Ngugi wa Thiong’o passes on in the US after long illness

Harassing Ngugi had become normal, he had been labelled an enemy of the State. His life was in danger by the time he fled the country.

Between December 31, 1977, and December 12, 1978, Ngugi was detained without trial at Kamiti Maximum Prison for having engaged in unspecified "activities and utterances …dangerous to the good government of Kenya and its institutions".

The worldwide ‘Release Ngugi Campaign’ catapulted the author to an international celebrity, especially after Amnesty International adopted him as a ‘Prisoner of Conscience’.

Denied a chance to teach at the University of Nairobi and in danger of getting re-arrested, Ngugi fled to exile in Europe and then settled in the US, where he lived for nearly five decades before his death on May 28 in Atlanta Georgia, aged 87.

Ngugi battled various ailments in his sunset years. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995. In December 2019 he had a triple bypass heart surgery. More so, he was struggling with a kidney ailment diagnosed in the late 1990s. 

Ngugi was a Distinguished Comparative Literature and English Professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Though he had initially viewed Kenyatta as "the Black Moses", the liberator, his opinion shifted as the new elites he led, the bourgeois, disregarded the poor – thus creating what Ngugi felt was a class-based society. It was his fight against capitalism that landed him in trouble with insiders in the Kenyatta State who had deep apprehension about Marxist views, either by academics or politicians.

Ngugi collided with the Kenyatta system over his leftist views, his denunciation of capitalism and his support of the lumpenproletariat; who are characterised in his books as the oppressed, the bottom of the ladder.

Born in Limuru in 1938, and known as James Ngugi in his first 1964 novels Weep not Child and The River Between 1964, Ngugi established himself as a writer, scholar, and social activist.

Globally, it is his discourse on language as a colonising tool that earned him a place in the decolonisation pedagogy. Various universities view Ngugi as an African guru. He has for long been regarded as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. This award eluded him in his sunset years.

A Bachelor of Arts graduate in English literature from Uganda's Makerere University, Ngugi also earned a master's degree from the UK's Leeds University. 

"Leeds shocked me, threw me into bewilderment from which I am slowly recovering. It seems to be a city that – mushroom fashion – had sprouted without a planning hand. Black soot seems to be the only clothes the buildings wear to fight off the cold," he wrote to a friend.

But Leeds gave Ngugi the academic space to write his epic work, A Grain of Wheat, which explores the themes of betrayal and sacrifice.

The novel, hailed as one of Ngugi's finest, explores the ambiguities that the society faced as it moved from colonialism to an independent state.

For years, Ngugi advocated for the decolonisation of African Literature and challenged African writers to start publishing in their own language.

He also challenged the writers to use their works to challenge colonial narratives and celebrate indigenous cultures, languages, and storytelling traditions. He argued that the continent could reclaim its lost cultural identity. He always saw African languages as an avenue to overcome linguistic imperialism and as a chance to foster a sense of belonging.

Though Ngugi did not have an earned PhD, he is the recipient of seven Honorary Doctorates. Those include a D.Litt from Albright University, Leeds, Walter Sisulu University, Dillard, and Aukland. He also has another honorary PhD from Walter Sisulu University and Carlstate University. Ngugi is also an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Letters, among other international accolades.

Ngugi's work as a writer was intertwined with his political activism. He was a vocal critic of neocolonialism, imperialism, and social injustice in Africa. His involvement in the cultural and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly during Kenya's struggle for independence and its aftermath, shaped his worldview and influenced his writing.

At only 24, Ngugi burst onto the East African literary scene through his first major play, The Black Hermit, which was performed at the National Theater in Uganda to celebrate the country's independence.

As the Tanganyika-born Trevor Whittock, one of his Makerere professors, wrote in the student newspaper Ngugi Speaks for the Continent. Though one of the British reviewers, Gerad Moore, questioned why Ngugi wrote the play in verse, another reviewer, Peter Nazareth, saw Black Hermit as the start of a tremendous literary odyssey.

As Nazareth, later a professor of Literature, would later remark: "Ngugi [was] a visionary, a political thinker, a person who keeps growing, who is persistent. It is not easy to be a novelist."

Ngugi rose like a phoenix in the world of literature. He became a prolific writer and wrote a series of short stories and a column for the Sunday Nation, As I See it with James Ngugi. As African writers emerged to claim their place with home-grown literature, and as they filled the void that had been dominated by English literary works, Ngugi found his place. But there was a singular problem: He was writing in whose language?

After the publication of Weep not, Child; Ngugi's language predicament with a foreign language was apparent. Daily Nation writer John de Villiers introduced him to the public and saw this predicament: "Slightly built James Ngugi spoke slowly, earnestly.

Only his hands were restless, seeming to flay the air in frustration when his command of the English language, as spoken, left him groping for the word or phrase that would express exactly his meaning." Kenyan scholar Simon Gikandi wrote: "We can see Ngugi making the first tenuous step into the public sphere that will come to define the rest of his life, drawing adulation from generations of readers, but also the enmity of an insecure post-colonial state."

His first novel, published in 1964, received critical acclaim, and he followed quickly with The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat in 1967.

It was after returning from Leeds and after earning accolades through A Grain of Wheat that Ngugi was appointed a lecturer in the then-English Literature Department at the University of Nairobi.

For the next ten years, Ngugi fought to erase the colonial face of the literature department.

In his book Detained: Writers Prison Diary, Ngugi traced his thoughts to 1966: "I [had] been sufficiently disturbed by the issue of languages for me to have stated in a lengthy newspaper interview at the University of Leeds, England, in 1966, that I had reached a point of crisis where I felt that I could not continue writing in English; that if writing in English and thus depriving a large section of the Kenyan masses of the results of my creative imagination was my only alternative, I would stop writing all together."

By unmasking the continued place of English over the African languages, Ngugi forced the university to place all the languages under the same pedestal. This led to the creation of the Department of Literature.

His counterparts in the struggle included Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Anyumba, and together they had written the polemical paper, On the Abolition of English Department, which opened the way for conversations in African universities on the study of African languages.

They posited: "If there is a need for a 'study of the historical continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African? Why can't African Literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?" While this appeared in his 1969 collection, Homecoming, he would follow this theme of literary emancipation with his epic work Decolonising the Mind (1986), Moving the Center (1994), and the 1998 work Penpoints Gunpoints and Dreams.

Ngugi spent his childhood in Kamiriithu, a village near Limuru. It is in Kamirithu that he tested his touch with the grassroots as he organised a community theatre as a space to give people a voice. The building of the Kamirithu theatre where the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Mary when I Want) was staged became a site of protest, much to the chagrin of the provincial administration in Central province.

On the weekend of November 27, 1977, the residents of Kamirithu were informed that the permit to stage the Kikuyu play had been withdrawn. For a month, they had turned up in huge numbers – and from various regions – to watch the play that was the talk of the town, a play that recounted their struggles.

That was until the chairman of Kamirithu Community Centre, Ngigi Mwaura, received a letter demanding they cease staging the play until a fresh permit was issued. The order had come from Simeon Nyachae, the Central Provincial Commissioner.

Former Central Provincial Commissioner David Musila [then a District Commissioner in Kirinyaga] would later supervise the demolition of Kamirithu theatre and construction of a polytechnic. Instead, he would later write that though he "knew the government was uncomfortable with the 'revolutionary' ways of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and his work," he has "[to date] never understood what dangers the Government saw in the play."

As the new Central PC, Musila floated the idea of a polytechnic to erase Kamirithu as a Ngugi's site of protest. "I personally supervised the construction of Kamirithu Polytechnic. The President also visited the site when the institution was nearing completion, and he was very pleased with our efforts," he wrote in his autobiography.

