Ngugi wa Thiong’o beloved to bop. He beloved it greater than the rest – much more than writing. Nicely into his 80s, his physique slowed by more and more disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would stand up and begin dancing merely on the considered music, by no means thoughts the sound of it. Rhythm flowed via his toes the best way phrases flowed via his fingers and onto the web page.
It’s how I’ll at all times keep in mind Ngugi – dancing. He handed away on Could 28 on the age of 87, abandoning not solely a Nobel-worthy literary legacy however a mix of deeply revolutionary craft and piercingly authentic criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do higher and push more durable – as writers, activists, academics and other people – in opposition to the colonial foundations that maintain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, the place the free affiliation of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made potential the liberty to suppose and communicate “from the center” – one thing he would at all times describe as writing’s biggest present.
Ngugi had lengthy been a constitution member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favorite by the point I first met him in 2005. Attending to know him, it shortly turned clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his educating, which in flip was umbilically tied to his political commitments and lengthy service as one in every of Africa’s most formidable public intellectuals.
Ngugi’s cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and chortle hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his physique and soul as a toddler, younger man and grownup victimised by successive and deeply intertwined methods of criminalised rule.
The homicide of his deaf brother, killed by the British as a result of he didn’t hear and obey troopers’ orders to cease at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his different brothers on reverse sides of the colonial order throughout the ultimate decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational actuality of violence and divisiveness as the dual engines of everlasting coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.
Greater than half a century after these occasions, nothing would arouse Ngugi’s animated ire greater than mentioning in a dialogue the transitional second from British to Kenyan rule, and the truth that colonialism didn’t depart with the British, however relatively dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.
As he turned a author and playwright, Ngugi additionally turned a militant, one dedicated to utilizing language to reconnect the advanced African identities – native, tribal, nationwide and cosmopolitan – that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the earlier seven many years.
After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was shortly declared a voice who “speaks for the Continent”. Two years later, Weep Not Little one, his first novel and the primary English-language novel by an East African author, got here out.
As he rose to prominence, Ngugi determined to surrender the English language and begin writing in his native Gikuyu.
The (re)flip to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not simply of his profession, however of his life, as the power of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to succeed in his compatriots in their very own language (relatively than English or the nationwide language of Swahili) was an excessive amount of for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a 12 months with out trial in 1977.
What Ngugi had realised when he started writing in Gikuyu, and much more so in jail, was the truth of neocolonialism as the first mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn’t the usual “neocolonialism” that anti- and post-colonial activists used to explain the continued energy of former colonial rulers by different means after formal independence, however relatively the prepared adoption of colonial applied sciences and discourses of rule by newly unbiased leaders, a lot of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi preferred to level out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture below the British rule.
Thus, true decolonisation may solely happen when individuals’s minds have been free of overseas management, which required first and maybe foremost the liberty to write down in a single’s native language.
Though hardly ever acknowledged, Ngugi’s idea of neocolonialism, which owed a lot, he’d often clarify, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and different African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns within the academy and progressive cultural manufacturing by virtually a era.
Certainly, Ngugi has lengthy been positioned along with Edward Stated, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak because the founding era of postcolonial thought and criticism. However he and Stated, whom he’d incessantly talk about as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British author Joseph Conrad, shared the same all-encompassing deal with language, whilst Stated wrote his prose largely in English relatively than Arabic.
For Stated and Ngugi, colonialism had not but handed, however was very a lot nonetheless an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived actuality – for the previous via the ever extra violent and in the end annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter via the violence of successive governments.
Ngugi noticed his hyperlink with Stated of their widespread expertise rising up below British rule. As he defined in his afterword to a lately revealed anthology of Egyptian jail writings since 2011, “The efficiency of authority was central to the colonial tradition of silence and concern,” and disrupting that authority and ending the silence may solely come first via language.
For Stated, the swirl of Arabic and English in his thoughts since childhood created what he referred to as a “primal instability”, one which may very well be calmed totally when he was in Palestine, which he returned to a number of instances within the final decade of his life. For Ngugi, whilst Gikuyu enabled him to “think about one other world, a flight to freedom, like a chook you see from the [prison] window,” he couldn’t make a ultimate return dwelling in his final years.
Nonetheless, from his dwelling in Orange County, California in the US, he would by no means tire of urging college students and youthful colleagues to “write dangerously”, to make use of language to withstand no matter oppressive order wherein they discovered themselves. The chook would at all times take flight, he would say, if you happen to may write with out concern.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
