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The Guardian Archive Long Read Hi, my name is Keri Baraka I'm the author of an essay called Ngugi wa Thiongho, Three Days of the Giant of African Literature, which was published in The Guardian Longwood in 2023.
I first started writing or thinking about writing this essay when the editor of the Longridge asked me if there was something I'd ever want to write about Gugi. And I think like the elemental thing about Gugi is that as an African writer, but... particularly as a Ken writer your entire makeup as a writer is defined either
from him or in opposition to him. So if you think of writing as like a house and there's like a foundation, the foundation of every kind of writer is like the idea of Nguiwa Theomo. Whether you love him or hate him, whether you want to write like him or don't write like him, whether you agree with his views of language or don't agree with...
his views of language, he's at the center of Kenyan writing. And so it's a thing about what it would look like to write an essay about a person who has been very important to how I think of myself as a writer. In the times I wrote this article, two things have changed. The first is that at some point last year, maybe eight months after the article was published, one of his sons, Mukomo Angugi, accused him of assaulting his wife.
That is Mukoma's mother, Gugi's wife. And I accuse him of being like a physically abusive man, of being an abusive husband to her. And this changes a lot how people... and in the african space i think globally but like african writers have talked a lot about what it means that like one of the heroes of african writing a man would like such good outside politics
was very harmful to people in his private space. The second big thing which has changed is that days ago, he passed away at the age of 87. So one of the things that Guri's passing means is that in African... literature, particularly African literature and English, but across African literature, there's like English, Spanish, French, Kikuyu in Gugi's case. The earliest generation of African writers start to emerge around the 1950s and 1960s.
And so you have people like Ngugi, people like Will Eshwinka, who won the Nobel Prize for like Genoa Chebe. And a lot of these people who are bookending the African Router series. And so it's happened that so many of them have passed away. And Ngugi's death... is not only important because of he himself passing away but also what it means for like to African writers that like of that first cohort very few of them are still alive and as time passes we are going to lose one of them.
Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to theguardian.com forward slash long read. Ngugiwa Thiongho, Three Days of the Giant of African Literature by KB Baraka.
In October, I flew to Irvine to meet the novelist Ngoiweth Young. I had spent the previous few weeks in cold and windy, Iowa, and the sunshine and warmth of California was a bomb. I sat in the backseat of my cab. Quiet. Outside, huge American trucks thundered past, the tangy smell of the ocean in the air. Gugi is a giant of African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me, he looms especially large.
alongside writers such as chinua achebe and olisoinka he was part of a literary scene that flourished in the nineteen fifties and sixties during the last years of colonialism on the continent If Achebe was a prime mover who captured the deep feeling of displacement that colonization had dragged, and Soinka, the really guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and Western ideas of freedom,
Then Gugi was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books a weapon, first against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruptions of Kenya's post-independence ruling elite. I was six or seven the first time I read Ngugi, borrowing a children's book he'd written for my primary school's library. When I was ten, I came across a worn copy of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a play he corroded with Mishaya Gitae Mugo.
or my grandfather's bookshelf. I read it again and again, captivated by the story of this leader of Kenya's independence struggle, challenging the right of a colonial court to try him. Kimathi, who led the arms rebellion against the British, was executed in nineteen fifty seven i studied ngugi all through high school as half generations of kenyan students my uncle an academic wrote a book about him
which I read as a teenager without properly understanding it. It was about a revolution Ngugi had led at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s, which had resulted in the university dropping English literature as a course of study.
and replacing it with one that positioned african literature's oral and written at the centre a decade later ngugi famously ceased writing his novels in english instead doing all his creative work in the language he grew up speaking i fell in love with the idea of ngugi as a fighter for african literature and so naturally i decided to go to the university of nairobi and majored in the very degree i had fought for there in the early
There were even more Ngugi novels and plates to write papers on, and city exams on. So much of the 20th century seems contained within Ngugi's life. He was born just before the Second World War, when Kenya was still a British colony.
he grew up under the shadow of a violent war for independence he went to university in uganda at a time of political and literary ferment across africa and he came of age as first uganda in then kenya nineteen sixty three gained the independence over the years that followed he saw with horror how people's pre-independence hopes were dashed he was thrown in jail by the kenyan government for his writing
After his release, he continued his writing and political activism, first in Kenya, then in exile in London, then, finally, in the US, where he has been a professor of literature for the past 30 years. he has become known not just as a novelist but as a major postcolonial theorist whose nineteen eighty six is a collection decolonizing the mind an attack on the hold of colonial languages such as french and english over former colonies
has become a set text for university students around the world. It is now an annual tradition to predict that Ngugi will finally receive this year's Nobel Prize for Literature and then to lament that it doesn't happen. In short, approaching kugi's house in california i felt nervous my body a hotbed of cliches hands shaky palms clammy heart racing the plan had been to write a profile taking the measure of this legendary author
who was now 84, and entering the final phase of his life. Ngugi had suggested that I stay with him during my time in Irvine. His health was poor and he would be having surgery, he said. If I stayed... It would be easier to speak. It was a strange arrangement, not exactly befitting the journalistic objectivity I had hoped to cultivate. But I wanted as much time with him as possible. And besides, I reasoned.
