Why Ngugi wa Thiong'o never won Nobel Prize for Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is the one globally coveted award that Ngugi wa Thiong’o did not achieve. Ngugi, who died this week, was a paradox. He was at once iconic and iconoclastic.

Did these two contradictions possibly contribute to his missing out on the Nobel?  

Kenya’s departed ="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/opinion/article/2001520565/ngugi-the-man-who-planted-stories-in-our-souls"> king of the written word

His candid thematic thrust and his disenchantment with the African condition, as well as the foreign hand in Africa, were not the kind of things that cheered powerful global interests behind entities like the Nobel Prize. Never mind that Ngugi was the recipient of lesser Euro-American decorations. The Nobel was the ultimate thing that did not come. Was it always not going to come? 

There was nothing wrong with Ngugi’s work. He was a master raconteur. He told gripping stories with rare mastery. His management of the literary flashback within flashback, and point of view within point view; as well as one reflector within another reflector, was matched only by Emily Bronte of Wuthering Heightsfame.  

Yet, Ngugi did not lack distinguished company as a literary icon who missed out on the Nobel. Such other eminent global literati as Leo Tolstoy, Graham Green, Hendrik Ibsen, Henry James, Franz Kafka, W. H. Auden, James Joyce, and many more literary luminaries missed the Nobel boat. Their absence has often led to doubts about the integrity of the adjudication. The competence and suitability of the panellists, most who served for decades without replacement, has also been questioned. 

Tolstoy’s Anna Kerenina and War and Peace have been hailed as the greatest novels in any language in world literature. If there is any contestation, it is about which of the stories is greater than the other. The subjective nature of literary appreciation, of course, makes it difficult to definitively settle on any one piece of work, or any one writer and their works, as the ultimate raconteur and literary artist.

It is instructive, however, that James Joyce’s Ulysses has featured, alongside such other works as Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote; Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird on respected lists that have each claimed to place them as Number One.  

The list of such luminaries is certainly far longer than this. It is also true that the Nobel Prize in Literature is not based on a writer’s single publication. Rather, it is the comprehensive body of literature by the individual that counts. Because of this alone, it would be defective to expect that a writer would become a Nobel Literature laureate based on one book.

This, though, has sometimes happened in the 124-year history of the prize.

Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks won the 1924 award. Then there was Ernest Hemmingway in 1954, for the stunning and gripping slim novel titled The Old Man and the Sea. 

The Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel is not expected to report why any nominee was not the winner. Their responsibility is to give a citation that justifies the winner. Hence, it is up to global literary scholars and commentators, wherever they may be, to attempt to reflect on the nominees, and make conjecture on why they did not make it.

Named for departed benefactor, Alfred Nobel (1833–1896), the Nobel Prize in Literature is one of five annual awards. The others are in Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, and Peace. According to Nobel Foundation, the literature prize “is awarded to authors who have written outstanding works demonstrating literary merit and benefited humanity.” 

Earlier promotional materials also spoke of “the Scandinavian spirit” as one of the requirements. The spirit was, however, never defined. Nevertheless, the Scandinavian spirit is widely understood to gravitate around the disciplines that Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, left in his last will, written in 1895.  

Allusively, from the Nobel literature, the correct writer will be one whose works “promote peace and international understanding,” so to speak; “spur intellectual curiosity,” especially in science and innovation; and “humanitarian concerns and values.”

How have the themes that ="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/opinion/article/2001520530/literary-colossus-loathed-by-authorities-but-loved-by-the-world">Ngugi addressed< chimed in with these “Scandinavians values”? 

Ngugi was a distinguished votary for things African. He believed that the continent had been served a raw deal by the international community, and especially by the Western world. His works are largely a declamation of the way the rich Global North has related with Africa. He paints portraits of an extractive and exploitative one-sided relationship that has favoured the Global North. In the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper, an Oxford history professor who scandalized Africa in the 1960s, it has been a partnership of the horse and horse rider, from the first point of contact, to the present day. The African has been the horse, while the Westerner has been the rider. 

="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/opinion/article/2001520526/unmasking-the-literary-genius-ngugis-musings-myths-criticisms">Ngugi’s works,< from the promise of The River Between (1964) and Weep Not Child(1965) all the way to the very latest writings in the 2000s, decry this uneven relationship. They call for a redefinition of ties, sometimes even a breaking of ties; with a critical movement of the centre of global conversations and opportunities. It is not clear what the European jurors in the Swedish Academy make of Kenya’s freedom struggle as depicted in Weep Not Child, The River Between, and A Grain of Wheat. 

These novels are carriages of painful experiences, imposed upon an African people by White foreigners, who alienate and disposes them of their land. The struggle between the two is often very violent and jarringly bloody. They do heartrending things to each other. The European-on-African violence and African-on-European violence in Weep Not Child and A Grain of Wheat is chilling. But it also reflects the reality that was the European imposed state of emergency in Kenya over a seven-year period, October 1952 to December 1959). 

The Mau Mau are glorified in Ngugi’s first three novels, and revered in Matigari and in Petals of Blood. In A Grain of Wheat, the hermit that is Mugo is venerated for what are wrongly believed to have been his exploits as a freedom fighter.  And Kihika, one of the Mau Mau commanders, is celebrated for leading a raid on a police station and for the assassination of a White District Officer. The Mau Mau are, invariably, a firm pillar in each one of Ngugi’s novels, without exception.  

