Don't come home Ngugi: The letter I didn't write to Prof wa Thiong'o

A few months ago, Late Comrade Karemi Nduthu’s brother, also called Nduthu, based in the US where Ngugi has lived since he left Kenya, requested me to pen a few words in appreciation of Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his contribution to society.

Nduthu was a member of the team of Kenyans abroad who may have known that the senior citizen may not recover from the ailment that troubled him.

Given the professor’s immense stature and effort at serving humankind, they felt it was better to celebrate him while he was still alive than wait till his death.

Nduthu’s request sent me into a panic.

How can I write anything for a person of Ngugi’s standing to read?

Even as I worried and refused to take up the challenge, I felt Kenya did not deserve the honour of providing a home for the great man of letters.

Therefore, I now know that I hesitated to write something that would read: “Ngugi! Don’t Come Home”

Don’t come home Ngugi! Home has a definition. Home has to be homely.

Firstly, where will your flight deliver you? The airport is still named after the man who detained you. It just survived a tender of selling it only the other day. Your grandchildren, the Gen Z  paid a price in the Mau Mau currency, and managed to stop the sale.

Shed a tear

The last time you landed at our airport, you kissed the soil and shed a tear. You had stayed away for 22 years.

That was your land only named after the man who tortured you in 1976. This time, in case you chose to return you will be kissing land now leased to an Asian, the owner is Asian.

The buyer, whom you warned us against in your many books, has taken cover waiting for the right moment for his ownership documents to be stamped by a seal now at State House.

Don’t come home Ngugi.

How will you survive the comprador bourgeois’ repressive State apparatus being a social justice advocate? Unfortunately, the 2010 Constitution denied us the luxury of detention without trial which you “enjoyed” from 1976 to 1979 when President Moi released you.

The game has changed. In the current Kenya, you are kidnapped, killed and dumped in a swamp. If you went to exile to avoid detention, how can you come back with the same ideas to be killed and be disposed of disgracefully?

Professor, don’t come home.

Where will you hide to avoid nightmares. The hotel in which your wife was sexually abused from still stands intact at the centre of the city, too close to the university where you professionally fit. The political assault on you and your wife, in one of the most secure hotels, was never resolved repulsing you back to the United States.

Detained or killed

The monuments of torture are littered everywhere. If you open Citizen TV in the morning to enjoy political discussions after 6am, you will be confronted by a picture of the Nyayo House torture chambers building in the background.

That is where all your good students were tortured, imprisoned, detained or killed. They had it rough because they had chosen to believe and implement your ideas.

Which stadium or institution will you go to since all are named after your tormentors. Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Kenyatta Avenue, Kenyatta University, Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, the Kenyatta picture on Kenyan currency, Mama Ngina Street and many more. You run the risk of sinking into depression.

If you came back, whom will you talk to in government?

You taught us that the neo-colonial State was and can never be a servant of the people and that it was created to protect the interests of the departed colonial masters and their local allies.

Since “independence”, transition in leadership has meant the removal of progressive voices to be replaced by graduates of an education for repression and exploitation. Your literary remedy, “Decolonizing the Mind”, was subdued by the Nyayo philosophy taught at the university in the philosophy department.

The end result has been the overhaul of patriotic political leaders, progressive scholars and servants from the system and their replacement with reactionaries. This is best illustrated by the rise in leadership of persons from the police and provincial administration into political leadership.

Your arrival will attract an NIS tag that will follow you everywhere you will go, so don’t come home sir.

Coming home is unfathomable.

If you came back as a political actor, which mainstream party will you join.

For quite some time, we have treated ODM as our institutional home for purposes of realizing a national democratic revolution.

Together with other players, we managed to push the establishment into embracing constitutional reforms which culminated in the promulgation of the new Constitution in 2010.

Eroded value

The passage of time has dangerously eroded its values. The Mau Mau land reform project vanished from the national agenda due to coalitions with the extreme right wing and co-options into government.

Historical injustices agenda was shelved by those who wanted to rebrand themselves for consideration for leadership in the national bourgeois establishment.

The Ruto era has given us an anticlimax where the regression process has culminated in ODM’s union with a government whose leader ranks top of the world on matters corruption and the violation of human rights.

In short, you have no political home to return to.

Please, don’t come home.

You have lived struggling to create a world order that puts human well-being as an object of plans by governments.

At the centre of this is efforts in calling for a review of the ownership regime of the means of production, mainly land and industries.

In the Kenyan experience, almost everything is being given away at throw-away prices. Sugar factories have gone, airports and ports are on the way.

Leaders involved in this exercise have been sorted out the Kenyan way. Others have been given shares in the companies being leased.

I am convinced that you are a qualified candidate for a bullet at the lounge of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport by you know who. 

My mind goes to what you have achieved as a free man. You published extensively, not to mention the many lectures you have delivered globally. All these achievements have been made possible because you have been alive.

It is not difficult to quantify the amount of loss to society we would have incurred if you had been killed in your first detention in 1976.

Ultimately, it is not your persecution or demise that counts in the struggle for liberation.

It is our collective impact on society that measures our historical worth. So, don’t come home.

They die last

Professor Ngugi, just as you grew beyond your village and became a Kenyan, you have evolved into a global citizen and Kenya doesn’t have to be your home.

In my only visit to Nigeria in 1998, I was privileged to interact with the Nigerian left. In one of their discussions, one of the revolutionary lawyers asked me whether I had read “A Grain of Wheat”, your book. I told him I hadn’t. I was dismissed and branded as either a pseudo leftist or an underdeveloped revolutionary.

Your books are basic and are compulsory reading for all progressives in Nigeria. If you settled in Nigeria, you won’t need Kenyan relatives for social warmth. The social and political environment will be perfect for your intellectual productivity.

Your return puts your productivity at risk.

You are a General who should stick to the bunker directing the war for liberation across the world. Great generals don’t die during the war, and if they must die,  they die last in any war. 

There is a lesson to be learned from the British colonial adventures. Economic strain in their motherland made them explore new settlements.

While it is acknowledged that they inflicted pain and suffering on the communities that they invaded, the courage to delink with their ancestors and found new homes is a lesson in transition.

You definitely won’t colonize any peoples’ lands, but I think you can go to countries that need reinforcement in their struggles for liberation.

Ernesto Che Guevara would give you a nod. No country is more fitting for a home on the African continent than Burkina Faso under the youthful President Ibrahim Traore.

Goodbye Prof. I am not expecting your visit.