Issue 240, Summer 2022
As a student at the University of Leeds, England, ca. 1966. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find in Ngũgĩ’s oeuvre—his fiction, his criticism, his theory—an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is because Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker. In our conversation in early 2021, we discussed his fascination with the idea of contraries: “I talk about struggle a lot, dialectical struggle, dialectics of Marx, dialectics of Hegel,” he said.
Born James Ngũgĩ in 1938 in a village in Limuru, Kenya, he attended Alliance High School, a missionary boarding school in the nearby town of Kikuyu, and in 1959 received a scholarship to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. From 1964 to 1967, he studied at the University of Leeds in England, and as a young professor at the University of Nairobi, he cowrote “On the Abolition of the English Department,” a manifesto arguing for African literatures to be placed at the center of the university’s curriculum. In 1973, four years before Chinua Achebe published his famous essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Ngũgĩ gave a talk in which he argued that “the Conradian narrative itself was rooted in the assumption of the inherent savagery of Africa and the Africans: that even the best minds and hearts of Europe were in danger of being contaminated.” In the seventies, Ngũgĩ decided to write his fiction in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ, rather than in English. The title of his most celebrated work of theory, a slim volume about the politics of language that led to that decision, has passed the acid test of true virality: the phrase “decolonizing the mind” pervades our public discourse without citation.
In his 2012 book Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngũgĩ describes his career in terms of what he calls “poor theory”: “Poor means being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive.” When I asked Ngũgĩ what he thought the poor theory of his fiction would be, he gave a wry laugh and said: “I suppose it will come to my writing in Gĩkũyũ, right? Poor theory is the idea of making the maximum from the minimum resources.” But whether writing in Gĩkũyũ or English, Ngũgĩ has done the maximum with the form of the social novel, which he has given a distinctly Marxist hue. His novels have detailed the violence and corruption of both the colonial and neocolonial governance of Kenya. In 2004, he published—and in 2006, self-translated—his magnum opus, Wizard of the Crow, a scathing satire of the global capitalist system he calls “corpolonialism.” His latest work, an epic poem called The Perfect Nine (2018, self-translation 2020), stars a disabled woman as the real hero of the foundational myth of the Gĩkũyũ people. For Ngũgĩ, there has never been a question of separating politics from art, but their entwinement cannot be reduced to identity politics. What makes his work political amounts to the recognition that to write with and about people—poor people, black people, women—is to fight for the People.
Ngũgĩ has always waged more than a paper war. From 1977 to 1978, he was held at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi for the crime of cowriting and mounting a play in Gĩkũyũ. In 1982, he flew to England to promote his English translation of Devil on the Cross, the novel he had written during his incarceration. Warned by the Kenyan government that he would receive a “red-carpet welcome” if he returned to his homeland, he remained in the UK for seven years. In 1987, the Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi, banned Ngũgĩ’s novel Matigari (1986, translation 1989) and intelligence agencies reportedly issued a warrant for the arrest of its eponymous hero, a Christlike figure who goes around asking, “Where can I find truth and justice?” When, more than two decades after he was forced into exile, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya for the release of the Gĩkũyũ edition of Wizard of the Crow, he and his wife were attacked at gunpoint.
While he is a regular on the betting list of potential Nobel laureates and the syllabi of classes on postcolonial literature, Ngũgĩ is often overlooked by the West’s leftist literati in their discourse about politics and fiction. Why does the revolutionary cast to his work go unrecognized? Perhaps some people view his novels, written in a “minor” language and steeped in “minority-centered” politics, as literally minor. Others may assume that his “postcolonial” worldview is wrapped in the barbed wire of the past—despite the fact that we continue to live in the postcolony. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Again, Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker—one born without an armchair. As fashionable as a dash of class analysis in a work of bourgeois autofiction may be, this level of political commitment from novelists simply won’t do. The truth is, Ngũgĩ is revolutionary in the way only a true artist can be—too revolutionary for our time.
INTERVIEWER
Are the titles of your novels important to you?
NGŨGĨ WA THIONG’O
A funny thing is that I tend to give all my novels the same title to begin with—Wrestling with God. Then while I’m writing, I realize, Oh, that’s not quite it . . .
INTERVIEWER
Why that title?
NGŨGĨ
I grew up with the Old Testament. It was the only book translated into Gĩkũyũ that was available to me. Reading it allowed me to tell myself stories any time I wanted. It was an extension of the storytelling sessions that took place in my community in the evenings, after all the work was done. And it was, like those stories, a work of magic realism. Imagine, a man called Jonah in the belly of a fish! Or Daniel in the pit of lions, or David playing the harp for Saul to help his manic depression. I was very preoccupied by the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel—that scene held a great power in my mind.
These days, I’ve been revisiting William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I listen to it on audiotape every night. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the human struggle with a greater power and, I suppose, to the idea of oppositions leading to progression. That idea was instilled in me when I read Marx and Engels at Leeds.