Ngugi was now a hunted man with the destruction of his theatre and detention. "My detention order was signed by then Vice-President Daniel arap Moi on December 29, 1977."

He then criticised the Weekly Review for "speculating" about his detention. "What's surprising is that The Weekly Review saw it fit to repeat the speculation even after my release," lamented Ngugi in his book, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary.

Ngugi never understood why Kamirithu was destroyed, and he posed that question in Detained: "What was wrong with Kamirithu peasants and workers wanting to change their lives through their own collective efforts instead of always being made passive recipients of Harambee charity meant to buy peace and sleep for uneasy heads?"

Ngugi would become a superstar within the walls of Cell 16 in Kamiti. It was a walk he never forgot: "As I am led into cell 16, literally opposite the chief warder's office, I kept on wondering if I will be the sole occupant of this doleful place, presided over by a youthful-looking superintendent and a jelly-fleshed warder. No other human sight, no sound.

Amidst a sepulchral silence, the warder ushers me into my new residence and he locks the door from the outside. He then stuffs a piece of blanket into the slit on my door so that I cannot see anybody, and nobody can see me. Then suddenly, the sepulchral silence is broken by wild shouts, 'It's Ngugi, it's wa Thiong'o', in Gikuyu and Kiswahili. 'Wiyuumiririe! Jikaze!"

Cell 16 was designed to torture its residents mentally: "[The] isolation block wedged… between the block for madmen and the block for those already condemned to hang…."

That was to be Ngugi's life from then on. Support would come in torrents from other detainees. In Kamiti, he joined other Kenyatta detainees, including Koigi Wamwere, Martin Shikuku, and Wasonga Sijeyo, who gave him a comb and a pair of sandals.

The Release Ngugi Campaign mobilised public support through petitions, protests, letters to government officials, and international solidarity events. Ngugi was finally released in 1978 following intense pressure.

While in detention, Ngugi wrote his first significant work in Kikuyu, Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross), published in 1980 while Ngugi was in exile. Ngugi says he wrote the draft on toilet paper – since there was no writing material. The novel is a satirical critique of capitalism, corruption, and neocolonialism in post-independence Kenya. He later wrote several other works covering themes of power, resistance, and cultural identity in his novels Matigari (1986) and Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), published in 2006.

Ngugi's attempt to get back his job would illustrate the academic roadblocks that had been put in place. As Ngugi recounted, the university was turned into an "instrument of suppression." Shortly after his release, Ngugi sought to return to his position as an associate professor in Literature at the University of Nairobi.

Ngugi wrote to Vice-Chancellor Dr Josephat Karanja: "I was released from detention in December 1978. I have been resting at home in Limuru for the last month and a half. I would like to know the university's position and attitude toward my resuming my teaching duties at the university."

He also appraised the chairman of the University Academic Staff Union after failing to get feedback from Dr Karanja, "not even an acknowledgement." He said, "I may point out that I did not resign from the University and that up to now, I have not been formally dismissed from the university."

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Dr Karanja had been told that Ngugi's detention was an "act of State" and that all contracts between him and any state institution were dissolved upon his detention. The university had sent his terminal dues to his wife, Nyambura, for six months.

"Your wife was given this information verbally by the Registrar and the Finance Officer in the Registrar's Office," the University Registrar would tell Ngugi. "In effect, therefore, your contractual relations with the university were ended by the Act of State."

With nowhere to go, and with police continuing to harass him, Ngugi left the country for self-exile. But before he left, the question had been raised in Parliament: Can the (Minister) take steps to ensure that people, such as Professor Ngugi, who are of world eminence, with training that can help our country, are not allowed to go and spend their lives in exile and contribute to the development elsewhere instead of contributing to the development of our own people?

Maina Wanjigi, an assistant minister, replied that they were "keen to have Professor Ngugi teach in our university as anybody else, but as I have said, there are two sides of the coin which must be reconciled.”

In exile, Ngugi left an indelible mark.