Adekeye Adebajo | Farewell to Africa’s prophet of decolonisation

Kenyan novelist, essayist, and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who died last month at the age of 87, was one of Africa’s most important first-generation post-colonial writers. Ngũgĩ grew up in a polygamous family of four wives and 28 children in the village of Kamiriithu.

He attended the elite missionary Alliance High School before inculcating a strong sense of Pan-Africanism at Uganda’s Makerere University, where he completed his English degree in 1963. He went on to graduate from Leeds University in England, where Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka also studied.

Ngũgĩ returned to teach at University College Nairobi, becoming chair of its Literature Department in 1972. Four years earlier, he had led colleagues in the department, Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong, to Africanise the curriculum. They had argued that just adding literature in English from other parts of the world was insufficient to transform the syllabus and that since Africa was not an extension of the West, the continent needed to be placed at the centre of reconceptualising a new curriculum, arguing that African Oral Literature should also be taught. This led to a major transformation of literature curricula throughout East Africa.

A 26-year old Ngũgĩ published Weep Not Child (1964), the first novel by an East African in the post-colonial era, which dealt with the tale of a Kenyan family amid the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s against brutal British colonial rule. It echoed some of his own family’s experiences: his mother was jailed and two brothers killed under Pax Britannica. Ngugi had handed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series) the manuscript of Weep Not Child at a 1962 Writers Conference at Makerere. A Grain of Wheat (1967) addressed similar issues. The River Between (1965) examined the clash between Christianity and African traditional ways. Ngugi wrote the plays The Black Hermit (1968) and the brilliant The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Micere Mugo, 1976) about the legendary leader of the Mau Mau uprising, hanged by the British in 1957.

TURNED HIS GUNS

The Fanonist Marxist soon turned his guns from Africa’s colonisers to what he regarded as its post-independence “comprador class” of collaborators with Western capitalism. He published his collected essays, Homecoming (1972), before the 1977 novel Petals of Blood, a scathing critique of the exploitation of peasants and workers by ruling elites and foreign corporations. To conscientise the masses, Ngugi set up a theatre group to perform his 1977 Gikuyu play (co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii), I Will Marry When I Want, to grass-roots communities. This landed him in jail for a year under the autocratic regime of Jomo Kenyatta. He used his time in detention to scribble notes on toilet paper for his Gikuyu novel, Devil on the Cross (1980), dealing with the exploitation of the poor. A prison diary, Detained, appeared a year later.

Ngũgĩ went into exile in 1982, first to England, before spending most of his career at America’s University of California, Irvine. He was deeply inspired by Caribbean writers: Nobel laureates, St Lucia’s Derek Walcott and Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul, as well as Barbadian novelist and essayist George Lamming. He continued to publish biting essays on decolonisation: Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of A Pen (1983), the popular Decolonising the Mind (1986), Moving the Centre (1993), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). As Ngũgĩ complained: “By our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit?” He often translated his Gikuyu novels into English himself. The novels Matigari (1986) and Wizard of the Crow (2006) sustained his attacks on African kleptocracy. He also published a trilogy of memoirs: Dreams in A Time of War (2010); The House of the Interpreter (2012); and Birth of A Dream (2016). The epic novel-in-verse, The Perfect Nine (2020), was his last major work.

Nigerian Booker Prize-winning writer Ben Okri described Ngũgĩ as “an almost militant proponent for African languages”. The Kenyan writer married twice, divorced twice, and had nine children, four of whom became writers. As he mused: “Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.”

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com