https://www.dn.se/kultur/maria-schottenius-ngugi-wa-thiong-os-berattarkraft-gloder-av-liv/
Maria Schottenius: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's storytelling power glows with life
Published yesterday 15:01
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Photo: Carl Bredberg
Persistent Nobel Prize-nominated author Ngugi wa Thiong'o has died at the age of 87. Maria Schottenius remembers a writer who fought for African languages and was driven by a defiant force.
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Ngugi wa Thiong'o was a writer who never closed himself off from his writing, but rather opened it wide to the outside world. For nearly half a century, he was a fervent advocate for African writers to write in their own mother tongue. His own life's work consisted of novels, short stories, memoirs, plays and essays.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in Kenya in 1938. He made his debut in 1964 with "Weep not, child", which was the first novel published in English by an East African author. And the following year, in 1965, "The River Between the Mountains" was published, which was the first in a series in which Thiong'o dedicated his stories to the Gikuyo people, something he continued with two years later in "If Not a Grain of Wheat".
The major turning point in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's life and writing came in 1977 when the novel "A Flower of Blood" was published in Kenya. It contained sharp criticism of what happened after the country's independence in 1963. The new leaders quickly allowed themselves to be corrupted, and the entire system was rotten from the start.
In the same year, he and fellow writer Ngugi wa Mirii wrote a drama in his native Gikuyu language. The play "I will marry when I want" was performed by farmers in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's home village of Kamirithu and became a major event.
Ngugi's groundbreaking essay collection "Decolonizing the Mind" had a major impact in all contexts where issues of postcolonialism were discussed. Photo: Brian Inganga/AP
Then the authorities struck. On New Year's Eve, the police stormed his house, arrested him, and at the same time took books from his bookshelf. They took everything by Marx, Engels, and Lenin and confiscated 25 copies of the infamous play. The authorities then held him in prison for a year without trial. He has described his time in prison in "Detained. A writer's prison diary."
With that incident, Ngugi wa Thiong'o broke with his Western-adapted narrative style and wrote "The Devil on the Cross" in prison. There he applies his new model: writing in the mother tongue, incorporating oral narrative forms into his literature. He repeats words and sentences, pauses, borrows elements from songs. With the novel, he also begins to wage a clear political struggle against violence and oppression.
It was a novel written on toilet paper, with no way to get an overview. Writing an entire book in that way, he later described as "romantic and surreal." In addition, the text was confiscated at the end of his prison sentence.
He has a strong and deep feeling for people's innermost dreams.
When Ngugi was released, the cruel dictator Moi was president. In 1982, at a conference in London, he learned that there were plans to arrest him upon his return home. Ngugi wa Thiong'o then stayed in London, which was the beginning of a lifelong exile. Between 1985 and 1986 he lived in Stockholm where he attended the Dramatic Institute and studied film, and had a son, Björn Lannö. He had a total of nine children, several of whom have become active as writers.
In 1986, Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote the ground-breaking essay collection "Decolonizing the Mind", which had a major impact in all contexts where questions of postcolonialism were discussed. Not least in the United States. He argued that one should "decolonize consciousness" through "the politics of language". He also identified burning issues early on that would arouse great interest much later. In the gripping novel "The River Between the Mountains", he problematizes circumcision as an idea and practice.
What characterizes and truly attracts us about Ngugi wa Thiong'o, not least in his early works, is that he has a strong and deep feeling for people's innermost dreams. Sometimes perhaps naively portrayed, but with defiant power, energy and righteous pathos. He gets a nerve in his stories from the very beginning, even though you can easily see through the intention and message. His storytelling power is strong and unquestionable. Oblique and blunt, rather than sophisticated, but glowing with life.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Photo: Carl Bredberg
In the book "The Perfect Nine" (2020), also written in Gikuyu and published in Kenya in 2018, he retells the Gikuyu myth in which all good virtues – beauty, personal courage and mercy – are embodied. It was nominated for the international Booker Prize.
Throughout his life, Ngugi wa Thiong'o emphasized the importance of African literature being expressed in indigenous languages if it is not to wither away. Most African writers well-known in the West write in English.
But he was adamant: the crucial thing for young African writers is the African languages. "They must take a stand on the question of the African languages, even if they are now writing in English," he wrote. "If the languages are to survive, they must be present in literature."
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