Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o… Encounter with an African literary giant

By Carey Baraka

IN October, I flew to Irvine to meet the novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I had spent the previous few weeks in cold and windy Iowa, and the sunshine and warmth of California was a balm. I sat in the back seat of my cab, quiet. Outside, huge American trucks thundered past, the tangy smell of the ocean in the air.

Ngũgĩ 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 so, naturally, I 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 on, 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 for his writing. After his release, he continued his writing and political activism, first in Kenya, then in exile in London, then, finally, in the US, where he has been a professor of literature for the past 30 years. He has become known not just as a novelist but as a major postcolonial theorist, whose 1986 essay collection, Decolonising the Mind – an attack on the hold of colonial languages, such as French and English, over former colonies – has become a set text for university students around the world. It is now an annual tradition to predict that Ngũgĩ will finally receive this year’s Nobel prize for literature, and then to lament that it hasn’t happened.

In short, approaching Ngũgĩ’s house in California, I felt nervous, my body a hotbed of cliches: hands shaky, palms clammy, heart racing. The plan had been to write a profile, taking the measure of this legendary author, who was now 84, and entering the final phase of his life.

Ngũgĩ had suggested that I stay with him during my time in Irvine. His health was poor and he would be having surgery, he said. If I stayed, it would be easier to speak. It was a strange arrangement, not exactly befitting the journalistic objectivity I had hoped to cultivate. But I wanted as much time with him as possible, and besides, I reasoned, I’d keep things professional.

And now here I was, pulling into his driveway, walking up to his redbrick bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac and ringing the bell.

Getting the napkins

I had never met Ngũgĩ before. I had seen him only once, at the launch of a translation project in Nairobi in 2017, and now he was in front of me. At the event, he’d spoken about the Nobel and how, the previous year, in expectation of his winning the award, a group of journalists had camped outside his house from the very early morning. When he didn’t win, he and his wife had given the journalists tea and comforted them. Today he was lounging in a shirt, trousers, slippers and a bathrobe, and I thought, Well, what did you expect, coming to his house at 9 am? He bade me join him at the dining table, where he was doing some work. Around us, everything was cream and grey: the walls, the couch, the chairs, the rug. It felt too clean, too stark, devoid of personality.

Before we talked, he said, he needed to know more about me, to know what my motivations were. He asked me to tell him about my writing. I talked about some articles I’d written and mentioned the novel I had been working on for a few years. “Like yours, it’s about religion and politics,” I said. I hoped, with this, to signal to him that he and I had similar interests in our fiction. He didn’t respond to this. Instead, he asked if I was making enough from my writing to earn a living. I told him I was. “That’s good,” he said. “I was never able to do that.”

We were interrupted by the doorbell. Two people came in: they were there to do his cleaning, cooking and shopping. In a few hours, he told me, a health aide would come to check his vitals. As Ngũgĩ has grown older, his health has deteriorated. In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he survived, despite a grim medical forecast that gave him three months to live. In December 2019, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Around the same period, he began to suffer from kidney failure, the same condition that killed one of his brothers. By the time I visited, he wasn’t able to leave the house much, apart from his three dialysis appointments each week. “I can’t move now because of my illness. You have to come to me. I’m the king,” he said.

Violence has loomed over much of Ngũgĩ’s past, yet now he lives a relatively genteel existence in American suburbia. Since 2002, he has been a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where his wife, Njeeri, also works. He has nine children – six from his first marriage – and many grandchildren, and he talks to his family every day. His days are largely spent at home, reading, taking calls and practising his Spanish with his cooking and cleaning help. Every few months, he is awarded another prize.

His phone rang, his assistant on the line. Ngũgĩ was supposed to be doing a video call with a group of South African academics who wanted to discuss decolonisation. Ngũgĩ told her he had been unable to log in. “But I have a young person here with me,” he said. “Baraka. He’ll be able to help me.” He handed me the phone.

I got to work, the savvy young person helping an 84-year-old man figure out technology. I handed the laptop to Ngũgĩ, who apologised to the academics for being late. As they talked, he asked me to get him some napkins. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “It’s hot in California,” he told the academics. “I’m not sweating because of your questions.”

