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Daily Maverick
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Elegy for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – Weep not Africa, the devil is on the cross
the passing of the sage needs an elegy weaving his works into memory woven not from sorrow but from the titles he left us each a thread in the long cloth of liberation Weep Not, Child though Njoroge's dreams were drowned in betrayal still he hoped still he studied still he believed that books could set a colonised people free as the Petals of Blood drift down the River Between Kamina's cries echo through the valley where Waiyaki once stood torn between tradition and the hunger for change Devil on the Cross watches from a billboard in Ilmorog where Wariinga, mother, secretary, warrior walks tall past the businessmen who sold her country for a coin and a foreign tongue through the smoke of the Kenyan stage we hear The Trial of Dedan Kimathi his voice unbroken his spine unbowed his name restored to the tongues of children (did I say Kenya? No, belonged to the world) he spent his life trying to Decolonise the Mind not just from foreign flags flying through the occupied territories and the Dias but from self-doubt from the coloniser who lived behind our eyes whispering shame in our own languages he taught us the necessity of Moving the Centre from empire to earth from London to Limuru from ivory towers to village theatres I Will Marry When I Want, said Gicaamba and Wariinga not when the landlord says not when the priest demands but when freedom rings clear as a blacksmith's hammer and for saying so he was Detained left with nothing but a Writer ' s Prison Diary pages scribbled in secret where even silence was written in resistance yet even in exile he nurtured Dreams in a Time of War walking barefoot through his boyhood while bombs fell and books were rare as rain in the House of the Interpreter he listened to the scriptures of the empire read aloud by boys in uniform and asked what if we spoke of our own prophets instead the Birth of a Dream Weaver was not painless it came with betrayal with exile with his passport stolen and his tongue declared dangerous yet he kept Wrestling with the Devil not to destroy but to expose his weapon not violence but parable his armour not hate but laughter the sting in his pen penetrating and shattering tyrants, and masters the humility in his heart warming every freedom fighter in Africa and beyond Barrel of a Pen in hand wa Thiong ' o resisted repression in neo-colonial Kenya noting that the Mau Mau is Coming Back out of myth walked Matigari wrapped in rags and questions seeking truth in a land where justice had gone into hiding on a windy playground Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus took off lifting young minds beyond fences and flags while Njamba Nene's Pistol reminded us that courage can be held even in small hands his Homecoming was never a return but a revelation a replanting a radical remembering that the village has always been enough on every page he spoke with the Language of Languages from Gikuyu to Kiswahili to the silence between drums reminding us that no language is small when it carries a people's soul he dreamed of The Perfect Nine daughters of Mũmbi mothers of a nation their journey carved in myth and marrow walking barefoot into legend from Something Torn and New he stitched a flag that no coloniser could fold his ink forming stars his stories forming skies weep not Africa the devil is on the cross screaming in white houses the walls of the empire shaking from voices Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o son of Kenya father of African letters fellow traveller of Fanon comrade of Sankara brother in resistance to Biko rooted in Makerere's red soil where he stood among a chorus of East African minds Micere Githae Mugo, fierce and unbending Okot p'Bitek, singing Lawino into eternity Ali Mazrui, mapping Africa's global soul John Ruganda, building stages of truth Pio Zirimu, naming orature as power Grace Ogot, weaving ancestral memory into prose Taban lo Liyong, sharp as iron in a blacksmith's fire Shaaban Robert, a Kiswahili visionary the South and North African contingents the Dias, Walter Rodney and so many others teachers and poets farmers and firebrands the women and men of the people who did more than write back to empire they wrote forward with and among their people they imagined futures in the ashes of conquest they held language not as a tool but as a weapon as shelter as seed Ngũgĩ understood this he knew that the word could build a nation he knew the power of stories told in the mother tongue and like all true cultural workers he toiled not for applause but for transformation now he rests but Njoroge still dreams Wariinga still walks Matigari still searches Dedan still speaks Mazrui lives and children still rise on buses made of books he is not gone his story is not over a monument built on language, knowledge, culture, history this elegy is still becoming. DM
IOL News
01-06-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
What Ngugi wa Thiong'o Taught Us About Freedom, Power, and Betrayal
