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Mail & Guardian
29-05-2025
- General
- Mail & Guardian
Writing against the grain: Adekeye Adebajo's Africa
Africa has always been marked by difference, globally, and this difference always bears negativity,and tends to perpetuate stereotypes. What Adekeye Adebajo's recent work The Splendid Tapestry of African Life: Essays on a Resilient Continent, Its Diaspora, and the World, counts for is to challenge and make that difference a positive appeal to the continent. The book is a collection of essays penned over a period of three decades, covering most compelling issues, debates and developments across the continent. It is the outcome of Adebajo's intellectual engagement which evolved and established a comprehensive and grounded critique, thoughts and reviews over the time. The collection is broken into 10 chapters, with 36 essays in total. The titles of essays are full of echoes and implications that bring a global kind of rendering to the issues explored. Among the names invoked throughout the book are William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Pliny the Elder, Ali Mazrui, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Chinua Achebe — to name just a few. Even the title of the book resonates with Nigerian novelist, poet and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth, where he laments the decay of beauties spoiled by the politics of corruption in his country. The title of the book also suggests a striking contrast with the issues covered, or more deeply, a politics of difference, which comes to mind when dealing with Africa. This contrast is summed up as follows: Africa we believe versus Africa we think. For the problematic arises out of difference, challenges and analysis. The truth that Adebajo brings into life is not something new, it is something embedded in Africa, which is not and/or cannot be seen from outside the continent. Nigerian poet and scholar Harry Garuba once said that the truth lies at the heart of an unexplored part of Africa that is not yet covered by the Western discourse, namely Afro-pessimism and Afro-romanticism. I believe Adebajo's attempt in this extensive study is to tap into that unexplored medium of the African domain. He aptly challenges the prevailing eurocentric and discursive representations of Africa foregrounded in the mainstream media, as well as the Western military and political interventions across the continent. For instance, calling France a myth of 'Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité', he calls into question the country's sustained hegemonic power in the francophone countries, saying, 'France continued to apply democracy inconsistently, sanctioning sham elections in Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Gabon, Niger and Togo between 1992 and 1996, and resuming aid to fraudulent, undemocratic regimes.' He adds, 'France's intervention on the continent has thus become a costly relic of a bygone age of imperial delusion.' The book covers a diverse range of issues, problems and themes around Africa including pan-Africanism; slavery; colonialism; reparations; foreign policy; governance; decolonisation; peacekeeping; Africa and Western relations; terrorism and Cold War problems on the continent, as well as cultural issues. In 586 pages, Adebajo deals with a multitude of issues besetting and underrating Africa. The Splendid Tapestry is informative and illuminating, providing an insightful, critical and deconstructive approach to global issues over Africa. Regarding reparations, for Adebajo, one of the most significant recent developments is the agreement by Germany to pay Namibia €1.1 billion in compensation, which was followed by the Netherlands' apology for Dutch slavery, globally. He asks: 'Will the more egregious abusers of France, Britain, Belgium, Portugal and Italy follow suit and start to atone for their historical crimes against humanity?' The way Adebajo tackles problems is strategic and optimistic. Bringing African leaders, thinkers, scholars such as Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Kwame Nkrumah, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui and many others into his pan-Africanist perspective, he establishes Africa as a global actor through interactions, encounters and engagement on the global scene. He sees Africa as moving, glittering and shining: 'Africa. A breath-taking continent of spectacular beauty conjures up extreme images of paradisiacal Eden as the birthplace of humankind and, in contrast, a conflict-ridden, disease-afflicted 'Dark Continent' that offers a glimpse of apocalyptic Armageddon. 'But Africa is a resilient continent that, despite continuing challenges, is currently on the move in the areas of economic development, conflict resolution, and democratic governance.' Though the bulk of the book takes a strategic and critical view over the African political landscape, considerable parts are dedicated to cinema, sports and cityscapes. One of the striking points he makes about Nollywood is important to note. He locates Nollywood at the heart of Africa because of its Nigerian location. He maintains: 'Nollywood has unquestioningly become one of the few true representations of 'global Africa'.' What strikes me most is to read about African cities in the writer's imagination. Adebajo provides astonishing pieces of cities, profoundly lived experiences of Lagos, Abuja, Accra, Abidjan, Johannesburg and Laayoune.
