Stefan Helgesson: Who should I argue with now that Ngugi wa Thiong'o is no longer with us?
Published 16:46
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1938–2025). Photo: Lars Lindqvist
The recently deceased, often Nobel Prize-nominated author Ngugi wa Thiong'o was groundbreaking – even when he was imperfect. Stefan Helgesson remembers a pioneer whose tireless work opened doors for new generations of African writers.
This is a commentary text. The writer is responsible for the analysis and positions in the text.
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The Great Leader is sick. The question is why?
With vivacity and gusto, the narrator in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel "Wizard of the Crow" (2006, untranslated) describes the theories behind it, one wilder than the other. Perhaps it was due to the wailing of a goat that the Leader believed was a sign of a plot against him. Or the illness arose from his obsession with an estranged wife whom he had to make cry. Or the Leader had been made ill by the demons that lived in his torture chamber, rumored to be made up of the skeletal parts of all the "students, teachers, workers and small farmers" he had killed throughout his kingdom of Aburiria.
The dictator novel has been seen as a Latin American genre – think, for example, of Mario Vargas Llosa's "The Feast of the Goats" – but there are plenty of African examples. In "Wizard of the Crow", Ngugi wa Thiong'o's last major work, the author excels in his satire of the dictator's arbitrary, narcissistic exercise of power. Published two decades ago, the story of Aburiria unfortunately feels more relevant and universal than ever.
But of course, nothing is known for sure in such a realm. The narrator interjects that he can neither "confirm nor deny the existence of the torture chamber". Yet it is told. And the narrator reproduces what is told. Here we notice how Ngugi – always called that, by first name – has a dual purpose with his novel. One is to serve up a relentless tale about postcolonial abuse of power, globalization and popular resistance; the other is to erase the author himself as the supreme creator of his story.
Often, almost as an article of faith, one hears that the "African novel" is shaped by oral culture. This is not entirely misleading, but it depends on which African novels one is referring to. There are quite a few. In "Wizard of the Crow," however, it is obvious that Ngugi wants to tie the narrative to a collective situation where a voice interacts with others in the room. Like damned, these voices only reach me as printed letters on paper, moreover translated by Ngugi himself from the original that he wrote in Gikuyu. But that doesn't matter much. The written staging of orality also releases a lot of narrative energy.
Not only must he himself write in Gikuyu, but all African writers – if they truly want to free themselves from the colonial legacy – should write in their mother tongues.
Now, however, the author, despite all his energy, has passed away . Born in 1938, Ngugi lived a dramatic life shaped by world historical shifts: decolonization, the Cold War, the fall of the Wall, the emergence of the "global South" as the shadow side and prerequisite of globalization. Who am I going to argue with now that he is no longer among us, I ask myself? Not that I have a crush on him, but he has been in my consciousness as a dialogue partner for almost my entire reading life. And in that role, despite his soft-spoken persona, he was constantly combative. But also contradictory and even changeable, more than the media image of him allows.
Ngugi's extensive writing career ran along three tracks: fiction, autobiography, essays – and it was his critical essays that had a particularly great impact. "Decolonising the mind" (1986), which has followed me since its publication, is his best-known contribution to the genre. It revolves around a crucial turning point in his career, when in the 1970s he switched from English to writing in his first language, Gikuyu.
Interestingly, this is the only thing that the wider public knows about Ngugi, perhaps because he develops an entire literary vision based on this personal decision. It is not only that he himself must write in Gikuyu, but that all African writers – if they truly want to free themselves from the colonial legacy – should write in their mother tongues.
Here we see the function of combativeness: it clarifies things. By making language politics, and by establishing an unambiguous literary norm, Ngugi could serve as a sounding board also for the many writers and critics in Africa who did not agree with his conclusions at all. But was that really what he did, that is, switch from English to Gikuyu? How did his language policy actually work?
To understand the shifts in Ngugi, both in his thinking and poetics, one must go back to his student days, in the early 1960s, at Makerere University in Uganda.
As elsewhere in the waning British Empire, literary studies were conducted there in the spirit of the critic FR Leavis. This involved a narrow focus on the "great tradition," a British canon consisting of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and a few others. Leavis's approach to these writings was to emphasize the exploration of individual ambiguity and moral stances in an anti-political approach.