Reflecting on the life and legacy of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Dr Iqbal Survé explores the profound lessons he imparted about freedom, power, and the ongoing struggles faced by Africa. Image: Independent Media January 5, 1938 – May 28, 2025 Last week Thursday, 28th May, saw the passing of Ngugi, the East African novelist. He was widely regarded as East Africa's greatest novelist and one of the best in Africa. (He coincidentally shared a birthday with my son.) He was unfortunate never to win the Nobel Prize for Literature despite being nominated several times and considered a favourite to be awarded the prize. Perhaps he had angered too many powerful people in Europe and among the elites. Ngugi understood Africa and the politics of the continent better than most. He explored through his novels the class struggles of ordinary people — a reality that remains with us today, as Africa continues to grapple with inequality and poverty. His work brilliantly intersected the personal and the political, a gift that reminds us that storytelling can be a form of resistance. NGUGI AND HIS IMPACT ON MY THINKING ABOUT POST-LIBERATION POLITICS The apartheid years — my formative years — especially the student movement in the post-1976 and 80s, were shaped by writers like Ngugi. For student activists and leaders, Ngugi's works were essential reading. We were fighting the apartheid system, a system of 'racial capitalism', race laws institutionalised to support economic exclusion. As activists and freedom fighters, we opposed this system, envisioning a non-racial society and socialism as a real alternative to benefit the people post-apartheid. While we were imagining a post-apartheid South Africa grounded in the Freedom Charter, Ngugi was imagining a post-colonial Kenya, where genuine freedom would reach the people, not just the new ruling elite. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Ad Loading THE NGUGI BOOKS I READ AND THEIR MEANING TODAY Petals of Blood (1977)I first read Petals of Blood in my early student years, during my time in the SRC and the Committee of 81. It may even have been banned in South Africa then. We hid these books alongside many other struggle literatures, mindful of the consequences if they were found. Petals of Blood was Ngugi's last novel written in English before he committed to writing in his indigenous language. The novel is set in post-independence Kenya and tells the story of villagers disillusioned by the broken promises of independence. Ngugi shows how the new ruling elite quickly resembled their colonial predecessors, a theme too familiar even today across many parts of Africa. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976)This play recounts the story of Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the Mau Mau uprising, who refused to betray his fellow revolutionaries under British torture. Many South Africans can relate to this heroism, the sacrifices made by anti-apartheid leaders who endured torture, imprisonment, and, too often, death. A Grain of Wheat (1967)Set during the struggle for Kenyan independence, this novel grapples with betrayal, loyalty, and the burdens borne by revolutionaries. South Africa, too, has its stories of betrayal, of those accused of collaborating with apartheid authorities, of the tragic labels of impi and askari. Ngugi was ahead of his time in laying bare the complexities and moral ambiguities of liberation struggles. His works continue to remind us: it is not enough to fight for freedom, what matters is what we do with it after it is won. NGUGI WAS A SAGE If He Could See South Africa TodayThe elites have benefited. The poor remain poor. Unemployment is massive. Racial capitalism, though no longer enshrined in law, endures in practice. Ngugi, a staunch anti-colonialist and communist, might have seen in our reality a confirmation of his warnings: that without vigilance and moral clarity, power merely changes hands without changing society. Though I differ with Ngugi on communism — I do not believe it offers a full solution for South Africa — I do believe that Africa must remain focused on what works, whether that is found in the best of socialism, capitalism, or something altogether different. Ideology must not triumph over pragmatism. We must be bold enough to accept uncomfortable truths: that we have, too often, failed to fulfill the promises of liberation. The struggle was noble, but the aftermath requires an even greater commitment to justice and transformation. Ngugi's writings teach us that history will judge us not by our intentions but by the realities we create. If we care, if we truly value our people, we must reduce poverty and inequality, not in theory, but in lived experience. The past should inform us, but it must not chain us. Our focus must be on the now and on the future. * Dr Iqbal Survé is the Chairman of Sekunjalo Group and the Past Chair of the BRICS Business Council & Co-Chair of the BRICS Media Forum and BNN. * Follow Dr Survé's updates via his WhatsApp Channel. * The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
Saudi Gazette
29-05-2025
- General
- Saudi Gazette
Giant of African literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o dies aged 87
NAIROBI — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who has died aged 87, was a titan of modern African literature — a storyteller who refused to be bound by jail, exile and illness. His work spanned roughly six decades, primarily documenting the transformation of his country — Kenya — from a colonial subject to a democracy. Ngũgĩ was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature countless times, leaving fans dismayed each time the medal slipped through his fingers. He will be remembered not only as a Nobel-worthy writer, but also as a fierce proponent of literature written in native African languages. Ngũgĩ was born James Thiong'o Ngũgĩ in 1938, when Kenya was under British colonial rule. He grew up in the town of Limuru among a large family of low-income agricultural workers. His parents scrimped and saved to pay for his tuition at Alliance, a boarding school run by