Approach
In October, I flew to Irvine, California, to meet the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He is a giant of African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me he looms especially large. Alongside writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was part of a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and 60s, during the last years of colonialism on the continent. 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 was six or seven the first time I read Ngũgĩ, borrowing a children’s book he’d written from my primary school’s library. When I was 10, I came across a worn copy of The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a play he co-wrote with Micere Githae Mugo, on my grandfather’s bookshelf. I read it again and again, captivated by the story of this leader of Kenya’s independence struggle challenging the right of a colonial court to try him. (Kimathi, who led the armed rebellion against the British, was executed in 1957.) I studied Ngũgĩ all through high school, as have generations of Kenyan students. My uncle, an academic, wrote a book about him, which I read as a teenager without properly understanding it. It was about a revolution Ngũgĩ had led at the University of Nairobi in the late 60s, which had resulted in the university dropping English literature as a course of study, and replacing it with one that positioned African literatures, oral and written, at the centre. A decade later, Ngũgĩ famously ceased writing his novels in English, instead doing all his creative work in the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ. I fell in love with the idea of Ngũgĩ as a fighter for African literature, and decided to go to the University of Nairobi and majored in the very degree he had fought for. There, in the early 2010s, there were even more Ngũgĩ novels and plays to write papers and sit exams on.
So much of the 20th century seems contained within Ngũgĩ’s life. He was born just before the second world war, when Kenya was still a British colony. He grew up under the shadow of a violent war for independence. He went to university in Uganda, at a time of political and literary ferment across Africa, and he came of age as first Uganda (in 1962), then Kenya (1963), gained their independence. Over the years that followed, he saw with horror how people’s pre-independence hopes were dashed. He was thrown in jail by the Kenyan government