New York Times
29-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Writer Who Condemned Colonists and Elites, Dies at 87
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a groundbreaking novelist, playwright and memoirist whose writings explored the iniquities and ambiguities of colonialism in his native Kenya as much as the misdoings of the postcolonial elite, and who led a passionate campaign for African authors to eschew the languages of foreign occupiers, died on Wednesday in a hospital in Buford, Ga. He was 87. His son Nducu confirmed the death. Often tipped as a potential Nobel laureate, Mr. Ngugi (pronounced GOO-ghee) spent many years in exile to avoid the wrath of a government he criticized. For several decades, he taught comparative literature and English as a professor at the University of California, Irvine. His work inspired successive generations of African writers along with contemporaries such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, both of Nigeria. His canon drew enthusiastic praise, including for his debut novel, 'Weep Not, Child,' in 1964. It is the story of Kenyan brothers whose family must confront the challenges of the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. The book has been described as the first major novel in English by an East African author. By contrast, 'Devil on the Cross' in 1980, composed in his native tongue as 'Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini,' was regarded as the first modern novel in the Gikuyu language, spoken by the country's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. The book, about thieves who vie for supremacy by stealing from the people, sent him on a career writing in his own language and subsequently translating his work into English. He wrote 'Devil on the Cross' on prison toilet paper while detained by Kenyan authorities for a year without trial because of a play he wrote. In a New York Times review in 2018, the writer Ariel Dorfman said the book was a 'narrative of the devilish temptations he faced and the ruses used to thwart his jailers as he sat writing night after night in his cell.' The novel 'shows Ngugi in full command of his craft,' Mr. Dorfman wrote. Mr. Ngugi's life and writing unfolded in lock step with the stirrings of emancipation in British-run East Africa. He lived in Uganda, which secured independence in 1962, and in Kenya both before and after its independence in 1963. It was a life freighted by the subtleties and shifts of a momentous era buffeted by what a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, in 1960 called 'the wind of change.' While Mr. Ngugi was educated at Kenya's British-run Alliance High School — a prestigious institution designed to mold an African elite in the image of the colonizers — other members of his family were caught up in the Mau Mau uprising against those same outsiders. A brother became a freedom fighter against the British, and another sibling was shot to death. When Mr. Ngugi returned home for the first time from Alliance, he found that his home settlement had been destroyed, its population herded into a so-called protected village set up by the British authorities to cement control of their colonial subjects. 'The hedge of ashy leaves that we planted looks the same, but beyond it our homestead is a rubble of burnt dry mud, splinters of wood, and grass,' he wrote in a memoir, 'In the House of the Interpreter,' published in 2012. 'My mother's hut and my brother's house on stilts have been razed to the ground. My home, from where I set out for Alliance three months ago, is no more.' But colonialism was only one part of his life's trajectory, much of it set against a backdrop of violence. The experience of detention persuaded him to seek exile in 1982, first in Britain and later in the United States. But on his return to Kenya in 2004, he and his family were the victims of a nightmarish attack. Intruders broke into an apartment where they were staying, attacked Mr. Ngugi and raped Njeeri, his wife. The episode was likely rooted in vengeance by his foes, but it also reflecting the criminality that had flourished during Kenya's corrupt independence. 'It wasn't a simple robbery,' Mr. Ngugi told The Guardian in 2006. 'It was political — whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current. They hung around as though waiting for something, and the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.' Indeed, Mr. Ngugi's work was heavily intertwined with the politics of the era, and his thinking about the far-reaching impact of imperialism on African sensibilities played a central role in a much broader debate. In 1986, he published a collection of essays titled 'Decolonizing the Mind,' which traced what he depicted as a corrosive colonial intent to supplant Indigenous languages with the language of the occupier so as to seal the mental subjugation of the colonized. In 2023, Carey Baraka, a Kenyan writer who interviewed Mr. Ngugi for The Guardian, asked whether 'Kenyan English or Nigerian English' had become 'local languages.' Mr. Ngugi rejected the notion. 'It's like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,' he replied. 'English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That's an example of normalized abnormality. The colonized trying to claim the colonizer's language is the sign of the success of enslavement. It's very embarrassing.' Asked if there were such a thing as a 'good colonialist,' he disputed the notion. 'It doesn't matter if you're carrying a gun or a Bible, you are still a colonialist,' he said in the interview. 