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The devastating news of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing has shaken the literary and academic scene in Africa and beyond. From the massive outpourings of condolences to his family from across Africa and the world, it is clear Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was more than just a literary icon. He was a titan. An avant-garde cultural symbol of rebellion. A behemoth of enormous wonder. Perhaps the last intrepid post-colonial voice in the historical context of his rise.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a peregrine falcon that traversed the breadth and height of a sky distant and immortal, valiantly floating in it as if it were a deep blue ocean of air magically suspended above the clouds by the literary gods, in search of a divine salve to heal what he believed was a colonial wound on African tongues. And he believed he found it. And brought it home. In 1986. And named it “decolonizing the mind”.
Many considered him a literary god, which he was. His name remains the totem of linguistic decolonization – a lone voice that shook the colonial minds and their collaborators like the mythical thunderbird, and, of course, in the profoundest of ways.
He was a dream weaver who dared to weave his stories with the authentic embroidery of his Gĩkũyũ language, spiritualizing language as culture and tool for decolonizing the mind.
Ngũgĩ’s pen was a gun with ink inside it. His poems, plays, novels, short stories and essays stung the steed of the state in some way or triggered his readers to question the status quo. Take, for instance, Ngaahika Ndeenda (Gĩkũyũ for “I Will Marry When I Want”), the 1977 play he co-wrote with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ. The play caused their arrest and detention without trial by the autocratic Kenyatta regime.
Through the story of a peasant couple, Kĩgũũnda and Wangeci, the play challenges received beliefs, the influence of foreign religions, and displays unbridled criticism of the Western powers and the corrupt political class that rule the post-independence African state. In Act 1 of the play, Kĩgũũnda informs Wangeci of a letter he has received from some rich man, Ikuua wa Nditika, who claims some foreigners want to buy the couple’s land to build a factory for manufacturing insecticides. Stunned, Wangeci puts a somewhat rhetorical question to her husband:
Aren’t they the real bedbugs,
Local watchmen for the foreign robbers?
When they see a poor man’s property their mouths water,
When they get their own, their mouths dry up!
Don’t they have any lands
They can share with these foreigners
Whom they have invited back into the country
To desecrate the land?
The play ends with the declaration that “the trumpet of the masses has been blown”. This play remains relevant in many African states today, more so in Kenya in the context of the Gen Z protests of 2024.
When Ngũgĩ intellectualized his radical thoughts, he birthed Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ set the foundational argument against the continued use of English and other colonial languages in the African (and similar) settings. He argued that African writers should write in their own native languages; and that the colonialists had dehumanized their former colonies by using the colonial language to culturally and spiritually subjugate their colonies across the world. In colonial Kenya, he observed, English became more than just a language where a people’s intelligence and knowledge were defined by their ability to write or speak the English language, and not their own.
Long before Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ was particularly perturbed by the vulturine nature of colonial philosophy of language. It is said Ngũgĩ was inspired by Nigerian writer Obi Wali who argued in his 1963 “The Dead End of African Literature” (published in Transition Magazine) that an “… African writer who thinks and feels in his own language must only write in that language” since “English does not have the capability to carry the African Experience”. As I had observed in an article published in The Elephant in 2020, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe had rejected Obi Wali’s view and instead argued that African writers had the ability to Africanise English to authentically convey their African truths.
Obi Wali’s paper had been published against the backdrop of the first Conference of African Writers of English Expression and which had attracted the participation of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Lewis Nkosi, Es’kia Mphahlele, and American poet Langston Hughes, among others. It was at this conference that Ngũgĩ shared the Weep Not, Child manuscript with Achebe who then made it possible for it to land on the desk of Achebe’s publisher in the UK.
In the late 1960s, alongside his peers Owuor Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong’, Ngũgĩ pressed for a new organizing principle – as they called it – at the University of Nairobi’s Department of English Literature that would “establish the centrality of Africa in the department” instead of retaining English literature and culture as the department’s mainstay. Subsequently, the department was renamed the Department of Literature and the study of literature was democratized as should be any form of learning.
