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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.
Irish Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Guth eile fós
Sa bhliain 2010 bhí an gnáthshioscadh agus cabaireacht ar siúl i measc an aosa litríochta maidir le cé a bhainfeadh Duais Nobel na Litríochta. Is fíor go bhfuil an duais áirithe sin ar an duais is lú meas de na duaiseanna Nobel ar fad seachas Duais Nobel na Síochána a n-áirítear buamadóirí breátha ar nós Henry Kissinger agus Barack Obama ar a bhfuaid. Bíodh gurbh é Mario Vargas Llosa breith an choiste rúnda a shocraíonn na nithe seo an bhliain sin, bhí plód d'iriseoirí agus de lucht faisin na nuachta ag feitheamh go mífhoighneach lasmuigh de theach Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, an scríbhneoir as oirthear na hAfraice arbh é rogha na ngeallghlacadóirí é ag an am, agus go ceann suim bhlianta ina dhiaidh sin. Is é is dóichí nárbh é an lipéad 'scríbhneoir ó oirthear na hAfraice' ná 'scríbhneoir Céineach' ab fhearr leis, ach scríbhneoir Kikuyu (mar a litrítear anois í). Óir, cé gur thosnaigh sé ag scríobh i mBéárla faoin ainm James Ngugi, dhiúltaigh sé dá ainm is dá theanga chéadfhoilsithe is gur chrom feasta a shaothar a scríobh ina theanga dhúchais, is í sin, sa Kikuyuís, teanga na Mau Mau. Ní móide go mbeadh aon bhreith aige ar dhuais Nobel na litríochta murach gur aistrigh sé agus gur aistríodh a chuid úrscéalta agus a chuid machnaimh go Béarla ina dhiaidh sin. Instear eachtra air nuair a bhí úrscéal aistrithe dá chuid i mBéarla á chur i láthair an phobail aige. Ní heol dom go baileach cén ceann é ach ceapaim gurb é Wizard of the Crow a bhí ann. READ MORE Fiafraíodh de ón urlár aníos cad ina thaobh nár scríobh sé sa Bhéarla sa chéad áit é. Thóg sé an t-aistriúchán Béarla ina ghlac agus dúirt sé 'Dá mbeadh an leabhar seo ann ar dtús, ní bheadh an leabhar seo (an bunleabhar Kikuyuíse) ann in aon chor.' Is é a dhála sin ag aon teanga eile é nach bhfuil istigh sa chlub, sa chumann, sa bhunaíocht uilechoiteann. Ní bhaineann cumhacht an domhain ar fad le réimeas míleata, le saighdiúirí ar an talamh, le buamaí á leagadh anuas, le ciníocha a bheith á ndíothú cé go bhfuil siad go dlúth agus i bhfogas dá chéile. Ní luafaí Ngugi wa Thiong'o in aon chor ná ar chor ar bith maidir leis an duais Nobel litríochta murach go raibh a shaothar foilsithe i dteanga fhorleathan dhomhanda; ní chloisfí giob ná gíocs faoi dá mba sa Khikuyís a bhreac sé gach rud riamh anall. Ní cúrsaí iontais é gurb é an Béarla an teanga is mó a shaothraigh daoine a bhain an duais amhrastúil seo, agus ina dhiaidh aniar, an Fhraincis, an Ghearmáinis, an Spáinnis, an Rúisis, teangacha mórchoncais agus díothú pobail iad go léir, ait le rá. Ait le rá chomh maith nár bronnadh duais mhór Oireachtais litríochta an domhain ach ar lucht cleite teangacha neamhEorpacha naoi n-uaire as 121 duais ar fad. Uair amháin don Araibis (491m cainteoirí), uair amháin don Bhengáilis (283m cainteoirí, ce gur scríobh Rabindrinath Tagore sa Bhéarla chomh maith), uair amháin sna teangacha Turcacha (200m cainteoirí, agus dhá thuras don teanga is mó cainteoirí ar domhan, an tSínis. Chuige seo, go bhfuair Ngugi wa Thiong'o bás an tseachtain cheana, ceithre scór agus ocht mbliana d'aois, duine de scríbhneoirí móra an domhain nach bhfuil aon insint mhór air toisc nach raibh sé cráite faoin existentialisme, ná faoi choinsias na buirgéiseachta, ná faoi óige lofa, faoi bhriseadh croí um leannán a thréig, faoi mhian bheag phearsanta nár comhlíonadh, faoi chiarsúr nár iarnáladh, nó faoi bhriosca a d'ith nó nár ith sé, ach gur scríobh sé go pearsanta paiseanta faoi éagóir na cumhachta. Ba leor sin le nach n-éistfí leis.
