Ngugi recalls his literary walk as Weep Not, Child turns 50

I began to write books in my second year of college, at 22, ignoring sneers from my fellow students and skepticism from most professors. Bethuel Kiplagat and Joe Mutiga were the exceptions among students, and Hugh Dinwiddy and David Cook, among the teachers. But Wanjik?, my peasant mother, had taught me never to accept limitations; whatever I achieved, she always wanted to know if it was the best that I could have done.

Although Weep Not, Child was my first novel to be published, it was actually the second after The River Between which I had conceived under the title The Black Messiah. But the two were connected. Initially I had wanted to base a novel on life under the State Of Emergency, but somehow nothing would form in my mind. Instead what stole into my mind was the story of the earlier phase of Kenya history when white settlers occupied our lands, and white missionaries, harvested our souls.

But as soon as I had handed in the manuscript of “The Black Messiah” for the East African novel writing competition on December 28, 1961, the story about contemporary Kenya that I had tried to write and failed suddenly started knocking at the door of my imagination furiously. The problem was that I did not know where or how to begin.

This might have been caused by new anxieties that gripped me. I was waiting for a response from Jonathan Cape of London to my collection of short stories which I had submitted to them on January 30, 1961. What I feared most, a rejection slip, came soon afterwards stating that “after careful consideration” they had decided not to make me an offer!

Rejection slip

I am forever grateful to both Jonathan Cape and later Hutchinsons for not publishing the collection as it was then, but at the time the rejection felt like an electric needle through the heart of my literary ambitions. In my diary I lamented the fact I had not “even 30 cents to buy a stamp.” But I also recall my inner defiance, a quality that has stood me well over the years. I wrote: Will not give up. Will strive. I’ll immediately begin a new novel!

Easier said than done. Ideas and plots would come and vanish. Outlines, however elaborate, remained just that: plans on paper. As it happened the first line of Weep Not, Child came unexpectedly.

It was during a talk by the visiting Ghanaian sociologist KA Busia, a distinguished scholar, but in politics leader of the United Party, which was in opposition to Kwame Nkrumah’s ruling Convention People’s Party.

He was talking about education.

The word education took me back to the day my mother sent me to school to get an education... My mind drifts away from Busia’s lecture, like in a dream, and flies from Uganda to Kenya.

I am back in my village in Kenya. Outside the demands for land and freedom, there is nothing that had gripped people’s minds more than dreams of school. I know I have dealt this in my novel “The Black Messiah,” still unpublished. But that one dealt with the beginnings of the Independent schools movement. That was before my time. What now comes back is the picture of the children I went to school with: the games; the laughter; the hunger; the ten-mile walk to school and back.

A distinct sentence steals into my mind: Nyokabi called him.

I scribble this on the piece of paper in front of me. But who is the him? Her fictional son, of course. Name? Njoroge. The name of the man who taught my brother carpentry was Njoroge. But this is not him; this is a boy, and his mother is offering him a chance to go to school. Nyokabi and her words are suspiciously identical with the words my mother once told me. Nyokabi, my mother, and Njoroge, me?

I wake up from my dream to a big applause. It’s the end of Busia’s lecture. I don’t even remember a word of the conclusion but I join the clapping. There’s something personal about my applause: I am really saying thank you from deep inside me. I leave Busia’s talk in a daze.

In the next weeks and months I have new companions that nobody else can see. Other characters have appeared from nowhere but they are rooted in my experience. Oh yes, Njoroge is really me and Nyokabi, my mother Wanjiku?. Really? There are a few discernible differences. I came from a polygamous household, four mothers, and several siblings; Njoroge has two mothers only, and three siblings.

But one of them is a carpenter, just like the brother I followed, and the other ended up in the mountains, a guerrilla fighter, just like the same brother I followed. It’s as if my real brother, Good Wallace, has given birth to two of himself, each phase of his life becoming a separate fictional existence. Finally, I went to through primary and secondary; Njoroge does not go to college. So the story is not about me: but the images that form have echoes of my own experience.

Why had this story refused to form when I had needed it for the monetary award? Why now with no prize in the horizon? The story may not be about me directly but it is helping me clarify the nightmare that had been my life in Kenya; it makes me feel at one with the land of my birth.

I am living the inner world of my characters when I get the invitation to the Conference of African Writers of English expression to be held in Makerere in early June, 1962.

Another prize offered itself: a chance to show the unfolding manuscript to Chinua Achebe.

I had met him briefly the year before when he visited Makerere and talked with English students. I may have mentioned “The Fig Tree” to him but I didn’t recall our having had a one-on-one. But now I had a big reason for wanting to talk to him, face to face, outside the formal seminars and plenary sessions. It had to do with the new work, what would later bear the title, Weep Not, Child.

This desire to show the manuscript to Achebe really motivated me. I had to finish the first draft, at least. I made a lot of progress, the story unfolding effortlessly, following its own logic, but the inevitable happened.

I got stuck. But I had written enough not to feel embarrassed about asking somebody to look at it. It was presumptuous of me but it never occurred to me that Achebe might simply not want to read it or even not have the time to do so.

I chose a moment after the conference had discussed his work, Things Fall Apart and Alex la Guma’s A Walk in the Night. I gave him the manuscript, some sections typed most of it, handwritten. He would read it, he said. I waited.

Towards the end of the conference Achebe returned my manuscript: he had not gone through it all, but he had read enough to see that I had a tendency of piling up on a point already made, like flogging a dead horse. And then he told me that he had already shown the manuscript to Van Milne of Heinemann. Milne later confirmed it and asked me to send them the finished manuscript.

Later it would emerge that the CIA or, rather, its money was behind the conference through the Paris-based Society for Cultural Freedom, though the leading lights of the conference, Esk’ia Mphahlele among them, were not aware of it. This spoke to the Cold War situation in which the conference and the decolonization of Africa took place.

Expressed interest

But at the time, the most I took and cherished from the conference was the fact that a publisher had expressed an interest in the book. I did not know that Achebe had already accepted to become Editorial Adviser of what would later become the Heinemann African Writers series, and my manuscript under the title Weep Not, Child would be the fourth in the series following two titles by Achebe, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy, and Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free.

Though I took the whole thing as matter of course, the significance of the moment did not escape me. Soon Kenya and East Africa would have its first modern African novel in English. As it turned out, Weep Not, Child was published on April 1964, literally a few months after Kenya had become a Republic. Thus the birth of the African English language novel in Kenya coincides with the birth of the Kenya Nation.

From then on any talk of African literature would include a mention of Kenya, my beloved country.

Will not give up; will strive, has remained my motto, thanks to Weep Not, Child just turned 50!

(This is an adaptation from Prof Ngugi’s upcoming third memoir titled: The Making of a Dream Weaver: A Makerere Memoir)

— Prof Ngugi is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English University of California, Irvine, USA.