Unmasking the literary genius: Ngugi's musings, myths, criticisms

Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kenya and Africa’s towering man of letters who has died at the age of 87, evolved from a mythical figure of my youth to become a close mentor whose friendship lasted to the last few hours of his life.

Our phone conversation last Sunday, only 72 hours before his death, was a regular feature in recent years, precipitated by his quest for clarity on the dramatic events unfolding in his beloved country, from which he was unmoored for half his lifetime.

="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/national/article/2001520372/ngugi-wa-thiongo-celebrated-kenyan-author-dies-aged-87">Exiled since 1982 <— barring the short-lived homecoming in August 2004, when he was greeted by throngs of enthusiastic supporters at the airport, before gun-toting goons pushed through his apartment door to brutally attack him and rape his wife— he remained estranged from his land of birth for 43 years.

Yet, he was connected to the everyday, as he revealed in our conversations, from the Gen Z protests — tell them, he chuckled, one does not become a revolutionary by being born into a generation. For the protests to shift from the ether and galvanise the masses into a national movement, he counselled, they had to include the farmers and small traders and the workers.

Always animated, always connected, he remained true to the cause of liberating this country from the shackles of neo-colonialism. This tribute nullifies journalistic distancing to draw on our many personal interactions to illuminate the man, his musings and myths, and the eclectic writings comprising novels, plays, essays, and criticism that enthralled readers in more than 30 languages, and which will far outlive him.

“Uzee ni nyumba ya maradhi,” Ngugi chuckled often in our regular phone conversations, likening old age to an abode of multitudinous ailments that he bore stoically in the last years of his life, using self-deprecating humour to downplay the serious illness that he bore stoically for years.

His kidneys had failed, necessitating dialysis every two days; a triple heart by-pass was conducted in 2019 — he had suffered minor heart attacks while visiting Kenya, but which he mistook for heartburn — he revealed laughingly. And much earlier, in 1995, a doctor gave him six months to live, after a prostate cancer diagnosis.

Ngugi simply refused to die embarking, instead, on the writing of his magnum opus, Wizard of the Crow, whose major antagonist, Aburiria’s despotic ruler, is beset with a myriad of maladies. But the Wizard came towards the end, not the beginning of a lengthy and productive literary career spanning 60 years — which parallels the life of the Kenya State.

It’s not a stretch to say the contours of the Kenya State have been made, unmade and remade by its foremost author, as he narrated it to the world. There is no Kenya without Ngugi, and there is no Ngugi without Kenya. Despite his lengthy absence from his land of his birth, all his writings and life’s pursuits centred on Kenya.

“No ndiraikia thari,” he told this author last Sunday, morbidly equating the publication of his latest work, ‘‘Decolonising Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas’’, which was issued by the New Press in New York this month, to the kicks of a dying man.

“I was born to tell a story,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2020. “I will continue telling it for as long as I have the strength to press a key on the laptop.”

He announced his arrival on East Africa’s literary scene in 1962, while still an undergraduate at Makerere University, when his play, the ‘‘Black Hermit’’, was performed at Uganda’s national theatre as part of Uganda’s independence celebrations. And in 1964, his seminal novel, ‘‘Weep Not, Child’’, was published, to great critical acclaim.

“I am driven to write,” he expounded on his creative impulses to the Los Angeles Times. I felt this from the very first day, in my second year as undergraduate way back in 1961, when I announced I was writing a book and I was met with derisive laughter.”

He proved the sceptics wrong, remaining in active publishing for 61 years, producing four dozen works of fiction, memoir, essays, plays and criticism. Several dozen titles of criticism are devoted to his work.

“There are certain authors whose lives — even if they are not directly transcribed or transmuted into text — are so intimately linked to the circumstances of the production and sometimes even the very form, of their texts, that any attempt to ignore the facts of biography would be foolish,” admonishes Patrick Williams in his introduction of his essay collection, ‘‘Ngugi wa Thiong’o’’.

“This is certainly true of Ngugi, though what is equally important in this context is the way we could ‘read’ Ngugi’s life as emblematic of what Kenya has gone through since the 1950s.”

Williams’ assessment still holds true. The broad issues that have roiled this country since the founding of the Kenya colony in 1920s, and which continue to fester to this day, did affect Ngugi and his extended family.

