By Lasisi Olagunju
My generation met him famous. His first novels he wrote as an undergraduate. One of them was the hugely popular ‘Weep Not, Child’; another was ‘The River Between.’ He was James Ngũgĩ, then he became James Thiong’o Ngũgĩ, then he stepped out fully and became Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
The African writer from Kenya who died last week worked really hard to repudiate everything that he thought oppressed him. He took out his scalpel and cut open the name he bore. He dropped the foreign and picked a labyrinthine label from his ancestral pouch. The language of his art was next. With the English language, he wrote himself to fame, then he dropped English and started writing in Gikuyu. If you thought Gikuyu wasn’t global enough, you could translate his works to English or whatever European language you wanted. Ngugi was rigid in his conviction. Was his muse playing with irony or contradiction or what figure of speech best describes his experiment with life? He dropped everything the oppressor brought to Africa. Yet, when death came last week, it met him in the very land that epitomises those things he ran away from – the United States.
Some forty-something years ago, ‘Weep Not, Child’ was prescribed for our school certificate exams. Some of us soon found in it much more than what WAEC said it was. It is a book of light; a writ of struggle and liberation. We ate and chewed and swallowed and digested it. From that story and the next and the next, I read in Ngugi an optimistic soldier of justice. He believed in the inevitable victory of light over darkness. ‘Weep Not, Child’ took its title from Walt Whitman’s ‘On The Beach At Night’. It is in that poem that the challenged child is told not to weep because “The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious” and “shall not long possess the sky.” But how long is not long enough? That book was written over 60 years ago. The sky is still possessed by the clouds.
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The writer loved his country and gave it his all. But his ‘free’ country soon showed him the taste of pepper. ‘Independence’ has remained what it parades: an exchange of foreign oppression for domestic repression. Jomo Kenyatta is knighted in ‘Weep Not, Child’ as the hope of the oppressed. He became president and blighted the tall and the short who placed their hope in him. Ngugi was a victim. His recollections say: “writers were not spared. In 1969, a leading poet, Abdulatif Abdalla, was imprisoned for writing a pamphlet entitled Kenya twendapi? (‘Kenya, where are we heading to?’) It was my turn in 1977 for my play, ‘I Will Marry When I Want’, and novel, ‘Petals of Blood’. I was in a maximum security prison in 1978 when Kenyatta died and his vice-president, Daniel Arap Moi, took over. Though I was happy that Moi released me three months after his ascension to power, I soon realized that he had emptied the jails of hundreds of Kenyatta’s political prisoners to make room for thousands of his own. Where Kenyatta had imprisoned me for my writing, Moi sent three truckloads of armed policemen to raze to the ground the community theatre where I worked, eventually forcing me – and many others – into exile.”
That was his Kenya; and it was not just his Kenya. It was and is Africa. Dark Africa has “Two laws. Two justices. One law and one justice protects the man of property, of wealth and the foreign exploiter. Another law and another justice silences the poor, the hungry, our people.” No darkness could be darker than what is described here by Ngugi in ‘The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’. Yet, throughout his life, the man kept talking about light defeating darkness.
Even as dusk approached and he was going, going, Ngugi still wrote optimism in 2020. He said that Wanjikũ, his Gĩkũyũ mother, used to tell him: Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa: No night is so Dark that, / It will not end in Dawn, / Or simply put, / Every night ends with dawn./ Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa…”
Language frees and can also enslave. Ngugi said it contains the seed of life. It is a sword of freedom and can be a tool in the hand of the oppressor. The writer believed so and I agree with him. He says: “If you know all the languages of the world and you do not know your mother tongue, the language of your culture, that is enslavement. On the other hand, if you know your mother tongue, the language of your culture and you add all the languages of the world to it, that is empowerment.” He also spoke about labels. Addressing a group of young Africans, he interrogated ‘tribe’ as a lexical item of racial interest. “Tribalism is a colonial invention”, he said, and asked: “Why would 250,000 Icelanders be called a nation and ten million Yorubas are called a tribe, and not a nation?.”
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Ngũgĩ wrote seven novels, at least five plays, more than four memoirs, over eight collections of essays, and several children’s books. You are very familiar with ‘Weep Not, Child’ (1964), ‘The River Between’ (1965), ‘A Grain of Wheat’ (1967) and ‘Petals of Blood’ (1977). Yet the man almost denied us the benefit of some of his critical stories. His ‘Devil on the Cross’, published in 1980 was originally in Gikuyu as Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini. ‘Matigari’, another novel published in 1986 was also written originally in Gikuyu; the same with ‘Wizard of the Crow’ originally in Gikuyu as ‘Mũrogi wa Kagogo’. Why did he do that? “When you use a language, you are also choosing an audience …. When I used English, I was choosing an English-speaking audience…” He said in a February 1996 interview in India. A global citizen sits in the US and writes in a Kenyan language! What kind of rebellion informed that? What Kikuyu audience was the writer targeting in America? I wished I could ask him to provide answers to those queries.
The challenges he faced were matched by the sheer strength of his character, his resilient spirit. To him, “Life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful.” His life mirrored the blistered feet on Africa’s sherd roads, stubborn and untired. In ‘The River Between’, we encounter Ngugi’s river, the Honia, which he says, “meant cure, or bring-back-to-life.” That river never dried and “seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the same way, never hurrying, never hesitating.” I think that says something prophetic of the tardy black man as he soon became marooned between the drought of the past and the pestilence of the present. For most of his 89 years, Ngugi stood at the bank of River Africa watching “as it gracefully, and without any apparent haste, wound its way down the valley, like a snake.”
‘Darkness Falls’ is the title of a critical part of ‘Weep Not, Child’. The storyteller fought darkness on all fronts. He still fights. For Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, writer of light, dusk dawned last week. As he ebbed away, one could imagine the horror in his eyes as he watched Africa’s inheritors do what the rains did in ‘The River Between’: “Carrying away the soil. Corroding, eating away the earth. Stealing the land.”
Africa’s predators are audacious; they do their thing right in the open marketplace. He cried out: “How do you satirise their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional exaggerations?” He asked in his ‘Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.’ But he was still full of hope that light would drive out darkness.
Hope appears to me his greatest asset. Till his canary stopped chirping, he never stopped asking the African child not to weep. He insisted that kisses of spoken and written words would soon birth a dawn of justice. In spite of all the death and destruction we see all over, he still believed that “This darkness too will pass away” and that “We shall meet again and again /And talk about Darkness and Dawn / Sing and laugh, maybe even hug…In the light of the Darkness and the new Dawn.” I do not know the peg on which his optimism was anchored. What we see is every new decade bringing darker misery. But we must listen to him. He was an elder who saw far even while seated. So, I ask him: Ngugi, before you cross the river, tell us: when is the new Dawn? And, where is the light you predicted? May your soul Rest In Peace.
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