Latest news with #NgugiwaThiong'o
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
27-06-2025
- First Post
Africa News Live Updates: Nine Nigerian judges in Imo state forced to retire over age falsification
June 27, 2025, 08:45:08 (IST) Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Kenyan writer and post-colonial critic Ngugi wa Thiong'o dies at 87 Ngugi wa Thiong'o, one of Africa's most significant writers and post-colonial thinkers, has died at age 87, The Washington Post says in a report. His literary work and essays consistently grappled with the enduring impact of colonialism and critiqued contemporary issues in post-independence Africa, including corruption and authoritarianism. A prominent political activist, Ngugi was imprisoned without trial in Kenya in 1977 for his work and was subsequently forced into exile for more than two decades. A core part of his legacy was his decision to stop writing in English and adopt his native Gikuyu, a move he described as a crucial act of 'linguistic decolonization' to challenge the cultural dominance of former colonial powers.
The Hindu
11-06-2025
- The Hindu
Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal: A rite of passage for the yesteryear readers of Madras
It has been a fortnight when words paused and two authors died. On May 28, African legend Ngugi wa Thiong'o passed away, and on Monday (June 9), Frederick Forsyth became part of the mists of time. And an essential part of growing up in Madras for an entire generation. If the former was the classical purveyor of the hard-hitting story, the latter was all about the quickening of the pulse, thanks to his fast-paced books. One common thread, however, was that both writers mined their material from reality. Relatively, Forsyth was the more popular of the two, dabbling in thrillers linked to the world of espionage, now fashionably called the deep state. A terrain that John le Carre too dabbled in. For many readers in the Madras of the past, an essential rite of passage was to read Forsyth's masterpiece The Day of the Jackal. It was akin to watching Pretty Woman at Casino, another growing up ritual. The historical fiction that looked into an assassination attempt on the then French President Charles de Gaulle has aged well just like one of his subsequent books, The Odessa File. Back then, it was a book you picked at Higginbothams, that is if the pocket money allowed this indulgence. Else you had to be prepared to haggle with second-hand book dealers on the pavement adjoining the General Post Office on Mount Road or rush to Moore Market and look for a dog-eared version or a pirated copy. For anyone moving from Nancy Drew, Famous Five and Hardy Boys, it was a step up from jam tarts and grisly murders. Forsyth, or for that matter, Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace and much later Jeffrey Archer and Sidney Sheldon were deemed the real deal, portraying a world slipping into crime and envy, and one with a harried sleuth on hot pursuit. Forsyth led the way and other commercial authors followed. His style of fiction, marinated in current events, proved to be a template for men like Leon Uris, whose novels centred around Jewish characters, and exposed us to traditions like Yom Kippur. Be it Uris or Erich Segal, whose Love Story was another essential read, there was always a Jewish or Israeli element in their tales. Whether it was the celebrated Forsyth or a James Hadley Chase, the booksellers at Moore Market, were clued in and reeled out titles that were deemed must-reads. Bargaining and stealing a deal, it would be then time to leaf through the pages while waiting to board a suburban train either at Central or Park, while sipping an HPMC apple juice. It surely was a Madras of a gentle pace and a lingering word.
