Introducing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

I have been a big fan of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o ever since I read Wizard of the Crow four years ago, and so lilisin agreed to my suggestion that I start a thread to introduce him for our last mini author theme read of the year, starting in September.

Born in Kenya in 1938, Ngũgĩ is a prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction. After being jailed in 1977 following the publication of Petals of Blood and the production of a play, I Will Marry When I Want, Ngũgĩ both lived in exile and decided to write in his native Gikuyu language, rather than in English.*

His major fiction includes The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Matigari, Weep Not Child, and Wizard of the Crow; plays include I Will Marry When I Want and The Trial of Dedan Kimathi; and nonfiction includes his autobiography, Dreams in a Time of War, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, and Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance.

Ngũgĩ's website

Interview with Ngũgĩ by Leonard Lopate on public radio station WNYC (audio)

In the next posts, I'll paste some of my comments and reviews of books I've read by Ngũgĩ. If you don't like to read reviews before you read the books, skip these posts!

I look forward to seeing everyone else's comments once this theme read starts, and hope you like Ngũgĩ as much as I do.

*ETA After writing his books in Gikuyu, he translates them into English himself.

Fiction

Although Wizard of the Crow is my favorite Ngũgĩ, I read it before I started reviewing books on LT. So I will just comment that it is a satiric look at a fictional, contemporary, post-colonial African country, filled with wonderful characters, magical realism, folklore, pointed looks at corruption, politics, environmental problems, and the relationships of Africa and the west, and more.

I also read Petals of Blood before I started reviewing on LT. It is a much darker satire than Wizard of the Crow, though not as complex, and was one of the works that got Ngũgĩ thrown in jail. It focuses on theater, politics, and life in villages just after Kenyan independence.

The River Between is an early work of Ngugi and doesn't have the scope, breadth of story line and characterization, and satiric humor of Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood. But, in a brief 100+ pages, it provides a lot of insight into the period when English colonists were first moving into the Gikuyu area of Kenya and their impact on centuries-old ways of life. Beautifully written and moving.

Matigari is a satire, an allegory, and a fable. It tells the tale of Matigari, which means "the patriots who survived the bullets," who emerges out of the forests after an unseen but epic fight with the colonizers to find that his unnamed but now postcolonial country is under the thumb of the former freedom fighters in league with western corporations and the military, particularly by His Excellency Ole Excellence, the Minister for Truth and Justice, and the specialists in Parrotology. Matigari is searching for his house, the house he built but that the colonizer lived in before he and the colonizer and the colonizer's African flunky fled into the forest to fight.

In mythical fashion, and in accordance with oral tradition, this story is repeated in various forms throughout the book as Matigari arouses the people, is hunted and jailed by the powers that be, and struggles to promote the people's right to own the products of their labor and live in freedom. This is not a straightforward tale. Time is fluid and Matigari is mysterious -- sometimes old, sometimes young, sometimes even the resurrection of Jesus. All in all, the novel is a compelling combination of a traditional form with modern literary styles and a vivid exploration of disillusionment, hope, and the necessity to continue the struggle.

A Grain of Wheat "Uhuru" means "freedom" in Swahili and, as this book starts, Uhuru, Kenya's day of independence from British colonial rule, is four days away. In a village in the Kenyan highlands, and in a neighboring small town, people prepare for the great day while several characters reflect on and converse about their experiences during the Emergency, the struggle for freedom that the British savagely attempted to put down and called the Mau Mau uprising. This is a novel about the aftermath of war and colonial rule.

Ngũgĩ explores the choices people make in times of conflict and, above all, betrayal -- personal, political, romantic, sexual. He is a wonderful story-teller, creating vivid, troubled characters, dramatizing the brutality and horror of the Emergency (imprisonment, torture, murder, destruction of villages) as well as the nature of life in a small village, and bringing excitement and suspense to the novel. This is all done so well that the small amount of history review and politics didn't bother me. It is an early work of Ngũgĩ's, but much more complex and interesting than his earlier The River Between.

Nonfiction

Dreams in a Time of War Because Ngũgĩ is such a brilliant writer, this memoir of his childhood is so much more than the tale of a boy moving from an almost traditional village to the best high school, a boarding school, in Kenya. It is a portrait of a world that clings to some of the customs in the past while being changed both by colonialism and by modernity, an introduction to the history and culture of the Gikuyu and an indictment of British exploitation and oppression, a demonstration of the power and beauty of storytelling and oral history, a loving tribute to family, and a testament to courage and determination and the power, for the modern era, of education.

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature The four linked essays in this book were originally given as talks in the early 80s; Ngũgĩ had already stopped writing fiction in English and this book was the last nonfiction he wrote in English. The word "politics" in the title is the key, as this is a very political book, and resonates with some of the rhetoric I remember from the mid- to late 70s and early 80s, when this was written. If I could summarize the essays briefly, I would say that Ngũgĩ's focus is on what he considers authentically African literature as expressed by peasants and workers, and not by the elite in independent Kenya and Africa who have internalized (not the word he uses) the perspectives and values of the colonizers, even though the country has become independent. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the sections in which he described his involvement in community-based theater and the way, in prison, he decided to develop his first novel written in Gikuyu so that it would be accessible and meaningful to the peasants and workers and not just the people who had been schooled in English literary tradition.

Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance A collection of talks (the first three from a lecture series at Harvard and the University of Nairobi, the last at Cape Town University), this book's main thesis is that Africa was "de-membered" in colonial times through, among other factors, the loss of its languages, through which we have memory, and that "re-membering" requires the use of those languages for literature, etc. He develops this idea in various ways: historically, psychologically, and through the lens of class. He also discusses the idea of an African renaissance, compares it to the European renaissance and its aftermath, and analyzes the meaning of being an "African" versus or in addition to a national identity. Throughout it all, the reader feels the intensity of Ngũgĩ 's moral, political, and literary convictions. I found it all very interesting.

Wow, this is absolutely superb. Thanks, Rebecca!

I'll definitely read Petals of Blood and Something Torn and New, and I may re-read Wizard of the Crow, which is one of my top 10 favorite novels I've read since 2000.

Thanks, Darryl. I ordered several books I hadn't read from the Book Depository yesterday: Weep Not Child, The Black Hermit, and Devil on the Cross. As far as I could tell, all the other books listed on Ngũgĩ's author page are out of print.

ETA I would especially love to read I Will Marry When I Want since that's what got him thrown into jail, along with Petals of Blood; it's my understanding that they touch on the same themes.

This is really helpful for picking out which book to read - thanks, Rebecca, for posting all that!

Thank you for taking the initiative to make this post. This looks like it'll be a fantastic place to get information on Thiong'o.

Thank you for all of your thoughts and information on Ngugi Rebecca. I have not read anything by him, although I own several of his books. I must really make an effort to get to him in September.

I bought Weep Not, Child and The River Between at Foyles Bookshop in London yesterday. Both are short novels, so I'll probably read them within the next two weeks.

Weep Not Child was one of the ones I recently received from The Book Depository, so I will be reading it too. I am disappointed with myself that I didn't read more Le Clezio during the previous theme read, and if I can ever get back to reading longer, more difficult books, I'll probably read more of him and more of Saramago too!

Touchstone didn't stick the first time!

I'm about a quarter of the way into Petals of Blood (it was the only one I could find physically on the shelves in my quick search of Seattle bookstores). I'm finding it to be an engrossing, interesting read. So far it's less complex than I had expected but since I'm reading it through the fog of a head cold, that's probably a good thing. It doesn't seem that anyone else has been reading it for this fourth quarter of 2011. Rebecca, your brief commentary above is much appreciated. It won't happen this year, but Ngũgĩ is a writer I will likely continue to explore.

I took Wizard of the Crow from the library last summer, and couldn't get very far with it. That disappointed me, because I had heard so many good things about Ngũgĩ, and that was the title most often mentioned. I can see from your excellent overview that it would be very wise to start elsewhere with his work (the very same advice I give about reading Faulkner! Duh.), rather than plunging right in to the complex masterpieces. Furthermore, satire is so hard to appreciate when your understanding of the reality being poked at is weak. I am still interested in reading Ngũgĩ, and now I have a blueprint to help me do it sensibly. Thanks so much for doing this, and for pointing to it in your general reading thread, where I picked up on it.