INTERVIEWER
The question of whether or not to take up arms in a struggle with power is a thread through your novels.
NGŨGĨ
You have to remember that I grew up in an environment of struggle. I was born in 1938, surrounded by British and African soldiers and by Italian prisoners of war. The colonial settler state in Kenya was so strong—the British had control of the army, the judicial system, everything, and the Mau Mau, or the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, who took up arms against them in 1952, were ordinary peasants and working people. One of them was my brother.
We were a big, polygamous family, with four mothers and one father, and we loved one another very much because we grew up sharing the same space, but politically we were torn. Good Wallace was up in the mountains fighting the British and our half brother Tumbo was with the colonial army. One night they both decided independently to visit another of our brothers, who was working in a shoe factory, and when they encountered each other at the door, they started running away in opposite directions. One was running from this colonial soldier, and the other was running because he thought this Mau Mau might kill him! I was surrounded by contending forces, and my attraction to the idea of wrestling might be part of that.
INTERVIEWER
Didn’t you have a brief flirtation with boxing?
In the second row, fourth from left, Ngũgĩ with the Christian Union at Alliance High School in Kikuyu, 1957. Courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
NGŨGĨ
Yes, I once put on boxing gloves because one of my fellow students at Alliance High School was a boxer. But my first wild swing at my opponent knocked him down, and I was so horrified that I never went back into the ring.
INTERVIEWER
Your biography and stories from your family often come into your work. Is that something you feel as a responsibility?
NGŨGĨ
Not consciously. The second novel I wrote, Weep Not, Child (1964), for instance, is autobiographical and not. Njoroge has only two mothers, rather than my four, but the novel’s opening is similar to an early scene in my second memoir, Dreams in a Time of War (2010), which describes my birth mother—my father’s third wife sending me to school. Her name was Wanjikũ. The dream of education was my mother’s before it became mine. She would supervise my homework, and I realized later that she couldn’t read or write—she was getting a sense of what I was doing by asking questions.
Later, when I got into trouble with the government, she was the only one who never tried to persuade me to give up my principles. She would listen to my reasons, and although she never said, Oh, go ahead and do it, she was supportive. I could feel it.
INTERVIEWER
Your siblings often appear in your books, too.
NGŨGĨ
Yes, I’ve written about my half brother Gĩtogo. He was a very lovely, strong, handsome young man. He could neither hear nor talk—he spoke with his hands. We all loved him. He was killed by the British forces when they raided our village. I had come home from school, which was six miles or so away, by foot, only to find that we had no food. I was preparing to turn around when one of my sisters and I heard gunfire. Because Gĩtogo could not hear, he kept on running when the British ordered him to stop, and they shot him. He was not a soldier with the Mau Mau—he was just a person who was hard of hearing.
One of my sisters, Wabia, has also appeared in my works in different forms. She couldn’t see, and she used sticks to walk—we didn’t have wheelchairs in those days—and trembled as if she had no bones. She would tell us stories at bedtime, and she had a very sharp memory, so when my other siblings were trying to remember songs from church, she always had the answer. She was the artist, the singer, of the community—our family’s Homer. She didn’t have much, but she gave everything, and that was very moving to me.
INTERVIEWER
I’m reminded of Warigia in The Perfect Nine—the last born, who cannot walk and so makes the others “perfect.” Did you have a particular affection for that character because of your relationship with Wabia?
NGŨGĨ
Maybe so, but Warigia had always fascinated me. Growing up, we all knew the origin myth of the Gĩkũyũ people, the daughters of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi. When the other sisters reach marriageable age, suitors come to compete for them, but there is a silence around Warigia. There are no details about her, so The Perfect Nine was my reinterpretation of the story. She is the one who has to overcome disabilities, or challenges of the body, and then ends up being the embodiment of love as choice, and of courage. She becomes the hero of the epic.
INTERVIEWER
When did it occur to you that your life, and the politics of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army, could be material for your fiction?
NGŨGĨ
It was at Makerere University, Kampala, that I began to write. In Nairobi, Africans were treated like foreigners, and I remember, when I arrived in Kampala, being amazed that the city was full of African people who didn’t look harassed. I don’t think I understood, until I got to Makerere, that I had lived through trauma. Makerere gave me time to reflect on everything that had happened.
INTERVIEWER
You write in In the House of the Interpreter (2012) and Dreams in a Time of War about experiencing violence at the hands of colonial forces in Kenya—once in primary school, when you were hit in the face by a young soldier, and then later, when you were taken off a bus in your school uniform and detained. What effect did those episodes have on you?