Al Jazeera
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Ngugi wa Thiong'o was not just a writer, he was a militant
Ngugi wa Thiong'o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page. It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak 'from the heart' – something he would always describe as writing's greatest gift. Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa's most formidable public intellectuals. Ngugi's cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule. The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers' orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole. More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi's animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn't leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya's new, Kenyan rulers. As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the 'cultural bomb' of British rule had 'annihilated' over the previous seven decades. After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who 'speaks for the Continent'. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out. As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu. The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya's new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977. What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn't the standard 'neocolonialism' that anti- and post-colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule. Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people's minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one's native language. Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi's concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he'd regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous 'decolonial' and 'Indigenous' turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation. Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he'd frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic. For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments. Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, 'The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,' and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language. For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a 'primal instability', one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to 'imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,' he could not make a final return home in his last years. Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to 'write dangerously', to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Times of Oman
29-05-2025
- General
- Times of Oman
Giant of African literature, Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o dies aged 87
Nairobi: Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, considered one of the greats of African literature, passed away at the age of 87, a spokeswoman for his Nairobi publisher confirmed. Thiong'o, who died in the US state of Georgia, leaves behind a long legacy of critical works. Born in 1938 under British colonial rule, he lived in exile in Britain, before moving on to the United States. He only briefly returned to Kenya. An author and an academic, Thiong'o's works range from novels including "Weep Not, Child," to non-fiction including his much-acclaimed "Decolonising the Mind" - a collection of essays about the role of language in constructing national culture, history and identity. Thiong'o, who was tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature countless times, first wrote in English, before switching to his native Kikuyu, in a move that can be seen as part of his desire to decolonise culture.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author who reckoned with colonial legacy, dies at 87
By George Obulutsa NAIROBI (Reuters) -Celebrated Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose sharp criticisms of post-independence elites led to his jailing and two decade in exile, has died at the age of 87, Kenya's president said. Shaped by an adolescence where he witnessed the armed Mau Mau struggle for independence from Britain, Thiong'o took aim in his writings at colonial rule and the Kenyan elites who inherited many of its privileges. He was arrested in December 1977 and detained for a year without charge in a maximum security prison after peasants and workers performed his play "Ngaahika Ndeenda" (I Will Marry When I Want). Angered by the play's criticism of inequalities in Kenyan society, the authorities sent three truckloads of police to raze the theatre, Thiong'o later said. He went into exile in 1982 after he said he learned of plans by President Daniel arap Moi's security services to arrest and kill him. He went on to become a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine. 'INDELIBLE IMPACT' Thiong'o ended his exile in 2004 after Moi left office following more than two decades in power marked by widespread arrests, killings and torture of political opponents. Kenya's current president, William Ruto, paid tribute to Thiong'o after his death in the U.S. following reports of a struggle with ill health in recent years. "The towering giant of Kenyan letters has put down his pen for the final time," Ruto said on his X account. "Always courageous, he made an indelible impact on how we think about our independence, social justice as well as the uses and abuses of political and economic power." Although Thiong'o said upon returning to Kenya in 2004 that he bore no grudge against Moi, he told Reuters in an interview three years later that Kenyans should not forget the abuses of the era. "The consequences of 22 years of dictatorship are going to be with us for a long time and I don't like to see us returning to that period," he said. Thiong'o's best-known works included his debut novel "Weep Not Child", which chronicled the Mau Mau struggle and "Devil on the Cross", which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison. In the 1980s, he abandoned English to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu, saying he was bidding farewell to the imported language of Kenya's former colonial master. (Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Aaron Ross)
