Ngũgĩ in America
A few years ago, heart surgery forced Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer and perennial Nobel shortlister, to give up driving. He misses it. He misses getting behind the wheel for a few hours with no end point in mind, randomly exploring the roads. “Like writing a story,” he said.
So when I offered to visit and take him for an afternoon drive, he accepted. For reasons unknown to me, my rental car was upgraded to a white Mustang, and Ngũgĩ laughed at the sight of the big American muscle car and then quickly confronted the challenge of sinking his body, clad in a white dashiki with fire-red embroidery, down into the low-sunk seat. He’s 84 now, still flashing an outsize smile but slowed physically by various health issues. “I can’t enjoy cocktail parties with friends anymore,” he said.
Our terrain was Irvine, in Southern California, where Ngũgĩ moved two decades ago, joining the faculty at UC Irvine. It’s where he’s spent the last stage of a long literary career as one of Africa’s most prominent writers, a position that was confirmed again this year when he was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement, was also the first written in an indigenous African language to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize. But Irvine could not be farther from the landscape of Kamĩrĩĩthũ, the village in Kenya where he grew up, or, for that matter, Makerere University in Uganda, where he was a student—it’s even far removed from England, where he did graduate work in the 1960s, and the East Coast academic environment he had grown used to before moving here.
