Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Grand Old Man of African letters, is telling me how he wrote Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross), the first Kikuyu-language novel, on prison toilet paper.
When did it all begin? The midnight before New Year’s Eve, 1977. I was with my family in Limuru when armed policemen came and shoved me into a Land Rover. It was an abduction: there was no reason in law to drive me away. Next day, Saturday, they put me in chains. They took me to Nairobi, to the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. I lost my name, Ngũgĩ. The prison officers called me only by the number on my file: K677. We, the other detainees and I, were considered political dissidents by the Kenyatta regime. For one year I was held without trial. My daughter Wamuingi was born in my absence. I received the news in a letter with a photograph enclosed. The first weeks were the hardest. I felt very lonely. But the other prisoners knew me and my work. They were encouraging. Some of them had books they lent me to read. Dickens. Aristotle. Some gave me biros and pencils as gifts. And there was another source of motivation to write. One day a warder complained to me that we educated Kenyans were guilty of looking down on our national languages. I could not believe my ears! That night I sat at my desk in my cell and let the beginning of a story in Kikuyu pour out of me. For paper, of course, I had only that provided in bundles by the authorities to meet a prisoner’s bodily needs. The toilet paper was thick and rough, and intended to be rough, but what was bad for the body was good for the pen. The bigger problem was the language. My Kikuyu looked funny on paper. I had no experience of writing at such length in Kikuyu. Once again, my friends in the prison were very kind, very helpful. They helped me to find the right word for this scene or that character. They taught me songs and proverbs I hadn’t heard before. I wrote the story’s final sentences only days before learning that I was to be released. The book was published in Nairobi two years later, in 1980.
Having bared his prison story to me, its trauma and its triumph, he smiles, looking younger than his seventy-seven years, and returns to his plate of foie gras poêlé avec tartare de légumes. We are talking over lunch in the French coastal town of Nantes. May in Nantes is already summery. We are on the busy terrace of a restaurant a short walk from Ngũgĩ’s hotel. Below the terrace, literary festivalgoers, between events, traipse or cycle along the canal; a few look up when Ngũgĩ stands abruptly and steps out of the parasols’ shade to the railing to take a call. His black shirt is embroidered with a bright golden-elephants design; his baggy, beige slacks finish in a pair of black, worn-out trainers. His Kikuyu (the indigenous language of over six million Kenyans)—fast and loud and emphatic—so unlike his English of the previous minutes, so unlike the French of the surrounding tables, fills the air. Nantes, as the town’s statues and street names remind us, is the birthplace of Jules Verne. Is Ngũgĩ, to the festivalgoers on foot or bike who steal looks as they pass, “Africa”? Verne’s Africa?
Immense brambly palisades, impenetrable hedges of thorny jungle, separated the clearings dotted with numerous villages.… Animals with huge humps were feeding in the luxuriant prairies, and were half hidden, sometimes, in the tall grass; spreading forests in bloom redolent of spicy perfumes presented themselves to the gaze like immense bouquets; but, in these bouquets, lions, leopards, hyenas and tigers, were crouching for shelter from the last hot rays of the setting sun. From time to time an elephant made the tall tops of the undergrowth sway to and fro, and you could hear the crackling of huge branches as his ponderous ivory tusks broke them in his way. (From Five Weeks in a Balloon.)
Ngũgĩ is on his way to Kenya. (Nantes, for its international writers’ festival, is a brief stopover.) He has lived in exile in the West, mostly in the United States, where he has taught comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, since 1982. Trips to his homeland are few and far between, and this one—his first in over ten years—might be his last. So it is a piece of luck, his coming here (a two-hour train ride from Paris), and my learning of it in time; and it is generous, or indulgent, of him to agree to meet with me to talk language and language politics when he must have many things on his mind.
In much of Kenya, where English, alongside Kiswahili, is the official language, his politics are controversial. Ngũgĩ has long argued that African authors should write and publish in African languages (“Why should Danish, with five million people, be able to sustain a literature but not the Yoruba, who are forty million?”); that African intellectuals should reason and debate in African languages. English, he insists, is not an African language. It is an argument that has set him apart from many of his contemporaries. The Yoruba author Wole Soyinka wrote his plays and poems in English; Chinua Achebe, an Igbo, wrote his novels and essays in English. In his 1965 essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” Achebe pointed out that his was “a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” An Igbo English. But for Ngũgĩ, such defenses fail to hold up. Soyinka and Achebe, he thinks, write as Africans estranged from their languages by the legacy of European colonialism. They write as white-cloaked surgeons whose African characters speak with transplanted tongues.
