Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ngugi wa Thiong'o: The Outsider

The Outsider: A vicious attack upon returning to Kenya after 22 years has not deterred Ngugi wa Thiong'o from believing in its democratic prospects; his new book deals with despotism, he tells Maya Jaggi
Saturday January 28, 2006
The Guardian

Growing up in the "white highlands" of colonial Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o was enthralled by flying ace Biggles. But as a teenager during the state of emergency in the 1950s, when his brother joined the Mau Mau uprising against British rule, he lived a "drama of contradictions". The RAF, on whose side Kenyans fought in the second world war, was the same force, he later wrote, "dropping bombs on my own brother in the forests of Mount Kenya".

History has always inspired Ngugi, a novelist, playwright, essayist and children's author who, as James Ngugi, was a pioneer of the African novel in English in the 1960s. Weep Not, Child (1964), A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) have been translated into 30 languages, and were re-issued in 2002 as Penguin modern classics. But after he changed his name and resolved in the 1970s to write only in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, his work was banned by the government, the village theatre he wrote for was razed, and he was detained without trial for a year in a maximum security prison before leaving the country 22 years ago.

Aged 68, he is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, and heads its International Centre for Writing and Translation. His wife, Njeeri, is director of the faculty counselling programme. They have two children, Mumbi and Thiong'o, aged 11 and 10 (Ngugi has seven older children from previous relationships). Yet the tranquillity of their home, adorned with African art, in Los Angeles belies their recent trauma.

Ngugi had vowed never to set foot in his homeland until President Daniel Arap Moi and his Kanu party were ousted, as happened in democratic elections in 2001. He returned in August 2004 to launch the first volume of a 1,000-page novel, Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow). Met by a throng of well-wishers and press at Nairobi airport, he says now, "I told them I wanted to be in touch with the everyday. But we returned to a nightmare." Two weeks into their visit, the couple were attacked by four men in their high-security apartment complex. Ngugi was beaten and his face burned with cigarettes. Njeeri was sexually assaulted - an ordeal she made public, she says, to combat pressures on women to remain silent about abuse. A laptop and jewellery were stolen. Three security guards and a nephew of Ngugi's by marriage were remanded on charges of robbery with violence, and one count of rape. The trial, which began in November 2004, is in its final stages, and the couple have returned twice to give evidence. "I don't want to play with my life," Ngugi says, "but we're determined not to be driven out of the country." Nairobi is notorious for crime. But in his view, "it wasn't a simple robbery. It was political - whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current. They hung around as though waiting for something, and the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us." They were held in separate rooms. "When I heard my wife scream, that was the end," he recalls. "Life wasn't worth living - there was nothing left to protect. I said, 'You can kill me'." He made a dash for the door. "They rushed to stop me - including the person raping my wife. Njeeri found me [outside] on the ground with three people on top of me covering my mouth, and a gun pointed at my temple." Yet the noise may have frightened off the assailants. "I don't think we were meant to come out alive. We think there's a bigger circle of forces - not just those who attacked us. I don't know if we'll ever reach the truth. But I'm sure that if it had happened under the Moi regime, we wouldn't be alive."

Wizard of the Crow, whose second of four volumes is published in Kenya this month, is set in the fictional land of Aburiria, ruled by a despot in an era of globalisation. Simon Gikandi, professor of English at Princeton, says: "In its best scatological moments, it echoes the great Latin American novels of dictatorship by Miguel Angel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez." Ngugi's English translation will be published simultaneously this August in London (Harvill Secker) and New York. A book of interviews, Ngugi wa Thiong'o Speaks (James Currey), will appear in Britain this spring.

He began the novel in 1997, before Moi ended his 24 years in power. For the ruler, whose western suits are patched with leopard skin, he drew not only on Moi, but "postcolonial dictators - Marcos, Idi Amin, Mobutu, Pinochet, Suharto. There's almost a comic element, except that they're so dangerous." The west, he says, colludes, "as though they need an absurd figure to laugh at while making sure he meets their needs; after the cold war, they became disposable". Yet some adapted. As the ruler says, "What I did against communists, I can do against terrorists." The novel marks a break with realism. "How do you satirise someone like Moi, who says he wants all his ministers to be parrots?"

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