I'd keep things professional. And now here I was, pulling into his driveway, walking up to his red brick bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac and ringing the bell.
Getting the napkins. I had never met Ngugi before. I had seen him only once at the launch of a translation project in Nairobi in 2017, and now he was before me. At the event... he'd spoken about the nobel and how the previous year in expectation of his winning the award a group of journalists had come outside his house from the very early morning when he didn't win he and his wife had given the journalists tea and comforted them
today he was lounging in a shirt trousers slippers and a bathrobe and i thought well what did you expect coming to his house at nine a m he bade me join him on the dining table where he was doing some work around us everything was cream and grey the walls the couch the chairs the rug it felt too clean too stark devoid of personality before we talked he said
he needed to know more about me to know what my motivations were he asked me to tell him about my writing i talked about some articles i'd written and mentioned the novel i'd been working on for a few years like yours it's about religion and politics i said i hoped with this to signal to him that he and i had similar interests in our fiction he didn't respond to this instead
he asked if i was making enough for my writing to earn a living i told him i was that's good he said i was never able to do that we were interrupted by the doorbell two people came in they were there to do his cleaning cooking and shopping in a few hours he told me a health aide would come to check his vitals as ngugi has grown older his health has deteriorated
In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he survived, despite a grim medical forecast that gave him three months to leave. In December 2019, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery around the same period he began to suffer from kidney failure the same condition that killed one of his brothers by the time i visited he wasn't able to leave the house much
apart from his three dialysis appointments each week i can't move now because of my illness you have to come to me i'm the king he said violence has loomed over much of ngwi's past Yet now he lives a relatively genteel existence in American suburbia. Since 2002, he has been a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where his wife, Njeri, also works.
he has nine children six from his first marriage and many grandchildren and he talks to his family every day his days are largely spent at home reading taking calls and practicing his Spanish with his cooking and cleaning help Every few months, he is awarded another prize. His phone rang. His assistant on the line. Ngugi was supposed to be doing a video call with a group of South African academics who wanted to discuss decolonization.
Ngugi told her he had been unable to log in. But I have a young person here with me, he said. Baraka, he'll be able to help me. He handed me the phone. I got to work. the savvy young person helping an 84-year-old man figure out technology. I handed the laptop to Ngugi, who apologized to the academics for being late. As they talked, he asked me to get him some napkins. He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
It's hot in California, he told the academics. I'm not sweating because of your questions. Normalize abnormality. After the call, I played Ngugi a song that had become a hit in Kenya in the months after the 2022 Kenyan general elections. The song, Vaida, is in Nguniore, a language neither Ngugi nor I speak. yet pretty soon he was dancing to it bopping his head shifting his shoulders on his chair in this day he said a song in an african language would not have become a national hit during my time
If you heard an African song on the radio, you switched it off. What you were waiting for was Jimmy Rogers, he said. This was part of what he called the normalized abnormality of the post-colonial condition. The colonized heard the language taken from them. and a foreign language put in its space but what of kenyan english or nigerian english i asked him aren't these now local languages
He looked at me, aghast. It's like the enslaved being happy that there's a local version of enslavement, he said. 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 a sign of the success of enslavement. It's very embarrassing.
he covered his eyes i read someone saying he is writing in french so that he can subvert it i thought wait a minute he is the one being subverted as he spoke i cringed I wondered what Ngugi made of the fact that I wrote in English, or that I, a Kenyan writer, was here to profile him on assignment from a British newspaper. Was I also one of the enslaved?
limuru where it all begins one morning a few years ago i was hiking near the place where ngwe was born and grew up limuru a town eighteen miles away from nairobi kenya's capital the cold beat into my face and the red soil crunched beneath my boots then my guide stopped look at all this he said this used to be my grandfather's land
Around us were rows of neatly manicured tea plants stretching out into the distance, waiting to be picked. I asked him if the family had tried to recover their land. Yes, he said. but state power had been so firmly against them that there was little they could do land has been the centre of politics in kenya since the end of the nineteenth century when britain established a protectorate here
Kenya was envisioned as a settler's frontier, where wealthy Europeans would hunt, bomb, and leave a gilded existence in wild Africa. In places such as The land that the British had grabbed from African communities was used to grow tea and coffee, the cash crops that financed the administration of the colony. Ngugi was born in 1938 through a poor prison family who belonged to Kenya's largest ethnic group.
which today accounts for around twenty per cent of kenya's population the family had been rendered destitute by these land grubs and Ngugi's father descended into alcoholism and cruelty towards his wives and twenty-four children. It was Ngugi's mother, Wanjiku Wangugi, who encouraged the children to go to school.
even as the guerrilla war against the british rage around them from the nineteen forties onwards the story of the land and freedom army better known by the derogatory name the british adopted for the group the mau mau is the foundation of much of Ngugi's most important work. Some of Ngugi's family were part of the LFA-led resistance in Limuru, while others collaborated with the British. Ngugi's older brother, Good Wallace, was a member.
