Remembering Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

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WHAT’S UP!

My first encounter with Ngugi was when I had just joined Senior One in King’s College, Budo. We found out that we were called ‘njukas’, and inquisitive me wanted to know what it means and where it came from.

Initial inquiries were dismissed as being from an ‘ambitious njuka’, but eventually a kind-hearted literature student explained that it was derived from a book written by a Kenyan author. Of course, I had to find the book, Weep Not, Child, and read it.

And I was introduced to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s world of rebellion and non-conformity. To a teenager who had started questioning almost everything, Ngugi’s writing was almost like a Bible (no offence meant to Christianity).

Before I read Weep Not, Child, most of the books I had read in primary had white heroes, the likes of books by the English writer H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quartermain et al) and Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of the character Tarzan. I had not even thought about it, but in those books, people like me were either servants or subservient to the white heroes of the books. Why I even thought that a story about a white boy growing up in a jungle was exciting still beats me, but Ngugi changed that silly attitude.

Budo, by then, had the practice of putting students together who were perceived to have certain talents. My mathematics was very good, so I was put in the ‘M’ class, and it was taken for granted that sciences were my forte. Indeed, I would go on to do PCM at A’Level and my first degree was a bachelor of science in statistics.

But I was an avid reader, and soon I had read every Ngugi book I could find. I had also discovered the African Writers’ Series, published by Heinemann, a London-based publisher. Between 1962 and 2003, it published 359 books by African writers. These were books by people like me written for people like me, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I must have read over 50 of the authors published and I still vividly remember the orange colour that made up the theme of African writing. Sadly, the decision was made to make the covers more appealing to Western readers, and the distinctive African look was discarded. Later, the series was altogether discontinued. But, back to Ngugi. His early works were around the theme of colonial exploitation and how it impacted African society. These include Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967).

But he soon became tired of the exploitation of Africans by their leaders, which gave rise to Petals of Blood (1977), which in my opinion is his greatest work. It had a profound effect on me, I remember. The betrayal of Africans by their leaders, which they continually blame on the colonialists, became an underlying theme in his later works. And for that, he was arrested and detained without trial for over a year by the Kenyan government.

A description of Petals of Blood on Goodreads reads: ‘The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time’. Sounds familiar?

This theme of African on African exploitation also features in the play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1977), co-written with Prof. Micere Githae Mugo. It specifically comments on the so-called African revolutions and how they turn out, betraying the very people they professed to help.

Throughout history, revolutions never turn out well. The French Revolution led to the rise of a dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, who would go on to declare himself emperor. So, why do revolutions still happen and always fail? That is a topic for further debate.

Ngugi’s fight against neo colonialism extended to the language he wrote his early books in — English. In an interview, he explained why he chose to write in his mother tongue, Gikuyu.

“I saw how once they have colonised another, the first thing they do is always impose their language as the language of power. So, they demonise the language of the colonised, and they glorify the language of the coloniser. It becomes the language of intelligence, of education, of intellectual exploration. And it’s the opposite with African languages. They are good for speaking, but not good for ideas, not good for politics.”

Inevitably, my challenging everything gradually stopped. Instead of living and letting die, I now live and let live. But Ngugi never stopped. Up to his last breath, he still fought tyranny, which he saw never stopped in Africa. His challenging the status quo is probably the reason he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he rightfully deserved.

Long after the colonisers had left, African people are still being oppressed, but now by their own. The Mau Mau rebellion, in which Ngugi lost a brother and saw his whole home village razed to the ground, ended almost a century ago. But the petals of blood are still very much with us.

Rest in peace, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o.