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The Guardian
28-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
A life in quotes: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a giant of African literature, champion of indigenous African languages and perennial contender for the Nobel prize, died Wednesday at the age of 87. Born in 1938, when Kenya was still under British colonial rule, Ngũgĩ dealt with the legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Long critical of the post-colonial Kenyan government, he was arrested by the regime of Daniel arap Moi in 1977 and imprisoned for over a year without trial. During that time, in a cell for 23 hours a day, Ngũgĩ began to write in his native language, Gĩkũyũ, instead of English, a political statement and practice he continued for the rest of his career in exile. Ngũgĩ remained a vocal critic of his homeland's government while living in the United States, and an astute chronicler of the legacy of colonialism in language, as outlined in his seminal 1986 text Decolonising the Mind. 'He lived a full life, fought a good fight,' wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. Here are some of his most memorable quotes: Colonialism normalizes the abnormal. – from Decolonising the Mind, 1986 The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent. – from Decolonising the Mind, 1986 Resistance is the best way of keeping alive. It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive. – to the Guardian, 2018 'If the state can break such progressive nationalists, if they can make them come out of prison crying, 'I am sorry for all my sins,' such an unprincipled about-face would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few. – from Wrestling with the Devil, 2018 The resistance of African American people is one of the greatest stories of resistance in history. Because against all those arduous conditions they were able to create … a new linguistic system out of which emerges spirituals, jazz, hip-hop, and many other things. – to the Guardian, 2018 I have become a language warrior. I want to join all those others in the world who are fighting for marginalized languages. No language is ever marginal to the community that created it. Languages are like musical instruments. You don't say, let there be a few global instruments, or let there be only one type of voice all singers can sing. – to the Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017 Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history. – from Decolonising the Mind, 1986 We should be able to connect to our base … and then connect to the world from our base. Our own bodies, our own languages, our own hair. When you want to launch a rocket into outer space, you make sure the base is very strong and solid. As African people, we [must] make sure our languages, our resources – the totality of our being is the base from which we launch ourselves into the world. – to the Guardian, 2018 Written words can also sing. – from Dreams in a Time of War, 2010 There's a slipperiness to the Gĩkũyũ language. I'd write a sentence, read it the following morning, and find that it could mean something else. There was always the temptation to give up. But another voice would talk to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle. – to the Paris Review, 2022 The only language I could use was my own. – to the Guardian, 2006 'I don't see the world through ethnicity or race. Race can come into it, but as a consequence of class.' – the Guardian, 2023 Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mold it, and those committed to breaking it up; those whose aim is to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow […] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes. – from Devil on the Cross, 1980 Being is one thing; becoming aware of it is a point of arrival by an awakened consciousness and this involves a journey. – from In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers and Empire, 2013 Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within. –from Dreams in a Time of War, 2010
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, giant of African literature, dies aged 87
The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who was censored, imprisoned and forced into exile by the dictator Daniel arap Moi, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature and one of few writers working in an indigenous African language, has died aged 87. 'It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our dad, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this Wednesday morning,' wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. 'He lived a full life, fought a good fight.' Ngũgĩ explored the troubled legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Consider a giant of the modern African pantheon, he had been a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature for years. After missing out on the prize in 2010 to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngũgĩ said he was less disappointed than the photographers who had gathered outside his home: 'I was the one who was consoling them!' Born in 1938, while Kenya was under British colonial rule, Ngũgĩ was one of 28 children, born to a father with four wives. He lived through the Mau Mau uprising as a teenager, during which the authorities imprisoned, abused and tortured tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. During the conflict, Ngũgĩ's father – one of the Gikuyu, Kenya's largest ethnic group – was forced off his land, and two of his brothers were killed. This struggle formed the backdrop to the novel that made his name: Weep Not, Child. Published in 1964, just a year after Kenya gained independence, it tells the story of the education of Njoroge, the first of his family to go to school, and how his life is thrown into turmoil by the events which surround him. A series of novels, including short stories and plays followed, as Ngũgĩ became a lecturer in English literature at Nairobi University. There he argued that the English department should be renamed, and shift its focus to literature around the world. 'If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African?' he wrote in a paper. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' In 1977, he published his fourth novel, Petals of Blood, and a play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which dealt with the troubled legacy of the Mau Mau uprising, but it was his co-authoring of a play written in Gikuyu, I Will Marry When I Want, which led to his arrest and imprisonment in Mamiti maximum security prison. 'In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language,' he told the Guardian in 2006. 'Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English?' He decided from then on to write in Gikuyu, that 'the only language I could use was my own'. Released in 1978, exile followed in 1982, when the author learned of a plot to kill him upon his return from a trip to Britain to promote his novel Caitani Mutharabaini, translated as Devil on the Cross. He later moved from the UK to the US, where he worked as a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, and headed its International Centre for Writing and Translation. Ngũgĩ continued to write in Gikuyu, despite his troubled connection with his homeland; an arrest warrant was issued for the fictional main character of his 1986 novel Matigari, which was also banned in Kenya. Returning to Nairobi with his wife Njeeri for the first time in 2004, two years after the death of Daniel arap Moi, Ngũgĩ was greeted by crowds at the airport. But during the trip, men wielding guns broke into their apartment, raping Njeeri and beating Ngũgĩ when he tried to intervene. 'I don't think we were meant to come out alive,' he told the Guardian two years later. His novel Wizard of the Crow, translated by the author into English in 2006, returned to the subject of African kleptocracy, being set in the imaginary dictatorship of the Free Republic of Aburiria. He said the 'most beautiful sentence in the entire novel' was 'a translation from Gikuyu by the author'. He continued to translate his own works from Gikuyu, and was nominated for the international Booker prize in 2021 for his epic novel-in-verse The Perfect Nine. He was the prize's first nominee writing in an indigenous African language and the first author to be nominated for their own translation. Ngũgĩ had nine children, four of whom are authors: Tee Ngũgĩ, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ. He is survived by his wife, Njeeri.