another brother kabai who had fought for the british in myanmar during the second world war worked for the british against the elefe another brother tumbo was a low-level police informant another brother gitogo who was deaf was fatally shot in the back by the british after he failed to respond to a command to halt during a police dragnet search for lfa fighters in nimuru one day when gui was a teenager
he and a friend were caught up in one of these police searches in the daytime local informants their heads covered in white hoods with narrow isolates would walk the street with brigish soldiers and squads comprised of home guards a paramilitary force drawn from loyalist members of the Agikuyu community and led by junior colonial officers. This group would forcibly detain whoever they met, regardless of age.
and the hooded informants would identify elefe members and sympathizers by a nod of the head ngugi's third novel a grain of wheat tells the story of a fictionalized informant ngugi and his friend were interrogated by the british officers but eventually let go as they walked away not daring to look back they heard gunshots and screams
executions of people who had either been identified by the informants or refused to answer questions. A few months later, in 1955, after his first time at the Elite Boarding School Alliance, for which his family had screamed to pay tuition before he was awarded a scholarship. Ngugi returned to his home village and made a shocking discovery. I stop, put down the box, and look around me.
he wrote in one of his memoirs. 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. My mother's hut and my brother's house on steels have been raised to the ground. My home, from where I set out for Alliance three months ago, is normal. The British had destroyed the entire village and moved its inhabitants to a fortified new site.
where the activities of the inhabitants were closely monitored. It wasn't quite a prison camp because the inhabitants could live. But as Ngugi writes, for all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp, and the village had been erased. At night, soldiers would pull villagers from their homes, interrogating and sometimes executing those who they believed supported the LFA. James and Ngugi Ngugi's career is often divided neatly into two parts. There's the first Ngugi
whose work as a published writer began at Makere University in Uganda in the late 1950s and continued until the end of the 60s. This Ngugi was called James Ngugi, sometimes J.T. Ngugi, and he wrote in English. His novels were political and critical of the colonial state, but certainly so. His protagonists grappled with the effects of colonialism, but saw Western education as a tool that could be harnessed against the colonists.
They weren't explicitly anti-Christian and dreamed of uniting local traditions with the best Western ideals. Ultimately, though, they failed. The second Gugi emerged in the 70s. Ngugi dropped his English name and later rejected English as his primary literary language. Influenced by his reading of Marx and Franz Fanon, in these later works, he began to engage much more directly with the state, with class.
with education with every aspect of post-colonial life petals of blood published in 1977 attacked the new political elite in independent kenya it was the first of his works published as Ngugiwa Thiongho, and the last novel he wrote in English. In this novel, education is no longer a tool of liberation. It is the educated elite who betray the people.
this was the first salvo from what the critic nikil saval has described as the rageful mid-period ngugi who excoriates the ken bujo sea with their golf clubs and other exact recreations of the colonial world they once james ngugi had been obsessed with the art of writing he had deliberated over style about where to place a word where to place a sentence his writing hero was joseph
The majesty and musicality of his well-structured sentences had so thrilled me as a young writer that I could cure about a writer's block simply by listening to the opening buzz of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or reading the opening pages of Conrad's Nostromo, he later wrote. For Ngugi wa Thiongo, style was secondary to his politics. His work attacked Western religion and education, language, and the betrayal of Kenya by the post-independence leadership. The first Ngugi wrote a grain of wheat.
The second Gugi revised it decades later. In one of the most important scenes of the novel, a group of LFA fighters attack and rape a British settler. This scene only exists in the first edition. Later, When Ngugi revised the text, the rape was removed and the LFE fighters came to see Mpura in their actions. When I asked Ngugi why I had made this edit, he told me, there was never a single instance of any white person in Kenya being so raped.
A historian pointed out this to me, and I did not want my novel to lie about Kenya's history of struggle. The language question. Ngugi's health aid came at around midday. I am squeamish about medical procedures and scared of needles, so I motioned to move away to give them space to do what they needed to do.
but Ngugi signaled to me that I could stay. I registered with Alam that he intended to have me there with him as she did her work. She took out a syringe. Ngugi talked to me. I didn't hear what he said. My mind was frozen, struck at the horror of the strange before me. I focused on the AIDS tattoo, an image on her arm of the Disney character's stitch. After she had left and I was breathing more easily,
Gugi and I ate lunch together, his food a mushy, saltless mix of chicken and vegetables. This is what my body can handle now, he said. As he ate, we continued to talk. our conversation less the interview that had planned than a discourse on colonialism art and language after the meal he stood up from the dining table and walked to his bedroom ngugi who was lost inches he could barely afford to lose to a stoop
walks haltingly in shuffling steps, with his hands folded behind his back. Sometimes he uses a walking stick, and on even rare occasions, a walker. He seems to dress entirely in a collection of never-ending ketenge shirts with embroidered collars, which are easy to move or remove when he needs to change his dressing for the catheter in his belly. Ngugi has a slow, slightly croaky voice.
he talks in a gikuyu accent mixed with traces of the english one he picked up while living in england often stressing the last word in a sentence he peppers his sentences with oh my god which he uses to register incredulity at opinions it takes to be absurd. He has a way of being dismissive without being rude, taking a strong stance without quite silencing you. He is quick to laugh.
And when he laughs at something he finds ridiculous, he buries his face in his hands while shaking his head and saying, Oh my God. When he laughs at something he finds funny, he lifts his hand to the top of his head. bald except for grey tufts of hair above his ears, but then winces, for that movement can be painful for him. Sometimes, the laugh can descend into a hacking cough.
which exacerbates the pain of the incisions he has in his belly from multiple surgeries. We spent a few hours at that table, Ngugi ever the professor, sharing his thoughts on his favorite topics, language and class. I don't see the world through ethnicity or race, Gugi told me at one point. Race can come into it, but as a consequence of class. He gave the example of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas.
He's as black as me, but every law he passes is against black people, but not the black middle class, the black working class. Outside, it turned dark, the harsh California sun fading into dusk. ngugi tapped the table ehengikuyu this is metha he said where is this word from kiswahili i said and where do the swahili borrow it from I didn't know. From the Portuguese, Ngogi said. This is how languages work. They borrow from each other. Is it possible to have multiple first languages? I asked.
I've been thinking of English, Kiswaili, Cheng, and the Luo as all being my first languages since I speak all of them with native fluency. I think, said Ngugi, you are lying to yourself. a man called Kerry. In Kenya, many people are trilingual, able to switch between the various languages different parts of identity call for. English and Swahili are the official languages.
the languages of school the law and politics though english is used more often than swahili and dominates the education system but there's also sheng which is an urban creole mostly spoken by the youth and which derives from swahili English, and the other languages in Kenya. I speak the three languages, but I also speak Doluo, which is the language of the community I am from, the Luo. Most African writers I know publish in colonial languages.
But where two or more African writers are gathered, the conversation often veers to the question of whether it is possible to have a literary career writing in African languages. I told Ngugi about this despair, and asked him if he'd had similar struggles. He had, but then he added that writing Ngikuyu had given him a freedom he hadn't had early in his career. Ngugi was not the first person to write creatively Ngikuyu. What marks him out is his career trajectory.
first garnering success in the west in english before reverting to an african language after petals of blood he has written all his novels first in gekuyu then later translated them into english He told me he was in the process of translating his first two novels into Gikuyu. I mentioned that I'd recently seen his early books on an acquaintance's shelf, the books he had published as James Ngugi. Oh my God, I'm so ashamed, he said.
But the advantage of that is that when I want to make fun of the colonists, I can make fun of James Ngugi and no one gets offended. Ngugi asked me what my English name was. Kerry, I said. Oh, you should definitely drop that, he said. In Kenya, most men named Kerry are named after an Englishman. Edward Kerry Francis, who is perhaps the most important figure in Kenyan colonial delegation.
As it happens, I wasn't named after K.E. Francis, but my father once told me he was better choosing the name because that was the inevitable assumption. Francis was a Cambridge professor of mathematics who, in 1928, abandoned his academic career to join a British missionary society that sent him to Kenya as a teacher. Francis taught first at Masino School in Western Kenya.
where he soon became headmaster he believed his duty was to produce obedient and disciplined students who would uphold the system one of his students was a boy called ogingaudinga who later returned to the school to teach maths in his memoir Odinga later described his clashes with his old teacher, who was now his boss. Among Francis's principles was that African students and teachers should have to wear shorts rather than trousers to remind them of their place in the colonial hierarchy.
Odinga refused to follow Francis' edict, wearing suits on Sundays. African teaching staff were not allowed to have overnight visitors, and they were supposed to buy only third-class train tickets. When Odinga bought his family second-class tickets,
Francis reprimanded him and Odinga quit. The two never spoke again. Odinga later became the first vice president of independent Kenya. In 1940, francis was appointed at mass at alliance high school a position he held until nineteen sixty two alliance a boys boarding school near limoro was designed to train the few africans whom the british would allow to be part of their government
Ngugi arrived at the school aged 17. At Alliance, the students were cushioned from the realities of British violence. In town, their uniforms protected them from police attention.
as ngugi writes in the house of the interpreter boys were trained in the habit of being waited upon ngugi was a modern learned student the first piece of writing he ever published appears in the school's magazine in In the essay, J. Tengugi, form 3A, praised British education and expressed his gratitude for Christianity, the greatest civilizing influence, which had led the Gikuyu away from witchcraft.