British missionaries. In an interview, Ngũgĩ recalled returning home from Alliance at the end of term to find his entire village had been razed by the colonial authorities. His family members were among the hundreds and thousands forced to live in detention camps during a crackdown on the Mau Mau, a movement of independence fighters. The Mau Mau uprising, which lasted from 1952 to 1960, touched Ngũgĩ's life in numerous, devastating ways. In one of the most crushing, Ngũgĩ's brother, Gitogo, was fatally shot in the back for refusing to comply with a British soldier's command. Gitogo had not heard the command because he was deaf. In 1959, as the British struggled to maintain their grip on Kenya, Ngũgĩ left to study in Uganda. He enrolled at Makerere University, which remains one of Africa's most prestigious universities. During a writers' conference at Makerere, Ngũgĩ shared the manuscript for his debut novel with revered Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Achebe forwarded the manuscript to his publisher in the UK and the book, named Weep Not, Child, was released to critical acclaim in 1964. It was the first major English-language novel to be written by an East African. Ngũgĩ swiftly followed up with two more popular novels, A Grain of Wheat and The River Between. In 1972, the UK's Times newspaper said Ngũgĩ, then aged 33, was "accepted as one of Africa's outstanding contemporary writers". Then came 1977 — a period that marked a huge change in Ngũgĩ's life and career. For starters, this was the year he became Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and shed his birth name, James. Ngũgĩ made the change as he wanted a name free of colonial influence. He also dropped English as the primary language for his literature and vowed to only write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu. He published his last English language novel, Petals of Blood, in 1977. Ngũgĩ's previous books had been critical of the colonial state, but Petals of Blood attacked the new leaders of independent Kenya, portraying them as an elite class who had betrayed ordinary Kenyans. Ngũgĩ didn't stop there. The same year, he co-wrote the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which was a searing look at Kenya's class struggle. Its theatre run was shut down by the government of then President Jomo Kenyatta and Ngũgĩ was locked up in a maximum security jail for a year without trial. It was a fruitful 12 months, however — as Ngũgĩ wrote his first Kikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross, while in prison. It is said he used toilet paper to write the entire book, as he did not have access to a notebook. Ngũgĩ was released after Daniel arap Moi replaced Kenyatta as president. Ngũgĩ said that four years later, while in London for a book launch, he learned there was a plot to kill him on his return to Kenya. Ngũgĩ began self-imposed exile in the UK and then the US. He did not return to Kenya for 22 years. When he finally did return, he received a hero's welcome — thousands of Kenyans turned out to greet him. But the homecoming was marred when assailants broke into Ngũgĩ's apartment, brutally attacking the author and raping his wife. Ngũgĩ insisted the assault was "political". He returned to the US, where he had held professorships at universities including Yale, New York and California Irvine. In academia and beyond, Ngũgĩ became known as one of the foremost advocates of literature written in African languages. Throughout his career — and to this day — African literature was dominated by books written in English or French, official languages in most countries on the continent. "What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?" Ngũgĩ asked in a seminal, fiery essay collection, named Decolonising the Mind. In one section, Ngũgĩ called out Chinua Achebe — the author who helped to launch his career — for writing in English. Their friendship soured as a result. Away from his literary career, Ngũgĩ was married — and divorced — twice. He had nine children, four of whom are published authors. "My own family has become one of my literary rivals," Ngũgĩ joked in a 2020 LA Times interview. His son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, has alleged that his mother was physically abused by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. "Some of my earliest memories are me going to visit her at my grandmother's where she would seek refuge," his son wrote in a social media post, which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o did not respond to. Later in his life, Ngũgĩ's health deteriorated. He had triple heart bypass surgery in 2019 and began to struggle with kidney failure. In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given three months to live. Ngũgĩ recovered, however, adding cancer to the lengthy list of struggles he had overcome. But now one of African literature's guiding lights — as Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once called him — is gone, leaving the world of words a little darker. — BBC
New Indian Express
29-05-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
NEW YORK: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's US publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngũgĩ's son Nducu wa Ngugi said he died in Bedford, Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. '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.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award.
San Francisco Chronicle
28-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. '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.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