The Guardian
03-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Those who depend on aid must embrace Trump's bombshell and shape their own destiny
About 35 years ago, the radio news announced that the then president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, had broken diplomatic ties with Norway. The embassy, with about 100 foreign and a few local staff, had one week to clear out of the country. I was one of a few staff there at the time who worked for the Norwegian development agency, Norad, and our jobs disappeared with that radio broadcast. An estimated $30m annual budget, largely targeted at the arid and semi-arid parts of Kenya, also disappeared. Obviously that did not matter much to Kenya's leadership, who felt that the independence of the country and the ability for them to decide what was good for Kenya, was more important. The drama was triggered because the Norwegian ambassador decided to appear in a court in Nakuru, where the human rights activist Koigi Wamwere was being tried for treason, hence showing solidarity with a so-called dissident who had been in exile in Norway. I was in a state of disbelief, as all my hopes of enjoying what looked like a progressive career were dashed overnight, barely 10 months after joining the embassy. I had been comfortable, having sole access to a desktop computer, rare in those days, but had not even practieds my computer skills as it was a privilege I took for granted. There are close parallels between my story and what happened to many non-profit organisations in Kenya and globally after 20 January, when Donald Trump took over as US president and cancelled most of the traditional work of the government's development agency, USAid, throwing many charities into a spin of confusion and unanswered questions. How could he do that so suddenly, they asked. Now, the UK is also cutting back on its own aid budget. For me, in 1990, the abrupt end of my job was a wake-up call. I never looked back. When I got my next role, three months later, I embraced my secondhand laptop and quickly perfected my ability not only to produce monitoring and evaluation reports supported by case studies, but also project proposals and budgets that I needed to submit to my supervisor for consideration. I embraced the fact that my job was never guaranteed. There were many factors at play that I had no control over. I needed the skills to be able to survive with any 'sound' employer, anywhere in the world, so developing myself was not a choice. I have since managed to have a flourishing career in the not-for-profit sector, in and outside the country. Even after leaving full-time work, I continue to offer my knowledge to a variety of groups locally and globally, simply because I woke up and practised self-determination. I remain a strong advocate for independence from donor dependency throughout my career. Trump's actions just re-energised my commitment to continue to use every single opportunity to support global majority actors to embrace the right mindset in their effort to explore alternative resources for their work. Funders, on the other hand, definitely need to embrace genuine and practical shifting of power in their approaches to supporting development work, so that what they initiate can outlast them, and be driven by local organisations, especially those from the global majority. In the past couple of weeks, I have become alert to various reflections that speak to this from colleagues in the sector. I continue to be astonished by how hard it is for us to learn important life lessons. One statement I like is by Thomas Sankara, who said: 'He who feeds you, also controls you.' I consider the spirit behind this wisdom a key takeaway for us in the not-for-profit sector. It reminds us how much power we surrender to those who fund our work, especially when we act and behave comfortably, when this is happening over many years, and without us riding on that wave to slowly grow alternative resources, however small they may be. Developing other resources requires a different mindset and the recognition that it's a courageous long-term journey, not for the faint-hearted. It is working against the tide. What happened to Kenya when our president froze a bilateral relationship with Norway overnight, has some parallel with USAid ending with a stroke of President Trump's pen. It looks as if we need to accept that these acts will repeat themselves in our unpredictable world, in one way or other. And so, for us in the majority world, it's time to shape our destiny; not to blindly follow those who 'feed' us; to start saying no to any money that does not meet the community needs we exist to support. It's time to rise up and be counted, as true believers, in the interests of the people we claim to represent when negotiating for funds, and be ready to walk away with our heads held high if it's not working. It's time to organise, not agonise. Janet Mawiyoo is a development consultant and founder of Galvanising Africa
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
I've Seen the World Our Trash Makes, and It's Terrifying
In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen. Much of the West's trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America. In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as 'garbage imperialism.' Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries. If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West's ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I've been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying. I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering electronics have been 'donated' by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met communities of 'burner boys,' young migrants from the country's desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me about coughing up blood at night. It's no surprise: The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth's most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization, will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste. It's not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today's waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. 'For us,' a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, 'rubbish is gold.' But much of it doesn't have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go. Nowhere does today's waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong, carbon-spewing journeys from one end of the Earth to another. Upon arrival in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems. The process's ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution, infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death of hundreds of thousands every year. The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa's next waste frontier, more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to possess plastic in their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent of discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or another. That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia. Across the country's 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons of it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste — toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java's street markets with tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians. Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug trafficking, it may be that there's too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich countries lose a liability and garbage producers are let off the hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been more dire: A recent United Nations study found that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined. Most crucially, it's hard for Western consumers to recognize the extent of the crisis — that the story they've been told about recycling often isn't true — when it is continually rendered invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me, would be to close Malaysia's ports entirely. We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you've ever thrown away in your life: There's a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean. Here the old adage doesn't ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes anyone's treasure.
