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| Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. |
Ngugi wa Thiong’o: 'I don’t think we were meant to come out alive'
A vicious attack upon returning to Kenya after 22 years has not deterred Ngugi wa Thiong’o from believing in its democratic prospects; his new book deals with despotism, he tells Maya Jaggi
Saturday 28 January 2006
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History has always inspired Ngugi, a novelist, playwright, essayist and children’s author who, as James Ngugi, was a pioneer of the African novel in English in the 1960s. Weep Not, Child (1964), A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) have been translated into 30 languages, and were re-issued in 2002 as Penguin modern classics. But after he changed his name and resolved in the 1970s to write only in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, his work was banned by the government, the village theatre he wrote for was razed, and he was detained without trial for a year in a maximum security prison before leaving the country 22 years ago.
Aged 68, he is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, and heads its International Centre for Writing and Translation. His wife, Njeeri, is director of the faculty counselling programme. They have two children, Mumbi and Thiong’o, aged 11 and 10 (Ngugi has seven older children from previous relationships). Yet the tranquillity of their home, adorned with African art, in Los Angeles belies their recent trauma.
Ngugi had vowed never to set foot in his homeland until President Daniel Arap Moi and his Kanu party were ousted, as happened in democratic elections in 2001. He returned in August 2004 to launch the first volume of a 1,000-page novel, Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow). Met by a throng of well-wishers and press at Nairobi airport, he says now, “I told them I wanted to be in touch with the everyday. But we returned to a nightmare.” Two weeks into their visit, the couple were attacked by four men in their high-security apartment complex. Ngugi was beaten and his face burned with cigarettes. Njeeri was sexually assaulted - an ordeal she made public, she says, to combat pressures on women to remain silent about abuse. A laptop and jewellery were stolen. Three security guards and a nephew of Ngugi’s by marriage were remanded on charges of robbery with violence, and one count of rape. The trial, which began in November 2004, is in its final stages, and the couple have returned twice to give evidence. “I don’t want to play with my life,” Ngugi says, “but we’re determined not to be driven out of the country.” Nairobi is notorious for crime. But in his view, “it wasn’t a simple robbery. It was political - whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current. They hung around as though waiting for something, and the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.” They were held in separate rooms. “When I heard my wife scream, that was the end,” he recalls. “Life wasn’t worth living - there was nothing left to protect. I said, ‘You can kill me’.” He made a dash for the door. “They rushed to stop me - including the person raping my wife. Njeeri found me [outside] on the ground with three people on top of me covering my mouth, and a gun pointed at my temple.” Yet the noise may have frightened off the assailants. “I don’t think we were meant to come out alive. We think there’s a bigger circle of forces - not just those who attacked us. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach the truth. But I’m sure that if it had happened under the Moi regime, we wouldn’t be alive.”
Wizard of the Crow, whose second of four volumes is published in Kenya this month, is set in the fictional land of Aburiria, ruled by a despot in an era of globalisation. Simon Gikandi, professor of English at Princeton, says: “In its best scatological moments, it echoes the great Latin American novels of dictatorship by Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez.” Ngugi’s English translation will be published simultaneously this August in London (Harvill Secker) and New York. A book of interviews, Ngugi wa Thiong’o Speaks (James Currey), will appear in Britain this spring.
He began the novel in 1997, before Moi ended his 24 years in power. For the ruler, whose western suits are patched with leopard skin, he drew not only on Moi, but “postcolonial dictators - Marcos, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto. There’s almost a comic element, except that they’re so dangerous.” The west, he says, colludes, “as though they need an absurd figure to laugh at while making sure he meets their needs; after the cold war, they became disposable”. Yet some adapted. As the ruler says, “What I did against communists, I can do against terrorists.” The novel marks a break with realism. “How do you satirise someone like Moi, who says he wants all his ministers to be parrots?”
