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New York Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Cult Classic That Expanded What African Literature Could Be
Roving Eye is the Book Review's essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books. Everything about the book spoke in riddles to me: the abstract orange-and-black stick figures on the cover; the vague, enigmatic tag line calling it 'a novel from Africa'; the blurb from Dylan Thomas heralding 'a grisly and bewitching story of indescribable adventures.' Then there was the title itself: 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard.' (What, exactly, is a 'drinkard'?) This was my first introduction to the author Amos Tutuola, a Nigerian with little formal education. But he soon became one of the most intriguing international writers I discovered during college and the ravenous, slightly delirious years that followed, their dusty paperbacks excavated from small New York bookstores that have long since vanished. Published in 1952, at the dawn of African independence (and a decade before the classic Heinemann African Writers series appeared), Tutuola's novel stood apart from the others I took home, and its mystery continues to exert a powerful pull. This month, THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD (Grove, 144 pp., paperback, $17) returns to life in a striking new edition, along with Tutuola's 1954 follow-up, 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,' with introductions by Wole Soyinka and Kaveh Akbar. Originally published under the Evergreen imprint of Grove Press, the books appeared alongside the storied house's rogues' gallery of midcentury American and European avant-garde authors like William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Inspired in part by folk tales and written in an idiosyncratic vernacular that mixes English with Yoruba syntax, 'The Palm-Wine Drinkard' went on to become something of a cult classic in the West. Time magazine named it one of the 100 best fantasy books of all time. It has been hailed as a forerunner of the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and others, and it had a significant impact on African literature, even if it has been largely overshadowed by Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart.' How did it become such a crossover success, an early example of what would come to be called 'world literature'? And how was it understood (or not) in its own time, both at home and abroad? The novel begins with a thorny predicament for the homebrew-loving narrator who weaves together the book's adventures. His personal 'tapster,' who for the past 15 years has been climbing and tapping palm trees to provide for the narrator's extravagant daily consumption of palm wine, falls from a tree and dies. All is not lost, though, for perhaps the dead man can be retrieved from 'deads' town,' where the spirits of the deceased congregate. The problem: how to find this ghostly place, and how to get there through a menacing 'bush' teeming with outlandish creatures and magical spells. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o belonged to an age of prophets – we must honour his teaching
Growing up in post-independence Nigeria in the 1970s, at home you always had access to the Bible if you were Christian, or the Qur'an if you were Muslim, along with books in the Heinemann African Writers Series. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a staple, and the plays of Wole Soyinka: The Lion and the Jewel, most likely, or The Trials of Brother Jero. Often accompanying them were books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – I remember we had both Weep Not Child and The River Between. And even if you didn't have them at home, you'd soon encounter them in school – they were standard set texts, from secondary school to college. These three writers belonged to the so-called first generation of African writing, the generation that started publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. The three names stood, like the legs of the three-legged pot, under African literature, while in the pot was cooking whatever fare the minds of these writers conceived of. They shared a similarity of subject matter: pro-independence, pan-Africanist, postcolonial theory, but stylistically they were very different from one another. Kenyan Ngũgĩ, unlike the two Nigerians, was shaped by very stern political obstacles, pushing him to take very radical positions on politics and language. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In 1955, back home from school on vacation, he found his family home destroyed by the British colonial soldiers. His home town of Limuru had been razed to the ground. This was during the emergency, what the British called the Mau Mau uprising. This incident formed one of the motifs in his early fiction. His early novels, Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977), were written in English, under the name James Ngugi, before he stopped writing in English and changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In his time as faculty member in the English department in Nairobi University, in the 1960s-70s, he fought for a curriculum change – in nomenclature and in substance, from English Literature to Literatures in English. It was a very important move that would shape other nascent departments of English Literature around Africa, by insisting upon a parity in all levels between English literature and other literatures in their original languages and in translation – those of African languages in particular. Ngũgĩ's generation saw the role of the writer as that of a teacher to the newly independent Africans, who were struggling to make sense of the modern world forcibly thrust upon them by colonialism. For Ngũgĩ, the teacher was always a Marxist activist, something of a community organiser. His plays, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) and I Will Marry When I Want (1977), were approached as community theatre, at the level of the people, for the people, and their highly political and critical content caused rioting on the streets when they were staged, for which Ngũgĩ was arrested by the Daniel Arap Moi regime. Arrests and detentions and exile were rites of passage for African writers of the first generation. Ngũgĩ's move into exile introduced his work to a new audience; he went on to produce some of his most important critical essays and polemical works. Decolonising The Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), in particular, occupies a central position in his body of work because of the early groundwork it laid in the field of postcolonial literary theory. His migration also included a migration away from the English language to his mother tongue, Gikuyu. Even when his position on the importance of writing in one's mother tongue grew less compelling than it was before the rise of world and global literatures, he held on to it, not for any practical value, but for the symbolic purpose of decolonising the mind. Growing up, we saw writers of Ngũgĩ's generation like prophets, figures from the Old Testament. That is why, when they die, we realise that the age of prophets is coming to an end, and we who are left behind must murk about the best we can, while we can.
