0:09

Hello

0:11

and welcome to the History of Africana Philosophy

0:14

by G.K. Jeffers and Peter Adamson, brought

0:16

to you with the support of the King's College London Philosophy

0:19

Department and the LMU in Munich, online

0:21

at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's

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episode, Afrophone Home,

0:26

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Way

0:30

back when we launched into the second of the three

0:32

parts of this series of podcasts on Africana

0:34

philosophy, we noted that we were shifting

0:37

our attention from philosophy carried on in

0:39

indigenous African languages on the African

0:41

continent, to philosophy carried

0:44

on by both continental and diasporic Africans

0:47

in European languages. Slavery

0:49

and colonization are so important to understanding

0:52

the modern intellectual production of African and

0:55

African-descended peoples, that someone

0:57

who expects Africana philosophy in the modern

0:59

period to be produced mainly in indigenous

1:01

African languages is someone who evidently

1:04

needs to be educated, not just about

1:06

Africana philosophy, but about the modern history

1:08

of the world.

1:10

Once this context is clear, it becomes

1:12

easier to appreciate the importance of firsts,

1:15

who were the first Africans to publish their thoughts

1:17

or express themselves artistically in European

1:20

languages like English.

1:22

Back in episode 33, for instance, we

1:24

looked at Phyllis Wheatley, the first Africana

1:26

writer to publish a book of poetry in English,

1:29

and for good measure one of the first American women of

1:31

any background to publish a book of any kind. When

1:34

the Kenyan subject of this current episode published

1:37

his first book, Weep Not, Child,

1:39

in 1964, he became the first East

1:42

African to publish a novel in English. You

1:45

might wonder who beat him to the punch to become the first

1:47

African from any part of the continent to publish

1:49

a novel in English.

1:51

As we noted in episode 71, credit

1:53

for that first is often given to the Ghanaian

1:55

J.E. Casely Hayford, who published

1:58

Ethiopia Unbound in 1911.

1:59

although that book's novelistic

2:02

elements are sometimes set aside to

2:04

make room for the exploration of philosophical positions.

2:07

Later on, though, we get such classics of

2:09

world literature as Things Fall Apart

2:12

by Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, published

2:14

in 1958.

2:16

The huge success of this West African novel

2:19

helped pave the way for the East African Weep

2:21

Not Child, and we will spend time in

2:23

this episode on the significant relationship between

2:25

Achebe and our subject. He

2:28

was known at the time that he published that first novel

2:30

as James Ngoogie. But importantly,

2:32

by the early 1970s, he dropped the

2:35

European name James, and became known

2:37

by the 100% African name Ngoogie

2:40

Wathiongo.

2:42

By the early 1980s, Ngoogie had established

2:44

himself as perhaps the greatest champion of Afrophone

2:47

literature,

2:48

that is, literature written in African

2:50

languages. He has written a number

2:52

of novels and other creative works in Gikuyu,

2:55

his native tongue, and has defended this

2:57

choice, reflected on it publicly and

2:59

with great philosophical depth.

3:02

He is thus a first who came to reject

3:04

the value of being that kind of first.

3:07

If his publication of a novel in English in 1964 is

3:10

symbolic of the importance of writing in European

3:12

languages for modern African literature,

3:15

his later stance points towards a future in

3:17

which writing in European languages will finally

3:20

cease to be the dominant method of communicating

3:22

artistically and intellectually for Africans.

3:25

Of course, this way of pointing toward the future

3:27

is also a way of pointing to the past,

3:29

to the time before the last 500 years,

3:32

back when there was no reason to expect African

3:34

thought to be expressed primarily in European

3:37

languages.

3:38

Ngoogie was born in 1938 in

3:41

a village called Kamerito in central

3:43

Kenya. His ethnic group, the Tiku'u,

3:46

also commonly known as the Kikuyu, is

3:48

the same people ethnographically described in

3:50

Jomo Kenyatta's pioneering book Facing

3:53

Mount Kenya.

3:54

It was published the same year in which Ngoogie

3:57

was born.

3:59

his book in episode 111, we

4:02

mentioned his explanation of the formation of karinga

4:05

schools, free from missionary control

4:07

and rooted in gikuyu custom, inspiring

4:10

Malana Karanga's choice of his own last name.

4:13

Ngogi himself went to a gikuyu independent

4:15

school called Manggu Karanga

4:18

from when he was 10 until about 15,

4:20

at which point the school was closed and reopened

4:22

under government control.

4:24

Then in 1955 Ngogi got into

4:26

an elite boarding school, High

4:28

School.

4:29

It is in the September 1957 issue

4:32

of the Alliance High School magazine that

4:34

we find Ngogi's oldest published writing, a

4:36

short story originally titled My Childhood.

4:39

In one of his memoirs Ngogi relates the deflating

4:42

experience of discovering that the published version

4:44

of the story was not only given a new title,

4:47

namely I Try Witchcraft, but

4:49

also that there was an editorial insertion that

4:52

had the fictional narrator assert that

4:54

Christianity was without doubt the greatest

4:56

civilizing influence and as it crept

4:58

in amongst the people many began to see the

5:00

futility of putting their faith in superstition

5:02

and witchcraft.

5:04

The story was meant to poke fun at childhood

5:06

superstition, semi-autobiographically

5:08

depicting a child who believes he can summon

5:11

any loved one by whispering the person's

5:13

name into an empty clay pot, a

5:15

strategy that ultimately fails. But

5:18

with the editorial insertion this light-hearted

5:20

reflection on childhood was transformed into,

5:23

as Ngogi puts it, a condemnation

5:25

of the pre-Christian life and beliefs of a whole community.

5:28

One can easily imagine how this early experience,

5:31

this loss of control over his own narrative,

5:34

shaped his later determination to write in a way

5:36

that was truly free of domination by

5:38

European perspectives.

