at home, as the holy book says. Their writings foresaw things that were coming. Besides A Man of the People, Achebe’s 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease, anticipated the corruption that would pervade the post-colonial public service in Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa; perpetrated by a university educated African elite.  

Ngugi addressed the same theme in his 1967 novel, A Grain of Wheat, which he authored as a postgraduate student at the University of Leeds. Independent Kenya was not yet four years old. Yet, Ngugi saw very clearly the greed that would overwhelm the political class. He, especially, foresaw their obsession with ill-gotten land, and other forms of theft by servants. While this theme was only allusively handled in A Grain of Wheat, where the local MP cheats poor people of land they purpose to buy as a group effort, it is more thoroughly explored in Petals of Blood. It is taken to dizzying heights in Devil on the Cross and in the surrealistic Wizard of the Crow, and certainly in Matigari. 

Wizard brings focus squarely on the phantasmagoric absurdity that informs the crooked African State House. The inept, docile and kowtowing dramatis personae around power are laid bare, worshiping the “omnipotent” Ruler. In this folklorist allegory that blends the real with the bizarre, you will see all the actors at the centre of power in a country like Kenya. Here, the Ruler imagines that he is the wisest creature God has created. Indeed, he sometimes believes that he is God. He even wears a godly crown that will not leave his head, even when he attempts to remove it to have a rest. He must be God all the time.

Conversely, he believes that everyone else is either a jealous conspirator against him, or an irredeemable nincompoop. Citizens are blockheads with frozen porridge in the brain cage. Hence, you will see the Ruler fantasizing with hallucinatory promises. He reels off imagined achievements. The bewildered public nervously claps at stately constipation of ideas. Twisted reality, and verbal retch. 

In July 2004 I was privileged to lead the publishing team that brought Ngugi back to Kenya after 22 years of exile. We toured different parts of East Africa, meeting his cheerful readers. He fielded questions from the Media; on radio and TV. He gave full-length interviews to print journalists on the abiding themes in his life struggle for liberty, and for a just and fair society. 

He spoke on art, and on the place of the artist in Africa’s unending struggles for liberation from a succession of guises of enslavement. Writers as liberators in the political space; the need to decolonise the African mind, aptly captured in the collections titled Decolonising the Mind, and Moving the Centre, as well as Writers in Politics. We took visits to Makerere, the University of Nairobi, and the University in Dar es Salaam. The  aura was full of scholarly cheer and literary festivity. We celebrated Literature and Orature in schools. 

Then, suddenly, the unexpected happened. The Ngugi family was violently accosted in the night, at the exclusive apartment where we had housed them.

Despicable things that we don’t want to revisit happened. It was a slur on the nation, a pithy reminder of the divine saying that the prophet is not without honour, except at home. In death, however, Ngugi is celebrated, even by those who publicly reviled him. No matter, it is well with his soul as he often said. May he repose in eternal peace, amen.

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser