Ngugi wa Thiong'o: His prose was militant, held no brief for elites

New Indian Express

3 days ago

NEW DELHI: In literature, life, and language Kenyan legend Ngugi wa Thiong'o was always off centre, pursuing directions away from canonisation. He died this Wednesday in the US at the age of 87, but his works will ensure he lives forever.
Ngugi's prose was militant. He thought the writer's job was to be in the 'Opposition'. He held no brief for elites, which emerged in his country, Kenya, after independence, because they were no less oppressive and exclusionary than the British masters they had replaced. He emerged as a bitter critic of the governments that came in the wake of Kenya's independence in the early '70s. He was perennially a Nobel Literature hopeful, but did not expect it.
Though with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was one of big boys of post-independence African literature, his position against the structures of the world that was White had always been too forthright; his steady stream of novels, plays and essays on questions of land, labour and language, showed he would not 'drop it'. His fiction is peopled with characters like Matigari, a man who will eschew words and take up arms to 'renew' the freedom struggle, and Njoroge, a boy-scholar who starts out believing in progress by education but whose hopes are dashed in the background of tensions between Kenya's White settlers and the militants of the Mau Mau revolt.
It was the summer of 2018, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o had been in exile from Kenya for over 30 years. He was in Delhi for a talk on translation which I was covering. His first greeting was a hug. In his Hawaiian shirt, he gamely posed for photographs and then settled down for a long interview at the time that tested his publisher Naveen Kishore's patience; Kishore had been waiting to whisk him away for a dinner at historian Romila Thapar's home.