“We cannot write in foreign languages unspoken and unknown by peasants and workers in our communities and pretend that we are writing for…those peasants and workers.”
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has joined the ancestors. A towering figure of African letters, wa Thiong’o was born on 5 January 1938 under British colonial rule in the village of Kamiriithu in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. His emergence as an intellectual was inseparable from his anti-colonial politics, and his literary legacy is that of a writer who embraced the inherently political nature of his work.
In the English-speaking world, wa Thiong’o is probably best known for his treatise Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language of African Literature, an anti-imperialist tract that rigorously demonstrated the role of language, education, and literary institutions in shaping the consciousness of the colonized. But wa Thiong’o also wrote a slew of radical novels, many written in his native Gikuyu after he refused to write in English. In 1968, he wrote a manifesto calling for the abolition of the English Department at the University of Nairobi and its replacement with a Department of African Literature and Languages. Through the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre, he organized popular, community-based theatre in Kenya.
Wa Thiong’o’s work was also critical of the postcolonial Kenyan government. He was imprisoned from December 1977 to December 1978 by Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, after he was accused of criticizing the Kenyatta government in his satirical play “Ngahiika Ndeenda” (“I Will Marry When I Want”).
We must acknowledge that recently, wa Thiongo’s reputation has been tainted by suggestions that he physically abused his life – a painful admission from one of his sons. This was also a painful revelation for those of us who saw wa Thiong’o as a literary forefather. It makes for an uneasy legacy that leaves lessons, both personal and political, for the living.
In 1980, Index on Censorship published an interview with wa Thiong’o, conducted by the late Ugandan educator and politician Amooti wa Irumba. In the interview, titled “The Making of the Rebel,” wa Thiong'o describes in detail his educational background and literary development, as well as the development of his political consciousness through his engagement with African and African diaspora writers.
To mark the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, we reprint “The Making of the Rebel” below.
The Making of a Rebel
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
I grew up under the influence of Gikuyu peasant culture - the songs, stories, proverbs, the riddles around the fireside in the evenings - as well as those values that govern human relationships in a peasant community... There has been a lot of struggle in Kenya in the educational field. That is, right from the beginning of imperialist cultural imposition at the start of this century there grew up its necessary dialectical opposite, a resistance to that foreign culture. So right from the beginning the Kenyan people - especially here in Limuru - started building their own schools, which combined elements of the new school system brought in by the British [missionary and government schools] and their own peasant culture.
The school that I first went to was Kamandora primary school [a missionary school]; later I went to Manguo Maringa school [a Gikuyu independent primary school]. Now I can't remember precisely the reasons for my leaving Kamandora for Manguo, but I can remember there was a lot of talk about proper education being offered at Manguo and other Gikuyu Maringa schools, and not so proper education being offered at Kamandora and the colonial schools. It was thought that in missionary schools some things were deliberately held back from students, and that in Gikuyu Maringa schools nothing would be hidden from the students to keep them ignorant. I think this was the reason behind my moving from one school to the other... Just to show you the kind of thing I am talking about: I remember in Manguo primary school being taught about South Africa, the oppressive political and economic system there. I have never forgotten this. That South Africa was an oppressive place would never have been mentioned in a missionary school.
In 1955 I went to Alliance High School, the only student from virtually the whole of Limuru who had a place there. Alliance High School was, of course, very different from all my previous school experiences. For one thing most of the teachers were foreigners - in fact most were British. I think the education offered to us at Alliance was intended to produce Africans who would later become efficient administrators of a colonial system. In his lectures the headmaster, I remember, would always emphasise that we were being educated to rule, and to rule, you know, as responsible human beings who would not become political agitators. What he actually meant was that we were being trained to become obedient servants of Her Majesty the Queen of England, to serve her and the British Empire, and never to question the legitimacy or correctness of that empire. Therefore politics were frowned upon: African nationalists were castigated, they were seen as irresponsible agitators, as hooligans. So at Alliance High School we were presented with two diametrically opposed images: that of the Kenyan patriot as a negative human being and that of the oppressor and his collaborator as positive human beings. Obviously the aim was to make us identify with the second image, to make us grow to admire and acquire all the values that go hand in hand with collaboration with imperialism.
My interest in writing really goes back as far as my primary school days. That's when I read Stevenson, Dickens and the abridged versions of works by many other European writers to which I was introduced by my teacher of English, Samuel Kevicho, who now lectures at the University of Nairobi. That's when my interest in writing stories really started. I remember in primary school arguing with a fellow student, Kenneth Bugwa. He told me that one could write a book and I told him, no, you cannot write a book until you are highly educated; if you write a book you might be arrested and imprisoned because you would not be qualified to do so. This argument had an unusual consequence. When I went to high school, my friend also went away to a teacher training school at Kambuga, and in his first year he started writing a book to prove to me that one could do so without being arrested. I can't remember now what became of his novel, but he used to send me excerpts. I used to say to myself that when I grew up I would like to write the kind of stories people like Stevenson and Dickens had written.
