Secure the base: Ngũgĩ's last lesson for a continent under siege

TimesLIVE

3 days ago

'Don't yet rejoice in his defeat ... the bitch that bore [Hitler] is in heat again.' — Bertolt Brecht, in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Last week, the world awoke to the devastating news of the passing of the eloquent wielder of words, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His death has robbed us of a principled voice of conscience that refused to compromise with the colonial project and its treacherous offspring of neocolonialism.
Ngũgĩ was more than an author. He was a sentinel, constantly sounding the alarm, translating the subtle currents of global power into a language accessible to his audience. His work transcended literature and became a foundational text for understanding the intricate dance between culture, language and power. His departure leaves a void that can only be filled by a renewed commitment to the very principles he championed.
Eight years ago, Ngũgĩ strode onto the stage at Wits University's Great Hall and fused two of his essay collections to reiterate his lifelong commitment to: 'Secure the Base: [and] Decolonise the Mind'. It was a masterclass in strategic thinking disguised as a lecture in literature, a magisterial critique of 21st century Africa and a battle call to the masses of our continent to rise to the occasion for our liberation. This simple yet powerful call encapsulates the dual, inseparable imperative for Africa's true emancipation.
With incandescent clarity, Decolonising the Mind, which first hit the shelves in 1986, reminded us that a people who speak in borrowed tongues soon think in borrowed hierarchies. Ngũgĩ meticulously argued that language is not merely a tool for communication but a carrier of culture, values and memory. To abandon one's indigenous language for that of the coloniser, is to accept an intellectual slavery, to view the world through a prism designed by others to one's own detriment.
This profound insight extends beyond linguistic choice; it challenges the very frameworks through which we understand history, economic development and even our own identities. Decolonising the mind means dismantling the psychological infrastructure of colonialism — internalised inferiority and an uncritical acceptance of Western paradigms as universal truths and the systemic denigration of African knowledge systems and practices. It calls for a radical re-centering of Africa, an affirmation of our diverse cultures and a conscious effort to rebuild narratives from our own perspectives.
The abstract discussions of Ngũgĩ's work have found chilling, concrete manifestation with Donald Trump's swagger back to the Oval Office, bringing with him the deplorable hound of white supremacy.
Then in 2016, Ngũgĩ published Secure the Base in which he sketched the geopolitical map we now inhabit — a world where financialised capitalism, digital extraction and militarised mercantilism treat Africa as a quarry, an open pit mine, not partner. This book moved beyond the cultural realm to address the very political economy — or material conditions — of African existence. Ngũgĩ understood that intellectual liberation must be paired with concrete, economic and political autonomy. He saw how global capital, untethered by ethical considerations, exploits African resources and labour without equitable returns. He warned against the illusion of aid that often masked mechanisms of debt and dependence.
Secure the Base is a call to consolidate African power, protect our land, resources, labour and data from external predation. The message is simple: protect your cultural nerve-centre or watch the body politic collapse. Among others, this means developing robust institutions, fostering genuine regional integration and building economies that serve the needs of African people, not merely the demands of global markets.
The Empire Strikes Back ... again
The abstract discussions of Ngũgĩ's work have found chilling, concrete manifestation with Donald Trump's swagger back to the Oval Office, bringing with him the deplorable hound of white supremacy. His first term offered a preview; his return is witnessing what will hopefully not amount to a wreckage of the world and humanity as a whole.
Consider his meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa. Trump understands South Africa's cross-racial crime problem through the point of view of race. ' But the farmers are white,' he said continually. This was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was a calculated dog-whistle, a classic demonstration of weaponised racial grievance. The subtext was as crude as Ian Smith's 'kith-and-kin' plea in then Rhodesia, later Zimbabwe, which sought to garner international sympathy for a white minority regime: black suffering is background noise, white discomfort is a global emergency! It is selective empathy that has long defined the Global North's perception of African problems and challenges.