5:41

Ngogi has authored a number of memoirs in

5:43

the 21st century, looking back upon

5:45

his development into the writer and thinker we know today.

5:48

Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2010,

5:51

covers the earliest parts of his life, while

5:54

In the House of the Interpreter, from which we have just quoted,

5:56

was published in 2012 and covers his time at Alliance of the

5:59

high school.

6:01

These memoirs help us to situate Ngugi in relation

6:03

to various figures and themes in the tradition

6:05

of Africana thought.

6:07

Someone who comes up often in dreams in a time

6:09

of war is Hari Thuku, a

6:11

Gikuyu activist who was the preeminent voice

6:14

for African nationalism in Kenya in the early

6:17

1920s. As Ngugi notes, Thuku

6:19

was deeply influenced by Marcus Garvey,

6:22

that most preeminent of preeminent nationalists

6:24

in the 1920s.

6:26

When colonial authorities arrested Thuku

6:28

and fired upon a crowd who were protesting

6:30

his arrest, resulting in a massacre, Garvey

6:33

spoke out about it in New York and sent a telegram

6:35

about it to the British Prime Minister.

6:38

Ngugi reflects on the possible impact of

6:40

these events on his father, who was living

6:42

and working in Nairobi, Kenya's capital at the

6:44

time.

6:45

Even the rural Karinga school that Ngugi attended

6:48

can be related to Garvey's influence. Ngugi

6:50

tells us that the founding of the earliest independent

6:52

school in central Kenya was strongly influenced

6:55

by Thuku's Garveyism.

6:57

Furthermore, the Kikuyu-Karinga Education

7:00

Association, of which Ngugi's school was

7:02

a part, was religiously affiliated with the

7:04

African Orthodox Church, which first

7:06

came to Kenya by way of South Africa.

7:09

Bishop Daniel William Alexander, a South

7:11

African who seems to have been of Caribbean background

7:13

on his father's side, brought

7:15

the church to Kenya in the mid-1930s.

7:18

As Ngugi points out though, the church was

7:20

first founded in the United States by an Antiguan

7:22

and was a direct outgrowth of Garvey's movement.

7:25

Ngugi writes, the American African

7:28

Orthodox Church had been formed by another

7:30

Alexander, Bishop George Alexander Maguire,

7:32

who earlier had been Chief Chaplain of Marcus Garvey's

7:35

Universal Negro Improvement Association.

7:38

Little to no attention has been paid thus far to

7:41

the fact that we can connect two of the major figures

7:43

in Africana thought still living today,

7:45

namely Malana Karinga and Ngugi

7:47

Wathiongo back to Marcus Garvey

7:50

through this crucial role of the African Orthodox

7:52

Church in the Independent School Movement.

7:55

While Kenyatta associated the Kukuyu

7:57

Ward Karinga with being pure-blooded,

7:59

Nguji offers us an interpretation of the term

8:02

that ties it more expansively to religious and

8:04

cultural purification. He writes,

8:06

Karinga was the self-chosen term for

8:09

orthodoxy in both tradition and

8:11

religion. Christianity would be shorn

8:13

of Western propensities and tradition of

8:15

negative tendencies,

8:17

the African being the judge of the shape and direction

8:19

of change.

8:21

When Nguji describes the takeover of the school

8:23

by the colonial government, he laments the

8:26

various ways in which African cultural nationalism

8:28

receded from his education.

8:31

Now here's a pop quiz for longtime listeners.

8:34

If Garvey was so influential, who was the leader

8:36

that Garvey most famously cited as having

8:38

been an influence upon himself?

8:40

Kudos to those who recall that it was Booker

8:43

T. Washington,

8:44

with extra points to those who can name the book of Washington's

8:46

that Garvey cites as having changed his life,

8:49

Up from Slavery. This

8:51

book is among the most widely read autobiographies

8:54

in the history of world literature, so it is

8:56

unsurprising that, as Nguji was growing

8:58

into an avid reader during his time at Alliance

9:00

High School, he came upon several copies of

9:02

Up from Slavery in the school's library.

9:05

He was struck by the similarities he found between

9:08

the American world, depicted by Washington,

9:10

and the one he knew in Kenya.

9:12

The thought occurred to him, the difference between

9:14

colonialism and slavery seemed to be

9:16

a matter of degree. Nguji

9:20

found his sense of determination and his thirst

9:22

for education mirrored in Washington, but

9:24

disliked his accommodation of structural racism.

9:27

As Nguji puts it, I felt uneasy

9:30

about his asking Black people not to agitate

9:32

for social equality, self-reliance

9:34

and self-effacement were contradictory ideals.

9:38

By judging Washington's program to be not

9:40

merely wrong-headed, but rather self-contradictory

9:42

at its heart, Nguji was unwittingly

9:44

arriving at the same conclusion drawn in W.E.B.

9:47

Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk.

9:49

Nguji tells us that he was only later informed

9:51

of Du Bois' critique by a Pan-Africanist

9:53

friend of his at-Alliance. Alongside

9:57

these connections to the wider world of Africana

9:59

thought, the tumultuous situation

10:01

in Kenya during his coming of age is

10:03

another key to understanding Ngubi's development.

10:06

Kenya was a settler colony, in which indigenous

10:09

black Africans lacked the rights and privileges according

10:11

to white settlers, not least with regard

10:13

to land ownership.

10:15

During the 1950s, a movement arose

10:17

amongst the Gukuyu, which sought to respond

10:20

to this racial inequality with violent resistance.

10:23

It was known eventually as the Kenya Land and

10:25

Freedom Army, or more famously, the

10:27

Mau Mau.

10:29

Through widespread propagation of the British perspective

10:31

on the conflict, this more famous name for

10:33

the group became synonymous with terrorism, bloodthirstiness,

10:36

and irrationality. More recently,

10:39

however, scholars like Caroline Elkins have

10:41

shed light on the shocking brutality and large-scale

10:43

injustice of the British response to the so-called

10:46

Mau Mau Rebellion, or as it is also

10:48

known, the Kenya Emergency.