NGŨGĨ
It’s something that stayed in my mind—that blow by someone who was probably my own age but who had the gun and the power. And that later arrest, when I was waiting to go to Makerere, was very, very unfair. The police were conducting an identity check on the bus and they claimed that I had evaded taxes, but the reason I didn’t have tax receipts is because I was a student, and I had the papers to prove it. That was my first experience of being in a court of law, and I had to defend myself. When you’re young, you think grown-ups don’t lie. But when the police gave their statement, it was a complete fabrication.
When it was my turn to testify, I was so eager to correct the record that I wanted to scream my story. The judge told me to question the lead officer, and I didn’t know anything about cross-examination, but then I remembered a style of debate that I had learned at Alliance High School, and something clicked into place. I realized that I could defend myself by asking him questions—“Do you remember when this happened? Do you remember that?” The policeman contradicted himself over and over again in response, of course, and so I was released.
The truth has always given me strength. When you have the truth on your side, you are consistent. Later, when I was taken to Kamĩtĩ, I found that I could respond to the tribunal of five judges even without having written anything down, because I was so sure of what had really happened. The truth gave me something to cling to.
At right, Ngũgĩ in the Ngong Hills, Kenya, in the fifties. Courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote a novel and a memoir in prison. Which genre do you prefer for truth-telling?
NGŨGĨ
I like to think in the form of a story, more so than any other form, whether in fiction or memoir.
INTERVIEWER
What about drama?
NGŨGĨ
My plays are essentially stories, and I’ve never written a play out of the blue. When I started writing plays as a student at Makerere, it was only because there was a competition between the different halls of residence, and my hall’s honor was at stake—they hadn’t done so well the year before.
The River Between (1965), the first novel I wrote, also came out of a competition. That one was more money driven. The idea of receiving a thousand Kenyan shillings—today, the equivalent of five American dollars—was so enticing that I thought I could finish the novel immediately. Of course, I became more interested in the story as I went on. That’s why I always tell young writers, Don’t worry about what motivates you to write. If you want to impress your girlfriend, that’s okay. Once you start, the writing takes over.
INTERVIEWER
How does a novel begin for you? Do you plan it out?
NGŨGĨ
I don’t plan. The novel forms as I go along. Generally, I have problems with the opening, but when it comes, it’s like a road map. Sometimes it’s an image—someone walking, say. Sometimes it starts with a memory. The first line of Weep Not, Child came to me during a talk about education by the Ghanaian sociologist K. A. Busia, and the genesis of Devil on the Cross was “Five Bandits,” a narrative poem by the South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha. I came across his work when I visited Tokyo in the seventies, and I heard that he had been incarcerated for his writing. I read the poem, which describes a party at which a group of businessmen, politicians, and such are boasting about the heights of their corruption, and I stored it away. In 1976, I introduced his work to the literature syllabus at the University of Nairobi, and I received a visit from a South Korean diplomat who came to my office to tell me how awful Kim Chi-ha was. I told him, Look, we in Kenya don’t put writers in prison. Soon after, I was myself in a maximum security prison, writing Devil on the Cross.
INTERVIEWER
Just before you went to prison, you were working on a history of the social life of European settlers in Kenya. Why was that never published?
NGŨGĨ
I had just acquired a literary agent, and he’d come up with that idea. It was to be called A Colonial Affair. He got me a lot of money in advance—more money than I had ever received for my novels. At first I spent a lot of time in archives, looking at old newspapers and settlers’ memoirs, learning about the Happy Valley lifestyle. But I found that I didn’t have the heart or the stomach to keep researching these white settlers—I call them parasites in paradise—drinking and having affairs with each other’s wives. So I ended up losing the money. The advance was taken from my future royalties.
INTERVIEWER
Do you show your drafts to anyone?
NGŨGĨ
These days I mostly like reading paragraphs aloud, especially to my children—they’re not always willing to listen. I generally don’t share works in progress, but in 1962, I showed the draft of Weep Not, Child to Chinua Achebe. He had visited my class at Makerere, and I met him again at the university’s Conference of African Writers of English Expression. He read just a few pages and marked them up. I remember he used the phrase “Don’t flog the dead horse”—meaning that I tended to belabor my point—and that was very helpful. Later, he showed my manuscript to Heinemann, his publisher at the time, who then published it.
From the first draft of Devil on the Cross, written in Gĩkũyũ on toilet paper in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, Kenya, ca. 1978. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
At left, Ngũgĩ interviewing Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Odinga Odinga for Nairobi’s Daily Nation, ca. 1963. Courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise very much?
NGŨGĨ
Sometimes quite a lot. I remember that the writing of The River Between was going very well until I got to a certain point, and then I was stuck. I realized that I had to go back in time, to begin the narrative several years earlier. It was like running to a long jump—I had to go back a few steps to get momentum.
INTERVIEWER
In that book, a young woman, Muthoni, rebels against her family by choosing to get circumcised. You describe female circumcision as “brutal” in your early journalism, but your treatment of the subject in the novel considers the question from many sides.