Consciousness of language politics came early to Ngũgĩ. In 1952, when thousands of the dispossessed Kikuyu began rising up against the colonial administration, he was a schoolboy of fourteen. The violent revolt by Kenya’s largest ethnic group panicked the British into declaring a state of emergency. All nationalist-run school administrations across the land were fired and replaced with ones sympathetic to the Crown. The sudden changes deprived Ngũgĩ and the other rural children—pickers of tea leaves—of their indigenous-language curricula. Instead of traditional songs, the pupils read Robinson Crusoe; instead of tales learned around a village fire, Shakespeare. Ngũgĩ, whose Kikuyu compositions had once been his teacher’s pride, saw his classmates punished for speaking the language. They were struck with a cane or made to wear metal plates around their necks bearing the words “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Lucky, resolute, he himself was never a donkey. To his surprise and relief he took at once to the English books. English, in his skillful hands, would bring him various student prizes and, in 1964, to Britain on a scholarship to study at the University of Leeds.
I don’t tell Ngũgĩ, when he returns from his call, my admiration for his first novels: Weep Not, Child, The River Between, and A Grain of Wheat, a trio originally published in London in the 1960s by the Heinemann African Writers Series. I don’t tell him how the deceptively simple, evocative opening to The River Between gets me every time, a pleasure that no amount of rereading seems to dim.
The two ridges lay side by side. One was Kameno, the other was Makuyu. Between them was a valley. It was called the valley of life. Behind Kameno and Makuyu were many more valleys and ridges, lying without any discernible plan. They were like many sleeping lions which never woke. They just slept, the big deep sleep of their Creator.
I don’t tell him, because Ngũgĩ would later call these works—which he wrote in English and published under his childhood name of James Ngũgĩ during his years in Leeds—his “Afro-Saxon novels,” the better to distance himself from what he considers to be their relative inauthenticity compared with his subsequent writings in Kikuyu. To write in Kikuyu while imprisoned was, for him, an act of autonomy, of self-determination. More than sounds and stories linking him to his formative years, the language, in Ngũgĩ’s mind, became a repudiation of the country’s English-speaking elite. The gesture was brave (he was always having to squirrel the toilet paper manuscript away from guards); it was eloquent. And yet, something in Ngũgĩ’s disregard for his earlier work, his argument about English in Africa rankles with me. I voice my thoughts.
“You wrote your first, the first, novel in Kikuyu in the 1970s. But hasn’t the relationship between Africa and the English language continued to change since then? What about the rise of post-independence Africans who feel completely comfortable in their English, authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani?”
(I mention Abani for a reason. We once met at a writers’ event in the United States and discussed the “language question.” Abani grew up in Nigeria. His father is Igbo. His mother is British. So English, in which Abani writes, is for him a native language. And it was for writing, in English, what were construed as dissident texts by the English-speaking Nigerian government, that he was put behind bars at the age of eighteen and then on death row. His release two years later was like a rebirth. But he never thought about writing in Igbo; it would have felt inauthentic, he said.)
Ngũgĩ says, “These authors have an inheritance. They should contribute to it. They have a duty to protect it.”
And, listening between the lines, I think I understand the two ideas of inheritance that Ngũgĩ’s word contains. The first, postcolonial, says African authors must take up pens to show that third world doesn’t mean “third-rate,” that African languages are the equals of their European counterparts: equally rich and complex and artful. The second, ancestral, says language is a natural resource of collective memory: a unique way of being in and knowing the world.
“There’s now a whole generation of young people in Africa who, through no fault of their own, do not speak their African mother tongue. You might say, ‘English or French is their mother tongue.’ No. English isn’t African. French isn’t African. It isn’t their fault, but that’s how it is. What would I say to a native English-speaking African? If you are born in an English-speaking household, there’s no reason for you not to learn an African language at school. Kiswahili. Kikuyu. Igbo. Yoruba. Whatever. And then use your English to translate works into African languages.”
There is nativist rhetoric in Ngũgĩ’s references to “African mother tongues” and “African languages.” It reminded me, a little uncomfortably, of things I had heard in Britain about the decisions of several councils, with their large immigrant communities, to erect road and street signs in other orthographies: Polish, Punjabi. Those opposed to the signs had declared that neither Polish nor Punjabi was a British language. That, too, was intended to pass for an argument. But terms such as “African languages,” like “British languages,” make little, if any, sense, linguistically speaking. They are proxies for personal opinions, depending entirely for their meaning on whom you ask. I suppose every African draws the line somewhere, and Ngũgĩ draws it at English and French. Fair enough. But then, Ngũgĩ’s position, I learned, is less personal than it is ideological, with the incongruities that ideology brings. For example, does he consider Kiswahili—a widely spoken Bantu lingua franca composed of many Arabic, Persian, and Portuguese influences—African?
“Yes.”
