By Sunny Awhefeada
There are people you think would never die. The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o who died on 28 May, 2025 was one. But, did Ngugi, as he was fondly called, really die? Ngugi in the fullness of his time became an idea and ideas don’t die! He was the idea that limned Africa’s postcolonial condition and bequeathed humanity a rich tapestry of narratives and phenomenally insightful essays. Ngugi lived by the word. As a journalist, university teacher and writer, the word was core to Ngugi’s life. Together with Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi deployed the novel to dredge the African experience or predicament as my great teacher Professor Romanus Egudu puts it. The trio in their scribal engagement accounted for the memory of Africa. Historians have captured the essence of the colonial predicament. But to come to terms with the range, depth and full implication of what colonialism did to Africa we must turn to Achebe, Ngugi and Armah. While history books chronicle incidents in cold and unemotional prints, the novelists breathed life into the events that happened to our past and how they shaped our today. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, recreated the past and enabled us to grasp the enormity of what happened to us. Beyond this, the trio dispelled western stereotypes and justification for the colonial subjugation of Africa.
I didn’t encounter Ngugi as Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I encountered him as James Ngugi. The year should be 1984 or 1985. His first published novel, Weep Not, Child, was in the Literature syllabus and our seniors who read it talked a lot about Njoroge. We were enthralled by their rendition of the content of the novel and waited for an opportunity to read it. And read it we did. The encounter with Weep Not, Child at that impressionable age transported us to another clime and an earlier time. The narrative was so engrossing that we imagined and thought we were Kenyans resisting colonialism. We felt revulsion at the evils of colonialism, the theft of land by the colonialists, the brutalization of the people and the ensuing mau mau war. We admired Njoroge. We saw his father Ngotho and wives Nyokabi and Njeri as well as his brothers, Boro, Kamau, Kori and Mwangi. They suddenly became like people in our homestead and we identified with their struggles. There was Jacobo whose daughter Mwihaki was Njoroge’s sweetheart. There was Mr. Howlands the white settler. The novel depicts the grimness of Kenyans’ experience of colonialism manifesting in dispossession, exploitation, marginalization, dehumanization, hopelessness as well as violence and death that came with resistance. The publication of the novel in 1964 was facilitated by Achebe whom Ngugi then James met at an African writers’ conference at Makerere in 1962. Ngugi was then an undergraduate. Despite the story’s traumatic plot and devastating subject matter many young readers found the novel’s prologue, excerpted from Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night” which provided the title, interesting. The arresting lines are: “weep not, child, weep not, my darling/with these kisses let me remove your tears/The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious/They shall not long possess the sky”. Our impressionable minds not only found the romantic lyricism of the lines appealing, it was enthralling and therapeutic as if it made up for the dastardly manifestations of colonialism.
The next novel of Ngugi we read enthusiastically after Weep Not, Child, was The River Between which was said to have been written before the former. Weep Not, Child can be read as a sequel to The River Between in which Ngugi depicts a society riven in two by modernity and tradition. Depicting the corrosive essence of colonialism the story navigates two communities Kameno and Makuyu and runs on a narrative spin anchored on binary oppositions. Weep Not, Child and The River Between make up Ngugi’s juvenilia. Significant as both novels are in the story they tell, they remain aesthetically unprepossessing. It is in his third novel A Grain of Wheat that Ngugi’s panache and effulgence as a great novelist manifested. I encountered A Grain of Wheat under the tutelage of a rigorous teacher of African Fiction Professor Tony Afejuku at the University of Benin. Professor Afejuku pronounced Ngugi with an authoritative emphasis and took my class through the gamut of his imaginative enterprise and the African condition. By the time of my reading nay studying, A Grain of Wheat, I have had considerable understanding of colonialism and the mau mau struggle. I was then able to not only understand, but interrogate the import of history and politics in Ngugi’s novels. A Grain of Wheat is best rated among Ngugi’s novels. It is at once a novel that looks to the past, interrogates the present and foretells the future. Elegantly written by deploying a multiplicity of narrative strategies, the novel locates its subject matter around the circumstances leading to the independence of Kenya in 1963. As the dawn of independence approached it was revealed that the character, Mugo, celebrated as the hero of the resistance actually betrayed the leader of the struggle. The novel packs into its alluring pages the motifs of colonialism, nationalism, betrayal, heroism and disillusionment. I wrote my final year project on A Grain of Wheat.
Another remarkable teacher, Professor Remy Oriaku, enacted the epiphany of my mature evaluation of Ngugi as a postgraduate student at Ibadan. Beyond the thematic reading of the novels, Professor Oriaku took us through the grid of Ngugi’s theoretical postulations which adumbrate Pan-Africanism, cultural hegemony and resistance, language and identity, philosophy, power, politics, history, ideology and polemics. As he calmly expostulated on Ngugi’s submissions he gave examples matching titles of essays with thematic slants of the novels. So, side by side we read the novels: Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1986); then the collections of essays Homecoming (1972), Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of a Pen (1983), Decolonizing the Mind (1986), etc. The dust laden, but rich library of Ibadan’s Institute of African Studies had these books on the shelves and I got immersed in them. That immersion in Ngugi’s writings banished hunger, anxiety and distractions. It was an intellectually stimulating and exultant moment of embracing Ngugi’s radical, revolutionary and humanizing thoughts. Ngugi’s corpus of writings was prodigious and was far larger than the foregoing. He also authored plays and memoirs.
In rejection of imperialism and Eurocentric sensibilities he jettisoned “James” the name I knew him with when I first encountered him. He went further to take the courageous step of writing only in Gikuyu, a decision that reduced his readership. He was detained for what the Kenyan government saw as incendiary writings. He wrote Petals of Blood on toilet paper while in detention. Haunted by the postcolonial apostates he had to flee the Kenya that he loved so much. He found a haven in the United States of America which is the center of the west he remonstrated against in his writings. An attempt at homecoming at the turn of the millennium saw him and his wife brutally attacked. That led to a final farewell to Kenya. Ngugi died in America instead of Kenya. He has also been cremated. His fate as an African writer who railed against the west, imperialism and neocolonialism yet lived and died there reflects the tragedy of what befell Africa after independence. African leaders betrayed the continent and the people on whose side Ngugi ranged. This betrayal is reflected in A Grain of Wheat which he dedicated to “the people of Kenya who now see all that they fought for being put on one side”. Ngugi died far away from the land of Gikuyu and Mumbi. Ngugi lived long, but his passage was un-African. No canons were fired at his death and contrary to Jonhson Adjan’s wish there were no drinks at his funeral. Ngugi missed the condition of African ancestor-ship. With his death in America and cremation will he return to Africa in his next reincarnation? Ngugi wrote in Kikuyu and I here say my farewell to him in Urhobo, akpo ke defa!