NGŨGĨ
Circumcision is not a custom you want to encourage, but neither do you want to call people who do it stupid or un-Christian. You can’t just attack people as if they were devils. People have to realize things for themselves, to undergo an education. In my journalism, I was more categorical, because in an op-ed there are no nuances. But in a novel, there’s conflict, there’s trouble. And that’s why, in The River Between, there’s neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of female circumcision. In my novelistic treatment, Muthoni dies, but I’m not punishing her. I’m just saying, This could happen.
The practice of female circumcision was harnessed politically by both sides of the struggle for independence, and the missionaries who ran some of the schools in Kenya opposed the custom as a way of fighting against the nationalist struggle. It wasn’t that they were saying that it was harmful—it was used as a kind of litmus test of whether you were Christian or not.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start feeling that religion could be used as a tool of oppression? In Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016), discussing the hymns of John Newton—the enslaver who wrote “Amazing Grace”—you write, “Christianity became the religion of empires the moment emperors realized that they could sin all they wanted all their lives and still have their sins washed away on their deathbeds.”
NGŨGĨ
It was gradual. I was very religious as a teenager, but by the time I wrote The River Between, I had become critical of Christianity, and particularly of the connection between Christian missions and the colonial project in Kenya. At some point it occurred to me that there is a great difference between spirituality and religion. If you look at the origins of most religious movements, they’re on the side of the ordinary working person. Jesus’s disciples were the rejects of society—fishermen, I am told, were among the lowliest of the low. He was revolutionary in his denunciation of the Roman Empire and of the people we call the Pharisees. You find the same thing with Buddhism. The Buddha comes from a wealthy family but abandons everything, more or less—he goes to the forest so that his disciples will commit to similar ideals. And women were some of the most faithful early followers of Muhammad because he pushed against conditions in which one could marry a hundred women, limiting the number to four. The problem is that most religions initiate rituals, and after some time those habits become more important than spirituality. It turns into a question of, Are you praying four times a day? The rites are taken over by the dominant social forces—by the rich.
INTERVIEWER
Is your implication, then, that the spirituality that religion begins with is inherently revolutionary?
NGŨGĨ
Look at the Bible and the role it has played in African American resistance. Do you know the song “O Freedom”? It is so powerful, so spiritual. Historically, enslaved people were denied formal education and even language—African languages were banned on the plantations—so they married the rhythms of their heritage with the sounds of English. You got a new language system, and that language produced spirituals. Think of Paul Robeson singing “Go Down Moses.” What I’m trying to say is that the Bible has played an almost revolutionary role in African American history, and even in our histories in Africa. Kenyans like Jomo Kenyatta often compared themselves to the children of Israel led by Moses, who were under Pharaonic domination. Many hymns were turned into liberation songs.
INTERVIEWER
In your writing, you draw certain connections between African American and African struggles—between J. C. Carothers, for instance, who diagnosed the Mau Mau with “mass mania,” andSamuel A. Cartwright in the U.S., who called enslaved people’s desire for freedom a “mental disorder.” Have you always been aware of these diasporic relationships?
NGŨGĨ
Growing up, I would hear stories and songs about Harry Thuku, a big hero at that time, who had led one of the early struggles in Kenya. His friend and adviser, Manilal Desai, was an Indian activist with connections to the Gandhi movement, and Thuku had other ties to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. I think that’s part of why the British jailed him.
I was always fascinated by Thuku as part of the mythology of Kenyan history. But when he was imprisoned, he became broken, and he lost the ideals that had led him as he organized workers. Later in my career, someone asked me to write a biography of him. I met him at his house, but I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written about your discovery of blackness in relation to oppression by white institutions—through your job at the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization, for instance—and also through reading. Who are some of the writers who informed that discovery?
NGŨGĨ
I read Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery at Alliance, but I really discovered African American literature and Caribbean literature when I went to Makerere. There was never any mention of those authors in the English department, but there was a history teacher there who introduced me to thinkers like C. L. R. James and to the novels of George Lamming. I found—and still find—Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin incredibly well crafted, and in many ways it inspired my novel Weep Not, Child. I remember thinking that if he could make this village community in Barbados feel so alive, I could do the same thing in Kenya, for Kenya.
At Leeds, I wrote my thesis about Lamming, in the context of politics, slavery, and revolution, and it was my breakthrough in theoretical exploration. Leeds was emerging as a counter to Oxford and Cambridge, and it was an exciting place to be. There was a Labour government, and Leeds United had recently introduced a black player from South Africa, Albert Louis Johanneson. There were Marxist societies all over campus. I remember that a Kenyan student I knew from Makerere had been to France on holiday, and he came back to Leeds with a crumpled copy of this book called Les damnés de la terre—that’s how I discovered Frantz Fanon. It passed from hand to hand between all the students from the colonies. Until encountering Marx and Fanon, I had never quite understood why, even after independence, the pattern of exploitation hadn’t changed. Fanon opened our eyes by bringing the class element to our understanding of the African situation. I think Petals of Blood (1977) reflects that thinking most clearly, but it’s there in A Grain of Wheat (1967), too.
At left, Ngũgĩ at a public library in North London, 1985. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
INTERVIEWER
Those novels, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood, are more inventive in terms of structure than your early works, which are essentially bildungsromane. How did that shift happen?
NGŨGĨ
In terms of form, those two early novels were products of my studies. As a student at Makerere, I was reading nineteenth-century novels that were part of the realist tradition. Really everything I read was an English novel even if it was written by Lamming, or by Achebe.
But then, toward the end of my four years there, for my senior thesis, I studied Conrad. In some ways, he’s a traditional storyteller, and the way he wrote novels—with one person telling a story that leads to another and another—reminded me of the orality of my culture. From a central linear narrative will come many others, set in the past or in different places.
INTERVIEWER
Did Conrad’s influence lead to A Grain of Wheat? That novel spans just a few days but its flashbacks give it an almost epic scale.
NGŨGĨ
It’s possible, because I had just read Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. It wasn’t conscious, but discovering how to pull together different settings, times, and voices was very exciting. When you find a way to do it, you can take the story to the ends of the earth or you can go back to its formation. In Petals of Blood, I tried to take the technique further—here were just four characters from a single village, who together cover the entire history of Kenya. When I came to write Devil on the Cross in prison, I was using an even simpler structure. Warĩĩnga takes the same journey—between one town or another and Nairobi—three times.
INTERVIEWER
Matigari is simpler still. It’s a quest over time rather than space.
NGŨGĨ
Yes, I like that nothing really happens in it, and yet it contains everything.
INTERVIEWER
Was the simplicity of Devil on the Cross and Matigari a product of your decision to write in Gĩkũyũ? In a sense, you had to start your literary trajectory all over again.
NGŨGĨ
Matigari was more fun, but everything in the writing of Devil on the Cross was difficult, because I was breaking away from my dependence on English. The main problem I faced in prison was that there was this little devil who used to come to me—a devil dressed in English robes. There is almost no written tradition in Gĩkũyũ, so I’d be struggling away with the vocabulary—some word like imperialism, say—and this little devil would come to me and say, Oh, why struggle so hard? I’m right here . . .
There’s a slipperiness to the Gĩkũyũ language. I’d write a sentence, read it the following morning, and find that it could mean something else. There was always the temptation to give up. But another voice would talk to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to the decision to write a novel in Gĩkũyũ when you were in prison?
NGŨGĨ
I was imprisoned for a play I had written in Gĩkũyũ with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ in 1977, called I Will Marry When I Want, which was later published (1980, translation 1982). I was struck by the fact that, although the police had questioned me when I had written plays in English, I’d experienced nothing as drastic as being sent to prison. The issue of language became very central to my thinking as I asked myself why I had been incarcerated for this play. By then, there was an African government, and the president was a very competent speaker of the Gĩkũyũ language. All this was circling in my mind when I wrote Devil on the Cross.
INTERVIEWER
You felt that it was the play’s language, rather than its content, that had angered the government?
NGŨGĨ
I had assumed that we would be applauded for bringing theater to the village in which it was performed. The Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Center was conceived as communal from the start. The actors were members of the community, and their input was very important in revising the scenes. We wanted to counter the way knowledge and expertise are mystified in the colonial system—to show that perfection in performance is the result of hard work, of a long process. To do all this, of course, we had to use the language of the community.
I was confused by my imprisonment because I had written other plays that were more overtly critical of the postcolonial regime, not to mention novels like Petals of Blood, which I thought was more scathing. Writing Devil on the Cross in Gĩkũyũ was an act of conscious resistance in a way that writing the play hadn’t been. It was as if I was telling myself, In this prison I will do the very thing that got me here, even though I am being guarded day and night, so I wrote a novel about class struggle in Gĩkũyũ—the language that had landed me there—and I did it with pens and paper supplied to me by the wardens! Most of them were so confused that I had been sent to prison for writing that they assumed there must have been another reason. I knew that they were prohibited from telling us about anything that was happening outside, but I didn’t want to ask them about the news—I wanted to ask them about Gĩkũyũ. Ironically, some of the wardens became my language teachers.
INTERVIEWER
Just as the style of debate you had been taught at colonial school helped you with the court case, the wardens helped you with your novel. You were using the tools of the oppressor.
NGŨGĨ
The paper I had was not very good as toilet paper, but it was very effective as writing material. It came in packets and, honestly, it was very good paper.
INTERVIEWER
I’m reminded of your definition of “poor theory” in Globalectics, the idea of creating out of limited means. Samuel Beckett felt that writing first in French and then translating himself into English gave him a useful creative constraint. Do you feel the same way about writing in Gĩkũyũ?