10:50

Elkins uncovered evidence that almost the entire

10:53

Gukuyu population was detained at some point

10:55

and in some form during the emergency.

10:58

Several methods of torture were used at the

11:00

prison camps, where those suspected of involvement

11:02

or sympathy were held.

11:04

Whatever one's moral evaluation of attacks

11:06

and killings by the insurgents, who in fact

11:09

killed many more Gukuyus loyal to the British

11:11

than they killed white people,

11:13

Elkins points out that,

11:14

The murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents

11:17

were quite small in number when compared to those

11:19

committed by the forces of British colonial rule.

11:22

After Elkins published her book on the subject

11:25

in 2005, a court case against the British government

11:27

by survivors of detention camps led

11:29

to an unprecedented settlement by that government

11:32

with the survivors and to the revelation

11:34

of previously hidden government documents, further

11:37

validating Elkins' account. And

11:40

Gukuyu and his family provide us with telling examples

11:42

of the difficulties and complications of life

11:44

during the emergency. His older

11:46

brother, Wallace, joined the Land and Freedom

11:49

Army, while other brothers of his by way of

11:51

other wives of his father found themselves

11:53

on the loyalist side, agents of the colonial

11:55

state. Another

11:58

brother, Itogo, was tragically murdered.

11:59

when he saw people running and followed suit.

12:02

A white officer called for him to halt, but

12:05

as Gitogo was deaf, he did not hear

12:07

and was shot in the back.

12:09

Ngugi's mother was detained, questioned, and

12:11

tortured in attempts to locate Wallace.

12:14

When Ngugi returned to Kamaritu from his

12:16

first year away at Alliance High School, the village

12:18

had been evacuated and destroyed as part of the

12:20

government's efforts to disrupt the insurgency

12:22

through the forced resettlement of Gikuyu people.

12:25

In short then, the war in Kenya in the 1950s

12:28

shaped Ngugi in countless ways, and

12:30

this fact set the stage for him to become the single

12:32

most powerful voice, commemorating the

12:35

epoch in literature.

12:37

Indeed, Weep Not Child, the

12:39

novel that made Ngugi the first East African to

12:41

publish a novel in English, depicts a boy coming

12:43

of age during the emergency,

12:45

overlapping in various ways within Ngugi's

12:47

actual experience.

12:49

Among the historical events recorded in this

12:51

important work of fiction is the interrupted

12:54

leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, who

12:56

returned to Kenya from his time as a student and activist

12:58

in England in 1946.

13:01

As leader of the Kenya-Africa Union, he

13:03

became the foremost defender of African rights in

13:05

the colony.

13:06

This is dramatized in Weep Not Child,

13:08

when Enjorogu, the main character, begins

13:11

to identify the Gikuyu and other black Kenyans

13:13

with the Israelites of the Bible,

13:15

coming to the conclusion that, although

13:17

all men were brothers, the black people had a

13:19

special mission to the world because they were

13:21

the chosen people of God. This

13:24

leads him to infer that, because black

13:26

people were really the children of Israel, Moses

13:29

was known other than Jomo himself.

13:32

In 1952, though, Kenyatta was arrested

13:35

along with five other nationalist leaders and

13:37

charged with being the mastermind behind the Maumau.

13:40

This was a flimsy charge with no basis in reality,

13:43

Kenyatta was for peaceful change.

13:45

He was convicted nonetheless, and from 1954 to 1961, was

13:49

a prisoner and an example of the colonial administration's

13:52

commitment to breaking the spirit of anti-colonial

13:54

resistance by any means necessary.

13:57

Enjorogu and other characters in Weep Not

13:59

Child

13:59

experienced Kenyatta's conviction as a

14:02

serious blow.

14:04

While We Do Not Child was the first novel that

14:06

Ngoogie published, it was not the first one that he

14:08

wrote.

14:09

The second novel he published, The River Between,

14:12

was actually written first.

14:13

Both novels were also composed not in Kenya,

14:16

but Uganda, as they are products of Ngoogie's

14:18

time at Makarere University, located

14:21

in Uganda's capital, Kampala.

14:23

As we noted when discussing a previous graduate

14:25

of Makarere, namely the first president

14:28

of Tanzania, Julius Nerere,

14:30

this was for a long time the only institution

14:32

of higher learning in East Africa.

14:34

That was still the case when Ngoogie arrived there in 1959.

14:38

More recently, in 2016, Ngoogie reflected on his time at

14:41

Makarere by publishing a third installment

14:44

in his series of memoirs, this one entitled,

14:46

Birth of a Dream Weaver of Writers' Awakening.

14:50

Framing the importance of this period of his life in

14:52

the book's prologue, he writes,

14:54

"'I entered Makarere University College

14:56

in July 1959, subject

14:58

of a British crown colony, and left in

15:00

March 1964, citizen of

15:02

an independent African state.

15:04

Between subject and citizen, a writer was

15:07

born.'"

15:08

As Ngoogie indicates here, the turmoil

15:10

of the 1950s gradually gave way to

15:13

constitutional changes in the early 1960s, leading

15:16

to Kenya's independence in 1963, with

15:18

Jomo Kenyatta as its first president.

15:21

Ngoogie relates this momentous change to

15:23

the fact that the early 1960s was a time

15:25

of striving for autonomy for himself as

15:27

well, intellectually and artistically.

15:31

We are told in Birth of a Dream Weaver how

15:33

arriving at Makarere caused him to think differently

15:36

about truth. Back at Alliance

15:38

High School, the faith-dependent notion of

15:40

truth made it a pre-existing entity

15:43

to be accepted, rather than something to be discovered

15:45

with difficulty.

15:47

By contrast, when pledging alongside his fellow

15:49

new students at Makarere to seek the

15:51

truth and study diligently, Ngoogie

15:53

could perceive a different notion of truth at play.

