Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Goodbye to the African giant who gave mother tongue literature the right to speak

If there is a name and oeuvre that hardly ever misses from African literature syllabi in the Global North and South, this is surely Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Ngũgĩ (a name he decided to choose after his childhood to replace his baptism name ‘James’), was born in 1938 in  a rural area of Limuru, from a large family and a polygamous father. His childhood has been marked  by the most bitter period of the British colonial power - as one can learn by reading Dreams in a time of war (2010), and his life has tasted the agony of being imprisoned, exiled and attacked. Members of his family participated in the Mau Mau revolution as one can read in his Weep Not, Child (1983), a work also  regarded as the best English novel written by an Eastern African author. While in prison, where he ended up without trial, he started writing the first work in Gĩkũyũ, that enabled him to create links with the community through writing, on toilet paper: “[..] the only connection I could think of now was language [..] this is how I came to write Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross) in Gĩkũyũ while I was in prison.” (Ngũgĩ  wã Thiong’o 1985: 153). [1]

After his detention he searched for exile in 1982 and taught comparative literature in the UK and US. Last June 2024, at the Swahili Colloquium in Bayreuth (Germany), the same University that awarded him a honorary doctorate on 5 May 2014, they were celebrating the 50^th anniversary of his eyeopener essay : Decolonising the Mind. The Politics of Language  in African Literature [2]. The essence of this work can already be understood in its dedication and a passage where the power of literature through language is foregrounded:

“This book is gratefully dedicated to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages.”

Unacknowledged  by the Swedish society for a Nobel prize, he has never given up to challenge the colonisers superimposed views and colonised minds  through his own committed life and literature. He has received his acknowledgment from the continent though. In 1962 the student newspaper The Makererian wrote “Ngũgĩ  speaks on behalf of a continent” to comment on his first play - The Black Hermit -  shown in Kampala to celebrate Ugandan independence day [3].

Ngũgĩ stopped writing in English and started promoting literature in his own mother tongue in 1982. As aptly put by Alain Ricard, Ngũgĩ was doing that for Gĩkũyũ while “the other Kenyan languages (Kikamba, Kiluhya and Dholuo) were being demoted because of the constant progress of Kiswahili and, of course, of English during the eighties.”  (Ricard, 1994).

He started writing  in “a language which did not have  a significant tradition of novel or fiction writing” (Ngũgĩ, 1986:74 quoted after Ricard, 1994) forging a great corpus of literature that has then been translated into other African and non-African languages.

A few extracts illustrated below will help the reader and every non-connoisseur of African-language literatures  to grasp his life and thinking, not to mention his revolutionary language choice and its impact. May this revolutionary wind continue to blow and foster language diversity and richness for all African countries and their literatures.  

“We spoke Gĩkũyũ as we worked in the fields. We spoke Gĩkũyũ in and outside the home. I can vividly recall those evenings of story-telling around the fireside. .. We children would re-tell stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields picking the pyrethrum flowers, tea-leaves or coffee beans of our European and African landlords. … Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content.”

(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Decolonising the Mind, 1986:11)

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“Now, it did not happen that I just sat down in my room one day and said to myself, ''I'm going to be very liberated: I'm going to start writing in Gĩkũyũ!'' It was not really a conscious decision on my part. I was, in fact, compelled by historical circumstances to resort to writing in Gĩkũyũ when I became involved in cultural work at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Educational and Cultural Centre near Limuru. […] It was then that we were confronted with a practical question: in what language should we write? If we were going to prepare a script for the people, what language should we use? The very fact that we had to ask ourselves such a question - the answer to which was so obvious - was a measure of how far we had come to be alienated from our people. […] Well, it was simply common sense and practical necessity that persuaded us to start writing in Gĩkũyũ. And when we scripted the play in Gĩkũyũ called Ngaahika Ndeenda (or I Will Marry When I Want), something happened which was very interesting. The people in the village of course knew their language much better than we did; so they began to offer their comments on the script. […] And because there was no language barrier, the villagers could also comment on the content of the play.”

(Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. On writing in Gĩkũyũ, Research in African Literatures, vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer, 1985), pp. 151-156. Special Issue on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o )

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Annachiara Raia

Selected works in Gĩkũyũ

Novels

Mũrogi wa Kagogo / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Nairobi ; Kampala ; Dar es Salaam ; Kigali ; Lusaka ; Lilongwe : East African Educational Publishers, [2005]

Matigari (1986) translated into English as Matigari / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ; transl. from the Gĩkũyũ by Wangũi wa Goro. - Heinemann: Oxford, 1989.

Caitaani Mutharabaini (1982), translated into English as Devil on the cross / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ; transl from the Gĩkũyũ by the author. - Heinemann: Oxford [etc.], 1987, and translated in Swahili as Shethani Msalabani.

Plays

Ngaahika Ndeenda (1980), translated into English as I will marry when I want / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ ; transl. from the Gĩkũyũ by the authors. - Heinemann: London [etc.], 1982. This work led to his detention for a year without trial by the Kenyan government. 

Children's books, among others

Nyoni Nyonia Nyone / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Nairobi ; Kampala ; Dar es Salaam ; Kigali ; Lusaka ; Lilongwe : East African Educational Publishers Limited, [2017]

Rwĩmbo rwa njũkĩ / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Nairobi : East African Education Publishers, [2013]

Epic

Kenda Mũiyũru: Rũgano rwa Gĩkũyũ na Mũmbi / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. - East African Educational Publishers Limited: Nairobi, 2018, translated into English as The Perfect Nine / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. London : Harvill Secker, [2020] [4]

His latest work, The Perfect Nine, is best understood within this context. Though it builds itself as a novel, that very term is a product of a European sensibility. The subtitle - The Epic of Gikuyu and Mumbi - is more useful. The artist is no longer engaged by grappling with the legacy of colonial rule. Having shuffled off English itself (the work was written in Gikuyu, the language native to central Kenya), Ngũgĩ turns his attention to his culture’s origins.