By Tirthankar Mitra
KOLKATA: One of his brothers was a freedom fighter against the British while another sibling was shot to death, Ngugi Wa Thinog’o found his home destroyed when one day he returned from school. The population had been herded to a “protected village” set up by the British to cement control on their colonial subjects.
But instead of picking up arms following the example of his brothers Ngugi used his pen all his life to express his protest against inhumanity. The topics of his writings were all around him. He explored the inequities and ambiguities of colonialism in his native Kenya as well as the misdoings of the postcolonial elite. While doing so he led a passionate campaign for African authors to eschew the language of their colonial rulers. His passing at 87 left many promises unfulfilled as Thiong’o was often tipped for the potential Nobel prize. But it did not make him bitter.
Rather it imbued Ngugi with a sense of gentle humour. When the Nobel prize went to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa in 2021, he said that he was less disappointed than the photographers who gathered outside his home:” I was the one consoling them.”
A lecturer in the English department at Nairobi University, he felt it should be renamed. Its focus ought to be shifted to literature round the world, “If there is need for ‘a study of a historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African?” he wrote in a paper.
It was the co-authoring of his play penned in Gikuyu “I Will Marry When I Want” which led to his arrest and imprisonment in a maximum-security prison. His works inspired successive generation of African authors with contemporaries like Nigerian writers, Chinua Achebe, Soyinka.
It was in the cell of this prison Ngugi first came across the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore in a newspaper writeup. Against this unfriendly backdrop, he went through this article putting Tagore’s idea in a nutshell “You may learn a lot of languages, but unless you speak and write in your mother tongue, nothing is of value.”
Come 2018, Ngugi visited Tagore’s ancestral home at Jorasanko. The palatial building made him compare it with his humble childhood home where he grew up.
He was a warrior whose weapon was language. And if Tagore preferred Bengali, the write-up on him in a dank prison cell was Kabiguru’s cue to Ngugi to pen his works in Gikuyu, his mother tongue.
Thiong’o showed his class from his debut novel, Weep Not Child, 1964. It is a story of Kenyan brothers whose family must confront the challenges of Mau Mau rebellion against the British rule. He spoke of Kenya’s largest ethnic tribe, Kikuyu in Devil on the Cross in 1980 penned in Gikuyu language. It is the first modern novel in this language.
Ngugi continued to write in Gikuyu and had the dubious distinction of an arrest warrant being issued for the fictional character of his 1986 novel, Matigari. It was banned in Kenya. His novel Wizard of the Crow was based on African kleptocracy . It was set in the backdrop of the dictatorship of the Free Republic of Aburiria.
He was nominated for the Booker prize in 2021 for his novel in verse The Perfect Ten. He was the prize’s first nominee writing in indigenous African language. Ngugi’s life is an object lesson to authors facing apparently overwhelming odds. He wrote Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper. He penned this book while being detained by Kenyan authorities without trial. He had written a play which earned him this prison term.
“In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language’ he said.’ “The only language I could use was my own’ he said explaining his choice of writing in Gikuyu.
Ngugi was educated in British-run Alliance High School. But his schooling failed to cut him off from his linguistic roots-Gikuyu. The ground breaking novelist had nine children, four of whom are authors.
Having served prison terms and surviving murderous attacks, steeled Ngugi resolve. “Resistance is the best way of keeping alive” he said adding “it can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice’. (IPA Service)
