|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
On the evening of 28 May 2025, my elder sister Janet informed me that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had left us. She thought I needed to know – and she was right: my family knows that I have a decades-old deep admiration for this accomplished writer of novels, plays, short stories and scholarly essays. Those of my readers that are in academia are familiar with the custom of authors acknowledging the contribution of various people to their work, but then ending by stating: “I take full responsibility for the views that I express herein.” Yet as Ngũgĩ states in his preface to his Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, “Over the years I have come to realise more and more that work, any work, even literary creative work, is not the result of an individual genius but the result of a collective effort.” This should be obvious, but the almost hegemonic individualist outlook of global capitalism makes it necessary to state it. On my part, Ngũgĩ’s work and activism have greatly influenced my outlook over the past forty-five years or so.
In my early years at Thika High School for the Blind, I heard senior students delightfully referring to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s works. Indeed, literature was a favourite among us, and so we juniors looked forward to getting to Form 3 to dig into it. However, none of Ngũgĩ’s books was a set book for our year, as we delved into Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine, Francis Imbuga’s Betrayal in the City, Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol, and Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector.
My first interaction with Ngũgĩ’s works was at the other Thika High School – the boys’ school where I went for my A-Levels, with my only other classmate from Thika High School for the Blind being John Musyimi Kilonzo, so that we were two blind boys in a mighty sea of 93 sighted classmates divided into three streams. There we studied The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a play which Ngũgĩ co-authored with Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo. We also studied its translation into Kiswahili as Mzalendo Kimathi (literally “Hero Kimathi”). The original English version was taught by an Englishman who read it dramatically, but had very little to say by way of literary critique. The Kiswahili version, on the other hand, was taught by Mr F. K. K. Mwangi – a Ngũgĩ enthusiast who taught it so well that we also deployed his insights to our essays for the English version exam. Almost three-and-a-half decades later, during my visit to Washington, DC, as a 2016 African Studies Association Presidential Fellow, I was delighted to listen to Ngũgĩ and Mĩcere share their thoughts about their inspiring play, not to mention the joy of sharing a breakfast table with Ngũgĩ at the hotel where we both were staying!
During my undergraduate days at Kenyatta University in the mid-1980s, we studied Ngũgĩ’s The River Between, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood. Thus my A-level studies at Thika High School and my undergraduate studies at Kenyatta University were the beginning of my decades of admiration for Ngũgĩ’s works that have had a major impact on my outlook, influencing what I think about a wide range of topics. Literature was my first academic love, philosophy my second, yet I ended up specialising in philosophy; but I have found that the two co-exist beautifully. Indeed, in his chapter in The African Philosophy Reader edited by P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux, Odera Oruka, the late University of Nairobi philosophy professor, acknowledged producers of literary works such as novels, short stories, plays and poems as constituting the artistic or literary school of African Philosophy.
The struggle against Western imperialism
At the core of both Ngũgĩ’s creative works (novels, short stories and plays) and his scholarly writings is the issue of decolonisation – the effort to resist Western imperialism and reassert the dignity of non-Western peoples. In his introduction to his Decolonising the mind, written in 1986, he states:
Imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the remotest corners of our countries. If you are in doubt, just count how many African countries have now been mortgaged to IMF – the new International Ministry of Finance as Julius Nyerere once called it. Who pays for the mortgage? Every single producer of real wealth (use-value) in the country so mortgaged, which means every single worker and peasant. Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the world today. It could even lead to holocaust.
Then, in his first chapter of the same book, he observes:
It seems it is the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in the metropolis of the western world: her submergence from self-governing communities into colonies was decided in Berlin; her more recent transition into neo-colonies along the same boundaries was negotiated around the same tables in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon.