The Herald
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald
Revolutionary men can also have a dark side
On May 28, the world awoke to news of the death of Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong'o, regarded as one of the leading African novelists and an important figure in modern African literature. Wa Thiong'o, who survived a prostate cancer diagnosis decades before, had been struggling with kidney problems at the time of his death. He passed away in Georgia in the US. Wa Thiong'o was an award-winning author of many books, including his debut novel, Weep Not Child , which was awarded the 1966 Unesco First Prize. Many other book prizes and accolades would follow, including the prestigious 2022 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, which is awarded biennially to writers, principally novelists, 'whose works evoke to some measure of brilliant versatility and commitment to literature as a search for the deepest truth and the highest pleasure'. He was also the recipient of 13 honorary degrees from some of the most renowned higher learning institutions in the world. In 2014, Walter Sisulu University awarded him a Doctor of Literature and Philosophy honorary degree, and in the same year, the University of Bayreuth in Germany, where I am currently pursuing my PhD in Geography, also awarded him an honorary doctorate. There is no question that Wa Thiong'o was a giant of African literature. But in March 2024, shocking allegations were made by his son, Kenyan-American writer Mukoma Ngugi, who stated on social media that his father, the great novelist and academic, had physically and psychologically abused his late wife Nyambura, Mukoma's mother. Writing on X (formerly Twitter), the Associate Professor of Literature at Cornell University shared the pain of growing up witnessing the abuse and silencing of his late mother. 'My father @NgugiWaThiongo physically abused my late mother. He would beat her up,' he wrote. 'Some of my earliest memories are of me going to visit her at my grandmother's where she would seek refuge. 'But with that said, it is the silencing of who she was that gets me. Ok — I have said it.' The revelations sent shock waves across the literary world and society in general, with many question how such a respected man could be guilty of such heinous actions. While the story was widely reported, it did little to diminish the legacy of Wa Thiong'o, who continues to be revered and celebrated in death as he was in life. But the allegations of Wa Thiong'o's abuse of his wife should not be swept under the carpet. They are as much a part of his legacy as his accolades and award-winning novels are. The refusal to engage with this aspect of his life, to see him as a complex human being who was both a victim of colonial violence in Kenya and a perpetrator of domestic violence on the home front, is an injustice not only to the memory of Nyambura, but to all women in the world who have been erased and whose own legacies are overshadowed by those of the powerful men they are married to. This perpetuates the privatisation of violence, where men are revolutionaries in public and abusers in private. This is the case with many great revolutionaries. One of the greatest black revolutionaries, Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P Newton, was accused by close Panther associates of behaving erratically and in abusive ways towards comrades, particularly women. In 2007, Ericka Higgins, one of the women leaders of the Panthers, disclosed that she was allegedly repeatedly raped by Newton and told that if she reported the rapes, her children would be harmed. There are wounds that many women who are in relationships with men celebrated as revolutionaries have had to endure in silence. When they speak out, they are shamed for 'tarnishing' the men's images. But if we are to reflect on the legacy of Wa Thiong'o and other great men, we must do so truthfully and remember them in their fullness.
