Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s two weeks of enchantment

“You are always on the outside. You begin to create an imaginary home — you think about it all the time. - Ngugi wa Thiong’o

NAIROBI: Africa’s most famous living author Ngugi wa Thiong’o leaves the country this evening to continue his global tour, heading out to Latin America and later the Caribbean, only hours after delivering his last public lecture aptly titled, Planes Must Fly.

Drawing on a metaphor of Nyeri mechanic Maurice Gachamba, whose lofty vision of innovation was clipped by an overzealous technocrat in the 1970s, the lecture was received with thunderous applause that threatened to lift the roof off the Taifa Hall as University of Nairobi chanted songs of praise.

“From the moment I entered the Department of Literature, it’s like I had entered an enchanted forest,” Ngugi said, hailing the warmth and generosity of spirit that lurked everywhere he went.

He spoke during a colloquium dedicated to his work at the University of Nairobi, and which preceded the lecture. During the lecture, marking 50 years of the publication of his seminal novel, Weep Not, Child, Ngugi marvelled at the generosity of spirit that contrasted his homecoming 11 years ago, when he and his wife were brutally attacked by armed gunmen in the heart of the city.

Neither was it lost on the author about the political transformations in the country. “Jomo Kenyatta sent me to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison,” Ngugi said of his 1977 detention without trial. “Moi sent me into exile. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House.”

And what a prophetic, if ironic twist to Ngugi’s story: the red carpet was rolled out for him at State House this week, calling to mind the coded message that he received in July 31, 1982.

On that day, a contact warned him he would receive “red carpet treatment” should he return to the country, which forced him to extend his three-week book tour in London to 22 years in exile.

Ngugi paid homage to that season of pain in London when he visited Eastleigh High School, hosted by Kamukunji MP Yusuf Hassan, with whom he and others helped found and directed activities of the Release Political Prisoners lobby in the early 1980s.

The depth of their friendship was evident to all; Ngugi gave an emotional appreciation of Yusuf, hailing his support during those bleak days in London, and where they reportedly met every day, for four years.

Ngugi succinctly captured the pain of exile in an interview with Bronwyn Mills, writing for the online journal, Frigate.com in 2000.

“You never have a sense of belonging,” Ngugi said. “You are always on the outside. And then you begin to create an imaginary home — you think about it all the time.... In a way, one does not face up to the reality of one’s new surroundings.”

“Indeed, in order to feel connected, I try to reach home by writing, by having a dialogue with home.... Home is still part of the imagination and writing helps to make it more real.”

Ngugi amplifies this sense of displacement in an essay in his collection, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams; Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, likening exile to prison:

“Exile is a way of moving the writer from the territorial confinement, where his acts of resistance might ignite other fields, into a global ‘exclosure’. The hope is that his actions from this ‘exclosure’, whatever they are, will not directly affect those confined within the vast territorial enclosure...”

Mass uprisings

One might argue that exile is an extension of the colonial state, where those agitating for African rights were removed from among their people and support base deposited in faraway lands, like the 1922 deportation of Harry Thuku to Kismayu; Me Katilili’s removal from the Giriama and exile in Kisii, or even the Talais’ removal from Kericho and their despatch to Gwasi island in Nyanza.

Ngugi ended his exile in 2004 but continues to live and work in the United States, serving as distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. This week, he was urged to return home by President Kenyatta when he hosted the author and his publisher and family of writers, Mukoma, Nducu and Tee, on Monday.

Uhuru said Kenya had changed, and that the country needed people with skills to invest in its future. A sign that their talks had found traction, Ngugi was again invited to State House on Tuesday for one-on-one discussions with the Head of State.

Whether the author heeds the call and returns home to spend his sunset years, only time will tell. What’s evident for now is that the country is poorer without one of its most prominent sons, a truly global academic and one of world’s most important writers.

Before his trip to Kenya, Ngugi was in New York at PEN World Voices Festival, before heading out to Europe for more literary events.

He was in Munsre, Germany, before moving on to Italy and then France.

From Nairobi, he is scheduled to fly out to Rio de Janeiro and then fly on to Barbados in the Caribbean where he is expected to deliver the George Lamming Distinguished Lecture at the University of West Indies, Mona.

The lecture is a reconnection of sorts with Lamming, one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated authors best known for his ground-breaking novel, In The Castle of My Skin.

Ngugi’s MA dissertation at Leeds University was devoted to Lamming’s work, part of which was eventually incorporated in his first collection of essays, Homecoming.

In an address delivered in June 2003 at the University of West Indies, Mona, Ngugi hailed Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin as emerging “at the high noon of anti-imperialism, the forcible entry of the masses into history. His work is simultaneously a product, a reflection, and a celebration of a people making history.”

Ngugi elaborated: “Even the date of its publication, 1953, marks a great moment in the praxis of decolonisation. It was a time pregnant with the tension between what had been a century of European imperial ascendancy in the globe, with French and British Empires at the helm, and what was about to be the redrawing of the power map of the world by the forces of decolonisation.

“This redrawing had already started with India’s independence in 1947, the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the defeat of the French in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the start of the Mau Mau armed challenge of the British colonial state in Kenya in 1952, and a similar armed challenge against the French in Algeria.

There was also Ghana’s independence in 1957; the initiation of the Cuban revolution in 1956; the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States, marked by the now-famous act of Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white person in Alabama in 1955; not to mention the workers’ movements in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, often marked by general strikes and mass uprisings.”

Ngugi’s encounter with Lamming’s writing in the 1960s would foment ideas that would crystallise in what’s known in literary studies as the Nairobi Revolution that placed African literature and its disasporas at the centre of scholarship and evolved into a postcolonial literary theory, of which Ngugi remains its most visible and eloquent exponent.

He referred to this experiment during his lecture as proof that where Kenyans have room to dream, they, too can make a contribution to the world if let their planes fly.

— Dr Kimani, an author and critic, is a (designate) faculty member at Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications.