Africa's writer NgugiwaThiong'o.
Town crier of Africa. The title evokes Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo’s lines when he demonstrates that he is the sole witness to his homecoming and it applies to the late Kenyan scholar, novelist and public intellectual, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o quite well. It characterises his resistance and stance, globally.
Ngũgĩ is regarded as a member of the first generation of modern African writers who emerged just before and after African countries became independent. He was the youngest of them when he made his appearance in the literary public.
For sure, he was one of those writers who were educated in colonial institutions. These writers were committed to social justice and human rights, as well as cultural roots. All the post-colonial writers were perfectly aware of what they borrowed or transferred from the West. It was not adopting the Western assumptions, it was a way of transforming them for a new literary public and culture.
Ngũgĩ was widely noted for his campaign for writing in native languages to challenge Western denigration of African culture, which he believed was steeped in English. For him, language was not just a communication tool — it was a medium of alienation which held Africans back from their own culture.
The seeds of his seminal work, Decolonising the Mind, were established at the first African writers’ conference held at Makerere University, in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962. Writers from across Africa who chose to write in English gathered to discuss English as a medium of modern African literature. It ended up in division. The most ardent advocate of African literature in African languages was Nigerian literary critic Obi Wali, who dismissed writing in European languages, as Ngũgĩ subsequently did.
Though this position garnered much attention, and sparked lively debate in the post-colonial world, it was hardly the main preoccupation of post-colonial writers, and also did not convince African writers of the time to recourse to their mother languages.
Most post-colonial critics were obsessed with discourse and its effect on oppressed cultures. Because the discourse was not embedded in the language of natives, or simply languages, it was oriented by the language of power, and alienation was not all that bad — alienation might even open a new way of seeing your own culture differently.
In time, Ngũgĩ’s autochthonous approach almost faded into obscurity. Though the language debate dominated Ngũgĩ’s intellectual and literary oeuvre, his tackling issues was no different from Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Okara, Cheikh Hamidou Kane and others.
One can read Achebe and Ngũgĩ in a deep conversation in terms of returning to their roots. For instance, Achebe’s guiding approach is clearly seen in his debut novel, Weep Not, Child, which has a bearing on Things Fall Apart. Achebe and Ngũgĩ were afraid of being attached to Euro-modernist forms, which they believed would alienate them from their own society.
Ngũgĩ strives to restore the dignity of his people, which was taken away by the “colonial library”. In his novel, Petals of Blood, the narrator, raising issues of history, aptly argues: “For there are many questions in our history which remain unanswered. Our present-day historians, following on similar theories yarned out by defenders of imperialism, insist we only arrived here yesterday.”
For Ngũgĩ: “The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with ‘the thing that has been’, a struggle, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people’s history.”
His preoccupation with the past led him to claim and reconstruct history through his work. His rendering of his past basically relies on three revolutionaries: Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Rodney, to whom he owes his critical approach. Ngũgĩ scholar James Ogude reads his works as “writing from below”, a Marxist approach initially employed by the Marxist English historian EP Thompson.
The most precious gift he passed on to his nation is his latest book, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi, which ranks alongside the famous Malian epic Sundiata.
I believe the epic will survive time and continue to honour the continent; it embodies all human suffering and dignity throughout the centuries, and the happiness of the time being and the time ever present and the time passed over present. Time never passed for Ngũgĩ, which always is invoked through memories that never age, as Harry Garuba reminds us.
It is crystallised in moments that contain overlapping terrains and lived through everlasting mourning, chants and praises. Hence Ngũgĩ as a praise singer, a town crier of his nation that never stops chanting for Africa. Here is how the narrator of the epic’s chants bear the hope of the future fostered through storytelling:
“Time flows on like an endless river,
Time Yesterday into Time Today,
Time Today into Time Tomorrow.
Now is Now and it is not Now because Time does not stop.
Yesterday is Yesterday and it is not Yesterday because
Time did not stop.
Tomorrow is Tomorrow and it is Tomorrow because
Time will not stop.”
His words are weaponised with the strength and resilience that were sustained to his last breath.
The Perfect Nine, in which Ngũgĩ pays his strong tribute to his nation, placed him alongside the great African griots who never tired of carrying the burden of the history of their nations, holding the power of storytelling to resist the time of destruction.
It is a masterpiece that hails from his nation, which he carefully treats as a pearl glistening in his eyes with relentless tears toward a world.
Ahmet Sait Akçay is a literary critic and African Studies scholar, he is teaching at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.