How Ngugi wa Thiong'o Turned Away from English to the Language of His People to Write Great Literature
Rarely do fiction writers pay a price as heavy as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938–2025) did for writing. He lost his Nairobi University job, was imprisoned, spent many years in exile, was attacked and robbed, and his wife was sexually assaulted when he returned to Kenya on a visit.
Tragedy and hardship were not new to Ngugi. When he was young, and Kenya was a British colony, one of his brothers was shot dead because, being deaf, he did not hear the English officer's command to stop. Ngugi had lived through the historic Mau Mau rebellion, during which his village, Limuru, was destroyed by British soldiers. His mother was arrested and spent three months in solitary confinement.
All these experiences fed Ngugi's hatred for colonialism and imperialism, turned him towards Marxism and fueled his creativity. Turning adversity to advantage, Ngugi wrote his novel Devil on the Cross on rolls of toilet paper while in jail.
Ngugi wa Thiongo's birth name was James Ngugi. In 1938, when he was born, Kenya was an English colony. By the time he changed his name around 1970, Kenya was a formally independent nation. But colonial legacies are sticky, stubborn and persistent.
In 1977, after seventeen years of writing in English, Ngugi abandoned it and began writing in his native language, Gikuyu. This was hardly easy. English was the colonialists' language, but it was also an international language. Writing in English potentially gave access to a readership that was spread across the world. English also had the paraphernalia that enables circulation of literary works – publishing houses, journals and newspapers, university courses, etc. – that native languages such as Gikuyu lacked. Many languages of the colonial subjects did not even have a script.
Also read: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End
Ngugi went a step further. In his view, 'language was the most important vehicle through which [colonial] power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.' This also had a class dimension. African literature written in European languages was 'the literature of the petty-bourgeoisie.' And while it was true that this class was far from homogeneous, ranging from agents of imperialism to nationalists or even socialists, and that the literature they produced did play a part in projecting a dignified image of Africa and Africans, the class roots of this literature yet constrained it.
For Ngugi, there was no alternative. The language of the coloniser and the imperialist had to be abandoned. The language of his people – the masses of people, the peasantry and the working class – had to be embraced.
But languages are not like shirts, you can't just toss one aside and wear another. 'Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.'
His first work in Gikuyu was a play, I Will Marry When I Want (in collaboration with Ngugi wa Mirii), followed by the novel Devil on the Cross , the musical play Mother Sing for Me , and several other works, including his 2006 opus, Wizard of the Crow .
How the play came to be is a fascinating story. One day in 1976, a woman from Kamiriithu village came to Ngugi with a request: 'We hear you have a lot of education and that you write books. Why don't you give some of that education to the village?' There was a somewhat decrepit youth centre in the village, she said, and they wanted help to revive it. She visited Ngugi every week for the next month or so, till he relented. This is how he came to be associated with the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre.
At the centre, theatre was to be part of a larger cultural enterprise – the revival of pride in being Kenyan, in being African. Spreading literacy was one part of this revival. Theatre was the other.
But they had no theatre – that is, an auditorium or playhouse. The peasants of Kamiriithu cleared an empty area and erected a stage, which was no more than a mud platform, and created makeshift seating for the audience. As Ngugi write later, 'Theatre is not a building. People make theatre. Their life is the very stuff of drama.'
But what language do you use when making plays around the lives of ordinary, working people? Not a language that sounds foreign to the people, that is alien to their history. Ngugi, again: 'It was Kamiriithu which forced me to turn to Gikuyu and hence into what for me has amounted to 'an epistemological break' with my past.'
The story of I Will Marry When I Want (original title: Ngaahika Ndeenda ) by Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii revolves around the proletarianisation of the peasantry in a recently colonised country. In Ngugi's words, the play 'shows the way the Kiguunda family, a poor peasant family, which has to supplement their subsistence on their one and a half acres with the sale of their labour, is finally deprived of even the one and a half acres by a multinational consortium of Japanese and Euro-American industrialists and bankers aided by the native comprador landlords and businessmen.' If this sounds a bit like the 1952 Bimal Roy film Do Bigha Zameen , that's not because the two Ngugis had seen it, but because the experiences of ex-colonies were similar in many ways.
Since the rehearsals of the play took place in the open, many villagers would sit around watching. In time, many of them knew the entire play by heart. They would bring their families and friends, and gradually, pretty much the entire village had seen the play before it opened. Many of them gave critical feedback and suggestions. Ngugi, used to the idea of a 'premiere' where a play is 'unveiled' in front of an admiring audience, wondered if anyone at all would come to watch when shows actually began.
When the play opened on October 2, 1977, it was an immediate success. The villagers of Kamiriithu came, of course, but not so much as spectators as hosts. It was their play, and they had spread the word far and wide to other villages. The play became part of a spontaneous festival, a mela. One time, it rained so hard that the actors had to stop and the spectators had to take shelter. This happened three times. Yet, every time the play resumed, they found that no one from the audience had left.
The play ran every day, drawing new and repeat audiences every day. It was a triumph. Till the Kenyan government banned any further performances of it on November 16, 1977. Ngugi was arrested on the last day of 1977 and spent the whole of the following year in a maximum security prison.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o with the author, Sudhanva Deshpande.
I met Ngugi in February 2018, and we spent several hours together in Kolkata and Delhi. I was invited by Seagull Books, his publisher, to engage him in a public conversation at the Victoria Memorial . I also interviewed him for Newsclick in Delhi. In these recorded interactions, I asked the questions and he answered. Off camera, though, it was the opposite. He was endlessly curious – about India (which he was visiting for the second time); about literature in various Indian languages; about India's relations with Pakistan; about the Indian Left movement and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in particular; about Jana Natya Manch, the theatre group I work with, and its founder Safdar Hashmi, who was murdered while performing; about how I came into theatre and became part of the communist movement; about my father, who was also a playwright; about the food we ate; and on and on.
We interacted again, briefly, this time on email, when LeftWord Books published a set of essays called The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World , edited by Vijay Prashad. He wrote an essay on how the Soviet Union helped him when he was writing his novel Petals of Blood . The book has an essay by Deepa Bhasthi on her communist grandfather's library. Bhasthi recently won the International Booker Prize, for which Ngugi was also nominated a few years ago. In fact, he is the only person to have been nominated for a translation of his own work, and the only writer to have been nominated for a work in an African language.
I asked Ngugi how on earth he wrote on toilet paper, which is so flimsy and highly absorbent. He laughed. 'Not the toilet paper they gave us in jail. It was hard and thick. It was meant to hurt our bums. I used it to hurt theirs.'
As the world bids farewell to this giant of world literature, it is this spirit, indomitable and playfully subversive, that will continue to inspire.
Sudhanva Deshpande is an actor and publisher. He is the author of 'Halla Bol: The Death and Life of Safdar Hashmi' (LeftWord Books 2020).
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