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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
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, giant of African literature, dies aged 87
The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who was censored, imprisoned and forced into exile by the dictator Daniel arap Moi, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature and one of few writers working in an indigenous African language, has died aged 87. 'It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our dad, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this Wednesday morning,' wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. 'He lived a full life, fought a good fight.' Ngũgĩ explored the troubled legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Consider a giant of the modern African pantheon, he had been a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature for years. After missing out on the prize in 2010 to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngũgĩ said he was less disappointed than the photographers who had gathered outside his home: 'I was the one who was consoling them!' Born in 1938, while Kenya was under British colonial rule, Ngũgĩ was one of 28 children, born to a father with four wives. He lived through the Mau Mau uprising as a teenager, during which the authorities imprisoned, abused and tortured tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. During the conflict, Ngũgĩ's father – one of the Gikuyu, Kenya's largest ethnic group – was forced off his land, and two of his brothers were killed. This struggle formed the backdrop to the novel that made his name: Weep Not, Child. Published in 1964, just a year after Kenya gained independence, it tells the story of the education of Njoroge, the first of his family to go to school, and how his life is thrown into turmoil by the events which surround him. A series of novels, including short stories and plays followed, as Ngũgĩ became a lecturer in English literature at Nairobi University. There he argued that the English department should be renamed, and shift its focus to literature around the world. 'If there is need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African?' he wrote in a paper. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' In 1977, he published his fourth novel, Petals of Blood, and a play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, which dealt with the troubled legacy of the Mau Mau uprising, but it was his co-authoring of a play written in Gikuyu, I Will Marry When I Want, which led to his arrest and imprisonment in Mamiti maximum security prison. 'In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language,' he told the Guardian in 2006. 'Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English?' He decided from then on to write in Gikuyu, that 'the only language I could use was my own'. Released in 1978, exile followed in 1982, when the author learned of a plot to kill him upon his return from a trip to Britain to promote his novel Caitani Mutharabaini, translated as Devil on the Cross. He later moved from the UK to the US, where he worked as a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, and headed its International Centre for Writing and Translation. Ngũgĩ continued to write in Gikuyu, despite his troubled connection with his homeland; an arrest warrant was issued for the fictional main character of his 1986 novel Matigari, which was also banned in Kenya. Returning to Nairobi with his wife Njeeri for the first time in 2004, two years after the death of Daniel arap Moi, Ngũgĩ was greeted by crowds at the airport. But during the trip, men wielding guns broke into their apartment, raping Njeeri and beating Ngũgĩ when he tried to intervene. 'I don't think we were meant to come out alive,' he told the Guardian two years later. His novel Wizard of the Crow, translated by the author into English in 2006, returned to the subject of African kleptocracy, being set in the imaginary dictatorship of the Free Republic of Aburiria. He said the 'most beautiful sentence in the entire novel' was 'a translation from Gikuyu by the author'. He continued to translate his own works from Gikuyu, and was nominated for the international Booker prize in 2021 for his epic novel-in-verse The Perfect Nine. He was the prize's first nominee writing in an indigenous African language and the first author to be nominated for their own translation. Ngũgĩ had nine children, four of whom are authors: Tee Ngũgĩ, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ. He is survived by his wife, Njeeri.