During school assemblies, he would sing God Save the Queen while his brother was in the forest fighting the terror unleashed by her soldiers. The last time Gugi saw Carrie Francis was in 1964, a year after Kenya's independence. Ngugi, whose first novel had just been published, was giving a talk to students at a secondary school in Nairobi. There, sharing a desk with a student was Francis. After retiring as principal of Alliance,
He had taken a position at this school as an ordinary teacher. He listened to Ngugi speak and then asked questions along with the students. What advice could he give a person who dreamed of being a writer? How did the writer balance the demands of the imagination and those of the political moment? Ngugi smiled at the memory. This was part of the dilemma of Francis, he said. He was a contradictory figure, Ngugi said. He was committed to African education.
but the point of that education was to produce boys who would never question the colonial system he had bullied them at alliance but then here he was humbly seated with students asking gugi genuine questions about his writing In 1966, Francis died and was buried in the school grounds at Alliance High School. At his funeral, the Paul Breyers were all Alliance alumni who had become key political figures.
Nine of the 15 members of Kenya's first post-independence cabinet were former alliance students. So, two were the first attorney general, first central bank governor, and first police commissioner. I asked Ngugi if there's such a thing as a good colonialist. Oh my God, he said. There's no such thing. Colonialism is a system. It doesn't matter if you're carrying a gun or a Bible. You're still a colonialist.
He laughed. Of course, I'd rather face the colonialists 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. Thanks for listening to the Guardian Longreach. We'll be back after this. It's time to uncover hidden gems in Southeast Asia with the help of Hilton's expert concierge team.
Be introduced to the magic of traditional water puppetry in Vietnam. Discover where to ask a wish of the four-faced Buddha in Thailand, or where you can dine in the sky while drinking in Singapore's sunset. Visit theguardian.com forward slash travel Southeast Asia and discover five-star unforgettable travel with Hilton. This message was paid for by Hilton.
With 3, save up to £756 when you trade in and get the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge with unlimited data today. Pocket-sized, power-packed and seriously slim. Search 3 or head in store today. Life needs a big network. Saving on device plan and unlimited airtime plan over 36 months. Credit by 3. Terms apply. Welcome back to the Guardian Long Read. The Conference. In 1959, Ngogi arrived in Uganda's capital, Kampala.
to begin his studies in English at East Africa's most prestigious university, Makerere. Tungugi, Kampala was a revelation. This was, as he puts it, his first encounter with the modern city dominated by black presence. At the time, it was the literary capital of East Africa, partly thanks to the university, which produced a generation of extraordinary writers. Alongside Ngugi were the distinguished critic Peter Nazareth,
the Kenyan poet Jonathan Carriara, the Ugandan writer John Nagenda, and P.U. Anelvania Zirimu, Umetad Makere and later married. In June 1962, The university hosted an event that would prove formative not just for Ngugi personally, but for the future of African literature. The African Writers' Conference was the first organized gathering of writers from across the continent. Ngugi was thrilled to hang out with authors he admired.
and to guide the American poet Langston Hughes, who had also been invited through Kampala. In the evenings, the writers would go out on the town. Describing the conference in the literary journal The Transition, Nagenda detailed a night spent listening to a writer read a greasly short story about a young father eating his child's liver.
afterwards everyone headed to toplife one of kampala's most popular clubs where patrons adhered to a strict dress code men in suits or tuxedos women in evening dresses and the music was a heightened mix of Congolese rumba or jazz. On the dance floor, the writers waltzed, forks trotted, or moved in time to the rumba.
Soinka impressed with both his dancing and his guitar skills when he got up to play with the band. During the day, discussions revolved around the great issue of the moment, decolonization. and the place of African literature within this new paradigm. Could the writer address political questions without compromising the artistic impulses? Was there even such a thing as African writing? Or was there only Ugandan writing?
Ghanaian writing, South African writing, and so on? From the start, the conference was controversial. This was an attempt to define African literature. yet novelists and poets who had long been working in african languages such as swahili ibbo zulu and amharic were left out the fiercest criticism of the conference came from the nigerian critic obiwali
Writing in Transition in 1963, Wally declared that true African literature could only be written in African languages. In his view, any African literature that was written in colonial languages could only be, at best, a minor branch of European literature. The student of Yoruba, for instance, has no play available to him in that language, for Ole Suinka, the most gifted Nigerian playwright at the moment, does not consider Yoruba suitable while he wrote.
In the issues of transition that followed, attenders responded. Mfalele argued that English and French could be used as a unifying force against white oppressors. Soinka, a Serbic, wrote, I learn a great deal about my opinions every day, and it was a new revelation that I do not consider Yoruba suitable for any of my plays. But what about Igbo? May I know what Obiwali has done to translate my plays or others into Igbo?
