Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-2025).

A Marxist and an African.

Many years ago, I can’t even remember when but around the time of the US illegal war on Iraq, I was at the University of California at Irvine for a lecture. The host took me to an alcove in the student centre. Sitting in a chair there was a familiar figure: Ngũgĩ. He had wanted to meet, and we sat together for an hour, with me in awe of one of my favourite writers, and he with piercing questions about the state of the left in the world today. He was interested in what was happening in India and in China, in Vietnam and Indonesia. I tried my best to keep up with his curiosity and his hunger.

Then he told me about parts of his life that I did not know much about: such as, his close relationship with several Indian writers, his investment in the entire Afro-Asian project, and his own Marxism. I knew that his writing was suffused with radicalism and hope, as well as a deep anti-colonial sentiment. But I did not know about much about the grip of Marxism on his thinking and his deep commitment to the left project, however weak it was at that time in his native Kenya and in other parts of Africa.

Ngũgĩ (right) in the Enkong'u emuny or Ngong Hills, Kenya, 1950s.

At the heart of it all is a tragedy. During the anti-colonial struggles, the British fiercely tried to crush it in Kenya. Ngũgĩ had a brother, Gitogo, who was deaf. During one of these incidents, a British officer shouted to Gitogo to stop moving. But he could not hear the command. Gitogo was shot to death in the back (a story retold in his early novel, A Grain of Wheat). Such a terrible tragedy came early in the life of Ngũgĩ, whose family village – Limuru – was razed to the ground by the colonial troops (his mother was imprisoned for three months in solitary confinement). His deep hatred for colonialism came from this tangible experience. Ngũgĩ told me about these stories with great feeling during that time.

I don’t think we took a picture of that first meeting, and indeed I cannot find any pictures of us together even though we spent time with each other and exchanged many emails (from which I shall quote in this brief remembrance). Most of you reading this will know his novels, but just in case, here are the ones that mean the most to me:

Weep Not, Child (1964).

The River Between (1965).

A Grain of Wheat (1967).

Petals of Blood (1977).

Devil on the Cross (1980).

Wizard of the Crow (2006).

There is more: short stories, plays, essays. Of these novels, the one that most fascinated me was Petals of Blood. Kenya won its independence in 1963. Ngũgĩ was twenty-five years old, his eyes fixated on the opening of a new world. But post-colonial national construction is complex given the fact that the colonial rulers stole so much of our wealth and left behind an inadequate state apparatus for building a new, dignified society. The novel is rooted in the perspective of those who participated or got caught up in the various uprisings prior to independence, such as the Mau Mau rebellion (1952-1960), and then moved to a village (Ilmorog) from where they experienced the advent of independence, the initiatives for development, and the disappointments of corruption. This is perhaps Ngũgĩ’s sharpest critique of capitalism and imperialism, his most pointed book about the humiliations visited upon people who aspire to live a life of decency and justice. ‘It was New Kenya. It was new Ilmorg. Nothing was free’ (p. 332).

The books characters reflect the kind of everyday Marxism that pervades the world. One of the elders in Ilmorg says that land, in the old days, ‘was not for buying’ but it was ‘for use’. The colonialists, he says, ‘only knew how to eat, how to take away everything’ (p. 82). Karega, one of the central characters, struggles with the world before him, and then educates himself into socialist thought and action. He begins to tell people about how capitalism is a ‘system that bred hordes of round-bellied jiggers and bedbugs with parasitism and cannibalism as the highest goal of society’. This is a succinct translation of Marxism into the idioms of the people of Ilmorg and of the factory where Karega had worked. He hated the ‘parasites’ that ‘always demand the sacrifice of blood from the working masses’. Karega is speaking in Ngũgĩ’s voice, angry at how the Kenyan elites had – after independence – ‘prostituted the whole land, turning it over to foreigners for thorough exploitation’ (p. 344). In Writers in Politics, published by Heinemann in 1981, Ngũgĩ said, ‘Imperialism can never develop a country or a people. This was what I was trying to show in Petals of Blood; that imperialism can never develop us, Kenyans’.

Ngũgĩ interviews Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Odinga Odinga for the Daily Nation (1963).

I first read Petals of Blood in 1987, and have since re-read it many times, teaching it twice. It is a marvellous book about the post-colonial condition and should have won Ngũgĩ every prize under the sun. He did win several prizes in the 1970s, the most significant to him being the 1973 Lotus Award for Literature from the Afro-Asian Writers Association at Alma Ata (USSR). Many years later, Ngũgĩ told me that that prize was the one that he treasured the most. The acknowledgments page for Petals of Blood is revealing. Ngũgĩ thanks the ‘Soviet Writers Union for giving me the use of their house in Yalta in order to finish the writing of the novel’. No one else is thanked in that way.

When I was editing a book called The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World, I called him and asked him if he would tell the story of this ‘house in Yalta’ for the book. He was delighted. He hastily wrote a draft and sent it to me. I read it and replied: ‘The essay is full of authentic charm and strong feeling for a past that seems to have abandoned us. The idea of being bound by links across divides is so powerful and so necessary. That this was the feeling you got at the Afro-Asian meeting pleases me to no end’. His response is precious:

Dear Vijay,

Thanks. I have always been grateful for the contribution of many people to my work, even where they don’t actually know that they did, so I try to acknowledge this, where I can. I will see what I can do about expanding on some of the issues. The problem is I don’t have at hand materials/documents, so everything is drawn from memory. And sometimes it is the apparently small things: like my meeting with Mulk Raj Anand, he was with his two daughters, and for some reason I thought they were incredibly beautiful, and the image of them and their father seated at the same table, is always in my mind whenever I think of Beirut.