Ngũgĩ’s observations above are in line with V.Y. Mudimbe’s explication of the meaning of “colonialism” in his The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge: “Colonialism and colonization basically mean organization, arrangement. The two words derive from the Latin word colére, meaning to cultivate or to design.” He goes on to point out that the colonists (those settling a region), as well as the colonialists (those exploiting a territory by dominating a local majority) have all tended to organise and transform non-European areas into fundamentally European constructs.
Thus Ngũgĩ was deeply concerned about the fact that the flags and national anthems did not bring the liberation which the peoples of Africa struggled for during the era of classical colonialism. He could therefore identify with V. Y. Mudimbe’s observation that the core of colonialism remained intact even after the hoisting of national flags:
In the early 1960s, the African scholar succeeded the anthropologist, the “native” theologian replaced the missionary, and the politician took the place of the colonial commissioner. All of them find reasons for their vocations in the dialectic of the Same and the other.
One of Ngũgĩ’s most articulate condemnations of Western imperialism is in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi which he co-authored with Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo. Although the immediate context of the play is the uprising of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (commonly referred to as “Mau Mau Uprising”) of the 1950s, Ngũgĩ and Mĩcere also set it against the background of the 400 years of the subjugation of the peoples of Africa through Western-instigated slave trade, classical colonialism, and the contemporary neo-colonial era. In this, Ngũgĩ and Mĩcere clearly acknowledged the impact on their thinking by Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Rodney is emphatic that although the West loves to say that Africa is “underdeveloped” or “undeveloped”, Europe and Africa were virtually at par in their economies until Europe set out on her maritime expeditions from the end of the fifteenth century. Those expeditions were characterised by unfair trade practices that systematically sucked the resources of non-Western societies to build up Western ones. Thus Rodney is emphatic that it was the very West that brought us to our knees through robbery, pillage, slavery, forceful occupation, and lately exploitation through puppet African regimes.
In sum, through The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Ngũgĩ and Mĩcere, aided by my A-Level Kiswahili teacher Mr Mwangi, I learned that the lowering of the Union Jack did not signify the ushering in of the freedom that our peoples fought for, as the West continues to use its economic muscle to exploit and oppress our peoples. Years later I was to come across Kwame Nkrumah’s memorable definition of neo-colonialism: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” As I pointed out in a previous article here, Nkrumah was emphatic that Western multinational corporations take centre stage in the domination of the neo-colonies as they exploit the continent’s natural resources; and as I also observed in that earlier article, it was not coincidental or accidental that Nkrumah was overthrown less than a year after the book was published.
Thus as Carey Baraka has correctly observed, “If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite.”
I have often been chided for going on and on about the devastating effects of Western imperialism more than sixty years after independence. I have been told, sometimes very sternly, that all the failures of the post-colonial state must be laid at the doorsteps of African political office bearers, with their kleptocracy and tyranny. In short, I have been told that our problem is no longer Western imperialism, but rather poor African leadership. In response, I have pointed out that the “Western imperialism-poor African leadership” dichotomy is a false one. After all, it was the West which supported some of the worst African dictators of the 1960s to the 1980s (Uganda’s Amin, Congo’s Mobutu, Malawi’s Banda, and Central African Republic’s Bokassa, among others) as long as they declared that they were against communism. Besides, the West continues to decide which contemporary African regimes to prop up and which ones to topple purely on the basis of its own geopolitical interests. No wonder front runners in many elections in African states rush to Chatham House to gain milage in the polls. Moreover, the burden of debt slavery under which the peoples of Africa are currently heaving has as much to do with the kleptocracy of African political office bearers as with the Western lenders who avail the credit knowing very well it will be carted off to personal foreign accounts.
The central place of the languages of the peoples of Africa
Many Kenyans are familiar with people who take great pride in their children attending high cost schools from the very beginning and thus acquiring an English accent. Some of them are even more proud that their children do not speak any indigenous languages, or speak a bit of them with that English accent. What they see as success Ngũgĩ sees as dismal failure. In a previous article here, I pointed out that around the world Western colonisers took the children of their colonial subjects to boarding schools in a bid to delink them from their cultural roots, and resolutely discouraged them from speaking their indigenous languages.
From Ngũgĩ I learned that language policy is a theatre of the struggle in which global capitalists vociferously work to destroy non-Western languages in a bid to impose their own worldview on their victims, and thereby to dominate them more effectively. In at least one of his visits to Kenya, I heard him strongly condemn the persistent colonial practice of punishing children who speak their mother tongues in school.
In 1977, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his friend Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ set up an open-air theatre based at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre in his rural home area, and enlisted workers and peasants to act out Ngaahika Ndeenda (Kikuyu for “I will marry when I want”) – a play which the two of them had written to protest against the exploitation of the peoples of Africa by multinational corporations. In response, the Jomo Kenyatta Regime detained Ngũgĩ without trial, and his cultural centre was later pulled down and a village polytechnic built on the site. It was as though international capitalism was telling Ngũgĩ: “The youth of your country must continue to serve the capitalist Leviathan without questioning it.” Ngũgĩ was only released after the death of Kenyatta.
While in prison, Ngũgĩ secretly wrote a second work in Gĩkũyũ on toilet paper, Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ (Kikuyu for “Devil on the Cross”). Its heroine is Warĩĩnga, a young woman who moves from a rural area to Nairobi, only to be exploited by her boss, and later by a businessman. She slowly comes to the realisation that her woes are due to the neo-colonial era in which she lives. Yet this novel was Ngũgĩ’s final break with fiction written in English; for he concluded that the political establishment only got truly ruffled when he began to write in Gĩkũyũ. After all, during that very year, 1977, he had already written Petals of Blood and co-authored The Trial of Dedan Kimathi without repercussions from the political elite.
Nine years later, Ngũgĩ wrote: “In 1977 I published Petals of Blood and said farewell to the English language as a vehicle of my writing of plays, novels and short stories. All my subsequent creative writing has been written directly in Gĩkũyũ language… However, I continued writing explanatory prose in English. (…) This book, Decolonising the Mind, is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way.” Many have chided him for not keeping to his resolution. Nevertheless, I would rather a person who tries and fails than one who does not try at all; for the one who tries might just succeed, while the one who does not has absolutely no chance of success.
In one of many video clips readily available online, Ngũgĩ states that the subjugation of a language is the subjugation of the minds of the owners of that language along with the history that makes them have a sense of “peoplehood”, and the knowledge systems carried by that language. The result is that such a people begin to be attached to the history of the conquering culture. He concludes: “If you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue or your first language or the language of your culture, then that is self-enslavement… but if you know your mother tongue or your first language then add all the languages of the world to it, that’s empowerment.”
My appreciation of the wealth encapsuled in the languages of the peoples of Africa, fired by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has been reinforced by the work of Kwasi Wiredu, the late Ghanaian professor of philosophy. Beginning with a UNESCO conference held in Nairobi in 1980, Wiredu emphasised essentially the same point in African philosophy that Ngũgĩ emphasised in African literature: he pointed out that many of the concepts that we take for granted in philosophy are simply formulations that reflect the worldviews of the owners of the Western languages in which they are formulated. For example, in “Towards Decolonising African Philosophy and Religion”, Wiredu illustrates that Placide Tempels’ famous claim, in his Bantu Philosophy, that for the Bantu “being is force” cannot be formulated in Twi – the language of the Akan. Even Alexis Kagame, himself a Bantu, disagreed with Tempels’ exposition.
Wiredu encouraged the writing of philosophical works in indigenous African languages, and even contributed a chapter in his Twi language to Chike Jeffers’ edited volume Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy for which Ngũgĩ wrote a foreword. I was therefore deeply moved to listen to Ngũgĩ’s Acceptance Speech in Gikuyu for the award of the 2019 Catalonia International Prize where he emphasised that all human languages are of equal worth. Carey Baraka tells us that at the end of his three days’ visit to Ngũgĩ in his California home in October 2022, Ngũgĩ told him: “Don’t forget to write in Dholuo.”