or whatever language he professes to speak. Ngugi struggled with Wally's criticism. He had begun working on his third novel, A Grain of Wheat, and would shortly after go to Leeds University on a British Council scholarship. to do post-graduate research on the barbedian writer george lamming while his argument kept on pursuing me through leeds and after wrote ngugi in decolonizing the mind i underwent a crisis i knew whom i was writing about
But whom was I writing for? Reflecting on the conference today, Ngugi acknowledged its importance for him as a writer, not least because it was the beginning of his close relationship with Achebe, whose novel Things Fall Apart, published in 1958 he greatly admired ngugi shared the manuscript for weep not child with him and achebe in turn sent it to his publisher in britain william hanyman
The novel became the seventh title in the Vaunted African Writers series, which introduced many international readers to contemporary African writing. Some years later, however, the friendship between ngugi and achebe soared as ngugi shifted towards wali's position on language in decolonizing the mind he included achebe among the african writers he criticized for writing european languages
Achebe said English was a gift. I disagreed, Ngugi told me. But I wasn't attacking him in a personal way because I admired him as a person and as a writer, what he was doing with his novels. i realized he was angry at me because in the first edition of one of his books he had quoted me at length but in the second he removed me completely the question of english continues to haunt
I can never think of my first novels without thinking of the language issue, he told me. How could I have these African characters and have them all speaking perfect English? When I wrote my first book, I wrote it in a language my mother couldn't access. I rewarded her for taking me to school by writing in a language she can't read or write. His voice went soft. Maybe it's just me.
Maybe I'm just wrong about the language issue. He paused. No, I don't think I'm wrong. Voice is silent. Face is gone. Later that night, We sat at his dining table in California, reflecting on the writers he studied with at Macare. For you, it must be history, he said. For me, this is quite recent. He turned to his laptop, on the table in front of him.
He googled one right after another, John Nagenda, Peter Nazareth, Jason Carriera, Pew and Elvanias Vivimo, only to find scraps about their lives and work. He shook his head in sadness. so many of his contemporaries forgotten their works out of print i thought of them in mackay in the sixties all bright and eager-looking trying to be writers a few weeks earlier
I'd told a friend that no one's story made me sad than that of Carriera, whose poetry I'd studied at university and who was largely fed into obscurity. Now, looking at Ngugi as he scrolled through Wikipedia, I understood that he and I shared this grief. The next morning, when I came out from my bedroom, Ngogi was up already. He was seated at the dining table. Sheaves of papers around him. His laptop open.
on the phone with one of his kids. After that call, he took a call from another of his children, then another, all of the conversations conducted in Gikuyu. I served myself breakfast, then joined him at the table. He asked me what else we should discuss for my story. I asked him about Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya. As a boy, Kenyatta had been a hero to Ngugi because of his fight for Gikuyu land rights.
After he became president, Kenyatta reneged on his promises. Rather than restoring stolen land to his rightful owners, he and his cronies acquired more for themselves. Kenyatta Ngugi told me, had merely wanted to replace the colonialists at the top rather than doing away with the entire colonial structure to kenyatta he said having black landowners black police officers a black government that was freedom
In 1977, Ngugi published the furious novel, Petals of Blood, a clear attack on Kaneta's government. But it was a different work, the same year, that led to his arrest. the play ngahik and enda i will marry when i want which ngugi had co-written was no more obviously critical of the ruling classes in kenya than the novel but there was one crucial difference as abuldrazak gruner writes
Because the play was written in Gikuyu, it was comprehensible to ordinary citizens and was therefore subversive. In Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, was held in a detention block with eighteen other political prisoners in his prison memoir he writes here i have no name i am just a number in a file k six seventy seven there On rolls of toilet paper, he began to write his first novel in Kikuyu. The process was extremely difficult because I was breaking away from my dependence on English.
Ngugi told the Paris Review in 2022. The main problem I faced in prison was that there was this little devil who used to come to me, a devil dressed in English robes. There is almost Norwegian tradition in Gikuyu, so I'd be struggling away with the vocabulary. Some word like imperialism, say. And this little devil would come to me and say, Oh, why struggle so hard? I'm right here. There's a slipperiness to the Gikuyi 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 Kikuyu, telling me to struggle. King of the castle. I was staying with Ngugi for professional purposes. A vulture there to pick over the details of his daily life for my own writing career. But that I am Kenyan and young,
and Gugi is Kenyan and old meant that in the time I was in his house, I found myself taking on a different role. I became, during the days I spent with him, a sort of roving assistant and, against all my instincts, an amateur home care aide. I became the quick to help young person I am with my grandparents. At around 11 o'clock on my second morning in his house, Ngugi had to start getting ready.
His home care aide was coming by shortly to drive him to his dialysis appointment. One of the things he hated about his illness was the fact that he couldn't drive himself anywhere anymore. Before leaving, Gugi handed me the house keys. you're in charge now he said i'll see you in a few hours now i was alone the king of the castle i wandered the corridors of the house tracing my fingers along the spines of his books
I sat in the living room and played the piano. I walked outside to his back garden. I had taken a book from his library and I sat on a chair, the sun on my face. On a shelf behind the kitchen window were a tin of violets.
brown and dying other plants in his back garden are flourishing in delightful hues the simmering pink of the bougainvillea the lush green of his climbing fig the bright yellow of his lantanas a few metres away from the flowers in his garden were some rows of maize these and the bougainvillea are very common in kenya and i felt a sudden rush of homesickness standing in this slice of kenyan california
When Gugi came back in the afternoon, I was sitting at the piano, playing. He stood there quietly listening and then decided to play something himself. He started playing three years earlier because his wife, Njeri, missed the sound of music in the house while the kids abandoned the piano. Reading the sheet music, Ngugi played Morningwood from Grieg's Piaget Suite.