“Arabic?” Language of the continent’s first colonizers, ivory and slave traders.
“Yes.”
“Afrikaans?”
He hesitates. “Yes.”
I try to get him to divulge his reasoning, but it isn’t easy. He only says, by way of explanation, that many poor black children in South Africa speak Afrikaans. I do not press him. Already his knife and fork hover over the remains of the foie gras.
Ngũgĩ’s thinking can be traced back to the mid- to late 1960s, his postgraduate student days in Leeds: the heady mix of Marx and Black Power. Lumpenproletariat! Black Skin, White Masks! No longer would he be the young author who could write, in a 1962 opinion piece for Kenya’s Sunday Nation, “I am now tired of the talk about ‘African culture’: I am tired of the talk about ‘African Socialism.’… Be it far from me to go about looking for an ‘Africanness’ in everything before I can value it.” That was before Leeds. Now, on his return to Nairobi, a thirty-year-old professor at the capital’s university, he proposed to abolish the English department in favor of a department of African literature and languages. He renounced his schoolboy Protestantism, and with it the name James, of his first books. His writing grew darker, more didactic.
In his 1985 essay On Writing in Kikuyu, Ngũgĩ describes the precursor to his imprisonment: the six months he spent in 1977 working with the villagers of Kamiriithu to stage the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (“I Shall Marry When I Want”), about greedy imperialists who exploit brave Kikuyu peasants. In keeping with his collectivist thinking, he intended the project to be a group effort. The men and women of the village were duly quick to correct his numerous Kikuyu mistakes: “You university people, what kind of learning have you had?”
“I learnt my language anew,” Ngũgĩ concedes. But he was proud, with much to feel proud about: The participatory theater project did a lot of good. Some of the villagers learned to read and write. Others, feeling valued, having something for their minds to do, drank less, so that alcoholism, the scourge of many Kenyan villages, was alleviated. Several discovered in themselves an actor’s bravado or other talents that might otherwise have stayed forever dormant. The popular enthusiasm was such that the play’s rehearsals immediately drew large crowds. Hundreds, then thousands, from the surrounding villages came and sat in the open air—and listened, shouted, clapped, laughed, booed. It was enough to make the authorities jumpy. Ngũgĩ became a man with enemies in high places.
The play was hastily banned; the village theater group disbanded, its grounds razed. And on the night of December 30, 1977, armed policemen with an arrest warrant rode past maize fields, tethered goats, and chicken coops to the only house in Limuru with a telephone wire.
Hoping, by incarcerating Ngũgĩ’s voice, to silence him, the regime unwittingly made him a cause célèbre. In London, members of the Pan African Association of Writers and Journalists massed before the Kenyan embassy and held up placards that read “Free Ngũgĩ.” A letter to the editors in the June 1978 issue of the New York Review of Books urged governments to push for the author’s release; its signatories included James Baldwin, Margaret Drabble, Harold Pinter, Philip Roth, and C. P. Snow.
It is surprising, then, that after his liberation Ngũgĩ was allowed to publish his novel. Perhaps the regime intended to placate the international uproar the author’s imprisonment had provoked. Perhaps, the Kikuyu was simply too much work for censors used only to reading in English and Kiswahili. Perhaps, going only on the book’s original cover, a cartoonish drawing that showed a paunchy white man hanging from a dollar-studded cross, the regime thought the book nothing more than an anti-imperialist tract. (Indeed, the title, Caitaani mũtharaba-inĩ, can be understood as “The Great Satan on the Cross.”)
Whatever its reason for allowing the novel’s release, the regime underestimated the Kikuyus’ appetite for a publication in their own language. The story of a young village woman who confronts the seedy foreign-money corruption in her country proved popular. In his essay, Ngũgĩ relates how the book was read aloud by literate members of a family to their neighbors, all ears. In bars, he writes, a man would read the choicest pages to his fellow drinkers until his mouth or glass ran dry—at which point a listener would rush to offer him another beer in return for the cliffhanger’s resolution.
Like most of Ngũgĩ’s international audience, I don’t know Kikuyu and had to content myself with the author’s own English translation of the story. (Other translations have appeared in Kiswahili, German, Swedish—and Telugu, in a version created by the activist poet Varavara Rao during his own prison stint.) So I ask him now if he could teach me a few Kikuyu words from the book. He sees me readying my pen and notepad, and—so promptly and proprietorially that I’m taken aback—he reaches over and lifts them from my hands. He says, as my pen in his hand writes, “kana, infant.” It could also mean “fourth” or “to deny” or “if” or “or,” depending on how you say it. Turungi, he says, is a very Kikuyu word. “It means ‘tea.’” Kabiaru, another “very Kikuyu word,” is “coffee.” In Kenya, home of tea leaves and coffee beans, I can easily see how these words might have associations—social, cultural—that are particular to the Kikuyu imagination. But even if they do, both, as Ngũgĩ goes on to explain, happen to be English imports: turungi, from “true tea” and “strong tea”; kabiaru from “coffee alone,” meaning black, no milk.
