Ngugi at 85: a reflection

On 5 January 2023, I learnt that writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo was turning 85 and that he was still writing.

I got through his son, Nducu Wa Ngugi’s Facebook page.

Apparently Nducu Wa Ngugi is also a writer and in that particular Facebook post, the elder Ngugi is watching his son, Nducu, signing copies of his own books.

Father and son are at peace with each other. Ngugi is holding Nducu by the shoulder as if to say, “go on, son.”

Altogether his sons — Tee Ngugi, Nducu wa Ngugi, Mukoma wa Ngugi and daughter Wanjiku wa Ngugi are all published authors, showing the father’s influence on his family.

Ngugi has always been an immense inspiration to many writers and scholars in the African continent and beyond.

It was in my early high school days in Centenary District, northern Zimbabwe, when I first came into contact with the Kenyan writer through his iconic novel, The River Between. My soul was immediately touched.

Our English teacher, may his soul rest in peace, used Ngugi’s book as supplementary reading for our class but for me, it went beyond all that.

My imagination was fired. The hills, the rivers, the elders in Ngugi’s Kenya were reminiscent of nearly everything in the northern part of my country.

My teacher held The River Between and read from it, pacing up and down the classroom.

The opening chapters were especially tickling:

“The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan.

“They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their Creator.”

My teacher read on, excited, “A river flowed through the valley of life. If there had been no bush and no forest trees covering the slopes, you could have seen the river when you stood on top of either Kameno or Makuyu.

“Now you had to come down. Even then you could not see the whole extent of the river as it gracefully, and without any apparent haste, wound its way down the valley.

“Like a snake. The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring back-to-life. Honia River never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes.

“And it went on in the same way. Never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.”

When he came to the river, my teacher’s voice became deeper: “Honia was the soul of Kameno and Makuyu. It joined them. And men, cattle, wild beasts and trees, were all united by this life-stream.

“When you stood in the valley, the two ridges ceased to be sleeping lions united by their common source of life. They became antagonists.

“You could tell this, not by anything tangible but by the way they faced each other, like two rivals ready to come to blows in a life and death struggle for the leadership of this isolated region.”

I felt like I was in that Kenyan terrain myself, seeing the similar valleys and ridges of our land through the classroom window.

The familiarity was exhilarating. Listening to the African Gikuyu names; Kameno and Makuyu rang a bell because Gikuyu strangely felt like Shona, my mother tongue.

My classmates and I were mesmerised too by the proverb: “Kagutui kamucii gatihakago ageni” — the oil skin of the house is not for rubbing onto the skin of strangers.

We sang out the proverb in the titillating Gikuyu in the school yard at break-time, just for the fun of it!

We were simply happy to have discovered a writer who came from a faraway place that, nevertheless, felt and smelt like ours.

Little did I know that I had unconsciously been led to realise that the names of men and women in my community could also appear in serious pieces of writings! I would write about my people as they are!

As time passed, I began to read more from Ngugi’s works on my own and through the syllabus, as I went further in my own schooling career.

I recall that I easily related with the set up in Ngugi’s play with Micere Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Khimathi.

I related easily especially with characters from the guerilla war of Kenya in the 1950’s captured in this play.

It was easy because I grew up seeing guerillas interacting with the peasants in Northern Zimbabwe during our long war of independence from colonialism.

The scene in which the colonial soldier searches a Kikuyu woman who is actually on her way to feed the Mau Mau guerrillas in the forest, was very familiar to me as I had seen women in my family hiding food in baskets in order to feed the guerrillas.

As I read the play, I smiled at this: “A woman is seen walking across the stage.

Between 30 and 40, she is mature, slightly built, good looking with a youthful face…”

She is a simple peasant woman who is beautiful, strong, clever and undeterred, like my own aunts were in support of the guerillas in Zimbabwe’s war of independence.

The play is based on Dedan Kimathi (1920-1957).

Belonging to the Gikuyu ethnic group, he was one of the most influential and charismatic leaders of the revolutionary struggle for independence.

Kimathi was well educated and spoke Gikuyu, Kiswahili, and English fluently.

He taught at the Karunaini Independent School in Nyeri, before becoming a freedom fighter.

His fellow soldiers gave Kimathi the titles of Field Marshal and Prime Minister.

In 1955, during the State of Emergency, the British, recognising his growing influence, offered a bounty for his capture.