Normalised abnormality

After the call, I ​​played Ngũgĩ a song that had become a hit in Kenya in the months after the 2022 Kenyan general elections. The song, Vaida, is in Lunyore, a language neither Ngũgĩ nor I speak. Yet pretty soon he was dancing to it, bopping his head, shifting his shoulders on his chair. In his day, he said, a song in an African language would not have become a national hit. “During my time, if you heard an African song on the radio, you switched it off. What you were waiting for was Jimmie Rodgers,” he said. This was part of what he called the “normalised abnormality” of ...colonial condition. The colonised had their language taken from them, and a foreign language put in its space.

“But what of Kenyan English or Nigerian English?” I asked him. “Aren’t these now local languages?”

He looked at me, aghast. “It’s like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement,” he said. “English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.”

He covered his eyes. “I read someone saying he is writing in French so that he can subvert it. I thought, wait a minute. He is the one being subverted.”

As he spoke, I cringed. I wondered what Ngũgĩ made of the fact that I wrote in English, or that I, a Kenyan writer, was here to profile him on assignment from a British newspaper. Was I also one of the enslaved?

Limuru, where it all begins

One morning a few years ago, I was hiking near the place where Ngũgĩ was born and grew up: Limuru, a town 18 miles away from Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The cold bit into my face, and the red soil crunched beneath my boots. Then my guide stopped. “Look at all this,” he said. “This used to be my grandfather’s land.” Around us were rows of neatly manicured tea plants, stretching out into the distance, waiting to be picked. I asked him if the family had tried to recover their land. Yes, he said, but state power had been so firmly against them that there was little they could do.

Land has been the centre of politics in Kenya since the end of the 19th century, when Britain established a protectorate here. Kenya was envisioned as a settlers’ frontier, where wealthy Europeans would hunt, farm and live a gilded existence in “wild” Africa. In places such as Limuru, the land that the British had grabbed from African communities was used to grow tea and coffee, the cash crops that financed the administration of the colony. Ngũgĩ was born in 1938, to a poor peasant family who belonged to Kenya’s largest ethnic group, the Agĩkũyũ, which today accounts for around 20% of Kenya’s population. The family had been rendered destitute by these landgrabs, and Ngũgĩ’s father descended into alcoholism and cruelty towards his wives and 24 children. It was Ngũgĩ’s mother, Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ, who encouraged the children to go to school, even as the guerrilla war against the British raged around them from the 1940s onwards.

The story of the Land and Freedom Army – better known by the derogatory name the British adopted for the group, the Mau Mau – is the foundation of much of Ngũgĩ’s most important work. Some of Ngũgĩ’s family were part of the LFA-led resistance in Limuru, while others collaborated with the British. Ngũgĩ’s older brother, Good Wallace, was a member. Another brother, Kabae, who had fought for the British in Myanmar during the Second World War, worked for the British against the LFA. Another brother, Tumbo, was a low-level police informant. Another brother, Gitogo, who was deaf, was fatally shot in the back by the British after he failed to respond to a command to halt during a police dragnet search for LFA fighters in Limuru.

One day, when Ngũgĩ was a teenager, he and a friend were caught up in one of these police searches. In the daytime, local informants, their heads covered in white hoods with narrow eyeslits, would walk the street with British soldiers and squads comprised of Home Guards – a paramilitary force drawn from loyalist members of the Agĩkũyũ community and led by junior colonial officers. This group would forcibly detain whoever they met, regardless of age, and the hooded informants would identify LFA members and sympathisers by a nod of the head. (Ngũgĩ’s third novel, A Grain of Wheat, tells the story of a fictionalised informant.) Ngũgĩ and his friend were interrogated by the British officers but eventually let go. As they walked away, not daring to look back, they heard gunshots and screams: executions of people who had either been identified by the informants or refused to answer questions.

A few months later, in 1955, after his first term at the elite boarding school Alliance – for which his family had scrimped to pay tuition, before he was awarded a scholarship – Ngũgĩ returned to his home village and made a shocking discovery. “I stop, put down the box, and look around me,” he wrote in one of his memoirs. “The hedge of ashy leaves that we planted looks the same, but beyond it our homestead is a rubble of burnt dry mud, splinters of wood and grass. My mother’s hut and my brother’s house on stilts have been razed to the ground. My home, from where I set out for Alliance three months ago, is no more.” The British had destroyed the entire village and moved its inhabitants to a fortified new site where the activities of the inhabitants were closely monitored. It wasn’t quite a prison camp, because the inhabitants could leave, but as Ngũgĩ writes, “For all practical purposes, the line between the prison, the concentration camp and the village had been erased.” At night, soldiers would pull villagers from their homes, interrogating and sometimes executing those who they believed supported the LFA.

James and Ngũgĩ