Straits Times
07-06-2025
- General
- Straits Times
TBR (To Be Read): What the late Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who rejected English, can teach Singapore
Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote Devil On The Cross (1980), his first novel in his native Gikuyu language, in prison on toilet paper. PHOTO: REUTERS SINGAPORE – One Wednesday evening in 2017, when I was a literature undergraduate, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o – who famously stopped writing in English and switched defiantly to his native Gikuyu – made an appearance on campus and said something that has troubled me since. He was almost 80, subdued in manner, and often dropped the kind of pithy sentence that inspired not applause but reverential silence, then scribbling. To the Singapore audience, he had said: 'If you know all the languages of the world, but not your mother tongue, that is enslavement.' Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
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
Mail & Guardian
06-06-2025
- General
- Mail & Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as town crier of Africa
Africa's writer NgugiwaThiong'o. Town crier of Africa. The title evokes Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's lines when he demonstrates that he is the sole witness to his homecoming and it applies to the late Kenyan scholar, novelist and public intellectual, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o quite well. It characterises his resistance and stance, globally. Ngũgĩ is regarded as a member of the first generation of modern African writers who emerged just before and after African countries became independent. He was the youngest of them when he made his appearance in the literary public. For sure, he was one of those writers who were educated in colonial institutions. These writers were committed to social justice and human rights, as well as cultural roots. All the post-colonial writers were perfectly aware of what they borrowed or transferred from the West. It was not adopting the Western assumptions, it was a way of transforming them for a new literary public and culture. Ngũgĩ was widely noted for his campaign for writing in native languages to challenge Western denigration of African culture, which he believed was steeped in English. For him, language was not just a communication tool — it was a medium of alienation which held Africans back from their own culture. The seeds of his seminal work, Decolonising the Mind, were established at the first African writers' conference held at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962. Writers from across Africa who chose to write in English gathered to discuss English as a medium of modern African literature. It ended up in division. The most ardent advocate of African literature in African languages was Nigerian literary critic Obi Wali, who dismissed writing in European languages, as Ngũgĩ subsequently did. Though this position garnered much attention, and sparked lively debate in the post-colonial world, it was hardly the main preoccupation of post-colonial writers, and also did not convince African writers of the time to recourse to their mother languages. Most post-colonial critics were obsessed with discourse and its effect on oppressed cultures. Because the discourse was not embedded in the language of natives, or simply languages, it was oriented by the language of power, and alienation was not all that bad — alienation might even open a new way of seeing your own culture differently. In time, Ngũgĩ's autochthonous approach almost faded into obscurity. Though the language debate dominated Ngũgĩ's intellectual and literary oeuvre, his tackling issues was no different from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Cheikh Hamidou Kane and others. One can read Achebe and Ngũgĩ in a deep conversation in terms of returning to their roots. For instance, Achebe's guiding approach is clearly seen in his debut novel, Weep Not, Child, which has a bearing on Things Fall Apart . Achebe and Ngũgĩ were afraid of being attached to Euro-modernist forms, which they believed would alienate them from their own society. Ngũgĩ strives to restore the dignity of his people, which was taken away by the 'colonial library'. In his novel, Petals of Blood , the narrator, raising issues of history, aptly argues: 'For there are many questions in our history which remain unanswered. Our present-day historians, following on similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism, insist we only arrived here yesterday.' For Ngũgĩ: '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.' His preoccupation with the past led him to claim and reconstruct history through his work. His rendering of his past basically relies on three revolutionaries: Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Rodney, to whom he owes his critical approach. Ngũgĩ scholar James Ogude reads his works as 'writing from below', a Marxist approach initially employed by the Marxist English historian EP Thompson. The most precious gift he passed on to his nation is his latest book, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi , which ranks alongside the famous Malian epic Sundiata . I believe the epic will survive time and continue to honour the continent; it embodies all human suffering and dignity throughout the centuries, and the happiness of the time being and the time ever present and the time passed over present. Time never passed for Ngũgĩ, which always is invoked through memories that never age, as Harry Garuba reminds us. It is crystallised in moments that contain overlapping terrains and lived through everlasting mourning, chants and praises. Hence Ngũgĩ as a praise singer, a town crier of his nation that never stops chanting for Africa. Here is how the narrator of the epic's chants bear the hope of the future fostered through storytelling: 'Time flows on like an endless river, Time Yesterday into Time Today, Time Today into Time Tomorrow. Now is Now and it is not Now because Time does not stop. Yesterday is Yesterday and it is not Yesterday because Time did not stop. Tomorrow is Tomorrow and it is Tomorrow because Time will not stop.' His words are weaponised with the strength and resilience that were sustained to his last breath. The Perfect Nine, in which Ngũgĩ pays his strong tribute to his nation, placed him alongside the great African griots who never tired of carrying the burden of the history of their nations, holding the power of storytelling to resist the time of destruction. It is a masterpiece that hails from his nation, which he carefully treats as a pearl glistening in his eyes with relentless tears toward a world. Ahmet Sait Akçay is a literary critic and African Studies scholar, he is teaching at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.
