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TimesLIVE
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Secure the base: Ngũgĩ's last lesson for a continent under siege
'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'!
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Decolonising minds, reimagining literature
Every year, a ritual precedes the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Several names of possible winners dominate discussions on the web. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o invariably featured in these conversations, but never won. Let us not equate awards with literary greatness, though. At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that the lack of the award did not prevent us from reading Thiong'o. We gravitated to the author and his ideas for his radical politics and theorisation on the use of language especially in post-colonial nations such as his own Kenya and India in our case. Ideas can travel without the patronage and fanfare of big awards. Thiong'o and the enduring popularity of his seminal text, Decolonising the Mind, is a case in point. Thiong'o spoke about decolonisation before it became a symposia favourite across university departments. He was a torchbearer in every sense. Much like Frantz Fanon, his intellectual mentor in some ways. Thiong'o was a lifelong advocate for an exploration of our own languages, stories, writers and a steadfast critic of Eurocentrism and linguistic imperialism. For those who may not know, he even shed his birth name James and chose Ngũgĩ in his native Gikuyu — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o meaning Ngũgĩ, son of Thiong'o. He has written extensively and expansively about the country of his birth and the birth of a writer in his memoir series — Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter and Birth of a Dream Weaver. It is in the last and final instalment of his memoirs where Thiong'o begins to reminisce about the birth of an author and the stories that he formed while studying at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. It is also here that he first met Chinua Achebe. In obituaries that have appeared since the announcement of his death, he is often referred to as an African writer. There's no debating his place of origin but Thiong'o is also a world writer who inspired and shaped thinking, writing, reading, and critical analysis in many corners of the world. Thiong'o did many radical things as a writer but the most important is his decision to quit writing in English around 1977 and switch to writing in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. This happened following his year-long stint in a Kenyan prison after the staging of his controversial play which highlighted inequities in Kenyan society. In Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981) he recounts the time spent as a political prisoner. Though recounting a personal experience, Thiong'o connects it to the larger political situation in Kenya by accusing the then government of being controlled by 'foreign capital' and 'foreign economic interests'. He said the Kenyan elites behaved as neo-colonialists. He was finally exiled from Kenya and lived in the UK and the US for the rest of his life. Not enough is often said or written about his fiction. Several of his novels are astonishing such as Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood amongst others. To many of us in South Asia, his non-fiction is more popular owing to the strong anti-colonial ideas they helped to develop. Having said that, one must also acknowledge that Thiong'o was a very different fiction writer from Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, the other two luminaries of 20th century African literature. Both Achebe and Soyinka focused extensively on the tension between tradition and the modern in African societies. Thiong'o, on the other hand, used every opportunity to unravel the pitfalls of colonialism and capitalism rather explicitly in his fiction. The three writers even openly argued in public during a conference in Uganda in 1962. Thiong'o argued that literature written in indigenous African languages should be called African Literature. Achebe and Soyinka opposed this idea and found Thiong'o's position flawed. It is not surprising that Thiong'o helped us to understand the virtues of translation through his speeches, essays, commentaries on the role of translation in a globalised world. Translation helps cultures to be in conversation with each other. He equated translation with democracy where everyone has a voice and representation or ought to have one. Translation provides that opportunity to all languages and writers of the world. He also self-translated his last novel, Wizard of the Crow, to English (from Gikuyu). Thiong'o's writings will continue to shape debates and discussions about the use of language and our reading of literature. His work provokes many questions. What constitutes the practice of decolonisation in current times? Is decolonisation being held hostage by academic lobbies in the West? Shouldn't decolonisation lead to new forms of storytelling in a multilingual nation like ours? Thiong'o created his own path. As readers, critics, students, and followers of his work, we should create ours. That's the best tribute for a writer you admire. Kunal Ray teaches literature at FLAME University, Pune. The views expressed are personal.
