By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted September 28, 2017)
The day
after I arrived in Kenya, I had my first encounter with Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I
had recently won a Rotary International ‘Ambassadorial Fellowship’ to study at
the University of Nairobi for a year. So I’d gone to new students’ orientation
at the Education Building Theatre 2 to hear the Chairman of the Literature
Department speak to us newcomers. I stood way up in the back of the large room
and listened to one of the most inspiring lectures I’d ever heard.
The room was
packed but I felt Ngugi was speaking to me directly. He spoke passionately
about the need for all of us to see ourselves as writers who would tell
Kenyans’ stories. He spoke as if he knew what he was saying and knew all of our
potential to do the work required to create a body of literature that could
equal or exceed that of canonical European writings.
Just years
before, Ngugi had spearheaded a cultural revolution at the University when he
with others insisted on the transformation of the English department into a
Literature department that was not Euro-centric as the English department had
previously been but Afro-centric. And more precisely, the core course would be
Oral Literature which would include every student going out and interviewing
elders who had oral traditions and stories of early Kenya to share. From there
the curriculum would expand in concentric circles: it would go from oral to
Kenyan lit, then to the study of South, West and North African and finally to
literature of the Black Diaspora and the rest of the world.
Ngugi’s
words that day lit a flame in my soul that has never died. His conviction about
students’ creative capacity made me hungry to listen to more of what he had to
say and share. But when I went to his office and asked that I be admitted to
his department, he refused me. I discovered that Ngugi could be hard core. In
part his refusal might have been because I wasn’t a Kenyan or even an African.
Plus I was a visiting student who might not be serious about literary studies.
But those were not his grounds. As revolutionary as his approach to education
seemed to be, he was still fixated on the British model which dictated that you
couldn’t enter a Master’s program (which is what I’d wanted to do as I already
had a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Comparative Religion plus a Master’s in
Education) unless you had done A levels in Literature and pursued the same
course for the first university degree. So his grounds for dismissing me were
academic. I did not qualify as far as he was concerned.
I didn’t see
Ngugi for several months after that since UON students went on strike for five
months. They were up in arms over some lecturer that they claimed was a racist
and had to be removed from the University. So while I had that time, I read a
lot of African and Pan-African literature, met writers like Okot p’Bitek, and I
got up my nerve to ask assistance from Ngugi’s good friend and fellow scholar,
Dr Micere Mugo who actually took pity on me.
It was
thanks to Dr Micere that Ngugi relented and allowed me into the undergraduate
program. That program was a three year course, but as I was committed to
getting an MA from UON, I took all the subjects and all the exams in one year.
That was undoubted the most intensely academic year of my life. If I wasn’t
reading, I was attending classes. And I made a point of attending every
lecture, seminar and tutorial that Ngugi gave. I was forever seated either at
his elbow or in the front row of lectures and more casual conversations that he
had with his students. I tried to be inconspicuous but at that time, (the
mid-Seventies) it wasn’t very easy since I was one of the few white students in
the department.
Ngugi with his wife Njeri and grandchild at PAWA 254 theatre
The other
thing about Ngugi was his subtle sense of humor and irony that invariably shown
through his lectures and more casual classes. He never came across as
academically arrogant or proud. Instead, he struck me as one of the most
humble, gentle man that I’d ever met. However, I never forgot how curt he’d
initially been with me, so I chose to keep my distance even though I wouldn’t
miss a single one of his lectures or sessions that he’d have in his office
among other students.
Ngugi’s
political perspective was never far from his analysis of literature. And as my
background had been in sociology and the study of revolutionary social
movements, I loved hearing his appraisal of how inherently political was
culture and specifically literature. Class consciousness was always understood
by Ngugi to be a component of every writer’s point of view, however latent or
subtle it might have seemed. But especially when we got into African American
literature with Ngugi, his literary analysis included both class and race. In
other words, he was talking about a post-colonial perspective years before it
was labeled to that effect.
While we
were in classes, the play ‘Kimathi’ by Kenneth Watene was staged and Ngugi was
clearly not impressed. He felt Watene had swallowed the British perspective on
the great leader of the Mau Mau or Land and Freedom Army. That is how ‘The
Trial of Dedan Kimathi’ was born. Co-created by Ngugi and Micere, The Trial was
first staged in 1976, and by then, I had been admitted to the Master’s program
at UON. Even so, I was still stunned when Ngugi asked me at the last minute to
join the cast and play an ‘ugly mzungu’ (white colonial woman or memsaab) who
sat scornfully through the trial of Kimathi. Needless to say I was delighted to
do it.