As he played, he kept on making a mistake at the end of the first bar. He tried again and again and again, failing each time, but then it clicked and he played through to the end. Maybe all these people asking when you're getting a Nobel should ask you when you're getting a Grammy. I joked. He turned to me deadpan. What I actually want to do is to play at Carnegie Hall. In the air hung a question I knew I ought to ask, but hesitated to. Because in Korean culture,
You do not ask people almost 60 years older than you about their marriages. Ngugi seemed to sense that an explanation of some kind was needed because he said, unprompted, I know I look like a bachelor, but I'm not.
He and his wife were going through a divorce. Before the two of them separated, they lived in University Hills, a part of Irvine where a lot of university faculty stay, near the beach. He'd drive out to look at the Pacific Ocean often. His most recent book, The perfect nine came to him during one of those drives, but then he'd moved out, and now he was bereft of the smell and sight of the ocean that had inspired his writing, living alone, far from the beach, unable to drive.
He walked to the dining table, his gait slow and careful. Ngugi has made peace with the physical difficulties of growing old, but he has not got used to the memory lapses. Sometimes it frightens me when this happens, he said. And I think... This is it. The odds Ngugi was a rank outsider when you first looked at the candidates, but we fear we've got it horribly wrong.
Panthers can't get enough of him and we're dreading him being announced the winner. Ladbroke spokesman, October 2010. If this morning's surge in bets is a clue, then Gugi could soon be heading to Stockholm. The Atlantic, September 2013. With just three days to go before the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded, Haruki Murakami and the canon writer Ngugiwa Thiongo are joined favorites to win the literary world's greatest honor.
The Guardian, October 2014. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, formerly the favorite at Ladbrokes, has now been used by Kenyan Ngugiwa Thiongo. The Guardian, October 2016. Ngugiwa Thiongo is the favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Again, the Johannesburg Review of Books, October 2017. Ngugiwa Thiongo failure to win 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature shocked people. BBC News Pigeon.
October 2019. Ngugi, 82, has been tipped to win for a decade, but this yet seems timely for the Kenyan writer whose work chimes with a global focus on black lives, focusing on the struggle against colonialism and its legacy. New York Times, October 2020. Heartbreak for Ngugiwa Thiongo fans as French author bagged the Christian Nobel Prize. The Daily Nation, October 2022.
Stockholm Syndrome. Only the Swedish Academy knows why Ngugi has never been awarded the prize. Perhaps his mistake was not to grow a serious grand old man with lettuce beard, unlike the two previous black African winners. Wallace Schoenker, 1986, and Abul Razak Gurner, 2021. Perhaps it was that his writing became too radical and revolutionary. Partly for this reason, Devil on the Cross was rejected by numerous US publishers.
One editor at Norton described it as, so passionate in its political convictions and so enamored of the Brechtian political rhetorical devices it uses to display its points, that its audience is exclusively those who care about current developments in contemporary African literature.
or current Marxist thought. Others agree that Ngugi's political commitments have sometimes undermined his writing. The decision to write in Gikuyu exacted a heavy prize, the Nigerian critic Adewala Majapias has written.
The artistry that had earned his English-language novel so much praise was now abandoned in favor of the crudest possible politics. The Ugandan novelist Jennifer Makumbi told me that, while Nguyi was, for her, they got when it came to sustained anti-colonial and post-independence dissolutional literature shian appears tended to agree that his place let him down they did not rise above propaganda she said
The morning before the Nobel was awarded in 2022, I called Ngugi and asked him if he was thinking about the prize. He told me he was not. That the Nobel committee was not interested in people who wrote in African languages. When responding to the inevitable Nobel question, Ngugi often suggests it is not of great significance to him. But his son, the novelist Makoma Wangugi, commented after the Tuntuntu Award,
The Nobel Literature Prize should in reality be called the Nobel Prize for European Literature and the Equational Other Friends. The surgery. Ngugi was having surgery in the morning. It was late on my third day with him, and we sat at his dining table. Our conversation and writing derailed, going over the instructions he'd been given to prepare for the operation.
was very late about the operation which promised to simplify the dialysis process and opened up the possibility of him being able to travel back to kenya for the first time since as he changed the dressing on the catheter wound on his stomach i was careful to glance anywhere but at his belly he said after to-morrow no more of this went through the list of things he had to do before surgery
Ngugi called his grandson Miringu to arrange an early morning pickup. He called his daughter Ngina who lives in Georgia. After this I can come to Atlanta anytime, he told her. In the morning Ngugi rose very early. After his shower, he struggled to change his dressing, his hands shaking. I stepped in to help. Ngogi's grandson was almost here. It was 5 a.m. As he got ready for the hospital,
Ngugi began to sing the old song they sang at Lance, Wash me further and I shall be white as snow. Underground The surgery went as planned and there was no need to stay at hospital after it was done. At 11am, his grandson wheeled him back into his home. Gui wanted to go outside so that he could sit on the patio and feel the sun on his face, but Miringo overruled him.