The Wire
5 days ago
- General
- The Wire
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Culture Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End Nandini C. Sen 36 minutes ago Ngugi chose to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu and argued that his stories need to reach his own people and stir their nationalist consciousness. Ngũgĩ-wa-Thiong'o (1938-2025). Photo: Wikimedia Commons Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now 'The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.' ― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o The world of literature and activism lost one of its best with the demise of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Ngugi was that rare writer who stood for everything he preached – respect for women, love for the mother tongue, standing up against the colonial mindset, standing up for one's rights and revising the historical wrongs of the British Colonial regime. This came at a great price – incarceration and banishment from his home country Kenya and a lifelong war with the powers that be. I was introduced to Ngugi's Decolonising the Mind (1986) in my Master's class at JNU and it gave me a whole new way to look at the world as I knew it. I realised that the 'freedom' that I had taken for granted was not something one could take lightly. It was something one had to fight for constantly. One also learnt how the nature of colonialism had changed – it was no longer a story of the White dominance over the Blacks/Browns but an insidious takeover by the corporates who enslaved our minds and held us hostage. This colonisation had a worse stranglehold because it was difficult to identify the coloniser since they now looked like us. Ngugi shot into fame with his debut novel Weep Not, Child (1964), the first novel to be published from East Africa. Ngugi's oeuvre can be compared only to that of Chinua Achebe's who was responsible for reading the manuscripts of The River Between and Weep Not, Child which were published by Heinemann with Achebe as its advisory editor. It was with Achebe that Ngugi's famous 'language debate' gained prominence and became a staple for every student of postcolonial studies. While Achebe chooses to write in English in spite of it being the language of the colonisers, Ngugi argues against it and chooses to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu. Ngugi argues that his stories need to reach his own people and stir their nationalist consciousness. To this effect he and Micere Mugo wrote the famous play on the Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) taught in Delhi University, until very recently, recreates the indomitable courage of the Mau Mau revolutionary and his right-hand person – a woman warrior. While Kimathi remains in jail, it is 'the woman' – representing Kenyan mothers – who tries to free him and in turn train the next generation for the struggle. The role of Kenyan women in the Mau Mau movement (Kenyan freedom struggle) is a historical reality. Ngugi's female characters are strong, bold and determined – towering over the men in sheer brilliance. In his world view, the mothers of the nation rule supreme, challenging the existing stereotypes of dependent women. These women do not exist merely to take care of their home and hearth; they work towards nation-building. He creates them in the mould of Mother Africa, thus adhering towards the Negritude Movement. In A Grain of Wheat (1967), Ngugi writes about Wambui, who 'believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive… Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear the women's skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women.' Wambui helps the Mau Mau warriors, and it is her conviction that her land can only be free once it is rid of the colonisers. Unlike many men who are seen to be supporting the British policies, Wambui is clear-headed about what is best for her people. About the dual nature of colonialism, Ngugi wrote, 'He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.' Ngugi spent his entire life exposing this unholy trinity through his powerful writing. Ngugi, christened James Ngugi at birth, was one of the 28 children born to the four wives of his father in precolonial Kenya. Growing up, Ngugi witnessed the forced takeover of lands by the British imperialists; he was witness to multiple arrests and tortures his people were subjected to, and he also witnessed the harassment his own father had to face. It was then that he slowly realised that the colonial forces were there to destroy and not to build. His evolving worldview led him to give up his Christian name, and he started to go by the name of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. He argued that the English departments in Kenyan Universities should start to focus on the study of indigenous languages of Kenya. Challenging the 'centrality' of London and the 'othering' faced by colonised countries, Ngugi argued in favour of centring Africa and studying other cultures in relation to it. Ngugi was a strong advocate on Fanonist Marxism. 'Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.' writes Ngugi in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature where he argues in favour of the indigenous languages because he sees language not merely as a means of communication but as a carrier and repository of culture. To this end, he gave up writing in English and wrote in his mother tongue Gikiyu. His co-authoring of a play in Gikiyu, I Will Marry When I Want (1977), which dealt with the controversial themes of poverty, gender, class and religion in the post-colonial context, led to his incarceration. While in his cell, where he was housed with other political prisoners, he wrote The Devil on The Cross (1980) on prison-issued toilet paper. It was here that he thought more closely about the language question and decided to continue writing only in Gikiyu. Ngugi was the first in his family to be educated, though he spent the better part of his life in exile, where he served as visiting professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University and later a professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He served as distinguished professor of English and comparative literature and was the first director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi will continue to be missed. I was fortunate to be able to meet him in person at the African Literary Association Conference in Accra, Ghana, in 2008. A mild-mannered and unassuming person, he waxed lyrical about the unity of African cultures. Ngugi was deeply interested in India and in his novel The Wizard of the Crow, he mentions The Gita, the Upanishads and the women writers of India. A prolific writer and an activist till the very end, Ngugi was also a perpetual contender for the Nobel. Commenting on the current governments and drawing parallels, Ngugi wrote, 'Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb.' His words reflect what we see playing out in our modern societies, which allow for totalitarian regimes at the cost of the divisiveness of their people. Nandini C. Sen is a professor of English at Delhi University who specialises in Anglophone African Literature. 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The Guardian
6 days ago
- 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