The Trial
had already been selected to go to FESTAC (the 2nd Pan African Arts
Festival) in Lagos, but I never intended to go as I knew there would be few
tickets available and they were for Kenyans. But I, like Ngugi, had caught the
theatre bug and took Drama classes with John Ruganda who invited me to join the
University’s Free Traveling Theatre (a whole other story) which I did. I also
got to see how much Ngugi admired Okot p’Bitek who wrote poetry grounded in his
own indigenous cultural traditions. ‘Song of Lawino’, I believe was initially
written by Okot in his mother tongue. It was also dramatized. It wasn’t
terribly long after that Ngugi cowrote The Trial of Kimathi that he began
working with Ngugi wa Mirii to co-author his first Gikuyu play, Ngaihika ndeeda
(I’ll marry when I want to).
Ngugi at his book signing at PAWA 254 Theatre in 2016
But before
that happened, I was taking graduate classes with Ngugi who happens to love
Russian literature. So we got to read and talk about everyone from Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky and Turgenev to Gogol, Chekhov and others. I had the privilege of
presenting the first paper in the class meant to contextualize Russian
literature which Ngugi understood as emerging out of conditions of 19th
century Russia where peasants (serfs) and workers were profoundly oppressed and
the potential for revolution was ripening. Reading and discussing this literature
in seminars with Ngugi was life-transforming, and I have to say, he embodied
the best qualities of a true intellectual for me.
It was later
on in my life when I read Gramsci and realized that Ngugi had prepared me to
fully appreciate what an organic intellectual is. It was after I’d completed my
course work and had to get a job in journalism to pay for completing my master’s
thesis, that Ngugi was detained. He’d recently published Petals of Blood in
English, which I know was a big deal to him at the time, since he’d
occasionally bemoaned the fact that almost ten years had gone by since he’s
written his last novel, A Grain of Wheat. But after Petals was published, he’d
rapidly gone on to formulate his perspective on writing in one’s mother tongue.
And undoubtedly, he was detained for writing and producing his overwhelmingly popular
production of his first Gikuyu play, Ngaihika Ndeeda. For not only was the play
attracting thousands to come to Kamiirithu, to see the show Ngugi and Ngugi had
directed starring a cast full of peasants and workers who’d been empowered by
everything they’d learned from Ngugi about themselves, social injustice and the
theatre. The play was subversive and the writer became the nemesis during those
last days of Kenyatta and the early days of the civilian dictator (soon to be
President) Daniel arap Moi.
I had
interviewed Ngugi shortly after Petals of Blood came out, but my editor Hillary
Ng’weno refused to published the interview. I gather he’d wanted to stay on the
right side of the government and Ngugi had already been identified as a
radical. But once Ngugi was detained, Hillary apparently had a change of heart.
He immediately published my interview with Ngugi. What’s more, when a year had
passed and Ngugi was miraculously released, it was Hillary who sent me to
Kamiirithu to conduct another interview with the newly freed writer. But my
boss had given an explicit set of questions to ask Ngugi, questions like ‘Do
you believe in peasant revolution?’ Mind you, Kenya had banned Mao tse Tung
several years before, so anything that smell of ‘peasant revolution’ was
anathema to the government.
So what I
did was give Ngugi my set of questions and ask him to fashion the questions
that would elicit the answers he’d like to share with a world awaiting word
from Kenya’s number one writer and recent detainee. I had the privilege of
being the first journalist to interview Ngugi before the international press
corps arrived on the scene. But when my former lecturer alluded to me
(namelessly) in the preface to his book Detained, he clearly didn’t understand
that I had risked my job to give him that open-ended platform. Hillary
literally was ready to sack me as soon as he read the transcribed interview
because it was obvious I had disobeyed his instructions and reconstructed
Ngugi’s interview. I had never seen Hillary so livid, but it was worth it.
Especially when that interview was published just as Ngugi had spoken to me.
I didn’t see
Ngugi for quite some time after that. I was delighted when he left the country
and didn’t come back in 1982 since the darkened days of Moi had already set in
and my professor wouldn’t have survived if he’d returned to Kenya during the
reign of Moi.
interesting article this one...it is amazing mama has such a good memory for stuff!
ReplyDeleteit sounds to me like a bit of jostling.there is a right word for it but i just can't get to it right now.
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