15:56

It is a notion best expressed, he tells us,

15:59

by Aristotle.

16:00

in the second book of his Metaphysics.

16:02

Truth is difficult to attain, as

16:04

demonstrated by the fact that no one ever has it

16:06

in its entirety,

16:07

but also not so difficult, because the

16:09

combination of our individual efforts over

16:11

time results in the attainment of a considerable

16:14

amount.

16:15

Ngoogie thus describes the pledge as exhilarating,

16:18

as if after living in the land of one truth,

16:21

a colonial truth, I had affirmed

16:23

the right to ask questions and contribute

16:25

to a common pool of knowledge.

16:28

Ngoogie's development as an artist picked up

16:30

its pace at Makiarete to say the least. He

16:33

got back into publishing short stories, he

16:35

became a playwright, beginning with a few one-act

16:37

plays before The Black Hermit, a

16:40

full-length work performed at the Kampala

16:42

National Theater in honor of Uganda's

16:44

independence. His turn to

16:46

novel writing was inspired by a novel

16:49

writing competition created by the East

16:51

African Literature Bureau, a government-sponsored

16:53

organization. He

16:55

challenged himself to write something from the perspective

16:57

of someone growing up in Kenya that would be

16:59

as compelling as the depiction of coming of age

17:01

in Barbados, in George Lamming's

17:03

In the Castle of My Skin, a pioneering

17:06

novel from the Caribbean published in 1953.

17:10

Lamming's novel, so impressed and googy that

17:12

he would later study it in depth as a literary

17:14

critic and conclude that although

17:17

it is set in a village in a period well before

17:19

any of the West Indian islands had achieved independence,

17:22

In the Castle of My Skin is a study of colonial

17:24

revolt.

17:26

It's finding it hard to write about boyhood during the

17:28

emergency though, and googy ended up setting

17:30

his first novelistic effort a few decades earlier,

17:33

making the transition from girlhood to womanhood

17:35

a major theme.

17:37

This is because the novel is about that time of controversy

17:39

over the right of female circumcision that

17:42

first resulted in the creation of independent schools.

17:45

The character Mutoni represents the controversy

17:47

in a number of ways, as she rebels against

17:49

her Christian father and seeks to be circumcised

17:52

so that she can be a woman made beautiful

17:55

in the manner of the tribe.

17:57

An injury she sustains during the process

17:59

takes her life.

17:59

and she herself becomes a new focus of controversy

18:02

between the two camps. How

18:05

did it come to be that this first completed novel,

18:07

known under a few other titles before it became

18:09

The River Between, came out second?

18:12

Explaining this allows us to bring up a major

18:14

moment in Ngoogie's life and in the history of African

18:17

ATHON in the 20th century, the African

18:19

Writers' Conference, held at Maccherere

18:21

in June of 1962.

18:24

As Ngoogie has pointed out, while the conference

18:26

was held as the first get-together of

18:28

African authors writing in English anywhere

18:30

in the world,

18:31

it built upon the work and examples of the Francophone-dominated

18:34

first and second congresses of Black writers

18:36

and artists, held in Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959, respectively.

18:42

We discuss these events in our episodes on Nékertoud

18:44

and Frans Fanon.

18:46

Recalling the participants of the 1962 conference in Kampala, Ngoogie

18:50

highlights Langston Hughes, that luminary

18:53

of the Harlem Renaissance.

18:54

As recent episodes of the podcasts have shown, he

18:57

continued to loom quite large in the world of African

18:59

art and ideas in the 1960s.

19:02

As Ngoogie put it,

19:03

Hughes gave the gathering, breath of geography

19:05

and depth of history.

19:07

Another well-known attendee, whom we have discussed

19:09

before, would be Wole Soyinka.

19:12

As we have previously noted, this is often

19:14

said to be the conference where he made his famous criticism

19:17

of Nékertoud,

19:18

a tiger does not proclaim its tiger-tude.

19:22

The person who Ngoogie was most excited to meet,

19:24

though, was Chinua Achebe.

19:26

In a report he wrote at the time, entitled A

19:29

Kenyan at the Conference, published in Transition

19:31

magazine, a respected literary journal

19:33

based in Uganda,

19:34

Ngoogie celebrated Achebe's artistry as

19:37

a writer.

19:38

I wanted to meet Chinua Achebe, the young

19:40

Nigerian novelist, whose two novels,

19:42

Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease,

19:45

seemed to herald the birth of a new society in

19:47

which writers, freed from the burden of political

19:50

protests and jibes at a disintegrating

19:52

colonialism, can cast an unsentimental

19:55

eye at human relationship in all its delicate

19:57

and sometimes harsh intricacies. In

20:00

other words, Ngoogie at this time valued

20:02

Achebe's ability to show how African

20:04

fiction can flourish when it is

20:06

not weighed down by narrow political motives,

20:09

but rather dedicated to the grand task of

20:11

capturing humanity in its fullness.

20:14

In Birth of a Dreamweaver, Ngoogie

20:16

admits that what excited him most about meeting

20:18

Achebe was the chance to share his new writing

20:20

project,

20:21

which as he puts it, had suddenly started

20:23

knocking at the door of my imagination,

20:26

after the submission of what would become A River Between

20:28

for the novel writing contest.

20:30

Ngoogie would in fact win that contest, but

20:33

that would not happen until November of 1962, and

20:36

thus remained in the future when Ngoogie had his time

20:38

with Achebe in June.

20:40

Achebe read the handwritten manuscript and

20:42

provided Ngoogie with critical feedback, but

20:45

even before giving him the feedback, passed

20:47

the manuscript on to a contact at Heinemann,

20:49

a British publishing house.

20:51

The iconic Heinemann African Writers

20:53

Series, for which Achebe agreed to serve

20:55

as editorial advisor, published Weep

20:57

Not Child in 1964 and then The River Between in 1965.

21:03

Achebe was thus centrally involved in launching

21:05

Ngoogie's career as a novelist.

21:08

This alone would be enough to mark the African Writers'

21:10

Conference as a milestone in Ngoogie's

21:13

life. It was made more significant still through an

21:15

intellectual controversy that developed in its wake

21:18

in the pages of Transition.

21:20

At stake was the writing of African literature in

21:22

English, the very topic that would eventually be

21:24

associated with Ngoogie more than any other thinker.

21:28

Obviously, though, it was not yet him who was arguing

21:30

that Africans should avoid doing creative writing

21:32

in European languages.

21:34

Obi Wale, a Nigerian intellectual,

21:36

was not at the conference, but reacted to reports

21:39

of what was discussed there in a piece published in

21:41

the September 1963 issue of Transition.

21:44

He wrote that the conference's most important achievement

21:46

was demonstrating that African literature

21:49

as now defined and understood

21:51

leads nowhere. Wale

21:53

was struck by how little of the output of the writers

21:55

at the conference would be understood by local African

21:57

audiences. He moved quickly to his

21:59

research.

21:59

radical conclusion,

22:01

until these writers and their Western midwives

22:04

accept the fact that any true African literature

22:06

must be written in African languages, they

22:09

would be merely pursuing a dead end, which

22:11

can only lead to sterility, uncreativity,

22:14

and frustration. Another

22:17

Nigerian writer, Gabriel Okada, thoughtfully

22:20

weighed in on the language question in the same issue

22:22

as Obi Wale,

22:23

arguing that it is possible and advisable

22:26

to twist languages like English to

22:28

local African purposes, particularly

22:30

through translating idiomatic phrases

22:32

used in African languages directly rather

22:35

than finding colloquial equivalents while

22:37

writing dialogue.

22:39

Okada closed his piece by asking rhetorically,

22:41

why shouldn't there be a Nigerian or West African

22:44

English which we can use to express our own ideas,

22:46

thinking, and philosophy in our own way?

22:49

Then, in 1965, Achebe

22:51

himself joined the discussion, publishing

22:53

a piece in transition entitled English and

22:56

the African Writer and providing a whole series

22:58

of reasons not to follow Wale in

23:00

thinking of African literature in European languages

23:03

as a dead end. We

23:05

will concentrate on three points Achebe makes in

23:07

the essay. First, the natural,

23:09

realistic, and pragmatic choice is to accept

23:12

that an originally colonial language like

23:14

English may need to serve as the language

23:16

of the growing national literature in a

23:18

newly independent African nation. After

23:21

all, he notes, the country which we know

23:23

as Nigeria, Tinei, began not so

23:25

very long ago as the arbitrary creation

23:27

of the British.

23:29

If we are giving up colonial inheritances,

23:31

why would we stop with language? Would we not

23:33

be compelled to also give up the countries themselves,

23:36

given their colonial origin?

23:38

How is all this realistic?

23:40

Second, to abandon European languages

23:43

would be to give up the benefit of being able to communicate

23:45

across the globe. Achebe talks

23:48

of traveling to Brazil and hearing from some

23:50

of the writers he met there about the restrictions

23:52

imposed on them by their use of the Portuguese

23:54

language.

23:56

Given that Portuguese is a global language compared

23:58

to most indigenous African languages,

23:59

languages, why would African writers choose

24:02

to restrict themselves to an even smaller audience?

24:05

Third, while Achevi unsurprisingly affirms

24:07

that Africans with indigenous mother tongues can

24:10

learn English well enough to use it effectively in creative

24:12

writing, he denies that Africans can

24:14

and should aim to use the language like

24:17

native speakers.

24:18

The price a world language must be prepared

24:20

to pay is submission to many different kinds

24:23

of use, he writes.

24:24

The African writer should aim to use English in

24:27

a way that brings out his message best, and

24:29

that altering the language to the extent that its value

24:31

is a medium of international exchange will be lost.

24:35

Achevi thus envisions an ideal balance. African

24:38

writers bring something unique to English while

24:40

also benefiting from the global platform that

24:42

English provides them.

24:45

Two decades later, in one of Ngoogie's most often

24:47

read essays, he praised Obi Walee

24:49

for having pulled the carpet from under

24:51

the literary feet of those who gathered at Macherere

24:54

in 1962, a

24:55

group that of course included Ngoogie himself.

24:59

Regarding Achevi and other pioneering authors,

25:01

such as his younger self, the Ngoogie of

25:03

the 1980s now felt it necessary

25:05

to say,

25:06

what they have produced despite any claims to

25:08

the contrary is not African literature.

25:12

Achevi still stood out to him as a major

25:14

talent, but this was talent in what Ngoogie

25:16

now preferred to call the tradition of Afro-European

25:18

literature, that is, the literature

25:21

written by Africans in European languages.

25:24

By contrast, this later Ngoogie not

25:26

only took himself to be contributing to African literature

25:29

through his writing in Gikuyu, but also to

25:31

be thereby doing his part in an ongoing

25:33

fight for freedom.

25:34

As he put it,

25:35

I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language,

25:38

a Kenyan language, an African language, is

25:40

part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles

25:43

of Kenyan and African peoples.

25:45

How did Ngoogie reach this conclusion?

25:49

To answer that question, we need to mention three

25:51

major developments over the course of his life from the 1960s

25:53

to the 1980s.

25:55

The first involves the intellectual impact of his

25:57

time in the mid-1960s at the University

25:59

of Leeds where he pursued a master's

26:02

degree in English.

26:03

In Leeds while studying Lamming and

26:05

other writers of the Caribbean for his thesis, Ngoogie's

26:08

eyes were opened by reading Franz Fanon's The

26:11

Wretched of the Earth

26:12

and then the foundational figures of the Marxist tradition

26:15

like Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

26:17

Meanwhile he worked on his third novel, A

26:19

Grain of Wheat, which would cement his reputation

26:22

as a great writer when it was published to critical acclaim

26:25

in 1967.

26:27

Like Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat

26:29

is a novel that struggles to come to terms with the emergency,

26:32

but this time from a vantage point equally concerned

26:34

with the meaning of independence.

26:37

The novel depicts a village preparing to celebrate

26:39

independence and suggests how complicated

26:41

independence must be in light of conflict

26:43

and mistrust, both between and within

26:46

characters, all stemming from choices

26:48

and divisions during the emergency. While

26:51

it is not a simple thing to say how

26:53

exactly Ngoogie's readings of Fanon show

26:56

up in A Grain of Wheat, it is telling that

26:58

he later began to claim that one cannot understand

27:01

African literature in the early post-independence

27:03

era without a proper and thorough reading

27:05

of the chapter Pitfalls of National Consciousness

27:08

in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. In

27:11

this chapter, Fanon warned that class

27:13

divisions among the formerly colonized

27:15

threatened to undermine the freedom promised by independence.

27:19

When Ngoogie claims that African literature

27:21

in the early post-independence period can

27:23

be read as a series of imaginative

27:26

footnotes to Franz Fanon,

27:28

he is certainly including his own A Grain of Wheat,

27:30

which he has described as both a celebration

27:33

of independence and a warning about those

27:35

pitfalls.

27:37

More generally, by the time Ngoogie left

27:39

Leeds, his perspective was fundamentally shaped

27:41

by Fanon and Marxism, influences

27:44

visible in various ways on all his

27:46

art and thought since then. A second

27:49

milestone came with his time in the late 1960s

27:51

as a lecturer in the English department in the University

27:54

of Nairobi.

27:55

Here, he joined together with two lecturers from

27:57

the university's Institute of Development

27:59

Studies.

27:59

to write an internal memo recommending

28:02

the abolition of the English department and

28:04

its replacement with a new Department of African

28:06

Literature and Languages. Some

28:09

refer to this act by Ngoogie and his co-authors

28:12

Ta-ban Lo-li-ong and Henry Owa-anyomba

28:15

as the Nairobi Revolution. This

28:18

may seem an exaggeration.

28:20

In a century full of violent revolts both

28:22

on and off the African continent, does it really

28:24

make sense to apply the term revolution to academics,

28:27

sending a politely worded memo?

28:30

But before we scoff at the dramatic label,

28:32

we should consider the importance of educational curricula

28:35

in the shaving of nations.

28:37

A scholar of Ngoogie's thought, Carol Sicherman,

28:39

has argued that in hindsight,

28:41

the memo is a founding document of the canon

28:43

revision, endemic in international academia

28:46

in the later 20th century.

28:49

Ngoogie and his co-authors sought to establish

28:51

the centrality of Africa in the university's

28:53

offerings, on the grounds that, education

28:56

is a means of knowledge about ourselves. They

28:59

proposed a model of education in which, as

29:01

they put it, after we have examined ourselves,

29:04

we radiate outwards and discover

29:06

peoples and worlds around us. In

29:09

the wake of the controversy stirred up by the memo,

29:11

the Department of English was renamed the Department

29:14

of Literature and did become more Africa-focused

29:16

than before. A Department of

29:18

Linguistics in African Languages was also

29:20

created.

29:22

When Ngoogie published Homecoming, his first

29:24

book of essays, in 1972, he

29:26

included the memo as an appendix, bringing

29:28

its bold vision of educational reorganization

29:31

to a much wider audience.

29:34

A third major development in Ngoogie's career

29:37

is even more obviously relevant to Obi

29:39

Walee's plea for African writers to write

29:41

in African languages, namely that Ngoogie

29:44

started writing in an African language.

29:46

It was a long time coming. As early

29:48

as his time in Leeds, shortly after finishing

29:50

A Grain of Wheat, he admitted in an interview

29:53

for a student newspaper, I have reached a

29:55

point of crisis. I don't know whether it

29:57

is worth any longer writing in English. The

30:00

first chapter of Homecoming is an essay called

30:02

Towards a National Culture, which concludes,

30:05

increased study of African languages will inevitably

30:07

make more Africans want to write in their mother tongues

30:10

and thus open new avenues for our creative imagination.

30:14

Yet by the late 1970s Ngoogie

30:16

was still writing creatively in English,

30:18

publishing his fourth novel, Petals of Blood,

30:21

in 1977.

30:23

The big change came with the second of a pair

30:25

of plays that he co-authored around this time.

30:28

First with an old friend from Maquerere, a

30:30

talented woman named Mishere Gittai

30:33

Mugo.

30:33

He co-wrote a play in English called The Trial

30:35

of Dedan Kimati.

30:37

It made its debut in Kenya in October of 1976

30:41

ahead of its performance as part of Kenya's contribution

30:43

to Fast-Stack in Nigeria in

30:45

February of 1977, though

30:48

Ngoogie himself does not seem to have made it to the Ulegos

30:50

for the festival unlike many of the figures we've

30:52

discussed in past episodes.

30:55

This play is important for its explicit valorization

30:57

of the Land and Freedom Army, the so-called Mau

30:59

Mau, through a heroic portrayal of Field

31:02

Marshal Dedan Kimati,

31:03

the most famous leader of the resistance who

31:05

was captured by the British and executed in 1957. In a preface

31:08

to the

31:09

published version of the play Ngoogie

31:12

and Mugo wonder why it has taken so

31:14

long to see this kind of artistic celebration

31:17

of the heroes and heroines of the struggle.

31:19

Why were our imaginative artists not

31:21

singing songs of praise to these heroes

31:24

and heroines and their epic deeds of resistance?

31:27

The play fits into a controversial pattern some

31:29

critics have discerned in Ngoogie's development.