NGŨGĨ
Beckett should have tried writing in Irish! Really, there are so many challenges that come with writing in Gĩkũyũ, not least finding a publisher. Even in Kenya, you are struggling against great odds. English has taken over how you discuss business, taken over what is taught in school, what books are available. There are far fewer books and leaflets written in African languages than there were before 1952, when the British closed all African-run schools. There has been a gradual takeover of culture and the intellectual community in Kenya. With my novels, I was doing something that had never been done in the Gĩkũyũ language before. My books are considered the founding of a tradition.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve long been interested in decolonizing the university syllabus. You were a part of the debate at the University of Nairobi in 1968, calling for the abolition of the English department.
From left: Ngũgĩ, Ali Mazrui, and Chinua Achebe at an event celebrating Heinemann's African and Caribbean writers at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, July 1986. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
NGŨGĨ
In a way, postcolonial and decolonial theory really began in Nairobi in 1968. My colleagues and I were drawing from the experience of the Nigerian historian Kenneth Dike and the Kenyan historian Bethwell Ogot—who was, incidentally, my mathematics teacher at Alliance. They had pushed for the acceptance of oral sources in history as important raw material. The question we were asking was, If you are in Kenya, shouldn’t the center of your experience be Nairobi, rather than London? Some people were furious that we were questioning the premise of the English course—the Kenyan Parliament suggested we were trying to abolish Shakespeare and bring in Caribbean communists. The idea of V. S. Naipaul being a communist was so laughable!
The thoughts I was having about language when I was in prison truly began even earlier, in 1966, when I attended the PEN International Congress in New York. There was a panel, chaired by Arthur Miller, in which Pablo Neruda and Ignazio Silone were participants. And I remember Silone complaining about the dearth of contemporary Italian novels being translated into other languages—especially English. He said something like, Italian is not like one of these Bantu languages with one or two words in the vocabulary. That stung. I remember standing up and correcting him in front of the entire audience. I was very, very cross, and when I went back to Leeds, where I was in the middle of writing A Grain of Wheat, I felt that I was proving Silone right by writing it in English. That set up the internal debate in my mind.
At a panel discussion with Nadine Gordimer at Amherst College, 1991. Photograph by Frank Ward. Courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections and the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
INTERVIEWER
The decolonize movement has gained a huge amount of traction in the West—in Hollywood, in journalism, in publishing, in universities. Do you feel vindicated?
NGŨGĨ
I remember the sense of near disgust that I felt from some of the leading African intellectuals when Decolonizing the Mind (1986) came out. There was one who said something like, Ngũgĩ is asking people to drive while looking in the rearview mirror. I recall thinking that he was inadvertently betraying his opinion about the backwardness of African languages—and this person, in his English-language work, was quite progressive! Another time, I was defending the book at a conference in London, and someone tried to ask me a question in Zulu—he was trying to make the idea of speaking in African languages seem ridiculous.
Later, I was inspired by Blake’s phrase “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” That summarizes my idea of “globalectics.” When you think of your own experience as a grain of sand, then you can see the world through that grain—through your own histories, your own language, be it English or Kiswahili. It’s the hierarchical system that I detest. We don’t have to put one language higher than another.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you write your memoirs in English and your novels in Gĩkũyũ?
NGŨGĨ
I had thought that Decolonizing the Mind would be my last work in English, that from then on it would be Kiswahili and Gĩkũyũ all the way. But I felt I was leaving the debate to others, letting others define who I was and what I was doing. For example, Achebe took offense when I had quoted him as saying something about having been given English, as if it were a gift. I was only repeating what he had said, but he didn’t take it kindly.
I knew that novels in Gĩkũyũ would reach more Gĩkũyũ speakers, but I was also a professor of English, and had to demonstrate that I was part of the debate, and still productive in the language in which I taught. The memoirs, though, were really written for my children, for my grandchildren, who live all over the world.
INTERVIEWER
In Decolonizing the Mind, you state the importance of starting with where you’re from. But in Globalectics, you seem to have revised your argument.
NGŨGĨ
When I left New York University in 2002 and came to Irvine, it was to be the founding director of the International Center for Writing and Translation. I was thinking about how I could begin something new. Do I start by bringing Kenya to Irvine? I decided that it was better to think about what was already there in California. So, for our first public event, I brought Native American writers and Hawaiian writers to the campus. Then we focused on African Americans, their impact on American culture and American speech, and finally we brought in people from the rest of the world. Within two years we had invited writers from Fiji, from Samoa, from Iceland, from India—and we had projects going on in all of those countries. The idea was to see how, over time, we have all defined one another.