This obsession with a mythical 'white genocide' and 'farm attacks' did not hatch in Washington. It is parroted in discussions, but when confronted with actual situation reflected in official crime statistics that show a comprehensive picture of violence affecting all communities, their retort is chillingly consistent: 'But the killers are black.' The implicit message is clear: barbarism is tolerable so long as it stays in its lane! Violence in Africa is a tribal problem — confirming a savagery that has always been known — unworthy of global outrage, unless white bodies enter the frame!
This narrative, meticulously crafted and widely disseminated, actively erases the vast majority of crime victims in South Africa, who are black, and ignores the complex socioeconomic roots of violence. For context, while farm crimes are a serious concern, they constitute a small percentage of overall crime. Farm crimes affect individuals of all racial backgrounds, yet the narrative often focuses solely on white farmers, creating a racialised panic that serves specific political agendas.
Gavin Evans' timely new book, White Supremacy: A Brief History of Hatred, provides an essential framework for understanding this dangerous resurgence. He traces this hierarchy of grief back to the poisonous well of Victorian pseudoscience, through eugenics, Nazism and Apartheid. Evans reveals how the concept of race was weaponised, not as a biological reality, but as a sociopolitical construct designed to justify exploitation and domination.
Trump merely pours the vintage into a new MAGA — Make America Great Again — flask, repackaging ancient prejudices for a digital age, normalising what should be anathema and emboldening supremacist movements globally. His rhetorical strategy serves to reaffirm the US, under his influence, as a spiritual vanguard for global white supremacy, leveraging the immense power of a global superpower to legitimise racist narratives.
Brecht's bastard is on the march, clothed in new guises but animated by the same ancient hatreds.
Brecht's warning buzzes in our ears — the hydra of fascism simply sprouts a fresh head when the old one falls. We witnessed a collective sigh of relief when Trump left office the first time, but that relief was premature. The underlying conditions that birthed him — economic anxieties, racial prejudice that lurks in the periphery and centre of the imagination of many Westerners and a deep-seated distrust of democratic institutions — were never fully addressed. It is doing so now, in digital misinformation farms, where algorithms amplify division; in new Cold-War militarism, as major powers scramble for influence and resources, often at Africa's expense; in financial sanctions dressed up as human-rights clauses, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations while serving geostrategic interests. South Africa and the entire African continent cannot Tweet our way out of this storm. We urgently need a fundamental shift in strategy, a proactive defence against these multipronged assaults.
Secure the base, or lose the future
Africa's greatest strategic depth lies in our demographic and cultural dynamism. We are the youngest continent, brimming with potential, creativity and diverse knowledge systems. Yet both are under siege from climate collapse engineered elsewhere, which devastates our agriculture and displaces our communities, trade wars we did not declare but distort our markets nonetheless and limit our growth to data mining we scarcely regulate, allowing global tech giants to extract invaluable information from our citizens without fair compensation or privacy safeguards.
In Ngũgĩ's lexicon, 'the base' is not mere territory, it is the physical and intellectual space where collective imagination meets material power. It is the sovereignty to determine our own destiny, to control our own narratives and to build economies that serve our people, not just global capital. Lose that, and we become spectators in our own drama, condemned to react rather than create, to follow rather than lead.
The implications of failing to secure this base are dire. The continent's vast mineral wealth, which should be a source of prosperity, often fuels conflict and external exploitation. The youth bulge, a demographic dividend, risks becoming a ticking time bomb if opportunities for education, employment and meaningful participation are not created. The scramble for rare earth minerals in the Congo, the ongoing geopolitical machinations in the Sahel and the continued desperate redlining of African refugees at Europe's borders all reminds us the empire never packed its bags. It merely changed tactics. The language may be softer, the methods more insidious, but the underlying drive for control and extraction remains.
Ngũgĩ's death is therefore not an elegy but a deadline. It is a powerful reminder that the struggle for true liberation is ongoing and requires constant vigilance. We either decolonise the mind or we rent it out, cheap. This choice is stark — or is it Starlinked? Failure to do so leaves us vulnerable to narratives imposed from without, narratives that often serve to divide and conquer, to justify continued exploitation.
Brecht's bastard is on the march, clothed in new guises but animated by the same ancient hatreds. We owe it to Ngũgĩ, and to ourselves, to ensure that his legacy lives on, not just in libraries, but in the vibrant, unified and self-determining Africa he so passionately envisioned. All Africans dare not forget his final note: 'Secure the base'!