‘TO GET IT RIGHT, YOU’VE TO WRITE’
A titan of world literature from Africa, Ngugi wa Thiong’o who was in India this week, talks of language, politics and his love for the Mahabharata
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a titan of world literature, was born in a colonised Kenya in 1938. Along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Ngugi is one of the pillars of African literature. Ngugi’s book Weep Not, Child, published in 1964, was the first East African novel in English. Kenya’s independence turned Ngugi into an activist-writer. A bitter critic of the colonial British government, he did not spare the governments that followed Kenya’s independence in 1968. His novels, plays and essays on the land, labour and language questions of his country and his continent turned writers like him into the Daniel Arap Moi government’s ‘Opposition’. Moi put him in jail for a play in 1977. He was released a year later. Between 1986 and 1996, Ngugi’s novel Matigari, written originally in Gikuyu was banned; rattled by the buzz around the book, the government had actually first issued an arrest warrant against ‘Matigari’ who it thought was a real person.
Currently, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, USA, Ngugi has been in exile from Kenya since the early ’80s. He was in India this week for the ILF Samanvay Translations Series 2018, held in collaboration with Seagull Books. Ngugi spoke to Hindustan Times a few days before the event. vis-a-vis the British but not in comparison to Africans. Africans were the third class. This racial hierarchy of dominance was encouraged as a policy. Trains had segregated compartments. There were compartments marked ‘Europeans-only’ and ‘Indians-only’. It was understood we were the rest, and the poorest. They didn’t even mark ‘Africans-only’ for us. Despite this separation, there were Indians who played an important role in Kenya’s struggles. Growing up, I read Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen. ‘To be or not to be…’ [Hamlet]…. ‘Please sir, I want some more…’ [Oliver Twist, Dickens]. How can one not be affected by their power? But what I was questioning was the centrality of English literature in our lives, which was in Africa the language of power. Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written plays, memoirs, short stories, novels. He is also a theorist of post-colonial literature. A pick of his best works: imperialism as being driven by racism. The idea that my god is more of a god than your god is ungodly –– the same applies to languages. It is anti-language to claim and act as if one language is higher than others. What I would like to see is more translations between African languages, and of course translations from African languages to other languages and from other languages into African ones. I describe translation as the language of languages.