By Wumi Raji
I met Ngugi wa Thiong’o in person only once. This was at the Gothenburg Book Fair held on September 23-26, 2010. The focus of the Fair which took place in Sweden’s second largest city was Books and Publishing in Africa. Naturally then, a lot of African writers and publishers featured at the event. Ngugi was there, and so were Nadine Gordimer, the white South African female writer and 1991 Nobel Prize winner in literature, and, as well, Nawal El-Sadawi, the Egyptian feminist writer and activist.
Each of the three literary guru drew huge crowds wherever s/he went or whenever s/he featured in a panel. So, it was difficult getting any of them for a one-on-one chat. I managed to catch Ngugi after great efforts. My late Professor, David Cook, spent fifteen years in Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda before joining the University of Ilorin in 1977 and was Ngugi’s teacher. Naturally then, the first question I put to him was whether he still remembered David Cook. His response was sharp – he did. He said Cook was a good teacher, a brilliant one at that, and one who related freely with his students. But, he added, David always wanted to teach literature as literature – whatever that means – again as he said, adding that he never wanted to touch the ideas in any literary works only the form. On that basis, he said finally, they always disagreed.
I understand what Ngugi meant, but do not agree that David Cook was only concerned with the form of literature. It is true that the Professor from Brighton always emphasized the importance of style and techniques. He repeated it again and again that it is the form of literature that gets the idea expressed in it across to a target audience. If you don’t write well, again he would add, whatever great ideas you may have will not get anywhere. Master the form so your purpose can be achieved – that’s how he always concluded.
Perhaps ironically, Ngugi appeared to be the greatest beneficiary of the admonitions by David Cook on writing of all of the latter’s former students. The Kenyan author produced an impressive body of work in a writing career that spanned more than sixty years. This comprises eight novels, three collections of short stories, seven plays, ten volumes of essays, five published memoirs and four collections of children’s writings. This is aside the translations into English of some of the works, having first written them in Gikuyu: Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will Marry when I Want), Caitaani Mutharabaini (trans. Devil on the Cross), Maitu Njugira (trans. Mother Sing for Me), etc. Together, these works, in terms of form, rank among the best anywhere. Together again, they ensured a place for Ngugi in the canon of world great writers.
Among African writers, Ngugi is generally regarded as the third most important after Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. His works are widely read and studied and in all my peregrinations, I never met anybody who complained that any of Ngugi’s novels was not well-written.
At the same time, and probably more than any other African writer, Ngugi was also well-known for the forceful ideas he articulates through his writings. Right from the start, from the very beginning, from the earliest of his works such as the short stories published in Secret Lives, the plays This Time Tomorrow and The Black Hermit and the novel, Weep not, Child to the last of his novels titled The Perfect Nine, and his memoirs, Ngugi makes sure that nobody misses the point he is trying to make. Ngugi has strong ideas on many urgent issues affecting Kenya, his country, Africa, his continent, Black people as a whole and people of the South in general. He writes on how to tackle imperialism, how to resist oppression, shake off colonial/neo-colonial/postcolonial conditions. He writes on Marxism, socialist revolution, feminism and/or combating sexism and patriarchy. The ideas are all intimately related and can be summarized in one sentence as focusing on how to lift up the repressed, or win liberation for the oppressed.
As earlier stated, Ngugi’s foremost concern was always the people of Kenya, his land of birth, followed by oppressed people wherever they are found on the face of the earth. Now, what distinguishes Ngugi from most other writers is that he never stopped at articulating these issues in his writings, he also went out to actualise them in struggles. This was what animated the theatre work he undertook in collaboration with the peasants and workers of Kamiriithu, a project which earned him a year of detention without trial and cost him his job as a Professor at the University of Nairobi.
Even so, Ngugi still never gave up. And it was for this that he was forced into exile. Even as a Diaspora, Ngugi never stopped. His attitude riled up Daniel Arap Moi, Kenya’s president at the time so much that he initiated an intense campaign of vilification against the writer, causing his images and effigies to be set up on the streets of Nairobi and then set on fire.
But the aspect of Ngugi’s multi-sided campaign known to most people has to do with his position on the use of indigenous languages in literary writings. It seems Ngugi received the insight originally as an aftermath of his theatre project with the ordinary people of Kamiriithu which took place in 1976. I will Marry when I Want, the play produced during that collaboration was originally written in Gikuyu and produced in the same language under the title Ngaahika Ndeenda. The way the play was received, the impact it made caused Ngugi to undertake a reassessment of the choice of language for his writings. To him now, to choose a language is to choose an audience: to write in English or any of the other European languages is to write either for the elite minority or worse still European readers; while, on the other hand, to write in a local language is for a writer to direct his/her works to peasants and workers and, in short, the wretched majority. The Kenyan author became more and more vociferous as time went on. This was to the extent that he dismissed all works of African literature written in any European languages – including his own as well – as Afro-European literature.
In 1986, with the publication of Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi announced that he was bidding farewell to English as the linguistic vehicle for any of his works. It was a position that fetched Ngugi a lot of criticisms and condemnations from many people, including fellow writers, intellectuals, critics and scholars. But it also fetched him a lot of praises from fellow ideologues and other people working with people at the grassroots, and on theories of development and/or local languages. What made this decision particularly surprising was that by this time, Ngugi had been driven into exile and dare not try to return to Kenya. Yet, he would go to European and American conferences to deliver speeches and papers in Gikuyu. It was a position that he was bound to review before long, and that moment came when he accepted a job as a visiting professor of Comparative Literature in Yale University. But saying that he reviewed the position is not to suggest that he abandoned Gikuyu and Kiswahili and went back to writing in English. No. What he did was to moderate his stance.
He now conceded that there was nothing wrong in speaking or writing in English or any other European language. To develop local languages however, or to reach people down below, he would submit, writers have to invest in local languages. From then on, starting with his novel Wizard of the Crow, Ngugi would first of all write and publish a work in Gikuyu and then commence the process of translating it into English. This was what he did till he drew his last breath on Wednesday May 28, 2025.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was indeed a man of strong convictions, and he stood by those convictions till the very end. May his example continue to inspire generations of writers and activists to come.
Raji is professor of Dramatic Arts at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife.