SOURCE: Pelton, Theodore. “Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Politics of Language.” Humanist 53, no. 2 (March-April 1993): 15-20.

I am concerned with moving the centre … from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. {This} will contribute to the freeing of world cultures from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race, and gender. In this sense I am an unrepentant universalist. For I believe that while retaining its roots in regional and national individuality, true humanism with its universal reaching out, can flower among the peoples of the earth. …

—Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms

The name Ngugi wa Thiong'o may be less recognizable to American audiences than those of Nobel Prize-winning African writers Nadine Gordimer and Wole Soyinka or even Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. And yet, the life and work of Ngugi provide an excellent starting point for people who wish to achieve some awareness of the many interrelated dilemmas—cultural, political, linguistic, developmental—that beset an entire continent of people and yet remain obscure even for the vast majority of educated Americans. In fact, Ngugi—the author of 19 books of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and children's literature—is as important today as any other single literary figure in understanding the problems of postcolonial Africa.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born James Ngugi in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya. In 1967, at the age of 29, Ngugi—already the author of three critically acclaimed novels—began an address to the Fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa by shocking his audience. “I am not a man of the church,” he stated. “I am not even a Christian.” Ngugi went on to censure the church for its role in the colonizing of his native land. At the end of the speech, a quavering old man approached the front of the auditorium, shaking a cane and denouncing Ngugi for blasphemy. “And you are a Christian,” the man rather absurdly insisted. “Your name, James, is a Christian name.” Perhaps as a result of this encounter, the next novel James Ngugi published bore his new Africanized name, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, formed by joining his mother's and father's family names. It is the name he has used ever since.

Thus, to approach Ngugi the writer, one must also confront this carefully cultivated mythic presence. Ngugi sees himself not just as a writer but also as a revolutionary continuing the fight against Western imperialism—particularly the sophisticated form of economic imperialism that, he argues, has replaced traditional colonialism in his country. In his first three novels, Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967), he set out to develop a national literature for Kenya in the immediate wake of that nation's liberation from British rule. Setting his novels' plots against such historic events as the Mau Mau uprising and the subsequent day of Kenyan independence (or Uhuru) in 1963, Ngugi sought to create and establish historical legends for a nation less than half a decade old.

Ngugi was firm in his denunciation of any compromise with British colonialism—so much so, in fact, that his personality and radicalism have become as important to his stature among African writers as his works. Stories of Ngugi's fiery literary and political activism now form a kind of oral literature among students of contemporary African culture. Ngugi himself has launched a second career telling these stories in subsequent nonfiction books, as well as in lectures and readings across Europe and North America.

One of the most famous of these stories concerns his experiences with the Kamiriithu theater project. Ngugi had been persuaded by the villagers in Kamiriithu, where he lived while teaching at the nearby University of Nairobi, to begin working with the local theater group on literacy projects. Since many of the villagers didn't speak English—the language of the former colonial administration, in which Ngugi had written his first four novels—and since he had an interest in exploring the traditions of pre-colonial African expression, Ngugi decided to write and produce a play in his own regional language, Gikuyu.

This was a bold initiative. Until 1970, theater in Kenya had been monopolized by the Kenyan National Theatre, a British-based company that produced largely Western plays, in English, with British actors. The Kenyan National Theatre had also altered the traditional “space” of African theater from a less formalized outdoor setting to a more formal and Westernized indoor one. Ngugi was interested in opening up the theater to the peasantry again; he wanted to make it not just an isolated aesthetic event for the cultural elite but “part and parcel of the … daily and seasonal life of the community,” as song and ritual had once been in the Kenyan countryside.

The play which resulted from Ngugi's experiments with the Kamiriithu Theatre, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), was wildly popular. Drawing from the experiences of theater participants who had been involved in the events of the time depicted—one man who made fake guns for the play had actually made real guns for the rebels—Ngugi allowed the audience themselves to feel a vital part of the artistic creation. The Kenyan government, however, was not as enthusiastic; it withdrew the license that allowed the “gathering” at the theater. Ngugi was arrested at the end of 1977 and “spent the whole of 1978 in a maximum security prison, detained without even the doubtful benefit of a trial,” as he noted in his book Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Later attempts by others to resurrect the theater led first to a government ban on theatrical activities in the area and later to the razing of the open-air theater itself.

In cell 16 of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Ngugi began to write his fifth novel—and his first in Gikuyu. He had been raised as a speaker of the language despite attempts by the British colonial administration to install English as its language of instruction in Kenya (in the schools Ngugi attended, children were punished if they were caught speaking Gikuyu on the grounds). Until 1978, all of Ngugi's works had been written in English, but now he desired not the international audience English afforded but the local one reachable only through Gikuyu. This proved to be a formidable challenge; although British missionaries had developed a written form of the language in order to make the Bible more widely available to this audience, there was no formal literature written in Gikuyu, and native speakers were punished for attempts to write secular works in the language. By writing a novel, Ngugi was now stretching this written language system beyond any previous test, especially since it required him to standardize written Gikuyu and make it more accurately reflect the way native speakers practiced it.

As it turned out, an even more immediate challenge for Ngugi was how to actually write a book in prison when he was denied access to writing paper except for the purpose of making a confession. Ngugi solved this problem by writing on toilet paper—a seemingly impossible undertaking, but as Ngugi explained in Decolonizing the Mind: “Toilet paper at Kamiti was meant to punish prisoners. So it was very coarse. But what was bad for the body was good for the pen.”

This novel, Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross), was hugely popular, finding an audience even among the illiterate; it led, among other things, to the development of “professional readers,” who sat in bars and read aloud to the clientele until a key passage, at which point they would stop and make sure their glasses were refilled before they continued the story. But after selling as well as any English-language novel ever published in Kenya, Devil on the Cross was banned by the government. A subsequent novel written in Gikuyu, Matigari, was published in that language by Heinemann of London but was seized upon arrival in Kenya; in fact, Ngugi's translation of this novel into English is the only version legally available in Kenya today. Ngugi now lives in exile; he has taught at Yale University and Amherst College and was recently appointed professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University.

Why, the reader may be wondering at this point, did Ngugi's work so consistently run afoul of the Kenyan government? Ngugi contends that it was his choice of Gikuyu, more than any other single factor, which led both to his imprisonment and to his subsequent exile. A reader unfamiliar with African literature might be puzzled by this. Why wouldn't the Kenyan authorities wish to permit literary works written in an indigenous African language? One would think that the government of an independent African state, nearly 30 years after Uhuru, would seek both to champion its own languages as evidence of its cultural independence from the West and to celebrate its successful struggle against tyranny—in this case, the Mau Mau uprising which began its guerrilla war against Britain in 1952.

It is important to remember here that Kenya, like many other African states, is a nation whose boundaries were artificially drawn in Europe. Although the Kenyan government has never officially explained why Ngugi was detained, we can see in this an initial reason for its actions. Kenya relies upon English as a unifying force; the citizens of that country are in the paradoxical position of having as their only common language the one spoken by their former oppressors. Nor is this situation peculiar to Kenya; Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has written of this problem in Africa in general, and in his article “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” published in a 1964 issue of Nigeria Magazine, he made clear his own opposition to the use of African languages for African literature:

It is not that I underrate their importance. But since I am considering the role of the writer in building a new nation I wish to concentrate on those who write for the whole nation whose audience cuts across tribe or clan. And these, for good or ill, are writers in English.

Achebe has since modified his position, saying that he admires those writers who use African languages for their works but remains adamant about the use of English in his own. And it is important to remember that Achebe's credentials as a champion of literary Africanicity are impeccable. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is probably the best-known African novel in the United States, and one that consciously seeks to show, in Achebe's words, that “African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans; that their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty, that they had poetry, and, above all, they had dignity.” Moreover, Achebe's position on the use of European languages is more in keeping with the feelings of most African writers than Ngugi's.

Thus, the issue of which language should be used to compose a truly African contemporary literature is murky at best. Ngugi steadfastly maintains that writing in African languages is a necessary step toward cultural identity and independence from centuries of European exploitation. But, as critic David Westley has noted, the problem is historically complex: as a strategy to maintain apartheid—by definition the separation of defined racial groups—South Africa for many years encouraged African-language manuscripts, under the theory that the resulting problems of communication would make it harder for various groups to band together and collectively protest government policies.

Of course, discussions of language alone neglect the all-important issue of class, an issue to which Ngugi continually returns. The masses of peasants and workers in Kenya are largely illiterate in English, and it is precisely these people from whom the government wishes to keep Ngugi's writings. The reason is a simple one: Ngugi is an explicit and unabashed Marxist, and his works recall the revolutionary spirit of the Mau Mau rebellion which convinced the English to relinquish control of Kenya.

A little history is necessary here. While the origins of the term are controversial, Mau Mau seems to have originally been a British term to describe the small bands of guerrillas which sought to resist the domination of British settlers in the 1950s. At that time, the Mau Maus did not constitute an actual national movement. The British settlers, however, grew increasingly worried about their tenuous hold on the country; only 1 percent of the population, they nonetheless controlled all the best farmland in Kenya. Taking advantage of a change in colonial administration, the settlers began spreading horror stories of a nationwide revolution in the offing. The authorities responded with a crackdown; gradually, however, the measures taken—illegal detentions, the razing of villages, and the imposition of a 24-hour curfew—had the ironic effect of provoking more and more people, particularly Gikuyu, to join the guerrilla bands.

Soon, the tiny force that the British tried to extinguish became a substantial guerrilla army (in Gikuyu, “The Land and Freedom Army”). The national state of emergency that was supposed to last several weeks lasted for seven years; for four of these years, the so-called Mau Mau rebels fought a guerrilla war against British rule. Eventually, the British defeated this army, killing its leader, Dedan Kimathi, and establishing prison camps to “rehabilitate” captured rebels. In their attempts to make these prisoners confess their allegiance to Mau Mau (a step in the rehabilitation process), prison officials practiced horrible tortures—twisting mens' testicles, punching prisoners into incoherence, sometimes whipping them to death. When the British government itself, thousands of miles away, learned what was being carried out in its name, it decided to follow a new policy in Kenya and readied the country for independence.

However, the independence Britain had in mind was not the same as that which the Land and Freedom Army had fought for. If independence was to be granted, the British wished to yield control to a government they had themselves trained and installed—one that could be counted on to protect the landed interests in the nation. Thus, the colonial administration stepped down and a neocolonial administration—answerable not to the Kenyan people but to the economic interests that still retained actual control of the country—took its place. The Kenyan rebels returning from jail found, in the words of Anthony Howarth and David Koff in their 1973 documentary Black Man's Country, a nation that “they had helped create, but which they had no place in.”

Ngugi asserts that the Kenyan government—and other neocolonial administrations like it in Africa—are fronts for “U.S.-led imperialism,” a phrase he returns to again and again. He continually reminds us that the world is and always has been a linked unit, that the rich—be they nations or individuals—did not get that way on their own, but profited by the labor of the poor. “Over the last 400 years,” Ngugi said at a recent conference at Yale University, “the developments in the West have not just been the result of internal social dynamics but also of the West's relationship with Africa, Asia, and South America.” The so-called First World's privileged position did not come about simply by means of superior technical ingenuity or managerial skills (much as we like to laud ourselves for these things); it began with the stolen labor of slavery and continued with the enforced labor of colonial governments, working hand in hand with multinational corporations.

In sum, Ngugi argues, if today a nation enjoys wealth—particularly great wealth, as we do in the United States—it is directly linked to exploitation somewhere else in the world. This is why the Kenyan government, acting as the proxy of Western investment, will not tolerate the widespread dissemination of a revolutionary message by a fiercely committed Marxist who is also a national hero (in 1964, Ngugi published the first novel in English by an East African), through a populist medium like drama or through structures designed to empower workers (written literature read aloud to the illiterate). In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngugi describes a revealing example of the type of self-discovery which occurred during his rehearsals of Ngaahika Ndeenda:

I remember for instance how one group who worked in a particular department at the nearby Bata shoe factory sat down to work out the process and quantity of their exploitation in order to explain it all to those of us who had never worked in a factory. Within a single day, they would make shoes to the value of all the monthly wages for the entire work force of three thousand. … For whom were they working for the other twenty-nine days? They calculated what of what they produced went for wear and tear of the machinery and for the repayment of initial capital, and because the company had been there since 1938 they assumed that the initial investment had been repaid a long time ago. To whom did the rest go? To the owners in Canada.

At a time when African governments do not wish to alienate large lender nations, such rhetoric represents a real threat to any neocolonialist regime. As Ngugi himself puts it:

A writer who tries to communicate the message of revolutionary unity and hope in the languages of the people becomes a subversive character. It is then that writing in African languages becomes a subversive or treasonable offence with such a writer facing possibilities of prison, exile, or even death. For him there are no “national” accolades, no new year honors, only abuse and slander and innumerable lies from the mouths of the armed power of a ruling minority.

Ngugi's year of imprisonment seems to have had a marked impact on his writing. As he notes in Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary, he found himself analyzing the purposes of detention itself:

Political detention, not disregarding its punitive aspects, serves a deeper, exemplary ritual symbolism. If they can break such a patriot, if they can make him come out of detention crying “I am sorry for all my sins,” such an unprincipled about-turn would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few. The “confession” and its corollary, “Father, forgive us our sins,” becomes a cleansing ritual for all the past and current repressive deeds of such a neo-colonial regime.

But Ngugi abjured the “cleansing ritual.” He is determined to keep the past alive, and Detained is a scrupulous record of the wrongs done against the Kenyan people: massacres, betrayals, abuses at the hands of settlers (one of whom, incidentally, was Karen Blixen, whose own account of her time in Kenya, Out of Africa, would later become an Academy Award-winning movie starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford), arrests and interrogations, including that of the author himself. Given the systematic attempt to break his will, the energy of Ngugi's response is astonishing. In Detained, he writes:

I would remind myself that the … ruling class had sent me here so my brain would turn into a mess of rot. The defiance of this bestial purpose always charged me with new energy and determination: I would cheat them out of the last laugh by letting my imagination loose over the kind of society this class, in naked treacherous alliance with imperialist foreigners, were building in Kenya in total cynical disregard of the wishes of over fourteen million Kenyans.

When Ngugi emerged from jail, literature had a different purpose; since then, his works have had much less room for subtlety. It is as if the concentrated anger and moral outrage built up during his incarceration exploded upon his release—the blast revealing, in a flood of sudden bright light, a stark vision in which all the ambiguity or shadowing we tend to value in creative works has been forever banished.

Take, for instance, A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi's last novel before his prison term. Published in 1967, this is a novel which cannily embraces ambiguity; at the moment of Uhuru, the Kenyans of a certain village seek out a hero to speak to them. Little by little, however, they realize that all the living have somehow been compromised, that war makes a person choose between life and heroism but rarely, if ever, allows both. When Mugo, the novel's central character, is finally forced to make a speech because the assembled masses think he is a hero, he instead tells them that he is the worst of all traitors, having sold out the village leader of the Mau Mau himself. He had wished only one thing, to be left alone; in war, this is a luxury.

Published 20 years later, Ngugi's most recent novel Matigari begins with Matigari ma Njiruungi, whose name in Gikuyu means “the patriot who survived the bullets,” emerging from the forest, having finally killed Settler Williams and his assistant John Boy. The allegory is not subtle, nor is it meant to be: Settler Williams is the English oppressor; John Boy his aptly named Kenyan collaborator. Matigari roams the land seeking “truth and justice” and wishing also to reclaim the home he fought for against Williams and Boy. But Williams' and Boy's sons now own the house; they are Kenyan captains of industry who openly bribe the nation's leader, His Excellency Ole Excellence; the three of them constitute the nation's ruling authorities, who work to smash workers' strikes and suppress all dissent. Matigari's act of emerging from “the forest” recalls the Mau Mau rebels who emerged from colonial prisons; but his questions reveal him to be different from the contemporary citizens of his country, who bow silently to the friendly faced neocolonial oppression. Matigari had sworn himself to peace upon leaving the forest but begins to see that he must again pick up arms to fight for what is right.

A Grain of Wheat was a novel about a war that was presumed over. The final image of Matigari shows a young boy, Muriuki, arming himself with Matigari's weapons, readying to fight a war that is just beginning. If the earlier novel is more subtle, it must be remembered that Ngugi imagined it serving an evaluative function; a work that seeks to stir people to revolt has much less room for subtlety.

Nonetheless, such a purpose may be argued as creating not literature but propaganda. Writing in Gikuyu has undoubtedly changed the forms of Ngugi's fiction—there is more concentration on folk traditions, and the appeal is intended to be simpler and more direct. But there is a sense as well that the quality of Ngugi's fiction may have suffered. Ngugi's long-time readers were largely disappointed with Matigari; having become a political figure, some have argued, Ngugi has become less effective, perhaps even lazier, as a creative artist. Moreover, even Marxists have criticized Ngugi's politics; to many, the intellectual level at which he makes his pitch for socialism in Matigari is too simplistic, savoring too much of mere propaganda. Others have criticized his project as too naive and have accused Ngugi of willfully refusing to acknowledge the complexity of the African-languages controversy. At a conference in England, South African author Lewis Nkosi once responded to Ngugi's call for writers to use indigenous languages by shouting him down in Zulu; the point, of course, was that Ngugi could not understand what Nkosi was saying.

Committed to the use of Gikuyu for his fiction, Ngugi has continued to use English for his books of “explanatory” prose, of which there were four in the last decade: Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary (1981); a series of lectures published as Writers in Politics (1981); Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Oppression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983); and Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). This seeming need to legitimate himself to his English-language readership (practically his entire readership), combined with the unfortunate fact that his novels, written in Gikuyu, do not usually get read in that language, renders Ngugi's choice of Gikuyu more a quixotic political gesture than an actual condition of existence for his fiction. This decision has led to some strange twists of fate: having declared himself a Gikuyu-language novelist, Ngugi has been required to become an even more prolific English-language essayist, turning out nonfiction in his colonial language faster than fiction in his native one.

Ngugi has also become the leading interpreter of his own works. Now all of his fiction is fringed with the author's own marginalia: “This is how I should be read”; “These are the conditions which produced this text”; “These are the issues my texts are concerned with.” In this way, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the writer, has become inseparable from Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the figure of the unfinished revolution. Mau Mau—which Ngugi was too young to join but which his older brother joined and died serving—has always been a constant presence in his works. Now the struggle which the rebels fought and lost, gaining independence yet finding themselves shut out of the government, has been picked up again by Ngugi. This time, each of his works seems to proclaim, we will be the victors in our struggle; this time we will get back what is rightfully ours—the land and wealth taken from us by foreign exploiters.

The five years since the publication of Matigari have been one of the longest periods of publishing inactivity in Ngugi's career. In many ways, the publication of that novel seemed to end a stage in Ngugi's career—one which began with his release from prison and saw the publication of two novels in Gikuyu and several works of non-fiction in English. According to Ngugi himself, he said farewell for good to English six years ago with the publication of Decolonizing the Mind. “I have lost interest in the use of the English language,” he remarked in a recent interview in Transition.

On January 18, 1993—Martin Luther King Day—James Curry/Heinemann published Ngugi's new collection, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. The essays range from Ngugi's celebrated (some would say notorious) 1980 address to the Danish Library Association, “Her Cook, Her Dog: Karen Blixen's Africa,” to his 1990 salute to Nelson Mandela, “Many Years Walk to Freedom,” written in (and translated from) Gikuyu. Ngugi has also appeared in print as a spokesperson for Mwakenya, an underground movement which openly seeks “the establishment of a national economy, where all the resources of the land will go to the benefit of all Kenyans.” The recent political news from Kenya, however, has not been good. On Wednesday, December 20, 1992, the nation held its first democratic elections in 26 years—and, as many people had predicted, the voting was marred by widespread irregularities and abuses. The election pitted President Daniel arap Moi and his Kenya African National Union against three main rivals: Oginga Odinga of the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD)/Kenya; Kenneth Matiba of FORD/Asili; and Mwai Kibaki of the Democratic Party. Moi, “who fought tooth and nail against multiparty democracy” (in the words of Canadian journalist Jonathan Manthorpe), won a bare plurality of the votes—nearly two million out of 7.9 million registered voters—but irregularities were reported at every polling station visited by journalists or international observers. (Even worse, three million Kenyans who had recently attained the age of majority were left off the rolls of eligible voters entirely; this, according to Manthorpe, in a country of 25 million people.) The victorious Moi has explained these irregularities as merely “administrative” glitches occasioned by a massive voter turnout, but it is unlikely that this election will quiet dissent against his government.

One wonders what the future has in store for Kenya. Although it appears to be one of the most stable nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya is precariously situated. Famine and political chaos brought international military intervention in Somalia, its northeastern neighbor, and bands of Somali gunmen have already been reported fleeing into Kenya. In Sudan, on the northwestern border, civil war and famine continue; in Angola, on the continent's western coast, free elections have been held after a 16-year civil war, but the new representative government is by no means stable; in the south, 1.5 million Mozambicans have fled that strife-ridden country during its civil war; and South Africa continues its own painful, convulsive transition from an apartheid nation.

One also wonders what the future has in store for Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Will he continue to write critical prose in that largely unread language, Gikuyu? Will he write another novel in that language or in the more widely spoken Kiswahili (a language whose linguistic boundaries extend beyond Kenya)? Will he return to the theater? And, most poignantly, will he ever be able to return to Kenya?

Ngugi, as Kenya's leading cultural spokesperson, is a man dedicated to making the world aware of the oppressive regime that still rules his nation. But he is also committed to healing the continent itself of the long-standing injuries of colonization, and he believes that this healing can only come through cultural autonomy and self-determination. “I think the dividing line is really the issue of language,” he repeats endlessly, tirelessly. He does not consider it an oversimplification to suggest that European languages themselves are the final, pervasive colonizing army that will not leave his homeland. So he repeats it again:

We must avoid the destruction that English has wrought on other languages and cultures in its march to the position it now occupies in the world. The death of many languages should never be the condition for the life of a few. … A language for the world? A world of languages! The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, provided there is independence, equality, democracy, and peace among nations.