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TimesLIVE
06-06-2025
- Politics
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi was simply ordinary — a man of the people
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist and thinker, who died on May 28, has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa's cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at Nairobi University and much later as a scholar of Ngugi and African literature. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngugi was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then, was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe — the man who published his award winning novel, Weep Not, Child under Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish worldwide series on 'Leading Writers in Context', again it is Achebe and Ngugi who featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on Ngugi in Context. His works have been widely translated in several languages across the globe: Japanese, German, Chinese and in many parts of Asia. I hope we will soon see his works getting translated into African languages across the continent. During his last days, he had embarked on translating his novels written in English into Gikuyu. It needs no emphasis that Ngugi remains one of the most influential African writers over the past few decades of Africa's independence, not only for his creative works but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people is an enduring theme in all his works. He was concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he was also interested in narrative, specifically imaginative literature, as an agent of history and self-definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment. He was concerned with literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and the repressive postcolonial states that followed. As early as 1972, Ngugi was already drawing attention to how the tyranny of the past exerts itself on his works. He wrote: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been,' a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history' (Homecoming, 39). For Ngugi then, the novel was an instrument that wills history into being and therefore, as a writer, he always located himself at the intersection of history and literary imagination. Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. For him, the search for Africa's identity therefore lay in a reconstructive project to reassert a radical form of Africa's historiography conceived from below. At the heart of his restorative project was also his call for a return to the source, which would also involve the privileging of African languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. For him, it was only African languages that had the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to equally carry the weight of a national history and memory. Genuine national literature, Ngugi argued, can only flower in local indigenous languages because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people. Ngugi always positioned himself as a writer in politics. He was hounded at home by one Kenyan political regime after the other and eventually driven into exile in the eighties by the repressive Moi regime in Kenya in the 80s. Little wonder then, that themes of dislocation, abandonment and exile dominates his works, written against the backdrop of authoritarian structures of control and imprisonment. Ngugi's early works are heavily weighted towards fiction, and the later lean towards non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories, Ngugi produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But after his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi wrote a total of five collections of essays as opposed to only three novels, Devil on the Cross (1981), Matigari (1986), and his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Murogi wa Kagogo (2005), written first Gikuyu before translation. But it was the establishment of a community theatre in his home village of Kamiriithu, and the staging of the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), that really raised the ire of the Kenyan authorities, leading to the banning of the play, his arrest and detention without trial. It also marked a major turning point in Ngugi's life when in prison, he used the language of his incarceration to write his first Gikuyu novel: Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), on rolls of toilet paper. Subsequently, it is only Ngugi's collection of essays that he would continue to write in English, obviously aimed at the academy, with whom he continued to wrestle with over a range of cultural and political issues. The joy of reading Ngugi's essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics akin to his narrative. If Writers in Politics (1981), and Barrel of a Pen (1983) essays seek to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre (1993) push the debate to its limits by insisting that the roots to Africa's freedom lay in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate the African identities from the prison house of European languages and cultures. The project should not only involve the privileging of African languages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies, which have been confined to the margins will gradually move to the centre, to become not just consumers but producers of global culture. It is the denial of the cultural space by the postcolonial state tyranny and global imperialism that Ngugi elaborates on in Penpoints, Gunpoint, and Dreams. Here the culture of violence and silence that has come to define the postcolonial state; the state's desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda, is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art that seeks to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming and colonising those spaces through the barrel of the pen. In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
TimesLIVE
03-06-2025
- 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
31-05-2025
- 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
29-05-2025
- 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
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