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o obituary
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who has died aged 87, was long regarded as east Africa's most eminent writer and, along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, a founding father of African literature in English. Like Achebe, his novels showed the social, psychological and economic impact of the colonial encounter in Africa, as well as the disillusion that followed independence. In later years Ngũgĩ championed writing in African languages and published fiction, drama and poetry in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. His first novel, Weep Not Child (1964), told the story of brothers who respond in different ways to the struggle in the 1950s for independence from British rule by the Land and Freedom Army (also known as the Mau Mau) in his native Kenya, and depicted the brutality of the British in their attempts to quell the rebellion. After Ngũgĩ showed the manuscript to Achebe at an African writers' conference in Makere, Uganda, in 1962, Achebe secured its publication (under the name James Ngũgĩ) in the Heinemann African Writers series. It was awarded Unesco's first prize at the World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal in 1966. Thereafter, many more of Ngũgĩ's novels and short stories were published in that series. A Grain of Wheat (1967), considered by some critics his best work of fiction, is set during celebrations for Kenya's independence day and deals with issues of single-minded heroism and betrayal, as well as the sufferings of detainees and women during the struggle for freedom. An earlier novel, The River Between (1965), featured an unhappy romance and divisions between Christians and non-Christians. It was written while Ngũgĩ was studying for a master's degree in the UK, at the University of Leeds. Ngũgĩ also wrote plays, including The Black Hermit (1962), which dramatises a conflict between the desire to stay with the traditional world of a rural village and the wish to benefit from modern improvements and wealth, and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, written in 1976 with Micere Githae Mugo, focusing on the deeds and aims of a leader of the Mau Mau. Appointed professor of English literature and fellow of creative writing at the University of Nairobi in 1967, Ngũgĩ argued successfully for the re-formation of the department to place African literatures, including oral literatures and writing in African languages, at its centre. At this time he changed his name from James Thiong'o Ngũgĩ to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. He also published a series of influential essays gathered later in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972). Increasingly alienated by the corruption and authoritarian policies that characterised Kenya's government under Jomo Kenyatta and his successor, Daniel Arap Moi, Ngũgĩ was influenced in his later writing by Frantz Fanon and Marxist ideology. Petals of Blood (1977), the last of his novels composed in English, was completed while he stayed in Yalta in Crimea, as a guest of the Soviet Union. Its central character, Wanja, a barmaid and prostitute, becomes a symbol of Kenya and the capitalist exploitation of labour, raped and damaged by corrupt businessmen and politicians. In the same year that Petals of Blood was published, Ngũgĩ became involved in creating community theatre along the lines advocated by Fanon. Together with the Kenyan playwright Ngũgĩ wa Mirii he composed a play in Gikuyu, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which included members of village audiences as actors and vocal responders. Its success, allied to its outspoken criticism of the Kenyan establishment, led to Ngũgĩ's arrest in 1977. He was detained in Kamiti maximum security prison in Nairobi for almost a year, until released partly through the intervention of Amnesty International. Finding that he had been stripped of his professorship and facing threats to his family, he left Kenya for Britain in 1982. While in prison Ngũgĩ had used sheets of toilet paper to write Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (The Devil on the Cross), his first novel in Gikuyu. Drawing on styles and forms reminiscent of traditional ballad singers, the novel mingles fantasy and realism to satirise wealthy Kenyans who exploit the poor. In Britain between 1982 and 1985 he worked with the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya and was writer-in-residence for the London borough of Islington. He was also in demand as a speaker at conferences promoting the reading and study of African and other Commonwealth literatures, often explaining his conviction that African and other indigenous writers should cease writing fiction in English, 'the language of the oppressor'. His arguments were later published in several collections of essays, including Barrel of a Pen (1982) and Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). Born in the village of Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kenya, Ngũgĩ was the son of Ngũgĩ wa Ndūcū, a landowner, and his third wife, Wanjiku, in a family consisting of four wives and 28 children. After primary education in the village school he was sent as a boarder to the Alliance high school near Nairobi. There students were made to speak in English only, and beaten if caught speaking Gikuyu or other indigenous languages. On his return home after his first term, he found that his village had been razed by British forces opposing the Mau Mau insurrection. His family were divided in their attitudes to the Mau Mau; some members opposed it, and one became an informer to the British government, while a half-brother joined the movement, another was detained, and a third, who was deaf, was shot in the back when he failed to stop in response to a command he did not hear. His mother had been detained and also abused. Ngũgĩ went on to complete a degree in English at Makerere University College in Uganda in 1963, and in 1964 won a scholarship to Leeds. That same year he married his first wife, Nyambura, a teacher, farmer and small trader. He taught English and African literatures at the University of Nairobi from 1967 to 1977, while also serving as a fellow in creative writing at Makerere University. Following his release from detention in December 1978 and subsequent move to the UK, he remained an exile from Kenya. His one attempt to return, in 2004, resulted in a brutal robbery and a sexual assault on his second wife, Njeeri, an incident that Ngũgĩ strongly suspected was encouraged by people close to the government. While teaching in the UK and the US, Ngũgĩ wrote several memoirs, including Detained: a Writer's Prison Diary (1982, updated as Wrestling With the Devil, 2018), Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010), and Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening (2016). He also continued to write fiction in Gikuyu. His verse epic retelling the Gikuyu myth of origin, Kenda Mũiyũru: Rũgano rwa Gĩkũyũ na Mũmbi (2019), translated by Ngũgĩ as The Perfect Nine, was the first work written in an indigenous African language to be longlisted for the International Booker prize. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees across the world, and was often seen as a leading candidate for the Nobel prize for literature; so much so that in 2010 many reporters gathered outside his home on the day of its announcement. When it became clear that the award had gone to Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngũgĩ seemed much less disappointed than the reporters, whom he had to console. Having separated from Nyambura, who did not accompany him into exile, Ngũgĩ married Njeeri, a counsellor and therapist at the University of California, in 1992; they separated in 2023. He is survived by 10 children and seven grandchildren. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (James Thiong'o Ngũgĩ), writer and activist, born 5 January 1938; died 28 May 2025
Mail & Guardian
06-06-2025
- General
- Mail & Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as town crier of Africa
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.
