From James Ngugi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The life of an African cultural revolutionary writer

Ngugi wa Thiong’o has ultimately joined the pantheon of African literary ancestors, nestling alongside Chris Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Abiola Irele, Ali Mazrui, and other greats, who gave Africa its authenticity after a long battle with Western imperialist writers, such as Joseph Conrad, Trevor Topper, Graham Green and others, who appointed themselves to the priesthood over African world.

It’s quite difficult to explain the wholeness of Ngugi’s ouvre, as his leitmotif ranges from rebellion against orthodoxy of European civilizing mission, to a struggle with local imperialists to identity crisis of modern Africa among other preoccupations.

Margaretta wa Gacheru, a sociologist and former student of Ngugi, aptly captured the sociological thrust of Ngugi’s writing when she wrote :

“Ngugi  was a national icon. To me, he’s like a Kenyan Tolstoy, in the sense of being a storyteller, in the sense of his love of the language and panoramic view of society, his description of the landscape of social relations, of class and class struggles.”

Much of his post colonial writings, such as The Devil on the Cross (1982) and (The Petals of Blood (1977) analyzed the dynamic and dialects of class relations in his native Kenya.

Social Influence

His radical bent and rebellion against any form of oppression, which shaped his writing is formed by his experience in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.  He witnessed the razing of his village and the forced internment of his family in detention camps during the infamous Mau Mau uprising, the  personal tragedy of his deaf brother, Gitogo, being fatally shot by a British soldier for not hearing a command, all this became a poignant symbol of colonial brutality that would echo through his work.

Despite the hardships, his parents’ sacrifices gave him the opportunity  to attend the elite Alliance boarding school. He later enrolled at the great Makerere University in Uganda, a salon  for African intellectuals. It was here, during a writers’ conference in 1963, that his manuscript for Weep Not Child caught the eye of Nigerian literary icon Chinua Achebe. Published in 1964, making it  the first major English-language novel by an East African, cascading the writer into global acclaim. The novel was the fourth in the prestigious African Writers Series . It was followed by The Rivers Between in 1967 and  A Grain of Wheat in 1972. At just 33, he was hailed as one of Africa’s pre-eminent contemporary writers.

Ngũgĩ, a perceptive chronicler of society at moments of crisis and transition after The  Grain of Wheat in 1972 abandoned  his English name, James, and resolved to write only in the language of the Kikuyu people, his mother tongue.

This was a turning point and radical shift for him. It was over the language question that he had a spat with the acclaimed Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, when he decided to switch from writing in English to the Kikuyu and Swahili languages – a controversial decision at the time. Achebe did not buy into this form of negritude.

“We all thought he was mad… and brave at the same time,” Kenyan writer David Maillu said in an interview.

“We asked ourselves, who would buy the books.”

One of his most famous works, “Decolonizing the Mind,” was published in 1986 while living abroad. The book’s argument is that it is “impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors,” AFP reports.

It’s interesting to note that  Ngugi  wrote  the first modern novel in the Kikuyu language on prison toilet paper while being held by Kenyan authorities.

A Cultural Ambassador

Ngugi’s death was a milestone in that it signified the end of an era for a writer, whose life and work were intrinsically woven into the fabric of Kenya’s tumultuous journey from colonial oppression to a complex, evolving democracy.

He  was more than a chronicler, he was a cultural warrior of the general rank, a  fiery  advocate for indigenous African languages, and a voice that refused to be silenced by imprisonment, exile or debilitating illness. His novels, plays and essays provided a searing chronicle of Kenyan society, its hopes, betrayals and enduring spirit.

His defining  novels, plays and memoirs plumbed the depth of   iniquities and ambiguities of colonialism in Kenya. He also explored in a poignant style full of dense irony the misdeeds  of the post-colonial elite.

Severally tipped as a potential Nobel laureate, but he was never awarded. Many critics believe that the Western politics of the Nobel award will never allow a certain category of  rebellious writers to win, citing the reluctance to award the prestigious prize to Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah or Dennis Brutus – writers, who challenged Western narrative on Africa.

He spent many years in exile to avoid the angst  of a government he criticized from Jomo Kenyatta to his clone- Arap Moi. For several decades, he taught comparative literature and English as a professor at the University of California, Irvine. His work inspired successive generations of African writers, along with contemporaries like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, both of Nigeria.