31:32

James Ogude, for example, has argued

31:34

that,

31:35

whereas in the earlier novels Ngoogie captures

31:38

the moral complexities of the historic war,

31:40

in the later works the Mau Mau war is

31:42

singularly seen as the ultimate expression

31:44

of Kenya's anti-colonial struggle. The

31:47

contrast here is often made in a way that suggests

31:50

Ngoogie sacrificed nuance for

31:52

the sake of a radical political stance.

31:54

Such criticism notwithstanding, there's no

31:56

doubting its impact at the time.

31:58

Another critic reports that that

32:00

one of the enduring memories of the premiere production

32:02

of The Trial of Deidan Kimati is

32:05

the image of hundreds of Black Kenyans spilling

32:07

onto the streets of downtown Nairobi from

32:09

the confines of the National Theatre triumphantly

32:12

singing Mao Mao songs.

32:15

The Trial of Deidan Kimati makes for a useful

32:17

contrast with another play, I Will Marry

32:19

When I Want.

32:21

This is its title in English translation, as

32:23

it is actually called Gaheka n Deida.

32:27

Like The Trial of Deidan Kimati, it was

32:29

co-written with a colleague from the University of Nairobi,

32:31

but this time a man and indeed another

32:34

Ngugi.

32:35

His name was Ngugi Wa Miri.

32:37

The two Ngugis aimed with their play to comment

32:40

on neocolonialism, specifically

32:42

the ongoing dispossession of the Kenyan peasantry

32:44

by a local ruling class who were in cahoots

32:47

with foreign corporations.

32:48

Ngugi, that is Wa Thiongo, has

32:51

recently admitted that he and the other Ngugi

32:53

were part of the same cell of an underground Marxist-Leninist

32:56

organization called the December 12 Movement,

32:59

named after the date that Kenya became an independent

33:01

republic in 1963.

33:04

In that sense, the political perspective of the play

33:06

was predetermined by the activism of its authors.

33:09

But as Ngugi has explained, it was

33:11

the special circumstances of its production that caused

33:13

the play to represent an epistemological

33:16

break for him as an author at the level

33:18

of language.

33:20

The two Ngugis composed the play for performance

33:22

at the Kamarithu Community and Education

33:24

Cultural Center located right in the community

33:27

where Ngugi's family had been relocated during

33:29

the emergency while he was away for his first

33:31

year at Alliance High School.

33:34

They worked together with community members in a collaborative

33:36

process that provided Ngugi with what

33:38

he considered the most exciting six months

33:40

in his life.

33:42

Central to the process was the choice to produce the

33:44

play in Gikuyu. As he put it,

33:46

the question of audience settled the problem

33:48

of language. He furthermore

33:50

enjoyed the way that he and the other Ngugi ceased

33:53

to be the sole authors of the play.

33:55

I saw how the people had appropriated the text,

33:57

improving on the language and episodes and metaphors.

33:59

so that the play which was finally put on

34:02

to a fee-paying audience on Sunday,

34:04

2nd October, 1977, was

34:06

a far cry from the tentative, awkward efforts

34:09

originally put together by Ngoogie and myself.

34:13

If this transformative experience finally brought

34:15

Ngoogie to the point of learning to write creatively

34:17

in Gikuyou, what happened next is

34:19

key to his decision to use that language for

34:21

all of his creative efforts going forward.

34:24

Sometime in December of 1977, two

34:26

government officials came to see President Jomo

34:28

Kenyatta with copies of Petals of Blood

34:31

and I Will Marry When I Want, explaining

34:34

how they were subversive and highly suspicious.

34:37

Performance of the play was banned and Ngoogie

34:39

was arrested on New Year's Eve 1977. He

34:41

was charged with possessing banned books, although

34:44

that charge was never substantiated, and all

34:46

books seized from his study were returned.

34:48

He was held in prison for about a year, becoming

34:51

well known as an international case of a prisoner

34:53

of conscience, with Amnesty International

34:55

campaigning for his release.

34:57

Ngoogie's 1981 memoir of his

34:59

time in prison entitled Detained

35:02

reflects on Kenyatta's legacy in the wake

35:04

of the president's death in 1978, while

35:07

Ngoogie was still in prison.

35:09

Ngoogie draws a contrast between Kenyatta and

35:11

Amal Khaal Kha-bral, who we covered in

35:13

episodes 115 and 116.

35:16

Ngoogie writes, A leader of the People's

35:18

Movement, who is of petty bourgeois origins,

35:21

training, or position, must, like Kha-bral,

35:23

recognize this reality if he's going to transcend

35:26

it by consciously rejecting his class

35:28

to find a true and permanent regenerative link

35:30

with the people.

35:32

Kenyatta, in Ngoogie's eyes, was a petty

35:34

bourgeois to the core, who

35:36

never consciously rejected that class base,

35:38

even while righteously fighting colonialism.

35:41

Ngoogie concludes, My reception

35:43

of his death was then one of sadness. Here

35:46

was a Black Moses, who had been called

35:48

by history to lead his people to the promised

35:50

land of no exploitation, no oppression,

35:53

but who failed to rise to the occasion, who

35:55

ended up surrounding himself with colonial chiefs,

35:58

home guards, and traitors, who ended up

35:59

ended up being described by the British bourgeoisie

36:02

as their best friend in Africa.

36:05

But there was something else that struck Nkuyu while he

36:07

was in prison reflecting on the experience of doing

36:09

those two plays.

36:10

He thought to himself, wait a minute, I

36:13

have been writing in English over the years and

36:15

nobody ever bothered with me. I write one

36:17

play in Nkuyu and I'm detained.

36:19

This led him to a decision about what to do next.

