The Dangerous Words of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o [SKINNYFest 4]

A dictator fears people who think for themselves. So when you get the ordinary, working people no longer singing about the leader but singing about themselves - what they have done in history, what they can do; what they have done before, what they can do again Ð that kind of awareness can make a dictator nervous.

Feature by Julian Smith | 14 Aug 2006
In 2002, after more than 20 years living in exile in Britain and America, Kenyan writer and professor Ngugi Wa Thiong'o returned to his native land with his family to launch his new novel, 'Wizard of the Crow'. Not long after his return, robbers broke into his hotel room and viciously attacked him and his wife, Njeeri. Ngugi was beaten and burned with cigarettes while Njeeri was stabbed and raped.

"Our attack was obviously not only robbery," says Ngugi. "It was politically motivated. Probably by those who have always been against what I stand for."

Ngugi has always had powerful enemies in Kenya. In 1977, while Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi, he was taken from his home and held in a maximum security prison for nearly a year. His crime was staging a play with a village theatre group. His previous works in English had been critical of Kenya's authoritarian regime, but this new play was his first major work in gikuyu, Kenya's most widely spoken native language and Ngugi's own mother tongue.

"It was performed in the open air using villagers, working people, farmers, the unemployed of the area. I strongly believe that I was imprisoned for working in the gikuyu language. I was talking about the same sorts of issues [as in my previous works], but in gikuyu, among ordinary men and women. A dictator fears people who think for themselves. So when you get the ordinary, working people no longer singing about the leader but singing about themselves - what they have done in history, what they can do; what they have done before, what they can do again – that kind of awareness can make a dictator nervous."

After his arrest, Ngugi resolved to use gikuyu as the primary language of his writing. In prison, he wrote 'Devil on the Cross', the first modern gikuyu novel.

Ngugi is currently back in Britain, promoting the English translation of 'Wizard of the Crow'. The novel is a satire of a post-colonial African dictatorships, set in the fictional country of Aburiria. The story centres around the nameless Ruler's plan to build a tower to heaven so that he can confer daily with God on running his country. It is full of humour and comical exaggeration, even as it deals with the all-too-real horrors of life under a brutal dictator.

Ngugi explains why he chose to abandon the social realism of his earlier novels in writing 'Wizard of the Crow': "The realistic mode is very limiting. The folkloric elements in gikuyu became very important to me. The oral imagination rejects the limitations of time and space. In the oral tale, in a peasant community, animals can speak with humans, you can travel in time, talk to the dead. It frees the imagination. This became very important when writing about the distortions of the post-colonial era. Some of the things that happened were stranger than fiction. How do you write in such a way that you are able to excite the imagination of the reader, when what he encounters anyway is stranger?

"For example, in 1984, the heyday of Moi's dictatorship in Kenya, he had just returned from a trip abroad and he held a press conference at the airport. He said that from now on he wanted all his ministers to act like parrots. Whenever he put a full stop, they must also put a full stop; when he put a comma, they must put a comma. He went on and on about wanting them to be like parrots. The challenge for a writer is how do you satirise a ruler like that? After that, realism cannot cope. I wanted something else, something that would get at the inner reality, the essence if you like."

With Moi's regime no longer in power, Ngugi is optimistic about Kenya's future, despite the attack: "My wife and I, we have to balance that experience with the welcome we got from ordinary people before the attack, and the widespread swell of solidarity and sympathy after the attack. We are very much attached to that Kenya. We have gone back since to give witness in the trial. And we are committed to continue returning to Kenya.

"A dictatorship creates moral decay. We are suffering the consequences of that moral decay even now - corruption, mismanagement, insecurity - but we no longer have this culture of silence and fear. People can speak out without fear of being put in prison, killed, or having their families tortured or disappeared. So it is very different, the atmosphere. I am just hoping that whoever comes to power will keep to the democratic instinct, and create an open society in which differences of opinion and outlook, no matter how conflictual, can be aired without consequences."
Wizard of the Crow' is Out Now
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival August 13 and 14