So have I written any philosophical works in Dholuo? Sadly, not yet. Why not? First, having gone through school and university using English, and most importantly having studied philosophy in English, writing a philosophical treatise in Dholuo requires more effort than may at first be apparent. Second, being totally blind, the software that provides me with audio output on my computer does not have a Dholuo option, so it speaks Dholuo in an unintelligible way (I often say the software did not go to school, so it does not know Dholuo). As such, proofreading my Dholuo essays would be close to impossible. Nevertheless, I have drawn from my considerable proficiency in Dholuo to reflect on various philosophical issues in line with Wiredu’s admonition. For example, at a conference in the Czech Republic in June 2024, I illustrated that the now-popular idea that there are “human animals” and “non-human animals” cannot be rendered in Dholuo, and is therefore simply a contrivance of the Western conservationist movement rather than a universally intelligible notion. Besides, my exposition and critique of the political thought of the late Luo Benga Musician Daniel Owino Misiani has recently been published. I nevertheless still have a dream that one day I will put out some philosophical works in Dholuo.
The liberating power of our own names
For Ngũgĩ, the pivotal role of preserving and developing our languages as part of our resistance to Western imperialism is closely related to the importance of using our own names rather than Western ones. In his Homecoming, Ngũgĩ recounts an incident in which he was invited to speak to a gathering of the leaders of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. He began his remarks by declaring that he was not a Christian. In response, an old man in the audience walked up to him and asked him why he was called “James Ngugi” if he was not a Christian. While he was taken aback by the old man’s response, he later realised the old man had a point, and went on to drop “James Ngugi” and to take up “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o” in its place.
In our introduction to our edited volume Odera Oruka in the Twenty-first Century, Oriare Nyarwath, Francis Owakah and I pointed out that names are not mere labels:
… the advent of colonialism distorted many aspects of African life, not least the mode of naming. This is an important issue, considering that one way in which we human beings gain control of our environment is through the names that we give to people, places and other things around us. Similarly, we develop our own identities through names given to us, as well as those that we might give to ourselves. Thus the colonialists got greater control over the Africans when they (the Africans) took on European names and modes of naming. Note that the colonialists rarely reciprocated the Africans’ receptiveness to their names.
One of the most tragic trends in Kenya today is the way many people insist on using only their first names. So often people introduce themselves as “Jack”, “James” or “Jill”; and when you ask them for their second name they get offended, feeling that you want to profile them “ethnically”. I think this trend was phenomenally reinforced after the post-election crisis of 2007/2008. In effect, our society has fallen into the trap of considering our cultural identities as a “backward” practice which militates against “nation building”. Yet as I have illustrated elsewhere, “nation building” is itself a ploy through which Western imperialism seeks to destroy the rich cultural diversities of our people by mashing them into sterile monoliths within formerly colonial territories in line with the violence of the 1884 partition of Africa in Berlin. Regarding this, Kalundi Serumaga’s memorable analysis in Speak of Me as I Am comes to mind:
Why is there only a handful of contemporary states in Africa whose names bear a relation to the identity of people actually living there? Everyplace else is a reference to a commodity, or an explorer’s navigational landmarks.
This frankly malevolent labelling offers the space for the linguistic demotion of entire peoples. To wit: 34 million Oromo, seven million Baganda, 43 million Igbo, 10 million Zulu will always remain ‘ethnicities’ and ‘tribes’ to be chaperoned by ‘whiteness’. 5.77 million Danes, 5.5 million Finns, and just 300,000 Icelanders can be called ‘nations’, complete with their own states with seats at the UN.
Some of these states were only formed less than two centuries ago (Italy: 1861, Germany: 1815, Belgium: 1830), while some of those ‘tribes’, and most critically for the argument, their governing institutions had already been created.