He was hunted down (October 1, 1956) by British officer Ian Henderson, followed by a “fake trial” where ironically, rather than accusing Kimathi of leading the armed revolution, he was charged with carrying a firearm.

He was executed at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, the same prison where Ngugi himself was held without charge decades later.

Kimathi’s legacy was obscured for years, thanks to the British propaganda (he was buried in an unmarked grave) until only recently when Kimathi has been honoured as a significant architect of Kenya’s independence struggle.

I must admit that of all Ngugi’s works, I was most mesmerised by his novel, A Grain of Wheat. I was touched by the intense personality of Mugo, particularly his loneliness and the overriding feeling that he has something to hide!

His development, just like his movements are as gradual as the movement of an ant. His hesitation is warm and often intriguing.

That he turns out to having been a betrayer not a hero is the most painful part of this novel.

My countryman, Charles Mungoshi, who was also intrigued by this novel, translated it into the Shona language as Tsanga Yembeu.

It is now available to people at schools and the villages in their own language.

For me, probably the most startling thing in the Ngugi story was Ngugi’s detention without trial in 1977, in an independent Kenya!

This came as a result of his and Ngugi WaMirii’s Gikuyu play, published in English as I Will Marry When I Want.

It was felt that he wanted to politicize ordinary Kenyans through this play, especially when it was used in the community theatre at Kamiritu.

In his book, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, Ngugi describes his times at Kamiti Maximum Prison in Kenya, the purposeful degradation and humiliation of the political detainees, the neglect and casual cruelty that undermined their health, the debilitating tension and tedium that marked each day in prison.

In a series of reflections he is able to consider his own writings, the nature of imprisonment and the way forward for the people of Kenya.

This very elaborate testimony by Ngugi, is confined to the periods between 31 December 1977 and 12 December 1978, during his incarceration. Ngugi says in the preface to this book: “I have, therefore, tried to discuss this issue not as a personal experience between me and a few individuals, but as a social, political and historical phenomenon.

I have tried to see it in the context of the historical attempts, from the colonial times to the present, by a foreign imperialist bourgeoisie, in alliance with its local Kenyan representatives, to turn Kenyans into slaves and of the historical struggles of the Kenyan people against economic, political and cultural slavery.”

The book is a window through which one could understand the extent to which human beings find strategies to survive under very inhumane conditions.

But it is not enough to write about Ngugi without indicating his position on the importance of the use of African languages in African literature.

This runs through most of his essays and particularly his book, Decolonising the Mind.

Central to Ngugi’s key position on language is his narration of what took place between and among the African writers and critics who gathered at Makerere in Uganda in June 1962 at the famous conference called: “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.”

The conference faced the fundamental question of determining who qualified as an African writer and what qualified as African writing.

Was African literature only the literature produced in Africa or about Africa?

Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme?

Should it embrace the whole continent or South of the Sahara, or just black Africa?

Should African Literature be only literature in indigenous African languages or should it include literature in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and so on?

In his book of essays called Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Ngugi describes the damaging effects of colonialism on African literature, education, and culture.

Ngugi describes the conflict between the economic effects of imperialism, still present in Africa, and the need for economic and cultural independence for African people.

Ngugi views language and literature as playing a central role in this struggle.

He asserts that language is essential to people’s self-perception and to their view of the universe.

He laments that despite his former status as only a student with one major publication, at the time of the Makerere meeting, he was invited, while all the prominent Gikuyu writers were not.

He describes the ways in which the colonial education system changed African perception of their language, and by extension, of themselves.

He recounts the divide that he and other African children experienced between the languages of their home and the language of schooling.

He retells his experiences of severe punishments that were inflicted on African children for speaking their native tongues in school. Some of the most brutal instances, which Ngugi recounts, include corporal punishment, humiliation, and fines.

As a result, Ngugi declared that he would return to writing only in Gikuyu.

The debate raged over the elimination of the English department from the university and its replacement by the Literature department.

After his release in December 1978, he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University, and his family was harassed.

Due to his writing about the injustices of the dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile.

Only after Daniel arap Moi, the longest-serving Kenyan president, retired in 2002, was it safe for them to return.

Ngugi has continued to write expressing his views on the place of Africa in its relations with the countries of the West and his ideas have influenced various paths thought in African literature.

Ngugi Wa Thiongo is best known for his first novel Weep Not, Child. His other novels; The River Between, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, confirmed his stature as one of the major African writers of our time. Ngugi is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Memory Chirere