'Of course I'd rather face the colonialist with the Bible than the one with the gun, but in the end, both the Bible carrier and the gun carrier are espousing the same thing.' Mr. Ngugi was born on Jan. 5, 1938, in the Limuru district, north of Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, then under British colonial rule. He grew up in a large, rural family, the son of a polygamous father and his third of four wives, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, who encouraged him to seek a good education. During his early years, Kenya became convulsed by an uprising against colonialism that the British authorities labeled the Mau Mau revolt. Mr. Ngugi said the name was a misnomer designed to minimize and distract from the rebellion's aims of securing land and freedom for the Kenyan people. The rebels' true name, he said, was the Land and Freedom Army. Like many Kenyan families, his had an ambiguous relationship with the guerrillas fighting British rule. An elder brother, Good Wallace, was a freedom fighter. Another, Kabae, sided with the British, and a third, Tumbo, was a police informant — an activity that inspired 'Grain of Wheat,' Mr. Ngugi's third novel. Another brother, Gitogo, was shot to death in the back by British forces after failing to halt when ordered to because he was deaf. In 1964, he married his first wife, Nyambura. In 2024, one of their sons, Mukoma wa Thiongo, accused his father of abusing and marginalizing her, writing on the social media platform X that she would seek refuge at his grandmother's house. The accusation sparked discussions across literary, cultural and social spheres on whether it was appropriate. Of his 10 children, four are published authors: Tee Ngugi, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Nducu wa Ngugi and Wanjiku wa Ngugi. They survive him, as do his other children, Kĩmunya, Ngina, Njoki, Bjorn, Mumbi and Thiong'o K., as well as seven grandchildren. After his studies at the Alliance, Mr. Ngugi won a place at Makerere University in neighboring Uganda, which at that time was a cultural and intellectual hub of the emerging Africa of independent nations. It was at Makarere that his emergence as a writer began. He recorded this period of his life in a memoir, 'Birth of a Dream Weaver,' in 2016. In a review in The New York Times, Michela Wrong, a British writer, said the book showed Mr. Ngugi finding 'his creative voice just as a continent is finding its freedom.' 'The convictions he forms,' she wrote, 'will last a lifetime: the quest for African dignity and self-realization, a rejection of Western hegemony, a passionate call for Africans to tell their own story in their own Indigenous languages.' Some of those perceptions underpinned his works, including the acclaimed 'Petals of Blood' of 1977, which cast a searing light over the postcolonial era. Mr. Ngugi went by his Western baptismal name, James Ngugi, until after the publication of 'A Grain of Wheat' in 1967. By 1970 he had adopted the name Ngugi wa Thiong'o as an expression of his African heritage and identity, in line with his decision to write only in his native language. He translated most of his work from Gikuyu into English, reaching a much broader audience. His decision to write in Gikuyu determined much of his subsequent output. In 1977, he was a co-author (with Ngugi wa Mirii) of 'Ngaahika Ndeenda,' a drama in Gikuyu with the English title 'I Will Marry When I Want.' It was produced in an open-air people's theater with ordinary Kenyans acting the parts. For six weeks the play had a successful run, but then the authorities chose to demolish the theater and send the author to prison without a trial. That was the beginning of the year in which Mr. Ngugi composed 'Devil on the Cross' on toilet paper. His incarceration also produced a prison diary, published in 1980 under the title 'Detained,' which further cemented his credentials as a writer and an activist seeking to expand Africa's sense of its own freedom. After his release and voyage into exile, he was a rare visitor to Kenya as his global reputation flourished. With 'Wizard of the Crow,' published in English in 2006 and set in a fictional African land called Aburiria, Jeff Turrentine said in a review in The Times, Mr. Ngugi 'has flown over the entire African continent and sniffed out all of the foul stenches rising high into the air.' But 'from that altitude he can also see a more hopeful sign: large masses of people coming together, sharing triumphant stories and casting spells.'
Arab News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: The Aesthetic Cold War by Peter J. Kalliney
How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In 'The Aesthetic Cold War,' Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean — such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka — carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work.
New York Times
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At 90, Wole Soyinka Revisits His Younger, More Optimistic Self
We are living, all of us, in an exhausting world, and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka is not immune. You don't become as profoundly invested in art and politics as he has been over his long life unless you care to your core about the path that we as a species are charting. 'I'm a fundamentalist of human freedom,' he said one morning last week in Brooklyn. 'It's as elementary as that.' In the late 1960s, during Nigeria's civil war, he was held for two years as a political prisoner, having agitated against the conflict. Three decades later, he was charged in absentia with treason, bringing the possibility of a death sentence, but he remained abroad until the dictator who had persecuted him died and was succeeded by a leader who promised reform. In between, cementing Soyinka's status as a global intellectual, he won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Academy lauding his 'vivid, often harrowing' works and their 'evocative, poetically intensified diction.' As his 90th birthday approached last summer, though, he decided to give himself an unusual gift — in reaction to what he called 'the double whammy of Ukraine and Gaza,' which made him so pessimistic that his impulse was to withdraw completely. 