By Sarah Ladipo Manyika
SAN Francisco, 7 October 2012. The audience perched on the edges of their seats, voices rising in collective, animated chatter. Then suddenly, joyful street music spilled through the second-floor windows of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), as though the city itself knew. Literary titan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was in the house! Months of planning with MoAD and Litquake—the Bay Area’s largest literary festival—had led to this moment, and now, as I prepared to moderate, I felt a familiar tremor of excitement. The Nobel Prize for Literature would be announced within days. Could it, would it, finally be Ngũgĩ’s year?
NGŨGĨ IN PUBLIC
For a world of connections and interconnections in a non-hierarchical way.
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, book inscription in Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing
My very first glimpse of Ngũgĩ came in May 1999 at Cambridge University: just flashes of his shirt, a short man nearly swallowed by an admiring crowd. I was visiting Cambridge as part of my doctoral research at Berkeley to conduct an interview with a young Ghanaian academic, Ato Quayson. But my scholarly agenda quickly dissolved upon learning Ngũgĩ would be delivering Clare College’s annual Ashby lecture. He was the first African literary ‘rock star’ I would encounter, and I could hardly wait.
In Cambridge’s grand Robinson College auditorium, Ngũgĩ’s small, slightly hunched frame belied the power of his lecture titled: ‘Universities and the Magic Fountain: African Literature into the 21st Century’. His hands danced to his words as he spoke in his trademark Gĩkũyũ-accented English, arguing forcefully for indigenous African languages as Africa’s medium of instruction. I marvelled at the large audience gathered to hear him and felt a surge of continental pride.
A few years later, I would meet, and this time, speak with Ngũgĩ at the 2006 annual African Literature Association (ALA) meeting in Accra, Ghana. He was there to give a plenary talk, coinciding with the release of his long-awaited English translation of his novel, Wizard of the Crow. It was the first ALA meeting held on the continent in years, and audience excitement was palpable.
In photographs taken from the conference, Ngũgĩ stands between other writers and academics wearing an emerald green Kitenge shirt, his arresting, deep-set eyes that seem to drift, his beard sparse and stubbly. All of us beam for the camera, but Ngũgĩ has that slightly haunted, faraway look in his eyes.
While celebratory, the conference carried a sombre undertone. Just two years earlier, Ngũgĩ and his wife had suffered a horrific, politically motivated attack during their return to Kenya after years of forced exile. Ngũgĩ’s wife, Njeeri, had been raped in the attack. The trauma reverberated in hushed tones among conference participants. I remember watching Ngũgĩ and wondering how he was coping in the aftermath. I also thought about how politically motivated violence had affected the families of other celebrated writers such as Wole Soyinka, Denis Brutus and Ken Saro-Wiwa. I thought especially of Ngũgĩ’s wife, Njeeri, whose decision it had been to go public with her assault. Yet despite the traumas he carried, in public Ngũgĩ remained as committed and passionate to his causes as ever. When I spoke with him, his approachability struck me—never rushed, never scanning for more important people to speak with, just genuinely present and energized.
Six years later, this time at my invitation, Ngũgĩ brought to San Francisco in 2012 that same passion and generosity I’d witnessed in Accra. On stage, we spoke of his new book and his language concerns, punctuated by his wry humour. ‘Can you imagine Italian literature taught only in Zulu? How absurd!’ Near the end, I asked for advice for budding writers. He smiled and paused dramatically: ‘Writing is very simple. So, I’m going to give you the formula.’ The room went silent, pens poised. ‘You can write, write, write again, and you will get…it…right.’ Joyful laughter erupted. Even as time ran out, he gave full, considered answers to every audience question.
I’ve met many literary greats from Ngũgĩ’s generation, but few have been as generous as he, not just toward me, but to everyone. At the 2016 Aké Arts and Book Festival in Abeokuta, Nigeria, I watched him patiently posing for numerous selfies and welcoming anyone to join him for lunch with his egusi and palm wine. At one of the festival’s most festive evening events, he delighted in a multilingual performance of his most translated short story, ‘The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright’, dancing in the audience with such joy and exuberance. At another book event in San Francisco in 2019, just before he began his talk, he called out Zambian-American writer Namwali Serpell and me, highlighting us to the audience as writers to read. His passionate interest in everyone truly embodied a principle he lived by, as he wrote when he signed my copy of Globalectics: ‘For a world of connections and interconnections in a non-hierarchical way.’
DISCOVERING THE LANGUAGE WARRIOR
How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonization?
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
It was in the mid-1980s in Nairobi, as a teenager, that Ngũgĩ first entered my consciousness. I knew he’d been imprisoned and exiled under Kenya’s dictator Daniel arap Moi for criticizing the government through his plays, but I wouldn’t read his work until years later while studying African Literature at Birmingham University. I began with his novels, Weep Not Child and A Grain of Wheat. Having lived in Kenya, I found their historical backdrop particularly compelling, though the stories themselves didn’t captivate me as much as his nonfiction. It was Decolonizing the Mind that truly struck me, laying bare the insidious effects of what, in his Cambridge talk, he termed ‘Europhonism’—the displacement of African languages and cultural memory by colonizing languages and cultures.