At Alliance High School I was lucky, in that the library was quite adequate for a school like that. There were many novels, and I used to read them. I read Dickens, but also a lot of racist writers like Rider Haggard with his King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain, as well as the racist stuff in the Biggies series... All that formed part of my literary world at the time. I also remember reading many thrillers, and my first literary attempt was an imitation of an American thriller writer, whose name I am sorry I can't remember just now. I sent this story to Baraza, which used to run a kind of literary page in Kenya - that was in 1956 - but it was rejected. Then of course there were also the texts studied formally in our literature classes, like Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw.
At Makerere University I followed a course based on the syllabus for English studies at the University of London. Thus it was a degree in the history of English literature as well as in the history of the English language. But the real importance of my university studies lay in that at Makerere, for the first time, I came into contact with African and West Indian writers. I remember three authors and books as being particularly important to me: Chinua Achebe and his book Things Fall Apart, George Lamming and his book In the Castle of My Skin, and Peter Abrahams’ Tell Freedom. At Alliance I had seen Tell Freedom held by one of the teachers, and I can remember literally trembling at the title. When I found the book in the library at Makerere, I was overjoyed. I read it avidly and later I read virtually all the books by Peter Abrahams - that was the beginning of my interest in South African literature. Achebe's Things Fall Apart started me on West African writers, like Cyprian Ekwensi; from then on I followed closely the growth of West African literature. For instance I used to go to the library and look up every item of fiction in West African journals and magazines, especially work by Cyprian Ekwensi (who, I later came to learn, was also an admirer of Peter Abrahams at that period). As for George Lamming, his work introduced me to West Indian writers, and this was the beginning of my interest in the literature of the African people in the Third World.
So I would say that Makerere was very important for me because, side by side with my formal literary education, I had through the library access to the kind of literature that told me of another world, a world which was in many instances my own. But African literature and all Third World literature had no place in the syllabus. African writers were never mentioned as part of the coursework, Third World literature was not taught in the entire department. Thus it was a big surprise later on when I came to learn through my own efforts that African and Third World people had, in fact, been writing for a long time – people like Aime Cesaire from the West Indies or other Negritude writers of Senghor's generation. In addition I had to discover that there had been a lot of writing going on in Africa by Africans, and in the rest of the Third World, in the nineteenth century. So just as at Alliance High School, I was once again confronted with two images - the official or Eurocentric image as seen through the kind of curriculum I was exposed to in the English Department, and the image of a struggling world as it emerged through the kind of literature I discovered for myself in the library.
The central role of Penpoint should also be mentioned. It was a literary journal of the English Department, but it was a forum at this time for writers of East and Central Africa. If people have noticed that my writing career began with short stories, it was really because of Penpoint, which could only publish short stories.
By the time I went to Leeds I had already written several short stories, three one-act plays, as well as the full-length Black Hermit, and the novels The River Between and Weep Not, Child. It was 1963, and independence had come to Kenya, as well as to other African countries. So I happened to go to Leeds when things were also happening in Kenya, East Africa, in the rest of the continent and in the rest of the Third World generally. This historical context is important for an understanding of the intensification of certain themes in my writing from that time onward. One could also say that at Leeds I encountered a radical intellectual tradition which had grown side by side with a conservative, formal tradition. Once again the kind of pattern I had found at Alliance and at Makerere was to be seen at Leeds University, that is, an official conservative tradition in the classroom which wanted you to identify with the oppressor as a positive human being, and beside it an unofficial, radical tradition which gave you the image of the resister as a positive human being. As before, the second image was the more powerful as far as I was concerned.
My studies at Leeds exposed me to a wider literary world, making me aware of radical literature that embraced the Third World and the socialist world as well. Frantz Fanon's books are an example. The person who first introduced Fanon to Leeds was Grant Kamenju. He went to Paris, and in an obscure little bookshop he found Fanon's book The Damned. That was its first English translation; it was later published outside France under the title The Wretched of the Earth. Of course this book was an eye-opener for me and for other African students at Leeds.
I think this was the only Fanon book I read at that time, but I read quite a lot of West Indian Caribbean literature. I was also writing A Grain of Wheat, arguing about the problems of colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism, and travelling widely in Europe. Incidentally, you remember this was the time when Vietnam was becoming very important in the world. The Vietnamese people's struggle had a lot of impact on the students at Leeds, as did the Palestinian struggle. The beginnings of a students' movement all over Europe also had an impact on us at Leeds. As for socialist writers, my first exposure to Karl Marx's works and ideas was at Leeds University. Reading novels like Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Brecht's works was also important to the development of my ideas…
I take literature to be a reflection of social reality, the imaginative reflection of the world in which we live. Or rather literature, as a set of particular but related mirrors, gives us various images of our experience, of our history. It therefore becomes very important to see what specific images are being reflected in whatever literature we are exposed to. Different classes have their different literatures which give images of the world in harmony with the peculiar needs and objectives of those particular classes. Thus an oppressive ruling class or nation tries to push forward a literature that reflects the world as they see it, images of the world and history which are in harmony with the needs and objectives of oppression and exploitation. And even where literature doesn't reflect the desired images directly, that ruling and oppressive class will bring forth interpreters and critics who will try to batter and change that literature, to interpret it, however radical it may be, in such a way as to make it seem to be looking at the world through the eyes, and according to the needs and objectives, of the oppressors. Now the classes that are struggling against oppression and exploitation inevitably try to promote a literature that is diametrically opposed to the literature I describe above. That is, they promote a literature which positively reflects their struggles and their history, or reflects the world in terms of their struggles, and which produces images in harmony with their own class interests, needs and objectives. Sympathisers of, or critics from, such a class or classes or nation will try to interpret literature from the point of view of the struggling peoples, from the point of view of their needs and objectives for liberation.