Europe, in its time, depicted the Mau Mau as a kind of madness and sickness. To date, the movement remains in their books as “a terrorist organization.” It does not seem likely that the European jurors who preside over the Nobel Prize have appreciated Kenya’s freedom struggle the same way Kenyans have done. It is doubtful that they are cheerful about Ngugi’s heroes in the struggle. They can be counted upon to be resentful of the little boy, Njamba Nene, who is some kind of miniature Mau Mau hero.

In the three children’s books, the young man of primary school going age is a critical aide to the land freedom fighters in the bush. He is a celebrity with his community in a manner that outsiders are unlikely to celebrate.

But what of the cultural conflict in The River Between?

The Kikuyu community in the narrative exists in a hostile Manichean divide that represents cultural conflict as a factor of the European presence. There is conflict between Christianity on one hand and, on the other, the traditional worship of Murungu (Mwenenyaga), led by the elder called Chege. Then there is conflict over cultural rites, such as circumcision. The colonists, together with their African Christian converts, find these rites abhorrent. Particularly repulsive is the circumcision of girls, which the girl called Muthoni praises as “beauty in the tribe.” Regrettably, Muthoni fails to heal after the operation, and dies. 

Even within our present context, there remains priggish contestation on Ngugi’s management of Muthoni. Kenya’s Ministry of Education sought, not long ago, a revision of this management, so as to make the book “acceptable” as a School Certificate set book. If accepted by the author and the publishers, this revision would apply only to the Kenyan school edition of The River Between. It is anyone’s guess what the Nobel panel made of this rich African story, and whether they could fully appreciate the inherent social dynamics and cultural conflicts from an invaded African perspective. 

Less still are the themes of greedy extraction and exploitation of African resources by a Western capitalist class, in collaboration with a corrupt African political power elite. This theme is dominant in Ngugi’s subsequent works. Devil on the Cross sharply satirizes European capitalists and their unholy alliance with African reptiles of State. It spares nobody, from the World Bank, the IMF, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the entire Euro-American multinational presence in Africa. 

The Ngugi essays in Writers in Politics, Decolonizing the Mind, and Moving the Centre, are more explicit in their disenchantment with the West. They call for new dialogues for the global community, with Africa occupying a central place. Ngugi is painfully critical of the suffocating dominance by the West as the centre of global discourses. This centre must be moved, to allow space for other cultures and their voices. 

The African mind must be freed to recognize itself as co-equal with other minds. African historical memory must be defrozen. African languages as repositories of cultural histories must, especially, be quickened. The dying of a language goes to the grave with history as cultural memory. Giving a foreign name to an African person buries the memory of African names, and what they signified. To say “Lake Victoria,” for example, buries the memory of the original name of the Lake (Nam Lolwe, in Dholuo, or Inyanza Eya Lulwe in Luyia), as was before Europeans renamed it. Nor do we remember Kisumu as Port Ogowe. 

But neo-colonialism in its diverse guises is the ="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/opinion/article/2001520528/writer-took-our-story-to-globe-but-in-defiance-not-submission">pivot of Ngugi’s writings<. He deconstructs Western entities and casts them into the trash can. The paradox of his towering iconic presence on the one hand, and his iconoclastic thrust at the marketplace of ideas is remarkable. It came prominently to play soon after he published his prison memoir, Detained.

Part of the memory addressed his experience in the season soon after his release from political jail. He accused the then influential and respected Weekly Review Magazine and its editor, Hilary Ng’weno, of publishing malice against him in his papers. What followed was mutual diatribe that spilled into the rest of the mainstream media.

The altercation is historically significant for two reasons relevant to the Nobel Prize question.

First was Ngugi’s contention that Ng’weno and his papers were an extension of Western imperialist interests in Kenya and Africa. He dismissed Ng’weno as “a comprador bourgeoisie,” who had been “thoroughly drilled in capitalist propaganda in exclusive capitalist academies.” It is instructive that Ng’weno studied nuclear physics in Harvard, before returning to Kenya, where he worked in the same media house with Ngugi; both as editors, in the 1960s. It was perhaps the Harvard experience that Ngugi considered “thorough drilling in capitalist propaganda in exclusive capitalist academies.”

Ng’weno retorted that Ngugi had attended “similar capitalist academies in Europe” and that he was the beneficiary of what Ng’weno called “massive royalties from books published by Western capitalist multinationals.”

Ngugi attended the University of Leeds. The UK’s Heinemann were his publishers. For the record, I began my publishing career with Heinemann Kenya in 1987. We did not consider ourselves to be “serving Western capitalist interests.” We only sought to place worthy books into worthy hands.  

Ngugi’s answer to Hilary was that he could not extricate himself from the contradictions that Western capitalism created and imposed on people like him. Perhaps the same was the case for Hilary, and for the rest of us? Whatever the case, Ngugi was the ultimate Afrocentric rebel; an Afro optimist whose cultural ideals and dreams for his people were eternally at counterpoise with Western institutions that he often benefited from, but which he also deconstructed and excoriated.  

His philosophical thrust was in many ways set to be at loggerheads with institutions in charge of the highest global decorations. Just as some lobbied for him, others lobbied against him.

A quick look at African beneficiaries of the Nobel Prize suggests their preoccupation with safe local spaces, and shared global philosophies. Ngugi was not one of these. He took his wars to all battlegrounds that he considered legitimate, regardless of any incidental gains they may bring him at an individual level. For this, he probably was never a favourite for the Nobel Prize. He was never going to get it.

 -Dr Muluka is a Strategic Communications Adviser