Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is one of Africa’s most important authors and literary theorists. He contributed to the creation of post-colonial literature in East Africa in the 1950s and 60s and has written extensively on the role of culture in both the subjugation and liberation of a country and a people.
wa Thiong’o was born in Kenya in 1938. At the time, the country was still under British colonial rule and his schooling reflected that. He attended the elite Alliance High School, which was run by Edward Carey Francis; a Cambridge professor of mathematics who joined a missionary society that sent him to Kenya to teach, Francis believed the purpose of education was to serve the system not to question it. The boys were taught classic English texts, and the hierarchy between English and Kenyan was rigorously enforced even amongst the teaching staff.
wa Thiong’o lived through the Mau Mau rebellion in which several members of his family were killed. wa Thiong’o went on to study at Makelele University in Kampala and published his first novel in 1964. He became a professor of English Literature at the University of Nairobi in the newly independent Kenya and campaigned for the abolition of the department because it upheld the primacy of English authors over their African counterparts.
Alongside his academic work, wa Thiong’o published books and write plays on overtly political themes and was jailed in 1977 because of his work. Designated as a political prisoner he was held for over a year without trial in a maximum-security prison. Upon his release, he lived first in Europe, then in the US where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
Your language or mine?
In 1962, wa Thiong’o attended the African Writers Conference alongside Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and John Pepper Clark who came to Kampala to discuss African literature in the context of decolonisation. Despite the all-star lineup, the Nigerian critic Obi Wali complained that the conference did not include any authors who wrote in African languages. The debate that followed would have a profound effect on wa Thiong’o.
At the time, wa Thiong’o worked in English under the name James wa Thiong’o. The conference convinced him to publish under his own name and to write in his native language, Gikuyu.
The role of language became a driving question for wa Thiong’o. He saw language and culture as vital components of colonialism. Giving priority and prestige to English and texts written by English authors served the aims of the system. It promoted England as the font of all knowledge and English as the language of high culture and accomplishment. English culture was something to aspire to and emulate, and the English language was the medium to work in if you wanted to be taken seriously.
Economic and political control of a people can never be complete without cultural control.
In 1968, as Professor of English Literature at the University of Nairobi, wa Thiong’o campaigned for the department to be abolished. Wa Thiong’o argued that the syllabus completely ignored African authors (even those who wrote in English), did not include references to Africa’s oral traditions of storytelling, and that the syllabus gave the impression that English authors spoke to universal truths rather than being bound by their own cultural contexts.
He and his fellow campaigners wrote a polemic declaration setting out their stall “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?"
For wa Thiong’o, this debate was about self-respect and rejecting the practices of the colonial period. The question of what to study became a way of overturning a system of thought laid down by the British in Kenya. The course was dropped by the university in favour of one that focused on African literature.
A cultural bomb
In his seminal work Decolonising the Mind wa Thiong’o discussed the role of literature and culture during colonialism. In the colonial system, culture and language are used to make the colonised feel inferior and therefore more accepting of the position of the coloniser as ruler.
African children who encountered literature in colonial schools and universities were thus experiencing the world as defined and reflected in the European experience of history. Their entire way of looking at the world, even the world of their immediate environment, was Eurocentric.
This type of education created a lack of respect for people’s own culture. People were told that their societies had not produced anything to be proud of, in contrast to the lessons they were taught about the achievements of English culture. Such lessons created a sense of shame in people about their culture and themselves and a reverence for the West. This reinforced an ideology that regarded Western superiority and rule as the natural order of things.
The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their language, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves…It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland.
By contrast, celebrating African cultural achievements can help undo this colonial mindset. Reasserting the relevance of African authors creates respect in the individual for their culture and themselves.
This would, however, be work that Africans would need to do themselves. As wa Thiong’o put it, a Western critic who is suspicious of liberation will be suspicious of characters, books, and authors that promote that view. Their evaluation of a work’s quality and importance will be shaped by their views, not by the work itself.
Political storytelling
Alongside his cultural commentary, wa Thiong’o is considered one of East Africa’s most important authors. He is frequently amongst the favourites to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and has been awarded ten honorary degrees.
His work contains multiple narrative lines and multiple viewpoints that unfold across different time frames. In doing so, wa Thiong’ places the collective rather than the individual at the centre of the story.
Are the sources of our inspiration foreign or national?
His works are often political motivated drawing on his own experiences of the post-colonial period, its promises and its failures. His first play The Black Hermit was a celebration of Ugandan independence and led one newspaper to declare: “Ngũgĩ Speaks for the Continent”. His novel Petals of Blood directly led to his imprisonment in Kenya after it offended the future president of Kenya Daniel arap Moi.
In addition to his major works including A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood and The Perfect Nine, wa Thiong’o has written several plays, children’s stories and is a regular contributor to newspapers across Africa.
Resources
Decolonizing the mind : the politics of language in African literature
Writers in politics : essays
Something torn and new : an African renaissance
Petals of blood
A Grain of Wheat
The Perfect Nine
Devil on the cross