Ngũgĩ’s demise took me back to a video I had stumbled upon some time back and which hadn’t helped quell the “decolonization” debate I have entertained in my head ever since I interacted with Ngũgĩ in Decolonizing the Mind.
Titled “An Evening with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o”, the video sits on the American Library of Congress YouTube channel. On that beautiful evening of May 9, 2019, Ngũgĩ spiritedly spoke about his philosophy as a leading exponent of mother-tongue literature. He spiced up the evening with readings from some of his published works.
The most interesting was a poem published in Gĩkũyũ titled Kũhanyũkĩra Itua (Quick Judgement) from his collection of poems written and published in his mother tongue in Venice, Italy. As an introduction to the poem, he mentioned that the breathtaking beauty of Venice had inspired the writing of the poem, even though the poem was really about his experience with Venetian cuisine. Venice was “…a city without cars or bicycles and without roads” since “every street was a waterway… rivers of water everywhere… canals…” He poeticized it – the way he said it, laughing freely in between his strong Gĩkũyũ accent, but in a way that persuaded one to believe him when he said he was wonder-struck by the picturesque Floating City of Italy. Ngũgĩ then proceeded to read the poem in its original Gĩkũyũ text, followed by a reading of its Italian and English versions. I considered this to be somewhat a poetic pageantry of three languages side by side on the same platform – all equal in the eyes of the audience.
While I neither speak nor understand Gĩkũyũ language, I had followed Ngugi’s rhythm and musicality as he read Kũhanyũkĩra Itua and easily nodded to the beat of the alliteration and to the gentle bend of his aging voice; and of course, the tonal skid in his characteristic laughter when he cracked a joke thereafter. It wasn’t surprising when Ngũgĩ later said that he only wrote poems in his Gĩkũyũ mother tongue and found it really difficult to pen poems in English. It reminded me of one of the late Kenyan poet Stanley Mitoko’s Dholuo poems, Silwal Rabora (Fair-skinned Giant), in his “Afrikan Dreams” collection of poems.
To Ngũgĩ, language is a musical instrument; one can only play best his own. And since poetry is music, how else can one write it better if not in his own language? But Ngũgĩ believed that languages can connect with each other through translation. Translation thus remains a medium of building a community of languages without hierarchy or claim to superiority.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chose a less familiar, less beaten path – the road not taken, in the words of American poet Robert Frost. Did it make his fiction less popular? Could it have been the cause of his failure to win the literature Nobel Prize? Was it even a failure? Did it limit his readership? Sometimes, real artistic fulfilment tends to defy quantity and popularity. What might function or be seen as utility may sometimes defy the ordinary. Is literature a utilitarian tool or a tool for asserting the Kantian duty for duty’s sake?
While some have accused Ngũgĩ of perpetuating an ethno-nationalist agenda, they seldom understand that the conceptual issues Ngũgĩ raised far outweigh such ethnic misconceptions. Others think that, except for a few translation projects, nothing much has come out of Decolonizing the Mind in terms of fiction. There is some truth in this.
I may not agree entirely with Ngugi’s essentialist view of language and in fact believe that literature thrives if there exist internal democracies that promote choice, including the freedom to choose the language through which to tell my story.
That said, while many African writers, desiring to be read beyond their native tongues and countries, chose to write in the colonial language, the success of Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind must be viewed from where it has been situated for a long time, i.e. the hallowed precincts of theoretical (and even meta-theoretical) discourse in Africa and elsewhere. For this reason, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s name shall remain on the lips of thinkers across disciplines for centuries.
A dirge for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (in Dholuo)
e ni ko n’adeko | they say I’m late to depart
kara pod wariwore | but we are all delayed
kara pod waluoro | we are still looking for a way out
kalausi luora | the wild cyclone spins around me
to wang’ yore em’odinoree | and so the paths are impassable
lowo jajuok | earth (the grave) is a witch
Jowi! Jowi! Jowi! | Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