'I remember going months saying to myself, I don't want to read any newspapers, I don't want to watch television news, I just want to get out, stay out and enjoy what it feels like,' he said, sitting in a greenroom at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, where Theater for a New Audience is giving his 1958 play 'The Swamp Dwellers' its Off Broadway premiere. In a deep, strong, mellifluous voice, its lilt sounding of both Nigeria and Britain, Soyinka immediately quibbled with his own choice of language: 'Enjoy is the wrong word, of course, because you never enjoy it. You know you're missing something, and sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. But I pursued that experiment anyway, where for six months I just did not read any newspapers. Occasionally somebody would send me a link, you know, 'You must read this,' and I would, yes.' But otherwise, 'I just put my eyes away, even to avoid headlines.' It was difficult to sustain, and he said he was dogged by the feeling that 'I'm going to wake up and find that the world is gone and I'm the only one left. And what am I going to do with myself?' Yet his attempt at disengagement ended for another reason altogether, which Soyinka — a raconteur par excellence, crowned with a dashing billow of white hair — mentioned almost as a punchline when I asked. His present to himself, it turns out, had come with conditions. 'Well, my gift was up at the end of six months. So I had no choice,' he said, and laughed. Adrienne Kennedy, whose play 'He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box' had its world premiere in 2018 at Theater for a New Audience, introduced the company's artistic director, Jeffrey Horowitz, to 'The Swamp Dwellers.' Now 93, Kennedy has taught Soyinka's play repeatedly, and when Horowitz asked her for a statement about it, she responded in emphatic verse, extolling Soyinka's fight for human rights for people of color and calling him the 'greatest living playwright.' She added: There. Is no one. Else who. Sees into. The thousands Of. Elements. Man. Faces. And he is willing. To. Be imprisoned For. His. Beliefs He. Is. A. Giant. . Soyinka was about 24 — out of his country for the first time, living in England — when he wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers.' Even though he was a British colonial, and would be until Nigeria gained its independence in 1960, he felt as if he was in 'alien territory' in England. 'Let's just say that my mind was very much on home,' he said. 'The politics, the realities, the climate, the food and so on. It was sort of the cusp of independence.' A 70-minute one-act, the play is set in the home of Alu and Makuri, perched on stilts above a swamp in the Niger Delta. Their grown son Igwezu has just returned from the city where he lives, only to find that the crops he planted near the village have been lost to floods. Awoye Timpo, the production's director, sees even in this early work a hallmark of Soyinka's writing: his ability 'to capture a sense of the epic inside the very, very personal.' 'Some of his other plays — 'Death and the King's Horseman,' 'The Road' — they have lots of scenes, they move in lots of different ways, but this play is compact,' she said. Soyinka said he had forgotten the existence of 'The Swamp Dwellers,' which is seldom produced these days, until he got the inquiry about this production. 'It's been done on television in a few countries, but it's been sort of overtaken by more contemporary plays and concerns,' he said. Re-encountering the work, he is painfully struck by his young self's optimistic depiction of 'a kind of hybrid community made up from different parts of the country.' 'That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,' he said. In conversation, Soyinka gives the impression of thriving on batting around ideas, arguing and re-evaluating. But he is adroit at brushing aside praise, as when I suggested that his outspokenness throughout his life was brave. 'I don't consider it bravery,' he said. 'I always explain that it's a question of being able to live with oneself. You know, it's either one believes in something or one doesn't. If you don't believe in a thing and you go along with it, I find it impossible to be at peace with myself. And I always say, I love being at peace with myself. It's true! It's true. I like to feel comfortable inside, deep inside. From that point I can do anything.' Art and politics are for him intrinsically entwined, though he does not indulge the romantic notion that turmoil is beneficial to artists. Professing himself 'a glutton for tranquillity,' he said that creating is a way of 'extracting something positive' while resisting the 'limpet gene attached to human evolution, which spells destruction, cruelty, abominations of different kinds.' He is distressed by recent events in the United States, where he once lived in self-imposed exile. He was here, too, during what he calls 'the Black struggle,' and it angers him to see the erasure of gains that his peers fought for in the civil rights movement: 'all this fervor just being rubbished.' He remembers recognizing the reversal of that progress — 'both subtly and overtly, openly as is happening right now,' he said — when it began in reaction to Barack Obama's presidency. 'Maybe as an outsider and involved very deeply with my own circumstances on the African continent — the fight against dictators, greed, the lust for power — maybe because I could stand sort of outside it, I could look inside,' he said. 'Because most of my [American] colleagues said, 'No, it couldn't happen.' I said, 'OK.'' After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, Soyinka took a pair of shears to his green card, determined to no longer 'be even a partial member of this society.' Now, he says, he looks at the United States and sees 'MAGA land.' 'It's one of the saddest developing phenomena that I know of,' Soyinka said. 'I just feel very, very sad that what's happening in the States should be happening in such a potentially progressive country.' Given the current political atmosphere in which foreign governments — including Britain, Germany and Canada — have warned their citizens about traveling to the United States, I asked if he felt safe visiting. 'Oh, I've lived in a constant state of nonsafety,' he said, with a small laugh. 'So I'm used to that. If I'm walking through the street and they pick me up, I have no problem whatsoever. You know, my laptop is where it is. It's up in the clouds.' Time and experience have shaped the hopeful young man who wrote 'The Swamp Dwellers' into a worldly old man with a dented sense of possibility. But if he regards humans as being entrenched in perpetual conflict, with 'power on the one side, freedom on the other,' he has not abandoned the battlefield. 'I've lost that sense of achievable idealism,' he said. 'But it's always there. One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That's what hurts.'