So, yes, I’m constantly revising my thinking—I now say, Start where you are, and then connect to the world. I recently gave a talk on decolonization at Yale, and spent a lot of time thinking about T. S. Eliot. I remember that, when I was first told that he was born in America, I was shocked. What does it mean that the author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” went to England, presumably to connect with tradition? Was there no tradition here? What about the writing systems of the Mesoamerican peoples?
I’m always struck by the architecture at Yale—it’s just like Oxford and Cambridge! I’ve been told they aged the stones with acid to make them look old. You can see the colonial hangover. Even here, the colonial process has taken people away from where they really are.
At the Brooklyn Museum, 1993. © Annalisa Teuscher. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
INTERVIEWER
You have acknowledged Conrad’s influence on you while also critiquing his racial politics. What is the role of the colonized intellectual in critiquing the colonial mindset in literature?
NGŨGĨ
Often you can see things that the reader from the colonizing country cannot see. Your perspective is different. You might notice, for instance, that Jane Austen describes one of her wealthy characters as a planter in the West Indies. Then you know that he was a slaveholder.
I love Wuthering Heights very much, and have always been intrigued by Heathcliff, a man who has no money or parents. We know that he was taken in off the streets of Liverpool. We hear that this kid is very different from the others—his coloring, even his hair.
INTERVIEWER
I see where you’re going . . .
NGŨGĨ
When I read that novel, I’m much more conscious than some readers of the fact that Liverpool was a center of slavery. It speaks to me differently from the way it might speak to someone from England. Emily Brontë doesn’t focus on it for too long, but I don’t think it’s far-fetched to believe that Heathcliff was a slave, or the child of a slave.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve heard you say that “cultural contact is like oxygen.”
NGŨGĨ
That comes from a phrase in Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire. It makes me think of how I came to value Shakespeare at the same moment I embraced my roots in Gĩkũyũ. That’s when I could see how deeply Shakespeare had transformed the English language. Before then, I hadn’t understood how much he must have enjoyed himself. That’s how I feel working in Gĩkũyũ.
INTERVIEWER
Wizard of the Crow is, I think, your masterpiece, but also a novel in which you seem to be enjoying yourself. There are elements of the carnivalesque and the satirical, even the scatological—a lot of defecation and farting. Where did that playfulness come from?
NGŨGĨ
It was a strange time. Around 1997, I was living in New -Jersey, and I went to the doctor for a checkup. I’m from a culture where you go to a doctor only when you feel a bit of pain, but in America, you go to the doctor when you’re not ill and they check everything. They diagnosed me with prostate cancer—my antigen levels were so high that another doctor gave me three months to live. The first line of Wizard of the Crow came to me as I was going home that night. I thought it would be my last novel, and I wanted to finish the whole thing within the three months, but it dragged on and on and there was nothing I could do about it. I was writing constantly. It was an obsession, more so than any other novel I had ever written.
All the time I was thinking, I must finish it, I must finish it. Ultimately it took about six years, and then I had to do a translation of it into English, so that took a few more years.
With his son, in the nineties. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
INTERVIEWER
I’m so sorry—did the cancer go into remission? Are you okay now?
NGŨGĨ
The pills they gave me were actually very good. Even today, doctors who look at my records are somewhat surprised.
INTERVIEWER
I would never have imagined that Wizard of the Crow came out of such a dark and terrifying place. The book is so funny and so carefully designed.
NGŨGĨ
It was fun to write. It made me laugh. My previous novels in Gĩkũyũ had prepared me for it, and a lot of the humor came from the language itself. Do you remember the character Tajirika, who has a disease called “If”?
INTERVIEWER
The “white-ache,” yes!
NGŨGĨ
The illness is, as you know, a word that gets stuck in his throat. In Gĩkũyũ, the word is korũo, which can mean “If only”—as in “If only I had white skin.”
INTERVIEWER
It works well in both languages. Korũo could sound like a cough, and If! If! If! like panting, or an asthma attack. I assume that when you’re writing in Gĩkũyũ, the wordplay emerges organically. When you’re translating, do you try to render the puns exactly?
NGŨGĨ
No, you have to find an equivalent, or something else that captures the same idea—you can’t do an exact translation because it wouldn’t make sense. That example was particularly difficult. In one scene, the police who are interrogating Tajirika start running away from him when he says “korũo,” because korũo can also mean “They’re coming for you.” Of course, no one would run away because someone said the word if, so, in the English version of the novel, I had to give Tajirika a few new sentences to set up the joke.
INTERVIEWER
Matigari was translated not by you but by Wangui wa Goro. Do you think your translation would have been, in some sense, closer to the original?
NGŨGĨ
I don’t know—I suspect that when you do your own translation you might become rather lazy. Goro’s translation was very good.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as fully bilingual?
NGŨGĨ
No. Gĩkũyũ is the language I feel more. English is just what I’m used to now. It’s not the language that my mothers or my father spoke. I don’t use English in the way my children who have grown up here do.
