Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find in Ngũgĩ’s oeuvre—his fiction, his criticism, his theory—an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is because Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker. In our conversation in early 2021, we discussed his fascination with the idea of contraries: “I talk about struggle a lot, dialectical struggle, dialectics of Marx, dialectics of Hegel,” he said.
Born James Ngũgĩ in 1938 in a village in Limuru, Kenya, he attended Alliance High School, a missionary boarding school in the nearby town of Kikuyu, and in 1959 received a scholarship to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. From 1964 to 1967, he studied at the University of Leeds in England, and as a young professor at the University of Nairobi, he cowrote “On the Abolition of the English Department,” a manifesto arguing for African literatures to be placed at the center of the university’s curriculum. In 1973, four years before Chinua Achebe published his famous essay “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Ngũgĩ gave a talk in which he argued that “the Conradian narrative itself was rooted in the assumption of the inherent savagery of Africa and the Africans: that even the best minds and hearts of Europe were in danger of being contaminated.” In the seventies, Ngũgĩ decided to write his fiction in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ, rather than in English. The title of his most celebrated work of theory, a slim volume about the politics of language that led to that decision, has passed the acid test of true virality: the phrase “decolonizing the mind” pervades our public discourse without citation.
In his 2012 book Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing, Ngũgĩ describes his career in terms of what he calls “poor theory”: “Poor means being extremely creative and experimental in order to survive.” When I asked Ngũgĩ what he thought the poor theory of his fiction would be, he gave a wry laugh and said: “I suppose it will come to my writing in Gĩkũyũ, right? Poor theory is the idea of making the maximum from the minimum resources.” But whether writing in Gĩkũyũ or English, Ngũgĩ has done the maximum with the form of the social novel, which he has given a distinctly Marxist hue. His novels have detailed the violence and corruption of both the colonial and neocolonial governance of Kenya. In 2004, he published—and in 2006, self-translated—his magnum opus, Wizard of the Crow, a scathing satire of the global capitalist system he calls “corpolonialism.” His latest work, an epic poem called The Perfect Nine (2018, self-translation 2020), stars a disabled woman as the real hero of the foundational myth of the Gĩkũyũ people. For Ngũgĩ, there has never been a question of separating politics from art, but their entwinement cannot be reduced to identity politics. What makes his work political amounts to the recognition that to write with and about people—poor people, black people, women—is to fight for the People.
Ngũgĩ has always waged more than a paper war. From 1977 to 1978, he was held at Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison in Nairobi for the crime of cowriting and mounting a play in Gĩkũyũ. In 1982, he flew to England to promote his English translation of Devil on the Cross, the novel he had written during his incarceration. Warned by the Kenyan government that he would receive a “red-carpet welcome” if he returned to his homeland, he remained in the UK for seven years. In 1987, the Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi, banned Ngũgĩ’s novel Matigari (1986, translation 1989) and intelligence agencies reportedly issued a warrant for the arrest of its eponymous hero, a Christlike figure who goes around asking, “Where can I find truth and justice?” When, more than two decades after he was forced into exile, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya for the release of the Gĩkũyũ edition of Wizard of the Crow, he and his wife were attacked at gunpoint.
While he is a regular on the betting list of potential Nobel laureates and the syllabi of classes on postcolonial literature, Ngũgĩ is often overlooked by the West’s leftist literati in their discourse about politics and fiction. Why does the revolutionary cast to his work go unrecognized? Perhaps some people view his novels, written in a “minor” language and steeped in “minority-centered” politics, as literally minor. Others may assume that his “postcolonial” worldview is wrapped in the barbed wire of the past—despite the fact that we continue to live in the postcolony. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that. Again, Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker—one born without an armchair. As fashionable as a dash of class analysis in a
