| Wizard of the Crow. Ngugi is a very unassuming artist considering all that he has achieved. Despite his intellectual prowess and acclaim, Ngugi treats everyone he meets with courtesy and respect. It is perhaps these qualities that have kept him at the forefront of writing about the post-colonial experience in Africa and around the world. Ngugi was born in Kenya in 1938 during the height of colonial rule in Kenya. "I lived through an apartheid-like existence like all Kenyans at the time," Ngugi said during an interview with The Capital City Hues. "Everything was segregated in terms of Europeans having the best land and we lived in what is here called reservations. There were schools for Europeans only; schools for Asians only; and schools for Africans. On the trains, there were sections for Europeans only, Asians only, and Africans only. Kenya was under British colonial rule from 1895-1963 when we got our independence through the Mau Mau armed resistance to British colonial rule." When he was a student at Makerere University, Ngugi was a journalist. He also wrote his first two books: Weep Not Child and The River Between during that time, beginning his writings about colonial and post colonial British rule in Kenya. Like any Kenyan, Ngugi was appalled by British rule. But after the exuberance of Kenyan independence in 1963, Ngugi also began to understand the limitations of the post-colonial government. "I've gone through the abuse of independence by the post-colonial governments," Ngugi said. "I have been imprisoned by the post-colonial government. I have been forced into exile by the post-colonial government. So that's my life up until now. Kenya lived through a period of dictatorship from 1982-2002. That's the period that forced me into exile. Now there is a new government. Nobody is in prison for speaking their own minds and nobody is in prison, jailed, or killed for speaking their own minds. So the democratic spirit is much better now." In1976, Ngugi wrote a play called I Will Marry When I Want. It was written in his native language, Kikuyu -- up until then, the Kenyan intellectual community only wrote in English -- and performed by villagers in their communities. The performances were stopped and Ngugi was jailed. "In my prison bloc, on the left was the bloc for the mentally deranged and on the other side was the bloc for those condemned to die," Ngugi said. "In prison, I really thought about the language issue very seriously, the whole relationship between African intellectuals and the language of olonization like English, Portuguese, and French. I felt it was abnormal for African intellectuals to continue doing intellectual production in the English, French, and Portuguese when the majority of our people, even within one linguistic community, did not speak any of those languages adequately. So I made a decision that from henceforth I would write my novels, my drama, and my plays only in the Kikuyu language, my mother tongue, as a way of encouraging others to write in their mother tongue. Only after that would I or others translate the works into English. In that sense, I was positioning African languages above English, French, and Portuguese." While some observers, those looking in from the outside, might view Ngugi's use of the Kikuyu language as a revolutionary act, to Ngugi, it was just an act of common sense. "It was normal for all writers in the world; to write in their mother tongues," Ngugi observed. "Only later are they translated into other languages. So I was doing what is normal. But in a colonial situation, what is often normal is turned upside down and becomes abnormal. So abnormality becomes the order in a colonial situation. Unfortunately, after independence, we normalized the abnormalities of the colonial situation. So what we thought was normal and national, now most of it was the distortions of colonialism, Africanizing or nationalizing them as African when they were not African. We were actually normalizing those abnormalities. So when a writer or intellectual like me comes around and says 'No, no, no, this is abnormal, it' should be the other way around,' we are the ones being normal. But the situation is so abnormal that it looks as if you are actually a revolutionary. So when you are writing in your own language, you are upsetting the apple cart. In essence, it isn't revolutionary because you are doing exactly what all writers do and have done. But in post-colonial situations, which have normalized the absurdities of the colonial heritage, what you do in normalizing what has been seen as normal, it is seen as a revolutionary act and you are punished for it." On some levels, the use of the British language by the Kenyan political and intellectual elite reinforced British rule one step removed in the post-colonial government. It kept the Kenyan government dependent on Britain and maintained a relationship that allowed the British to continue to benefit from Kenya's natural resources. Ngugi's use of the Kikuyu language was an act against dependence. "To claim my own language; to claim the primacy of African languages, is an act of not allowing the colonial system to be the one that is helping to define me," Ngugi emphasized. Ngugi's first novel when he was released from prison was in the Kikuyu language. "I decided instead of moaning about it, let me use the conditions in prison to actually resist," Ngugi said. "I started writing a novel in the Kikuyu language. I wrote it on toilet paper. When I left prison after one year, the novel was published as Caitaani Mutharabaini, the first modern novel published in the Kikuyu language. It was later translated into English as Devil on the Cross. But it was originally written, published, and read in the Kikuyu language." The use of the Kikuyu language -- and other African languages -- will affect how Kenya and other African countries are viewed on the world stage, according to Ngugi. "It's not a question of English, French, and Portuguese being bad languages," Ngugi stressed. "They are, in fact, very important languages. But it's a question of our relationship to our own languages. Instead of intellectual production primarily in languages other than our own, we now say our languages will be the primary means of our intellectual production and then we connect with other languages through the act of translation." On the world stage, you are expected not to come as a beggar with other people's languages," Ngugi continued. "You claim your own, then standing on your own ground, you can afford to shake hands with other people and other cultures that stand on their own ground to have a meaningful exchange of cultures. We are not talking about isolation. We are talking about the ground on which we stand in an exchange with other cultures." For the most part, Ngugi has been in exile from Kenya since 1982 when the dictatorship took power. He has spent most of this time in the United States. This has had good and bad impacts on Ngugi's writing. "It is good in that you can see from a distance the mountains and the valleys much more clearly," Ngugi observed. "But at the same time, being removed, you lose the changing of every day, especially seeing changes in language, the everyday changes that inspire writers." Ngugi's stay in the United States may have also helped him see the world in much broader terms. "I don't lose the spirit of Africa," Ngugi said about the length of his exile. "I grew up in Africa. I like to look at the world through African eyes. I don't want to lose that base, looking at the world through African eyes. But I don't want to just look at Africa. I want to look at Africa in the world and look at the world through African lives." Ngugi's latest book, Wizard of the Crow, reflects Ngugi's broader world view. It is a satire about post-colonial rule. It could be set in Africa. It could be set in Latin America or Asia. While Ngugi still has his "Asian eyes," he makes the African experience universal. "I didn't write Wizard of the Crows simply in terms of being peculiarly African," Ngugi said. "Oppression is a social phenomenon. It can happen anywhere." During the Harambee reception, Ngugi read from the English translation of the book. The audience routinely laughed at the subtle humor Ngugi infuses his literary works with. When asked if the humor loses anything when translated into English, Ngugi said there is a difference. "It's a little more humorous in the original language," Ngugi admitted. "But on the whole, the humor comes across in English in terms of people laughing at the same spot that people reading in Kikuyu would also laugh." Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow can be purchased at the Rainbow Book Cooperative, 426 W. Gilman Street. Editor's Note - During the first week of November, while attending a conference in San Francisco, Ngugi was the victim of racial profiling at the prominent hotel he was staying at. While in the hotel's restaurant, Ngugi was asked to leave by a hotel employee because the restaurant was only for registered guests. Racism still impacts the world renown. |
| Ngugi wa Thiong'o spoke at the Harambee Center Cutting edge of history by Jonathan Gramling |
 |
| To look at the life of Ngugi wa Thiong'o is to look at the history of Africa during the 20th Century. Ngugi, one of Africa's preeminent intellectuals and writers -- his books were required reading in the schools of the newly independent African countries during the 1960s -- spoke at the Harambee Center October 19 as a part of his tour promoting his latest offering, |
| Eileen Hocker (l), Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Fabu Carter Mogaka |
 |