36:22

As he put it, I would attempt a novel in

36:24

the very language which had been the basis of my

36:26

incarceration. Like Martin

36:29

Luther King Jr. before him, Nkuyu found himself

36:31

composing a work on prison toilet paper. In

36:33

Nkuyu's case the novel, Shataini

36:36

with a Bayrani, known in English translation

36:38

as Devil on the Cross. This

36:41

was the first of four novels that Nkuyu has written thus

36:43

far in Gikuyu and having traced his

36:45

career up to the point of this change, we will

36:47

close this episode by exploring some of what Nkuyu

36:49

has said in defense of this change and

36:51

in support of other African writers joining him in

36:54

making the choice advocated by Obi

36:56

Walee. For this we can

36:58

turn to his 1986 book,

37:00

Decolonizing the Mind, the Politics

37:02

of Language in African Literature,

37:04

perhaps his most famous non-fiction work of all.

37:06

It appeared in English, a language Nkuyu has

37:08

continued to use in non-fictional works. Here

37:11

he takes up a point we saw Gabriel Okada

37:14

making in that same issue of Transition that

37:16

published Obi Walee's call to write in African

37:18

languages. Okada argued

37:20

that African writers can construct a local version

37:23

of the English language by translating expressions

37:25

from indigenous tongues.

37:27

Okada called it a fascinating exercise

37:30

to consider how he might arrive at the nearest

37:32

meaning in English for any expression in his

37:34

native tongue, Ija. To

37:36

this Nkuyu responds, why we

37:38

may ask should the African writer or any

37:40

writer become so obsessed by taking from

37:43

his mother tongue to enrich other tongues? Why

37:45

should he see it as his particular mission? We

37:48

never asked ourselves how can we enrich

37:50

our languages?

37:52

Audaciously Nkuyu makes his case for the use

37:55

of African languages, partly by extolling

37:57

the value of translating European and other

37:59

non-African.

37:59

African works into African languages.

38:02

Why not have Balzac, Tolstoy, Sholokov,

38:05

Brecht, Luh-Sun, Pablo Neruda,

38:08

H.C. Anderson, Kim Chi-Ha, Marx,

38:10

Lenin, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Aeschylus,

38:12

Aristotle, and Plato in African languages?

38:16

The colonial condition inculcates an undervaluing

38:18

of African languages, and African writers

38:21

should fight against this, rather than simply

38:23

accepting that colonial languages will

38:25

retain their position of prestige. Ngoge

38:28

develops a theory of language to support his view,

38:31

which relates to functions of language, communication,

38:33

and culture.

38:35

Communication is ultimately based in the cooperation

38:37

required for the production of goods to meet

38:39

human needs.

38:41

Over time, communication gives rise to culture,

38:43

which Ngoge defines as, those moral,

38:46

ethical, and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual

38:48

eyeglasses through which human beings come

38:51

to view themselves and their place in the universe.

38:54

Colonial domination of African peoples, which

38:56

is ultimately an attempt by the colonizers

38:59

to control the production of wealth by African

39:01

peoples, centrally involves domination

39:03

of the mental universe of the colonized,

39:06

the control through culture of how people

39:08

perceive themselves and their relationship to the world.

39:11

When African children are taught to write in foreign

39:13

languages, they are alienated from their immediate

39:16

environment and oriented toward Europe

39:18

as the center of the universe.

39:21

It should now be clear how Ngoge relates the

39:23

cause of using African languages for writing

39:26

to the goal of total liberation from European

39:28

colonialism.

39:29

Ngoge concludes, we African writers

39:31

are bound by our calling to do for our languages

39:34

what Spencer, Milton, and Shakespeare did for English,

39:37

what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian.

39:39

Indeed, what all writers in world history

39:41

have done for their languages by meeting

39:43

the challenge of creating a literature in them,

39:45

which process later opens the languages for

39:47

philosophy, science, technology, and

39:50

all the other areas of human creative endeavors.

39:53

Of course, we'd like to second Ngoge's inclusion

39:55

of philosophy on this list, and we'd also

39:57

like to warn against a possible misunderstanding of what

39:59

he's done.

39:59

Nguji is proposing.

40:01

He is certainly not saying that Gikuyu

40:03

speakers should produce literature only for one another,

40:06

and so on for every group of language users. He

40:09

says in another book of essays called Moving

40:11

the Center that he is an unrepentant

40:13

universalist, and that he is all for

40:15

having works from every language translated into

40:17

every other language. Thus, an

40:19

English or French or Spanish or Swahili

40:21

student should at the same time be exposed

40:24

to all the streams of human imagination flowing

40:26

from all the centers in the world, while

40:28

retaining his or her identity as a student

40:30

of English, French, Spanish, or Swahili

40:33

literature.

40:34

But what about the more pragmatic argument given

40:36

by Achebe

40:37

that African authors would benefit from writing directly

40:40

in a language that can be appreciated by as

40:42

many readers as possible,

40:43

which means writing in a global language like

40:46

English?

40:47

Nguji concedes that it is useful to have

40:49

a language that can be read all over the world, and

40:51

in fact points to the similar fact that

40:53

in an African context, Kiswahili

40:55

has the advantage that it unites many people

40:58

from across East Africa.

41:00

The problem with English is connected to the very

41:02

way it became a global language, it

41:04

is spoken all over the world because it was exported

41:06

as part of the process of colonization.

41:09

This is not true of Swahili, whose power as

41:11

a language has not depended on its economic,

41:13

political, or cultural aggrandizement. It

41:15

has no history of oppression or domination of other

41:18

cultures.

41:19

So yes, says Nguji, let's have a

41:21

shared means for communication across the globe, a

41:23

language for the world, but let's have it be

41:25

Swahili.

41:27

While not denying the cogency of Nguji's argument

41:30

here, we don't have much choice but to continue

41:32

bringing you this podcast in English, insofar

41:34

that it is as we continue to bring it to you at all,

41:36

which we won't be doing for the rest of August, because

41:39

the podcast will be on its summer break. But

41:41

it will be well worth the wait to rejoin us in September

41:44

when we resume, because we'll be speaking to an interview

41:46

guest who can fairly claim to be the world's foremost

41:49

expert on Nguji Wathiongo, namely

41:51

Nguji Wathiongo.

41:53

Here on The History of Afrikaansa.

42:00

You