Like many university students, I studied Decolonizing the Mind alongside Chinua Achebe’s essay ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, weighing where I stood between the two literary titans. Ngũgĩ argued for urgently reclaiming African languages, while Achebe championed English as an African language offering both communicative ease and unique possibilities to ‘Africanize’ it. I found merit in both writers’ perspectives.
I couldn’t deny Ngũgĩ’s point about the linguistic marginalization of African languages or his lament that intellectual production in Africa was almost exclusively done in European languages. His arguments resonated all the more deeply given my own inability to speak Yoruba, my father’s tongue. I admired Ngũgĩ’s principled decision to write new books in Gĩkũyũ first—a choice clearly not merely academic. It was, after all, his Gĩkũyũ play Ngaahika Ndeenda—not his earlier works in English—that led to his detention by the Kenyan authorities.
Yet, coming from Nigeria, a nation of several hundred languages, I appreciated English as a unifying lingua franca. This same appreciation had led me to study French, unlocking other continental experiences. Like Achebe, I delighted in how Africans’ English enriched English itself. Re-reading Ngũgĩ’s novels years later, my eager pencil marks from earlier readings highlight how much I loved the rich, vivid imagery with which he infused English. In A Grain of Wheat, people appeared ‘like clusters of locusts perched on trees,’ the train became ‘the iron snake’ and guns, ‘bamboo poles that vomited fire and smoke.’
Though I could never write in an indigenous African language, Ngũgĩ’s advocacy inspired my support for translation and publishing in these languages. One memorable project was collaborating on a groundbreaking online anthology led by my publisher, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, at Cassava Republic Press. In this 2015 Valentine’s Day collection, seven African writers had short stories translated into their mother tongue—or, in my case, father tongue: Yoruba.
This commitment to African languages and to a radical rethinking of literary exchange, as described in Ngũgĩ’s Globalectics profoundly influenced my 2016 decision to grant my Nigerian publisher, Cassava Republic Press, world rights to my second novel rather than granting rights to a Western publisher first. Ngũgĩ’s example, grounded in a careful consideration of power structures and dissemination, resonated with my growing understanding of how stories travel and who controls their journey.
Inspired by Ngũgĩ’s literary activism, I embarked on other projects aimed at amplifying fresh perspectives from young African writers’ voices. One such project was co-editing Pulsations: The Journal of New African Writings with novelist and scholar Patrice Nganang. We published with Africa World Press from 2011 to 2012 in both French and English and welcomed pieces in indigenous languages too. I was particularly excited about bridging the linguistic divide between Francophone and Anglophone African writers, but literary activism proved challenging. The funding, publishing, and audience-building hurdles were significant; our journal lasted only two volumes.
In 2017, Patrice’s own courageous activism—speaking out against state-sponsored violence toward the English-speaking minority in Cameroon—landed him in a Cameroonian prison and, like Ngũgĩ, in exile.
STORYTELLER AMONG STORYTELLERS
Stories, like food, lose their flavour if cooked in a hurry.
—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow
Ngũgĩ’s role as a language warrior and publishing revolutionary was inextricably tied to the importance of storytelling. He was a master storyteller, especially drawn to oral storytelling, and this side of him sparkled in our personal encounters. Naturally, I began our 2012 public conversation by asking about storytelling. I’d invited Ngũgĩ’s son, Mũkoma wa Thiong’o, also a writer, to share the stage with his father, and this seemed to elicit an outpouring of stories from both, at times a melodic call and response between father and son. Mũkoma described their family storytelling traditions, illustrating with hilarious tales featuring Mwangi the cowboy. Ngũgĩ added his own story—theatrically covering his eyes—featuring his youngest daughter, Mumbi, ‘far more down-to-earth’ than her siblings, who was completely mystified by her father and brothers’ imaginative tales. Laughter rang through the audience.
After the event, the magic continued when Ngũgĩ, his youngest son Thiong’o, and Mũkoma joined us for dinner at our home with friends and fellow writers Anne Whiteside, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Nozipo Maraire. After dinner, the storytelling began in earnest. Ngũgĩ, holding court from the head of the table, read an unpublished story written for Mumbi about shadows and sibling rivalries that would later appear in his 2019 collection, Minutes of Glory: And Other Stories. Behind him, Mũkoma’s blues guitar hummed softly. NoViolet lent her contagious giggle to the melody.
What struck me that night wasn’t just Ngũgĩ’s storytelling prowess, but how deeply he listened to others. He seemed as enthralled with our stories as we with his. Pure playfulness filled the night, and everyone shared. The Ngũgĩ sons read excerpts from their works, Nozipo from her acclaimed novel Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter, while Anne recited a William Carlos Williams’ poem, ‘This is Just to Say’. Looking back, there was something almost prophetic—two of us would transform the stories we shared that night into books. NoViolet’s Caine Prize-winning short story ‘Hitting Budapest’ became part of We Need New Names, and my story ‘Morayo’ grew into Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun.