The late Kenyan novelist and activist believed erasing language was the most lasting weapon of oppression. Here, Aminatta Forna recalls the man and introduces his essay on decolonisation
In the 1930s, it was common for British missionaries to change the names of African school pupils to biblical names. The change wasn’t “just for school” – it was intended to be for ever. So Ngũgĩ became James and my father, Mohamed, became Moses. While many students retained their new names throughout their lives, Ngũgĩ and my father changed theirs back, though you can still find early editions of Ngũgĩ’s first book, Weep Not, Child, under the name of “James Ngugi”. With the novel, Ngũgĩ established himself as a writer and later, by reclaiming his Kikuyu identity as an activist, began a process of decolonisation that he would explore in one of his most famous nonfiction works, Decolonising the Mind (1986), which challenged the dominance of European languages in African education and literature. Ngũgĩ worked throughout his life to promote the decolonisation of language, writing and publishing his books in Kikuyu and only later translating them himself into English.
Ngũgĩ was a campaigner against the legacy of colonialism, but first and foremost a Marxist. Studying at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, he witnessed first-hand the brutality of the police towards striking white miners and realised that economic exploitation was a class issue and not a purely racial one. He endured exile, imprisonment, physical assault and harassment by the postcolonial Kenyan authorities and yet never stopped writing and publishing, even penning one of his works, Devil on the Cross (originally titled Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ), on prison toilet paper. Detained for his involvement with community theatre groups, Ngũgĩ noted that as long as he wrote in English, the authorities ignored him. Only when he began to write politically critical plays in Kikuyu, and ordinary working people could understand them, was he arrested.
Ngũgĩ was one of the grandfathers of African literature, and his courage made him beloved of a generation of writers. At the 2015 Pen World Voices festival, Ngũgĩ opted to stay in the same hotel as the other African writers, while others of his stature chose loftier accommodation. Here, the likes of Lola Shoneyin, Alain Mabanckou, the late Binyavanga Wainaina, Taiye Selasi, Ngũgĩ’s son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ and me fetched the cups of tea he drank all day long, found a pen he needed or hailed a taxi on his behalf. One evening I helped organise an after-dinner party in a local bar. Ngũgĩ went to bed early, set an alarm, rose and joined us in the bar. He wanted tea, but the bar didn’t serve it. So someone ran out and fetched him one. In May this year, Ngũgĩ was apparently dancing with some of his students at the University of California, Irvine, to mark the end of the semester on the Friday before his death, at the age of 87.
Aminatta Forna
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