The first book he read in his mother tongue was the Bible. “I still go back to the Old Testament for imagery; it’s so much a part of me.” The novel’s first volume has sold well in local terms: 1,500 copies within a year, some read aloud in bars and matatus (taxis). “One book in Africa is read by at least 10 people - sometimes a whole village,” he says. He was born in 1938 in Kamiriithu village, just north of Nairobi. At mission school, and an elite colonial school for Africans, he read Dickens and RL Stevenson, alongside H Rider Haggard and John Buchan. During the eight-year emergency, speaking Gikuyu was punishable with the cane but he promised his mother, Wanjiku, that “I must never be absent from school, however hungry we were”.
His father was among those Gikuyus - Kenya’s largest ethnic group - forced off their land, the spur for the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, or Mau Mau. In the “large polygamous household - father, four wives and about 28 children”, Ngugi lost a brother fighting for the allies. Another brother, who was deaf and mute, was shot dead during the emergency (“when the British soldiers told him to halt, he didn’t hear”) - which he fictionalised in A Grain of Wheat set on the eve of independence in 1963. His mother was held in solitary for three months after his older brother joined the resistance. “He kept sending messages saying I mustn’t give up school - he was obsessed with my education.”
Ngugi co-authored a play on the captured guerrilla leader, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1977). “Mau Mau history was always an inspiration to me,” he says. “I’m amazed at how a people who didn’t even have neighbouring bases could sustain a struggle for years. I’ve come to admire the courage.” His work touches on the terror of the emergency, though the concentration camps, ruled by starvation and torture, and the enclosure of whole villages in barbed-wire prisons, have only recently been exposed by western scholars, such as Caroline Elkins in Britain’s Gulag (2005).
“Kenyans know what happened - we’ve been saying it for years,” says Ngugi. “People thought I was exaggerating, but my work was mild compared to what [Elkins] has unearthed. This was a genocidal war, and there were no overseeing eyes, except a few voices in Britain raising scepticism about what their government was telling them.”
After studying English at Makerere university in Uganda, Ngugi wrote his first novels at Leeds university in the 1960s. He read Marx and Fanon, while discovering Caribbean literature. George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin (1953), set in Barbados, was “the first novel that painted a picture of myself in Africa - it spoke to me so directly”. It was an antidote to Out of Africa (1937), which he described in an essay on Karen Blixen, “Her Cook, Her Dog” (1980), as “one of the most dangerous books ever written” about the continent, for its condescension masquerading as love. Conrad “can see what’s heartless about colonial conquest, but he has no faith in people’s capacity to overcome it”. By contrast, Brecht’s poetry “had an extraordinary optimism about the capacity of human beings to change their environment”. He was already questioning the gulf between African intellectuals and the audiences they sought. “I thought I was going to stop writing, because I knew about whom I was writing, but not for whom,” he says. Yet joining a peasant theatre in Kamiriithu in 1976 was a “homecoming: the only language I could use was my own”.
His co-written Gikuyu play, I Will Marry When I Want (1977), brought banning and arrest, recorded in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981). “In prison I began to think in a more systematic way about language,” he says. “Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English? It was there that I made my decision. I don’t know if I’d have broken through the psychological block if not forced by history.” As he argued in his essays Decolonising the Mind (1986), as “the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation, language was the means of the spiritual subjugation”. His first novel in Gikuyu, Devil on the Cross (1980), was written in prison, on toilet paper. Warned in 1982 that he faced a bloody “red carpet welcome” if he returned to Kenya, Ngugi stayed in London, where he wrote Matigari (1986), all copies of which were impounded in Kenya.
Binyavanga Wainaina, a writer and founding editor of the Nairobi literary magazine Kwani?, read Decolonising the Mind at 17, and “my view of Kenya was changed for ever”, he says. “The idea that one could bring the world to people in their mother tongue threatened the middle classes. English still has a limited impact on hearts and minds, but when you start talking about change in your language, the police take notice.” Ngugi says, “I feel very happy about my stand. I met a lot of hostility. But now in Kenya many books are being written in Gikuyu, and theatre in African languages is quite common. The younger generation will have a choice.”
Despite the attack, he drew encouragement from his return. President Mwai Kibaki, his former professor at Makerere, “is no Moi. So far, people can speak freely, without looking over their shoulders. For many Kenyans, it’s a big difference.”
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