I thought Beirut and Lebanon very beautiful (this was before the wars that followed, in 1967), but what stands out, nevertheless was the Palestinian Refugee Camp that we visited. It is probably not there anymore but whenever the Israel-Palestinian issues come up, it is the image of that camp that comes to mind. We also made it to Damascus, and I remember the big hall, with goat/sheep stuffed with rice, on all our tables. I don’t recall who was the President of Syria at the time, but I think he spoke to us, a welcome. The Syria of today is mixed up with that image and of course the biblical ones as well. Mark you, all this was very new at the time. I think also the Sino-Soviet split had begun, because I recall some Chinese writers or delegates talking to people on the side and handing some leaflets about social imperialism or something like that.

With Faiz, it was more an impression of him, it was only later in that we met in Nairobi, and we had lunch together. I think he was then editor of Lotus, and he was following up on the possibility of the next Afro-Asian writers being held in Nairobi. This was a result of an impromptu verbal invitation that Okot p´Bitek issued at the Alma-Ata conference, but the problem was that Okot, a Ugandan living in exile in Kenya, had not checked with anybody. So, when a resolution was later moved and accepted to have the next one, in Nairobi, it was left to me to follow up. I did actually meet with the then Minister of Sports and Culture, who showed much interest, and then later became very cold about it, I believe because of the Soviet connection. I really liked Faiz, such a big literary personality, but also humble, personable. I always hoped we would meet again some time, somewhere, but we never actually met again.

Best,

Ngũgĩ

Here, Ngũgĩ is referring to the Pakistani communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), who was the editor of Lotus, to the Indian communist novelist Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), and to the Ugandan poet Okot p´Bitek (1931-1982) who wrote Song of Lawino (1966). I will be writing about both at another time (particularly Mulk Raj Anand, whom I knew thanks to my mother).

The essay we published in The East Was Read told the story of the writing of Petals of Blood in the USSR. It ended with the poem that Ngũgĩ had written to thank his hosts. The book also contains a lovely essay by Deepa Bhasthi on her grandfather’s Soviet library. Deepa won the Booker Prize this year for her translation from Kannada to English of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq.

After writing Petals of Blood, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya to work at the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi. At the University, Ngũgĩ pioneered post-colonial studies, when its faculty transformed the colonial English Department, allowing its scholars and learners instead to look deeply into Kenyan and African arts and culture by absorbing the potential of the African imagination. Ngũgĩ took art to the working-class neighbourhood of Kibera and brought the aesthetics of Kibera to the university. His deep desire to stop writing in English and move to Gikuyu stemmed from those interactions with the Kenyan working poor (Petals of Blood was his last novel to be written in English). For his growing popularity in the working poor neighbourhoods and for crossing class lines, Ngũgĩ was fired from the university in 1978, and then subsequently imprisoned (he wrote Devil on the Cross, his first Gikuyu novel, on bits of toilet paper while in jail). He only left the country because the Kenyan elites turned their back on him.

Over the years, Ngũgĩ and I spoke about what he had done in Nairobi and then about the attacks on the university system across the African continent in the era of neo-liberal austerity and privatisation. It is shocking how the International Monetary Fund insists as part of its debt stabilisation package that such schools as the University of Nairobi, a treasure for Kenya, be eviscerated. This was a conversation I have had since the early 2000s with a series of important African intellectuals, from the great Malian political economist Thandika Mkandawire to the Beninois philosopher Paulin Houtondji about this attrition. They bemoaned the situation and tried – in their different ways - to reverse this attack, including through important pan-African institutions such as CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), based in Dakar, Senegal.

During the pandemic, the University of Nairobi shut down the Department of Literature. I called Ngũgĩ. He was angry (managing his anger a little because he had just had a triple bypass surgery in 2019). He had written a poem called IMF: International Mitumba Foundation. Ngũgĩ wanted me to publish it and so I did in the 2 December 2021 newsletter of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (you can subscribe to these weekly newsletters at the bottom of our home page).

Some words of annotation for the poem:

Mitumba Second-hand.

MaTumbo Stomach.

Bakshish Bribe.

First, they gave us their tongues.
We said, it is okay, we can make them ours.
Then they said we must destroy ours first.
And we said it is okay because with theirs we become first.
First to buy their aircrafts and war machines.
First to buy their cars and clothes.
First Buyers of the best they make from our Best.
But when we said we could best them
By making the best from our best
Our own from our own
They said no, you must buy from us
Even though you made the best out of your best.
Now they make us buy the best they have already used
And when we said we could fight back and make our own
They reminded us they know all the secrets of our weapons.
Yes, they make us buy the best they have already used
Second hand, they call it.
In Swahili they are called Mitumba.
Mitumba weapons.
Mitumba cars.
Mitumba clothes.
And now IMF dictates mitumba universities
To produce mitumba intellectuals.
They demand we shut down all departments
That say
We have to stand on our ground,
The best ground from which to reach the stars.

But mitumba politicians kneel before IMF,
International Mitumba Foundation,
And cry out
Yes sirs
We the neo-colonial mimics milk the best bakshish.
Mitumba culture creates MaTumbo kubwa
For a few with Mitumba Minds.

Ngũgĩ deplored Mitumba Minds. He wanted clear thinking about African realities. His death, at the age of 87, must be mourned. But his life must be celebrated.

At the grave of CLR James at Tunapuna Cemetery, Trindad and Tobago, 2000.

In April 2020, Ngũgĩ sent me another poem to publish. The entire work can be read in this 23 April 2020 newsletter. But here is a short extract, applicable to our times and central to his message:

Wanjikũ, my Gĩkũyũ mother, used to tell me:
Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa:
No night is so Dark that,
It will not end in Dawn,
Or simply put,
Every night ends with dawn.
Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa.

One of the genuine radicals of African thought, a master storyteller.

Salaams and vivas to Ngũgĩ, our friend and teacher.