The idea that the author had a special mission as a truth-teller characterized his writing until the end.
These were literary values that the young Ngugi adopted. His first three novels, Up Through the Darkness (1964), The River Between the Mountains (1965) and If Not the Grain of Wheat (1967), are sustained by precisely such a subdued portrayal of ambivalent characters. In an early essay, he expresses it as the writer's task being to give expression to "the music and inner conflicts of one's own soul." The individualism in that formulation runs counter to the poetics of Wizard of the Crow and, in fact, all of his novels from A Flower of Blood (1977) onwards.
And at the same time: the idea that the writer and artist had a special mission as a truth-teller characterized his writing right up to the end. The early training did not disappear – it was only overlaid with newly acquired insights.
His debut in 1964 with "Up through the Darkness" was a success. Literarily, East Africa had lagged behind other parts of the continent, but now Kenya finally had "its" Chinua Achebe. A couple of years later, Ngugi continued his studies, this time in Leeds, England. The contrast with Makerere was striking: from late colonial provincialism to northern English radicalism. It was here that he read the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon and discovered Caribbean writers such as George Lamming.
Filled with the revolutionary spirit of the time, Ngugi, after Leeds, began teaching at the University of Nairobi and launched a rebellion against his own institution. In the most famous letter in history to a departmental board ("On the abolition of the English department"), he and his two co-authors Taban lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba demanded that Africa and African culture must become the starting point for literature teaching in Nairobi. Africa, they wrote, should be "our cultural springboard into the world."
Of course, it might seem. But then you forget not only the inertia of the academy, but above all the English cultural self-sufficiency of the time. When Ngugi and his colleagues rebelled against a British canon, they swept in with both a new, cosmopolitan view of literature and a fresh pedagogy that was ahead of its time. And they succeeded: in 1970, The Department of Literature was established in Nairobi, which implemented an enormously ambitious curriculum that brought together African, Caribbean, American and European literature.
That moment of optimism was short-lived, however. During the 1970s, Ngugi increasingly came into conflict with Kenya's post-colonial leaders. His literary activism, with the play "Ngaahika ndeenda" ("I'll marry whenever I want"), written in Gikuyu, led to his imprisonment and eventually a lifelong exile that began in 1982.
The fact that African writers have so naturally entered the world literary scene today is not least thanks to his tireless pioneering work.
Here his language activism in "Decolonising the mind" takes on both an ironic and tragic twist: it is precisely at the moment when he is physically removed from the country that he programmatically asserts the necessity of writing in a local language in Kenya. He never abandoned this conviction; he continued to write his fiction in Gikuyu. But the novels were translated and almost everything else he continued to write in English.
The practice of exile therefore led him to increasingly assert translation as a linguistic mode of his own, perhaps most clearly manifested when the online magazine Jalada had his story "The Upright Revolution" translated into 100 different languages. The lesson to be learned from this is that languages are never disconnected satellites, but only live in relation to other languages.
Ngugi's choice of language was thus never binary, although he liked to portray it that way. At the same time as he built a written literature in Gikuyu, it was thanks to global English that this act, as well as the political meaning of choosing the vernacular, gained international diffusion at all. In other words: both-and, not either-or. His own concept of "globalectics" (after "dialectics") captures this interplay well.
Perhaps that is how we must approach his entire oeuvre: as a complex constellation of imperfect but often groundbreaking texts. I personally find his novels uneven, his autobiographical books magnificent, and his essays challenging but sometimes simplistic. However, Ngugi's importance as a writer far exceeds the particulars of his output. The fact that African writers have so naturally entered the world literary stage today is not least due to his tireless pioneering work.
This very weekend, that deed is being honored at a major literary conference in Nairobi with participants from every continent. The world is gathering in Ngugi's old hometown: the exiled writer's revenge.
Read more:
Maria Schottenius: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's storytelling power glows with life
Erik Esbjörnsson: His choice of language formed a school for a generation of African writers
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Related articlesErik Esbjörnsson: His choice of language formed a school for a generation of African writers
Maria Schottenius: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's storytelling power glows with life
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