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3 things Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o taught me: language matters, stories are universal, Africa can thrive
Celebrated Kenyan writer and decolonial scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o passed away on 28 May at the age of 87. Many tributes and obituaries have appeared across the world, but we wanted to know more about Thiong'o the man and his thought processes. So we asked Charles Cantalupo, a leading scholar of his work, to tell us more. When I heard that Ngũgĩ had died, one of my first thoughts was about how far he had come in his life. No African writer has as many major, lasting creative achievements in such a wide range of genres as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His books include novels, plays, short stories, essays and scholarship, criticism, poetry, memoirs and children's books. Read more: His fiction, nonfiction and plays from the early 1960s until today are frequently reprinted. Furthermore, Ngũgĩ's monumental oeuvre is in two languages, English and Gĩkũyũ, and his works have been translated into many other languages. From a large family in rural Kenya and a son of his father's third wife, he was saved by his mother's pushing him to be educated. This included a British high school in Kenya and Makerere University in Uganda. When the brilliant young writer had his first big breakthrough at a 1962 meeting in Kampala, the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, he called himself 'James Ngũgi'. This was also the name on the cover his first three novels. He had achieved fame already as an African writer but, as is often said, the best was yet to come. Not until he co-wrote the play I Will Marry When I Want with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii was the name 'Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o' on the cover of his books, including on the first modern novel written in Gĩkũyũ, Devil on the Cross (Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ). I Will Marry When I Want was performed in 1977 in Gĩkũyũ in a local community centre. It was banned and Ngũgĩ was imprisoned for a year. And still so much more was to come: exile from Kenya, professorships in the UK and US, book after book, fiction and nonfiction, myriad invited lectures and conferences all over the world, a stunning collection of literary awards (with the notable exception of the Nobel Prize for Literature), honorary degrees, and the most distinguished academic appointments in the US, from the east coast to the west. Yet besides his mother's influence and no doubt his own aptitude and determination, if one factor could be said to have fuelled his intellectual and literary evolution – from the red clay of Kenya into the firmament of world literary history – it was the language of his birth: Gĩkũyũ. From the stories his mother told him as a child to his own writing in Gĩkũyũ for a local, pan-African and international readership. He provided every reason why he should choose this path in his books of criticism and theory. Ngũgĩ was also my friend for over three decades – through his US professorships, to Eritrea, to South Africa, to his finally moving to the US to live with his children. We had an ongoing conversation – in person, during many literary projects, over the phone and the internet. Our friendship started in 1993, when I first interviewed him. He was living in exile from Kenya in Orange, New Jersey, where I was born. We both felt at home at the start of our working together. We felt the same way together through the conferences, books, translations, interviews and the many more literary projects that followed. Since Ngũgĩ was such a voluminous and highly varied writer, he has many different important works. His earliest and historical novels like A Grain of Wheat and The River Between. His regime-shaking plays. His critical and controversial novels like Devil on the Cross and Petals of Blood. His more experimental and absolutely modern novels like Matigari and Wizard of the Crow. His epoch-making literary criticism like Decolonising the Mind. His informal and captivating three volumes of memoirs written later in life. His retelling in poetry of a Gĩkũyũ epic, The Perfect Nine, his last great book. A reader of Ngũgĩ can have many a heart's desire. My book, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts, was based on the three-day conference of the same name that I organised in the US. At the time, it was the largest conference ever held on an African writer anywhere in the world. What I learned back then applies now more than ever. There are no limits to the interest that Ngũgĩ's work can generate anytime anywhere and in any form. I saw it happen in 1994 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and I see it now 30 years later in the outpouring of interest and recognition all over the world at Ngũgĩ's death. In 1993, he had published a book of essays titled Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Focusing on Ngũgĩ's work, the conference and the book were 'moving the centre' in Ngũgĩ's words, 'to real creative centres among the working people in conditions of gender, racial, and religious equality'. First, African languages are the key to African development, including African literature. Ngũgĩ comprehensively explored and advocated this fundamental premise in over 40 years of teaching, lectures, interviews, conversations and throughout his many books of literary criticism and theory. Also, he epitomised it, writing his later novels in Gĩkũyũ, including his magnum opus, Wizard of the Crow. Moreover, he codified his declaration of African language independence in co-writing The Asmara Declaration, which has been widely translated. It advocates for the importance and recognition of African languages and literatures. Second, literature and writing are a world and not a country. Every single place and language can be omnicentric: translation can overcome any border, boundary, or geography and make understanding universal. Be it Shakespeare's English, Dante's Italian, Ngugi's Gĩkũyũ, the Bible's Hebrew and Aramaic, or anything else, big or small. Third, on a more personal level, when I first met Ngũgĩ, I was a European American literary scholar and a poet with little knowledge of Africa and its literature and languages, much less of Ngũgĩ himself. He was its favourite son. But this didn't stop him from giving me the idea and making me understand how African languages contained the seeds of an African Renaissance if only they were allowed to grow. I knew that the historical European Renaissance rooted, grew, flourished and blossomed through its writers in European vernacular languages. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and more took the place of Latin in expressing the best that was being thought and said in their countries. Yet translation between and among these languages as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture, plus biblical texts and cultures, made them ever more widely shared and understood. Read more: From Ngũgĩ discussing African languages I took away a sense that African writers, storytellers, people, arts, and cultures could create a similar paradigm and overcome colonialism, colonial languages, neocolonialism and anything else that might prevent greatness. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Charles Cantalupo, Penn State Read more: Why auction of Buddha relics was called off and why it matters – an expert in Asian art explains Mbare Art Space: a colonial beer hall in Zimbabwe has become a vibrant arts centre Waiting for Godot has been translated into Afrikaans: what took so long Charles Cantalupo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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
