Literature is a dancing mask, not one story bound in a cultural straitjacket

Late author Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o. [File]

As a young university student slightly more than two decades ago, I wrote in an earlier incarnation of this page what  I thought was a stinging criticism of the then fixation with Ngugi wa Thiong’o and other older writers back then. I touched several raw nerves at a time when critics were outdoing themselves in condemning publishers, panels that selected set books for high school and just about everybody for according preference to older, well-known writers at the expense of new ones.

While today I strongly believe we are not doing enough to identify and nurture upcoming talent, especially in the literary field, allow me to share the words of one Nderitu Ciuri. After reading my piece back then, Ciuri — I don’t know him — wrote back a small piece that ended in a few words that will follow me all days of my life and perhaps beyond the grave. “By trying to belittle Ngugi,” Nderitu wrote, “Munene runs the risk of belittling himself.” Crisp, bare knuckle and delivered as coldly as what we used to call a ‘sucker punch’.