Tireless pursuits of Kenya’s two great authors

Prof Ngugi Wa Thiong’o addresses journalists at a breakfast meeting in Nairobi Wednesday. RIGHT: Prof Micere Mugo gives a public lecture at Riara University Wednesday.

NAIROBI: In July 2004, when Africa’s greatest living writer returned to Kenya after 22 years in exile, his local publisher, without any sense of irony, organised his tour around the theme of ‘reviving the spirit.’

After all, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ever the public intellectual, would be touring different cities across East Africa giving lectures, restoring the place of imagination in our social and cultural development, as had happened through the heady decades of the 1960s and the 1970s.

In the event, it was the terror that he had fled years earlier preceded by a stint in detention without trial that would be visited upon him when he and his wife were brutally attacked.

One might talk of life imitating art as irony, a powerful tool in the creation of fiction played out and an outraged world condemned Kenya’s treatment of its revered author.

Ngugi is back in town to mark the Golden jubilee of his seminal novel, ‘Weep Not, Child,’ the book that put East Africa on the literary map and set in motion a long and fruitful career that has seen the production of several dozen works of fiction, non-fiction, plays and criticism.

Still, the theme of reviving the spirit of the past seems apt. This afternoon, between 12 and 4pm, Ngugi will return to his alma mater, the Alliance High School to deliver a public lecture. Alliance is also the locale of his second memoir, ‘In the House of the Interpreter.’

Ngugi’s tour coincides with that of another prominent Kenyan author, also domiciled in the United States and who is delivering a public lecture at Riara University this afternoon.

Prof Micere Mugo’s professional track has intersected with Ngugi’s in the past, both having served at the faculty of the University of Nairobi’s Literature Department in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The two also collaborated in the writing of ‘The Trial of Dedan Kimathi’. What’s remarkable about the play is that it sought to re-imagine the life and trial of freedom icon Dedan Kimathi and rehabilitate his place in history, nullifying the racist representations that peppered colonial literature.

Unsurprisingly, the country’s political leadership took cue and restored Kimathi to national legitimacy in 2006, immortalised in a bronze statue erected on the city street bearing his name.

In recalling Ngugi and Micere’s past, there are interesting parallels about their lives; both were hounded out of their country due to political intolerance of the time and both were using art as a tool for social change.

Micere was stripped of her Kenyan citizenship in the aftermath of 1982 coup and adopted by Zimbabwe, where she taught before migrating to the United States. For more than a year, as Ngugi writes in his prison memoir ‘Detained’, his name was substituted with his prison file number K6 77.

His sojourn abroad, first to Britain and later to the United States, would see him teach and lecture at some of the world’s top universities including Yale and New York University, before settling at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he has served as a distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature since 2002, besides directing the school’s International Centre for Writing and Translation.

SOCIAL CHANGE

For his efforts, Ngugi was recently presented with the UCI medal, the highest university commendation.

Describing Ngugi as “one of the prominent writers worldwide today,” UCI Chancellor Michael Drake hailed him as an “emblematic figure who shows and models for us how we can stand up to tyranny, adversity, oppression and not lose our human values.”

Ngugi is also an honorary member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, an exclusive club whose 250 members are picked from diverse creative fields, from architecture to music and writing and is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States. Micere’s track is similarly impressive. After leaving Zimbabwe, she taught at various American universities before settling at Syracuse in 1993, rising to the Meredith Professor in the Department of African-American Studies and Teaching Excellence Professor.

She received glowing tributes in April this year when Syracuse organised a symposium titled ‘A Tireless Pursuit,’ which celebrated her work and served as her farewell before her retirement last month.

Micere, who is serving as a distinguished visiting professor at Riara for the next 10 days, has been speaking to students and mentoring faculty. She will crown her tour with a public lecture this afternoon between 2 and 4pm titled, ‘A Home Away from Home’: A Biographical Sketch that illuminates on her experience in the diaspora over the past three decades.

Another lecture is scheduled for next Tuesday at the same institution and it reflects on Micere’s other academic interest: the politics of gender.

Ngugi will be back at the University of Nairobi next Thursday, climaxing his tour with a book signing ceremony at Text Book Centre next Saturday from 11am.