you should lie down and rest he said ngugi agreed to go to his room but called me in we need to talk some more he said he was in pain lying in bed he called one of his daughters in law who is a doctor when he put the phone down his breathing was heavy and his right hand was on his belly resting on top of the surgical incision he asked me to remind him where we had left the conversation the previous day
Then he began to talk about an underground movement he had been part of in Kenya in the 70s. The December 12th movement, DTM, had been formed at a conference of Marxist-Leninists held in Nairobi in 1974. There were strict requirements for joining when the members instructed to be disciplined. For instance, not being punctual was enough to get you rejected. Because it was life and death, Gugi explained. A key part of the UTM remit
was intellectual warfare against the state, publishing openly critical literature and distributing anti-government leaflets across the country. Ngugi told me that the play that led to his imprisonment was a DTM project. Both Ngugi and his co-writer were members of a cell based in Nimuru. In 1978, when Kenyatta died, he was succeeded by his vice president, Daniel Arapmoye. Desperate to win popular approval,
The new president released Ngugi and other political prisoners, but soon his government became as autocratic as Kanyata's. In 1982, there was an attempted coup against the government. I asked Ngugi if the DTM was involved. No, he said. DTM believed that politics led the gun, not the gun leading politics. To them, the only valid way of initiating political change was by popular action, not by military action.
In the wake of the failed coup, DTM members were nonetheless arrested en masse while others fled the country. At the time, Ngugi was in London for the launch of Devil on the Cross.
He was warned that he would be killed if he returned, and so for the next few years London became his home. In 1986, he published Matigari, the only novel he would write during this time in England. In the book, an eponymous protagonist organizes against a president who has betrayed the country's dreams a barely disguised stand-in for moi moi believing the novel's protagonist to be a real person ordered the arrest of matigari
when the president learned the character was fictional the novel was banned in nineteen eighty nine google moved to the u s for a professorship at yale marking the start of a stay in american universities which eventually led him to california where he joined UC Irvine in 2002. That same year, Moe's rule ended, and in 2004, Ngugi visited Kenya for the first time since 1982 to launch his new novel, Murogi Wakagogo, Wizard of the Crow.
Two weeks into his visit, he and his wife were attacked by an armed gang, and his wife was raped. It wasn't a simple robbery, Nguya said. It was political, whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the Mankind. The whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate us. Yet he continued to return to Kenya in the years that followed. He steadfastly holds on to his citizenship and pays attention to Kenya's politics.
As he spoke of DTM and his memories of Kenyan exos in London, he coughed, though coughing was extremely painful to him at this moment, and I left him so that he could rest.
The language question continued. In the months after I left Mugri's house, having scrubbed from my memory as much of the medical stuff as I can, I've been thinking about Mugri's legacy and wondering what it means that despite the success of decolonizing the mind its central exhortation tried creatively in african languages has remained largely unheeded since i wrote decolonizing the mind
I've received everything from open hostility to polite expressions of interest, but no real change in practice, he acknowledged in 2017. In conversations with fellow writers, we ponder the language question. One Ghanaian playwright, in despair about the seeming impossibility of abandoning English, pointed out that his language, Dagbani, was spoken by a relatively small group of people in Ghana, and if he wrote in it, he would hardly be read.
In any case, the infrastructure to publish in his language did not exist. When I mentioned the example of Ngugi, his rebuttal was swift. Well, Ngugi is Ngugi, he said. You can't compare me to Ngugi. Even Ngugi's own children's literary careers exist largely in English. Four of his children, Tingugi, Nduusu wa Ngugi, Wanchiku wa Ngugi, and Mukoma are novelists. with two living in Kenya and the rest in the U.S. I asked Ngugi if the message of decolonizing the mind had failed. No, he said.
The problem has always been the negative government policies towards African languages and a lack of publishers in African languages. Now I'm thinking back to Ngugi's books. Across many of his novels and his plays, The action revolves around a severe protagonist, whether the educated hero in his early books wants to unite society, or the radical who wants revolution. What unites these protagonists is the failure of their efforts.
They are rejected by the people they seek to save and most of them are killed. For a writer whose radical politics are so evident in his books, he has always seemed pessimistic about the success of his character's quests. The morning I left his house, I had found Gugi up already, seated at his table, his laptop open in front of him. He asked me if my cab was here yet. I told him that I'd just ordered it and it was a few minutes away. Do you have everything you need?
Yes, I said. Don't forget to write in the loo, he said. I know it's hard at first, but you have to try. My phone beeped. My cab was here. I went to my room, wheeled out my suitcase and put my heavy coat, I knew this last three days, on my shoulder. I opened the door, shook his hand and walked out of the grand old Kenyan man of Leta's house.
Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Long Read. That was Ngugiwa Thiongo, Three Days of the Giant of African Literature, written and read by Keri Baraka and produced by Nicola Alexandro. The executive producer was Ellie Bury. This episode was engineered by Mark Kiambo. Reporting for this project was supported by a Silvers grant for work in progress from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
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