Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Son of Makerere

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By Austin Bukenya and Susan Kiguli

We are unafraid to admit that when the news of Ngugi's passing came to us, we experienced a roller coaster of emotions. We flipped from the gratitude of knowing that we have had the privilege of claiming Ngugi as our own in many different ways, and of being part and parcel of his legacy as part of his Makerere community to a sense that the likes of Ngugi do not come in hordes and filling his shoes is a dream or fantasy.

In the moment of wanting to honour Ngugi in a way that would fit with his an unassuming and down to earth nature, we reached for his Makerere memoir: Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. We revisited this memoir in awe, clinging to every word as if it were a poem, for two most important, almost sacred reasons to us: It is about Makerere from Ngugi. We need not explain what this means to literary scholars at Makerere University or to anyone associated with Makerere.

The second reason we went back to this memoir and lingered on words and moments in it is because of the powerful images presented to recreate a feeling, to put forward a message in a way that the reader is made to reflect actively on these experiences, to relive moments with Ngugi, to figure him being formed by the place and in his very self effacing manner adding to the tone and magic or if you like the instrumental colour of the Makerere of Ngugi’s time.

We revisited this memoir to hear him talk again about his timeless attachment to us and to this place he loved so dearly, and in a way, reassure ourselves that Ngugi had made sure that his bond to Makerere was engraved forever in his words about it. It has been our way of remembering and of sitting again and again with Ngugi at a place he treasured so much. It is our way of focusing on Ngugi and Makerere, knowing well that so many people are living again his sojourns in other physical and fictitious worlds.

His memories of Makerere also raise the major issues that Ngugi was so passionate about from his early years as an upcoming writer and public intellectual. While at Makerere, he was fully immersed in issues of injustice, racism, ills of colonialism and the precursor signs of what would go wrong with products of colonialism, such as Amin in power. These issues engaged Ngugi’s mind at the time he was at Makerere and, in our view, continue to be very much part of Ngugi beyond Makerere and beyond the physical realm.

One of the things we have always found most fascinating about Ngugi’s memoir about Makerere is the tapestry of experiences within and outside Makerere, this approach of using memories of Makerere or Makerere as a setting to reflect on larger issues such as the methods and attitudes of colonialism: for example, the denial of a stage to Ngugi’s play This Wound in my Heart because “They don’t think a British officer can do that” forms the pattern of the very methods of oppression that Ngugi fought against all his life and which his work will continue to fight.

Revisiting Ngugi’s Makerere memoir has felt like holding a grand prize in our hands. Ngugi weaves an embroidery of images, mini-narratives, and sounds that connect Makerere to the larger happenings of the late 50s and early 60s. The memoir is about Makerere, but it never lets you forget that it is about a Kenyan student at Makerere University.

This is indeed a tale by a master weaver who creates cross stitches of words and ideas that clearly show how Ngugi’s existence at Makerere links to his other relationships to Kenya and to the world.  There are gems of Ngugi’s life at Makerere, for example, the story of Ngugi’s meeting with Langston Hughes at Makerere, of their getting stuck in Wandegeya because perhaps this place echoed familiar places in Langston Hughes’s mind.

Ngugi always spoke of Makerere as a place with lots of opportunities. He always softly asserted that he was a student seeking opportunities at this place, so we wish all our students here at Makerere will read Ngugi’s inspirational work about a place we probably take for granted, whose history we even gloss over sometimes.

Ngugi, in his typical style, illuminated some dark places in our understanding of Makerere University, and that is why we have chosen to remember him by focusing on his words about the place that saw him produce his first two novels, his journalistic work and his early plays and poems.

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In this very reflective and reflexive memoir, some stories have clung to our minds like sugar crystals, we know it should not be funny but the story of one of the Kabaka’s policemen assuming that Ngugi was his classmate Pat Creole-Rees’s servant because Pat was white and Ngugi black, is one of those ironies that are seriously funny if we can allow ourselves the ambiguity of words here.

Ngugi’s own remembrance of Makerere, in our estimation, is most important for giving us in detail the beginnings of Ngugi’s writing career, those, to echo Achebe, who are familiar with the literary gossip about African literature may know that Ngugi began his writing life in Northcote currently Nsibirwa Hall at Makerere University. It was here that he experimented with writing his early scholarly articles about the beauty of connecting with African culture and heritage and the importance of African languages.

In fact in one of the reports about Ngugi in 1963, from the former Faculty of Arts Archive, the warden of Northcote Hall, Mr. H.P. Dinwiddy has this to say: “James Ngugi came to Northcote Hall in 1959, and it was a little time before one realized how gifted this quiet person is.

Without any warning, I found a story in Penpoint and then three others in the Kenya Weekly News, and following that, a play-The Rebels-was written for the English Competition and, later, broadcast on the U.B.S (Uganda Broadcasting Services). With the same quiet concentration, a novel was written- The Black Messiah- between February and November of 1961, and this has been entered for the Novel Competition run by the East African Literature Bureau.

Almost immediately, he handed this in in Nairobi he started another novel, which is now in the hands of Heinemann Publishing firm. He has just written another play, and two of his stories have been broadcast on the U.B.S.”

The comment captures just a little of what Ngugi began here at Makerere and what he has continued to do until his last breath. A colleague, in his recollection of what Ngugi was and what Makerere and Uganda meant to him, said that he told him in just April of this year that he longed to write one more book focusing on the epic story of Nambi and Kintu of Buganda.

He kept coming back to Makerere when he could, and his last visit was in 2013 at the celebration of 50 years of the University of East Africa. He visited the department of Literature and pointed out the spot where he sat as a student in the famed Lecture Room 4. He kept wanting to have a moment with each and every staff member. Ngugi loved people and valued meaningful connections.

(Courtesy)

We thought he would come back here in 2022, but he was not able and could not even give the keynote speech he had prepared to give at the International Humanities Conference organised by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. To honour his devotion and dedication to Makerere, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Barnabas Nawangwe, planted a tree in his honour in the Arts Quadrangle. The tree stands beside the Department of Literature offices as a sign of Ngugi’s deep association with his beginnings and roots. 

Ngugi on many occasions and in his memoir about Makerere stated: “Makerere Made Me”, a very poetic phrase in all senses but we want to think that the place and the man have kept giving to each other and we are unable to decide who has given more so we embrace both Makerere and Ngugi and thank Ngugi for flying the Makerere Flag high.

Prof. Austin Bukenya and Dr Susan Kiguli are members of the Department of Literature, Makerere University, Uganda.