Born in 1938 —the dateline, January 5, was his invention, he told me, and he settled on it because it’s preceded by the festivities from Christmas and the New Year, so he thought no one would bother about the milestone.

His seminal novel, ‘‘Weep Not, Child’’, in the shadow of the Mau Mau war, gestures to the communal traumas of landlessness and displacement, and the silent tragedy of those caught between the two sides of the struggle — those who collaborated with the colonial authorities and those who resisted and fled to the forest to fight. These issues filter onto the pages of his early novels.

Ngugi’s elder brother, whom he fondly called Good Wallace, joined the Mau Mau; Ngugi’s step-brother joined the colonial troops. Another step-brother, who was deaf and mute mirrors the tragedy of Gitogo in ‘‘A Grain of Wheat’’.

He chronicles his childhood in a memoir, ‘‘Dreams in a Time of War’’, and the sequels, ‘‘In the House of the Interpreter’’ and ‘‘Birth of a Dream Weaver’’.

The latter two document his schooling days at Alliance and Makerere—two elite colonial institutions that sought to mould him in service of the Crown.

But his life away from school mirrored a different reality; he returned from school to find an entire village had been overrun by the British colonial administrators, which explains why the theme of return is so persistent in his fiction. Out of this rotting social compost emerged incandescent fiction that will continue to illume.

The trilogy of novels, ‘‘The River Between, Weep Not, Child’’, and ‘‘A Grain of Wheat’’ provide penetrating portraits of a community in the grips of a rebirth and renewal, after years of colonial oppression and subjugation, but also hints at the prospects of the dream being deferred.

The post-independence disillusionment sets in ‘‘Petals of Blood’’, ‘‘Devil on the Cross’’, and ‘‘Matigari’’, while ‘‘Wizard of the Crow’’ satirises the eventual capitulation to global financial systems, to the detriment of the masses. This circles back to his plays that earned him political persecution, most notably, ‘‘Ngaahika Ndeenda’’ (I Will Marry When I Want) that he co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, now deceased.

It’s difficult to single out an individual text that has been most impactful, even though readers of fiction tend to think Ngugi’s first trilogy of novels enjoyed artistic fluency that appeared hampered by his growing immersion in politics in later years.

But his essay collection, ‘‘Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature’’, undoubtedly thrust him to the international limelight as one of Africa and world’s foremost cultural critics and theorists.

The overarching argument in the treatise is that the decolonising project does not end with the physical expulsion of colonial authorities from Africa; the total liberation is only feasible when Africans decolonise their minds by reclaiming their indigenous languages which are their cultural embodiments.

="https://www.tnx.africa/arts-culture/article/2001520389/ngugi-wa-thiongo-tributes-pour-in-for-literary-giant-who-gave-voice-to-africa">When he returned< to his village at Kamiriithu in Limuru, on the outskirts of Nairobi, and mobilised villagers to develop and perform in the musical, ‘‘Ngaahika Ndeenda’’ (I Will Marry When I Want), government agencies descended and dismantled the makeshift theatre and razed it down. Subsequently, the author was hurled to the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, where he was detained without trial for one year.

He wrote a prison memoir, ‘‘Detained, on toilet paper’’, as well as the allegorical novel ‘‘Caitaini Mutharaba-ini’’ (Devil on the Cross).

He emerged from prison, following Jomo Kenyatta’s demise and the rise of Daniel arap Moi, in 1978. Unable to secure his job back from the University of Nairobi, he went on a book tour to London in 1982. His date of return was July 31, 1982—the eve of the abortive military coup.

He received a coded message warning he’d receive “red-carpet” treatment upon his return. It turned out to be a banishment for a lifetime.

Ngugi departed from our midst on the same day as did Maya Angelou, the African American author best remembered for her enchanting poetry and captivating prose, and only a few weeks after the demise of V Y Mudimbe, the Congolese author and philosopher best known for ‘‘The Invention of Africa’’, which critiques the limitations of Western lenses in evaluating Africa’s cultural past.

Now he’s evolved from a dear friend to my ancestor whose vision, courage and creativity will, to use the assessment from the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, serve as our leading light.

Kimani is an acclaimed author, journalist and editor. He is Professor of Practice at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications in Nairobi. He previously taught at Amherst College, Duke University and at the Witwatersrand University in South Africa.