Thus while many continue to jeer at Ngũgĩ’s change of name, his was a powerful act of resistance against Western cultural imposition. Yet his action set off a trend in which a considerable number of Kenyans dropped their Western names or reduced them to initials, while others steered clear of giving their children such names. Lately some Kenyans are even getting more creative by coming up with hitherto unknown names that have nothing to do with Western culture but instead reflect both their traditional identities and their Kenyan identity.
Rejection of Western religion
Ngũgĩ was consistently emphatic that Western imperialism uses religion to subdue its victims. For example, in Decolonising the Mind he writes that the imperial master is “armed with the bible and the sword”. In The River Between, he portrays Joshua, one of the earliest and leading converts to “Christianity” in Makuyu, as a most unreasonable father. Of him Ngũgĩ writes:
The new faith worked in him till it came to possess him wholly. He renounced his tribe’s magic, power and ritual. He turned to and felt the deep presence of the one God. Had he not given the white man power over all? (…) He realized the ignorance of his people. He felt the depth of the darkness in which they lived. He saw the muddy water through which they waded unaware of the dirt and mud. His people worshipped Murungu, Mwenenyaga, Ngai. The unerring white man had called the Gikuyu god the prince of darkness.
In his Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, Ngũgĩ recounts how after two weeks of social isolation in Kamiti Maximum Prison, the Prison Chaplain came into his cell carrying two Bibles and religious tracts printed in the US and began to preach to him, suggesting that his detention was an act of God. Ngũgĩ’s response summarises his lucid understanding of the way the Kenyan political elite misuses religion after the pattern of the colonisers:
‘Hold it!’ I cried out. ’Who needs your prayers, your Bibles, your leaves of holiness – all manufactured and packaged in America? Why do you always preach humility and acceptance of sins to the victims of oppression? Why is it that you never preach to the oppressor? Go. Take your Bibles, your prayers, your leaves of holiness to them that have chained us in this dungeon. Have you read Ngaahika Ndeenda? Did you ever go to see the play? What was wrong with it? Tell me! What was wrong with Kamiriithu peasants and workers wanting to change their lives through their own collective efforts instead of always being made passive recipients of Harambee charity meant to buy peace and sleep for uneasy heads? Tell me truthfully: what drove you people to suppress the collective effort of a whole village? What has your borrowed Christianity to say to oppression and exploitation of ordinary people?
Yet on this point, Ngũgĩ seems to have fallen into a very common error, often articulated as “Christianity is the white man’s religion”. The error lies in conflating Western Christianity with biblical faith. Western Christianity is characterised by a shallow profession of commitment to the Holy Bible while paying deep allegiance to numerous pre-Christian European superstitions, and of using the Holy Bible to provide a false rationale for the Western imperialist status quo. Indeed, oblivious of the biblical imperative to uphold the dignity of every human being as created in the image of God, Western imperialism uses religion to justify the myth of “white” superiority and to calm down its victims by holding out to them the promise of a better existence after death.
I often imagine many an American slave owner in the Bible Belt “giving thanks” to God at a Sunday service that his slaves were working hard on his farm. In the British Empire, The Slave Bible was published in London in 1807 on behalf of the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves. In it all references to liberation were expunged in a bid to keep the slaves from rebelling, and slaves who dared to read the real Bible were punished. If by “Christianity is the white man’s religion” the saying refers to this religion, then it is spot on. If, however, its utterer intends to include in it all expressions of faith based on the Holy Bible, then it is grossly erroneous, as it neglects to make the important distinction between Western Christianity and biblical faith. After all, contrary to the false impression which Western Christianity has created for centuries, the Bible is not a European book, but rather a Semitic one, and the brown-haired, blue-eyed Christ of Western movies is no more than a figment of Western imagination.