INTERVIEWER
How do you work with an editor on Gĩkũyũ texts?
NGŨGĨ
Well, there are very few Gĩkũyũ specialists, so I am usually the writer, translator, and the editor in one. The exception was when I was writing Wizard of the Crow. I gave the English translation to Erroll McDonald. He is the best editor I’ve ever had, although he was amazingly slow—painstakingly thorough. He made me see that the novel had been very unwieldy—there were entire pages he put a red line right through. I then took the cuts he had made and applied them to the Gĩkũyũ original.
INTERVIEWER
Do you research your novels?
NGŨGĨ
I may do research in the process of writing, but not beforehand. I’m more interested in the story. Once a narrative begins, it takes me to places where I have to ask questions, and I love asking people questions. Wizard of the Crow features a character who goes to study in India, and my Indian scholar friends recommended I read the Mahabharata—such a rich, incredible epic. At first I found the ethos of the book quite conservative, but then I discovered in it the story of a poor boy named Ekalavya who lives in a forest. As the story goes, he visits a lord who knows archery, and asks the lord to teach him, but the lord refuses, so the boy returns home and creates a statue of the teacher. Under the statue’s tutelage, Ekalavya becomes a better archer than even the nobles, and he goes to thank the lord, but the lord isn’t pleased. He says, “You show gratitude to your teacher by giving him something,” and the young boy says, “I’ll give you anything. You’re my teacher.” The lord demands Ekalavya’s thumb, so that he can no longer shoot. I was fascinated by this act of disabling—what I interpreted as a hobbling of the working-class people or the peasantry. I saw in it a Third World politics—the way the West disables people in Africa and Asia.
For The Perfect Nine, I consulted Wanjiku Kabira, an expert on oral tales, who knows a lot about the ogres in Gĩkũyũ stories.
INTERVIEWER
Did that book come easily?
NGŨGĨ
Almost as a revelation. When I was living in Irvine, near the Pacific Coast Highway, I would sit on the rocks and look out. Something about the vastness of the ocean made me think about my childhood, and the Gĩkũyũ origin myth struck me anew. These women didn’t have brothers, their father couldn’t have gone everywhere with them. I started to reconsider these women—how they would have had to make their own clothes and weapons, and know how to hunt and how to defend themselves against wild animals. They expressed, for me, a creative union between mind, body, and soul. They did everything—they were the original feminists. I wrote the book very quickly—in three months, perhaps.
That feeling of finishing a novel, the sense of satisfaction, is so special. It’s like no other feeling I know. What I really think, and what I talk to my children about all the time, is that when you do your first draft of a novel, your soul is in it. All the novels we write carry our souls, and this is what people relate to.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve lived here for three decades now. Are you an American citizen?
At C. L. R. James’s grave in Trinidad, ca. 2000. Courtesy of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
NGŨGĨ
No. I don’t want to lose my Kenyan citizenship. I like America, and I like that almost every community and religion in the world is represented here in one form or another. I admire its openness. I admire its checks and balances. But I don’t like American imperialism and the role that it plays in the world. The treatment of African American people here, and of black people as a whole, I find very, very disturbing.
INTERVIEWER
I read that you were harassed in San Francisco for “sitting while black” in a hotel.
NGŨGĨ
I was on a book tour, for Wizard of the Crow, and my publisher kept me in very nice hotels. I was sitting in the dining area reading the newspaper before breakfast, and a nicely dressed young man, very polite, came up to me and said, “This place is for guests of the hotel.” I asked him, “Why do you think I’m not a guest of this hotel?” and he said, “Please, you have to leave,” and so it went on. He used no abusive words, but his certainty that I was not staying there is what I remember most clearly—it scared me more than somebody calling me this or that. I came to the conclusion that if in a slightly different situation this man had possessed a gun, he would have shot me with the same certainty.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve often written about the paternalistic side of racism, that white racist certainty, in your novels. How have you managed to capture that psychology?
NGŨGĨ
I think my familiarity with it goes all the way back to Alliance’s headmaster, E. Carey Francis, a completely contradictory figure—such a product of the British Empire that he often criticized it for not meeting its ideals. He felt the Mau Mau were evil, but also understood their genuine grievances. You could see he really believed in his school and in educating African people, and he devoted his life to them. But he believed, at the same time, that an African student could never be as good as an English one.
INTERVIEWER
You write, in Birth of a Dream Weaver, about the moment at Makerere University when the scholar Gerald Moore pointed out that you had given a black female character in an early manuscript of The River Between “beautiful blue eyes.” You were so shocked that you couldn’t even hear the rest of the conversation. What has been your own process of decolonizing the mind?
NGŨGĨ
I don’t think anybody who has gone through a colonialist system can claim to be free of the effects of the colonial. All we can do is continue to fight against those tendencies. Scars on the mind take a long time to heal.
