Ngugi's pen liberated the African's mind

The East African Standard (Nairobi)

http://allafrica.com/stories/200312220314.html

ANALYSIS

December 22, 2003

Posted to the web December 22, 2003

Dauti Kahura

Nairobi

Two decades after Ngugi wa Thiong'o set off on a self-imposed exile in
London, he is still the most discussed, the most read, the most written
about and the most controversial literary figure in the country.

For the 21 years Ngugi has been away, he has evoked different sentiments
from friend and foe.

His critics accuse him of abandonment, betrayal and disillusionment - to
borrow from the pet themes brought out in his books - because of his
preference for the West as his base.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

And many of his admirers feel that Ngugi should have returned home a long
time ago to help build the nation.

They argue that the dictatorship he has been so critical of ceased to exist
many years back, yet he has continued to shun his motherland.

To some extent, some of his critics feel that the scholar has something up
his sleeve, he is not genuine in his continued stay abroad ostensibly
because of bad governance in his home-country. The doors, they say, are
wide open for him to return, yet he has kept off.

On a more philosophical plane, many Kenyans have tried to understand, most
of them without success, exactly who Ngugi wa Thiong'o is. In respect of
his works and disposition as an intellectual, they ask: "Who is Ngugi and
what does he represent? Is Ngugi a cultural Marxist? Is he a Kikuyu
chauvinist? Is he a nationalist? Or is he an internationalist?"

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that Ngugi's contribution to the world
of literature, both locally and abroad, occupies a place among the literary
heavyweights of the world.

In April 2003, South African President Thabo Mbeki, extrapolating on the
importance of a cultural renaissance in the context of the New Partnership
for Africa's Development (Nepad), referred specifically to Ngugi's crusade
in promoting indigenous knowledge through African languages as the template
from which Africa will advance its holistic development strategy.

Since July 2002, Ngugi has been the Distinguished Professor at the
International Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of
California in Irvine (UC-I), the largest translation centre in the world.

Karen Lawrence, Dean of the School of Humanities at University of
California, said of the writer after accepting his credentials: "To have
someone of Ngugi's prominence as the Centre's first director will bring
immediate visibility and stature to our activities in support of writing
and translation.

"He is a major writer and public intellectual, who has helped shape
critical debates about language, culture and politics. He is one of the
founders of modern African literature and an important theorist of post-
colonialism."

Born 65 years ago an the Gitogoothi village, Limuru, Ngugi was catapulted
to fame through his early novels, such as Weep Not Child, The River Between
and a compilation of his short stories, Secret Lives.

But it is his masterpiece, A Grain of Wheat, a melancholy text that
captures the vicissitudes of a country (Kenya) on the threshold of
independence that brought Ngugi's literary genius to the fore in the true
Conradian tradition, and established him as one of Africa's master
storytellers.

Seven years after he began penning his great socialist novel, Petals of
Blood, it was eventually published in 1977 and launched by the current
President Mwai Kibaki, then the Finance Minister.

Described as a novel that truly made Ngugi a giant of African literature,
it at the same time internationalised the sleepy town of Limuru in the
world of literature.

To date, many of Ngugi's works have been translated into more than 30
languages. Many of his admirers have always wondered whether Ngugi was not
the classic case of the prophet derided at home but exalted in foreign land.

Professor Charles Cantalupo has described Ngugi as a writer who has been
feted everywhere in the world but his own home.

"Since his exile in 1982, the eloquence of Ngugi's novels, essays and plays
has rung out and echoed in nearly all the geographical and intellectual
centres in the world of arts and letters, with the tragic exception of
Kenya itself."

True to Prof Cantalupo's assertion in 1994, more than 200 literary scholars
from all over the world met at USA's Penn State University, Berks Campus,
for three days to celebrate the works of Ngugi.

Considered by his contemporaries to be one of the greatest writers to come
from Africa, Ngugi was the focus and the idol at the Penn conference, the
largest ever convened to discuss a living modern Africa writer.

At the jamboree, where Ngugi also read from his works, he was summed up
thus: "Ngugi wa Thiong'o is of course best known to the world as a novelist
of extraordinary accomplishments and vision, whose current work fully
matches those of such modern African giants as Naguib Mahfouz, Wole
Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer."

Nothing could be truer. In West Africa, a region that has produced
literature greats such as Achebe, Nobel laureate Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah,
Sembene Ousmane, Elechi Amadi, Ama Ata Aido and Mariama Ba, among others,
Ngugi's texts are compulsory in the study of African literature at the
university level.

Likewise, in southern Africa, a region that produced this year's winner of
the Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee, past laureate Gordimer and
other African literary luminaries, like Jack Mapanje, Chenjerai Hove,
Dambudzo Marechera, Njabulo Ndebele, Ezekiel Mphahlele and Alex La Guma,
the study of African literature is considered incomplete without Ngugi's
works.

Recently, Ngugi was honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
as one of its eminent members. Very few people have been so honoured, more
so non-Americans.

The fact that Ngugi was accepted into the hallowed corridors of the academy
attests to the esteem with which he is held by the Americans.

The people who sit in his board at the Institute at UC-I include Jacques
Derrida - a French philosopher considered to be the modern-day Descartes,
Gayatari Spivak, a globally acclaimed Indian literary scholar, currently
teaching at Harvard University and Soyinka.

A recipient of many world-class literary prizes, from the UNESCO prize to
the most recent Nonino International prize executed by former Soviet Union
President Mikhail Gorbachev, Ngugi's name has, in the recent past, been
mentioned as a possible nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature.


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