I fondly remember my delight when I met Ngũgĩ outside the University of Nairobi’s Taifa Hall one afternoon well over ten years ago and exchanged pleasantries with him. However, much as I would have loved to chat for much longer, I quickly excused myself as I had no appointment with him. I did not know that Ngũgĩ was standing out there waiting for some kind of quorum for a talk he was scheduled to deliver because the notice had only been pinned on noticeboards without being also sent by email, and I cannot read print, being totally blind. To my great surprise, Ngũgĩ’s parting words to me were “God bless you.” This suggested to me that while he rejected the “white” man’s God, he did not necessarily reject God Almighty.
The search for genuine democracy
Ngũgĩ was keen to see the peoples of Africa exercising their agency in the political realm. Indeed, he wrote in a bid to contribute to the coming of the day when they would throw off the economic, political, linguistic and religious shackles of the neo-colonial era and finally participate in political processes in which they could freely map out their future. However, due to his Marxist inclination which emphasised the critical place of the ownership of the means of production, Ngũgĩ avoided the widely-held but misleading belief that elections are tantamount to democracy – a view I have interrogated in a previous article here. He would have agreed with Odera Oruka’s observations in his Practical Philosophy: In Search of an Ethical Minimum:
In a society where the majority are illiterate and there is widespread poverty, political and intellectual liberties are luxuries. The people either do not understand them, or they have no motivation to exercise them. Poverty-stricken people want bread, not freedom of thought and speech. Neither do they care about the right to vote and stand for public office, unless this is clearly explained to them in terms of their social frustration. Otherwise, a potential voter would easily sell his voting card for a loaf of bread or a small sum of money.
Unlike Ngũgĩ, I have invested much time agonising about models of governance, with some of the fruits of my labours being the journal articles “Liberal Democracy: An African Critique”, “Nationhood and Statehood: The Impact of a Conflated Discourse on African Polities and their Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups”, and the edited volume Africa Beyond Liberal Democracy: In Search of Context-Relevant Models of Democracy for the Twenty-First Century. Nevertheless, Ngũgĩ’s Marxist orientation has tempered my expectations by making me acutely aware that without economic freedom, political freedom as espoused by Western liberal democracy is a mirage.
The ultimate honour
When Ngũgĩ taught at the University of Nairobi in the 1960s and 1970s, the university had no ISO certification, no service charter, and no performance contracts, and yet it was a knowledge powerhouse respected around the globe. For example, its research projects in oral literature and Sage Philosophy made an indelible motif on the tapestry of scholarship on the continent and beyond.
Besides, some of the most influential scholars at the University, including Taban lo Liyong, Okot p’Bitek, Austin Bukenya, Francis Imbuga, David Mulwa, and Ngũgĩ himself had no Ph.D. degrees. While this might be surprising to some today, the fact is that the British system after whose model the University was founded laid a much higher premium on research and publication than on Ph. Ds. Indeed, it was quite common for people at the University of Nairobi, as in British universities, to rise to professorship without Ph. Ds; and as for Ngũgĩ, he never pursued a Ph.D., and did not even complete his M.A. thesis at the University of Leeds, and yet his contribution dwarfs that of many a Ph.D. holder. Yet this is the situation of several other literary giants on the continent, including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. In fact, in Anthills of the Savannah, Achebe seems to express his disdain for the over-rating of Ph.Ds by presenting one of the members of the cabinet, Reverend Prof. Reginald Okong, who got his Ph.D. irregularly in the US and then used it to obtain a teaching position at his university back home.
Over the years, many have desired to see Ngũgĩ receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, I have not been one of them. In my opinion, we sons and daughters of Africa have no business hankering after other people’s awards, for to do so is symptomatic of mental colonisation – the very thing Ngũgĩ indefatigably fought against. Ngũgĩ has informed many and motivated them to work for a better future in which people are duly rewarded for their labour. Ngũgĩ is a hero to millions around Africa and way beyond, and that is of much more value than any honour that a clandestine clique locked up in a boardroom in a Western metropole might be whimsically inclined to confer.