His  ouvre drew enthusiastic praise, beginning with his debut novel, “Weep Not, Child,” in 1964, which  is the story of Kenyan brothers whose family must confront the challenges of the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. The book has been called the first major novel in English by an East African author.

Colonial Struggle

By contrast, “Devil on the Cross,” published in 1980 and composed in his native tongue as “Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini,” is regarded as the first modern novel in the Gikuyu language, spoken by the country’s largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu. The book, about thieves, who vie for supremacy by stealing from the people, sent Mr. Ngugi on a career writing in his own language, and subsequently translating his work into English.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2018, the author Ariel Dorfman said the book was a “narrative of the devilish temptations he faced and the ruses used to thwart his jailers as he sat writing night after night in his cell.” The novel, Mr. Dorfman wrote, “shows Ngugi in full command of his craft.”

Mr. Ngugi’s life and writing unfolded in lock step with the stirrings of emancipation in British-run East Africa. He lived in Uganda, which secured independence in 1962, and in Kenya, both before and after its independence in 1963. It was a life freighted by the subtleties and shifts of a momentous era buffeted by what a British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, in 1960 called “the wind of change.”

While Mr. Ngugi was educated at Kenya’s British-run Alliance High School — a prestigious institution designed to mold an African elite in the image of the colonizers — other members of his family were caught up in the Mau Mau uprising against those same outsiders. A brother became a freedom fighter against the British, and another sibling was shot to death.

When Mr. Ngugi returned home from Alliance for the first time, he found that his home settlement had been destroyed, its population herded into a so-called protected village set up by the British authorities to cement control of their colonial subjects.

“The hedge of ashy leaves that we planted looks the same, but beyond it our homestead is a rubble of burned dry mud, splinters of wood, and grass,” he wrote in a memoir, “In the House of the Interpreter,” published in 2012. “My mother’s hut and my brother’s house on stilts have been razed to the ground. My home, from where I set out for Alliance three months ago, is no more.”

But colonialism was only one part of his life’s trajectory, much of it set against a backdrop of violence. The experience of detention persuaded him to seek exile in 1982, first in Britain and later in the United States.

Enemies Within

But on his return to Kenya in 2004, he and his family were the victims of a nightmarish attack. Intruders broke into an apartment where they were staying, attacked Mr. Ngugi and raped his wife, Njeeri. That episode was most likely rooted in vengeance by his foes, but it also reflected the criminality that had flourished during Kenya’s corrupt independence.

“It wasn’t a simple robbery,” Mr. Ngugi told The Guardian in 2006. “It was political — whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current. They hung around as though waiting for something, and the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.

Indeed, Mr. Ngugi’s work was heavily intertwined with the politics of the era, and his thinking about the far-reaching impact of imperialism on African sensibilities played a central role in a much broader debate. In 1986, he published a collection of essays, “Decolonizing the Mind,” which traced what he depicted as a corrosive colonial intent to supplant Indigenous languages with the language of the occupier so as to seal the mental subjugation of the colonized.

In 2023, Carey Baraka, a Kenyan writer who interviewed Mr. Ngugi for The Guardian, asked whether “Kenyan English or Nigerian English” had become “local languages.” Mr. Ngugi rejected the notion.

“It’s like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,” he replied. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of normalized abnormality. The colonized trying to claim the colonizer’s language is the sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.”

Asked if there were such a thing as a “good colonialist,” he disputed the notion. “It doesn’t matter if you’re carrying a gun or a Bible, you are still a colonialist,” he said. “Of course I’d rather face the colonialist with the Bible than the one with the gun, but in the end, both the Bible carrier and the gun carrier are espousing the same thing.”

Mr. Ngugi was born on Jan. 5, 1938, in the Limuru district, north of Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, which was then under British colonial rule. He grew up in a large, rural family, the son of a polygamous father and his mother, third of four wives, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, who encouraged him to seek a good education.

During his early years, Kenya became convulsed by an uprising against colonialism that the British authorities labeled the Mau Mau revolt. Mr. Ngugi said the name was a misnomer designed to minimize and distract from the rebellion’s aims of securing land and freedom for the Kenyan people. The rebels’ true name, he said, was the Land and Freedom Army.