Just three years shy of entering his 90th year, world-renowned African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed on Wednesday, May 28, survived by his wife, children, and grandchildren, as well as leaving behind a giant legacy of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle on the cultural front of the African Revolution.
Born in 1938 in the town of Kamirithu, Ngũgĩ grew up in a Kenya that was still under the direct yoke of British colonialism. As such, Ngũgĩ’s life was far from peaceful or uneventful.
In the massive land grab that was part of the British colonial policy to seize territory to cultivate cash crops, Ngũgĩ’s family was one of many who were deprived of their land.
Thus the immediate and physical impact of colonialism–the murder of thousands, the expropriation of resources, and the subsequent atrocities imposed on African people–was accompanied by the destruction of African languages and culture, buttressing the physically felt colonialism with that of the colonization of the mind.
The logic of colonialism necessitated a disruption of a sense of self and way of life that culture naturally informs. This, of course, was done to prevent resistance as much as possible; though history has shown us time and again that African people are not easily cowed.
As a gifted writer in both English and Gĩkũyũ, Ngũgĩ was especially positioned to express the implications of what the suppression of African languages can mean for African people.
Ngũgĩ believed that the question of language was not solely a mechanical process of communication. As he writes in his 1986 book “Decolonising the Mind,” for Ngũgĩ, language was “both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.” It was the “collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.”
Hence, language is a living thing, changing and evolving in accordance with the development of its people. Language is an intrinsic part of a people that, when preserved, in turn tells its people’s ever-developing story.
Deeply influenced by both Karl Mark and Franz Fanon, and encountering firsthand the savagery of British colonialism, Ngũgĩ would dedicate his life and career to piercing the beating heart of cultural imperialism: the devastations wrought upon African cultures due to decades of British colonial domination suppressing and repressing any form of cultural expression among African people in Kenya and the Continent.
Ngũgĩ’s philosophy on the salient role of language was so deeply felt, it led him to the remarkable and unheard-of decision, at least at the time, to solely write in his native language of Gĩkũyũ and forever abandon the English language in any written projects he would undertake. Leaving the work of translating to English for those willing and eager to do it.
Some of Ngũgĩ’s well-known works include “A Grain of Wheat,” which is set in 1963, a few days within Kenya’s independence from Britain, and “Weep Not, Child,” while he was a student at Makerere University, which deals with Africans and white settlers in rural Kenya during the Mau Mau Rebellion.
His most incendiary work, at least to the Kenyan government post-independence, for which he was detained in December 1977, was his play “Ngaahika Ndeenda,” which translates to “I Will Marry When I Want.”
In the 1960s, Ngũgĩ was also the reason the University of Nairobi forewent English literature in favor of literature in African languages, written or oral.
For Ngũgĩ, language was a form of oppression that was part and parcel to the logic of colonial and neocolonial domination. Ngũgĩ asks, “What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”
Hence, for Ngũgĩ, it was the task of African writers to do what for African languages what “Spencer, Milton, Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of human creative endeavors.”
The development of African languages, however, must not be a task undertaken as the goal in itself. In his “African Identity is Key,” Chairman Omali Yeshitela makes this point succinctly:
“When we emancipate Africa and African people we will have a common economy. If I don’t speak Swahili or Lingala, I can learn a revolutionary language that will help me to emancipate Africa and African people. Then I’m on the road to unifying the language of Africa. So I believe the question of language is important. I believe the question of land mass is important in our work to take back Africa.”
The reality is that African people speak a variety of beautiful languages that colonialism has sought to exterminate. The variety of languages has, in turn, become a point of contention for ethnic nationalists whose conception of peoplehood does not extend beyond their ethnic group.
However, what the economic and political unity of African people promises is the development of a more common African language that commerce will necessarily require. As of today, Swahili seems the most promising.
Ngũgĩ’s life and work were a significant part and expression of the African liberation struggle. As an African writer, he did what was in his power to wage war against ideological imperialism and live up to his own call for African writers everywhere:
“Writers–particularly African writers–must return for their inspiration to the people, to the peasants and workers in their societies. I think it is important that we return to the roots in the lives of the peasants and workers. Doing so means that we shall necessarily be confronted with issues of language, for instance, and of how we can meaningfully join hands with others to transform the social conditions of our being.”