I think that if the novel is to be meaningful it must reflect the totality of forces affecting the lives of the people. And all the great novels, even in the bourgeois critical and literary tradition, have reflected this totality of forces at their particular moment of history. Take a novel like Tolstoy's War and Peace or his Anna Karenina for that matter - surely you will find that virtually nothing is left out of these novels. All the economic forces at work in Russian society of the nineteenth century are reflected there, and the struggle of the peasantry for emancipation from feudal society . . . On the other side I find very disturbing the tendency in literary criticism to equate negative aspects of life with the true human condition, that is, if you show people as stupid, cowardly, vacillating, always terrified of death or life, sometimes wanting to commit suicide out of sheer despair, then you are said by some critics to be depicting the true human condition. Why should we equate weakness with the true human condition? On the contrary, I would have thought that resistance to oppression, the strong desire in human beings to overcome nature and all the things that inhibit the free development of their lives, this is the most important of human qualities... We know that the transformations of the twentieth century have been the result of the struggles of peasants and workers. So how can we say that these two classes, whose labour has changed nature, are weak, naive, stupid? It is their heroic struggles with nature, with the natural universe, and their struggle against social forces that diminish man which we should be writing about…
I believe that African writers must stop using imperialism purely as a slogan... Writers - particularly African writers - must return for their inspiration to the people, to the peasants and workers in their societies. I think it is important that we return to the roots in the lives of the peasants and workers. Doing so means that we shall necessarily be confronted with issues of language, for instance, and of how we can meaningfully join hands with others to transform the social conditions of our being . . . If our audience is composed of peasants and workers, then it seems to me that we must write in the languages of the peasants and workers of Africa. We cannot write in foreign languages unspoken and unknown by peasants and workers in our communities and pretend that we are writing for, and somehow communicating with, those peasants and workers, or pretend that we are writing a national literature. I would go as far as saying that what has so far been called African literature in English is not African literature at all. It is “Afro-Saxon literature”, and what has been called African literature in French is equally not African literature - it is “Afro-French literature"... African literature can only be written in African languages.
Do I plan to have my own novels translated? No, I don't think I'll do that. You see, these novels were originally written in that foreign language, and I don't know how effective a translation would be. I'd like to continue writing new things in Gikuyu... The most important thing for all of us is to produce new works in these languages since each language imposes its own kind of logic.
I put a lot of emphasis on content and language, not so much on form. It should be the content that is the deciding factor. Of course the content will to a large extent be determined by the class audience we are addressing. In other words, if a writer is desirous of communicating with a particular class audience, then of necessity he will grope for the necessary forms and techniques best suited to the task.
Theatre is very important, in the sense that one can communicate directly, and also because it involves more than just one person. But I can only talk about our experience at Kamirithu. The Kamirithu Community Educational and Cultural Centre is at the centre of a village where peasants and workers live in mud huts. When we all came together to produce the play Ngahiika Ndenda (' I'll Marry When I Want'), we found that as soon as the peasants and workers realised that this play reflected their lives in their language, they took the initiative in suggesting additions and even deciding the form of the performance: designing the open-air stage, where the audience should sit, and so on. The play used mime, songs and dances, which also come out of the community life. People saw that the script or content of the play reflected their lives and history, and so they appropriated it, so to speak - they added to it, altered it, until when they came to perform it, Ngahiika Ndenda was part and parcel of their own lives and history. Consequently the standard of performance of the play by these peasants and workers of Kamirithu village, Limuru, Kenya, was probably one of the highest in the history of the Kenyan stage. People who came from far away to see the play were struck by the high standard of presentation. So our experience showed us that theatre is perhaps the most relevant literary form of ideological communication in the Kenyan context.
I was never formally charged with any offence, nor was I ever told any specific reasons for my arrest and subsequent detention. I was convinced though, that it was to do with the play Ngahiika Ndenda and my other works like Petals of Blood. In other words, I believe I was detained because I wrote truthfully about the Kenyan historical situation, both past and current.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank very sincerely all the people - students, workers, intellectuals - and all the organisations which have been working for the release, not only of myself but of all the political prisoners in Kenya ... I was very moved when I came out of detention and found that there had been so much struggle by so many people . . . and that it had been worldwide. It was tremendous.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, “The Making of a Rebel,” Index on Censorship, 1980.
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