(And, later, with the help of Kikuyu scholars, I will discover just how much vocabulary Ngũgĩ’s Kikuyu works—plays, novels, children’s stories—owe to English: pawa [“power”], hithituri [“history”], thayathi [“science”], baní [“funny”], ngirini [“green”], túimanjini [“let’s imagine”], athimairíte [“while smiling”], riyunioni ya bamiri [“family reunion”], bathi thibeco [“special pass”], manĩnja wa bengi [“bank manager”]. It also turns out that the extent of this borrowing is quite vexing to some Kikuyu critics. Why, for example, does Ngũgĩ write handimbagi [“handbag”] when Kikuyu has its own word, kamuhuko? Why does he write ngiree [“gray”] when Kikuyu already has kibuu?)
English has fed Kikuyu (as French long fed English, as Arabic fed Kiswahili). It is why history is too complex, too many-sided, it seems to me, for the binary readings—African versus European, indigenous versus imperialist, black versus white, poor versus rich—of much language politics. In the person of the Victorian settler, the British expelled many Kikuyu from their land and homes; in the person of the colonial policeman, they shouted and shot at African protesters demanding equal rights. Many colonizers committed atrocities. Nothing can justify the baseless stupidity of the colonialist worldview. But even in the grubbiest circumstances, men and women of all tongues can perform small acts of humanity. English was also the language in which the Kenyan-born paleontologist L. S. B. Leake—a fluent Kikuyu speaker—compiled his magnum opus The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903. Running some 1,400 pages, it is a paean to the social, cultural, and linguistic riches of the Kikuyu people. One section lists the traditional names of over four hundred species of plant; another gives the precise lexicon to describe the various colors and markings on goats, cattle, and sheep. In the person of the liberal Anglican, English devised Kikuyu’s orthography, published Kikuyu dictionaries and grammars, built schools. For all its paternalism, the language doubled as the language of African aspiration. When, in the 1920s, educators proposed dropping English in favor of teaching in Kikuyu, Luhya, or Luo, many parents recoiled; English, they understood, was a potential leveler, a gateway to the wider world.
Ngũgĩ’s own children, several of them writers, have this idea of English. I learn this toward the end of our conversation, when the young server comes for our plates. I am asking Ngũgĩ what his offspring think of his ideas; in place of speaking, he picks up my pen and notepad again and writes. Beside the names of his sons and daughters appear the titles of their respective books: Nairobi Heat, The Fall of Saints, City Murders, Of Love and Despair. All English. His son Mũkoma, the author of Nairobi Heat, is presently an assistant professor in the English department at Cornell. Is his father disappointed?
He isn’t. Or so he says. He shrugs. Children will be children.
But even were his children to ever start writing in Kikuyu—as Francophone authors Pius Ngandu Nkashama of the Congo, and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal also write in Tshiluba and Wolof, respectively—other obstacles, cultural, technological, economic, remain. In indigenous languages no author can yet aspire to scrape much of a living. According to a report by the Kenya news agency, dated July 30, 2014,
In developing countries like Kenya, there is a serious lack of reading materials.… In Kiambu County… there are no public libraries where people can quench their reading thirst, and this has seemingly led to poor reading culture within the area.… In USA, a child is introduced to a library at as early age as five years, unlike in Africa where even university students are not acquainted to or are “allergic” to libraries.
Another agency item, put out a few weeks before my meeting with Ngũgĩ, carried the stark headline “Few Customers in Bookshops.”
Ngũgĩ remains cautiously optimistic about the future of Kikuyu and other African-language literature. He has reasons to hope. One is the annual Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, co-founded in 2014 by Ngũgĩ’s son, Mũkoma, which awards original writing in Kiswahili. The bigger one, by far, is translation. In February 2015, the Nigerian publisher Cassava Republic brought out Valentine’s Day Anthology, a downloadable collection of short romance stories by leading African authors. Each story had been translated from English into an indigenous language such as Kpelle, Kiswahili, Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa. And Cassava Republic is not alone. Ceytu, a new imprint in Senegal, recently translated The African, a novel by the French-Mauritian Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio, into Wolof.
Colleagues wait for Ngũgĩ at his hotel. Before taking my leave, I ask him if he could teach me one more Kikuyu word, the one word that everyone ought to know. In my notepad he writes, in the same firm, elegant hand as, forty years earlier, he wrote on prison toilet paper: thayũ.
Peace.