Our Griot Becomes an Ancestor: Rest in Power Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o bade this world goodbye on 28 May at the
age of 87. Fare thee well, great griot of our pathways. Say us well to the
ancestors whom you now join to be clothed with the earth from which we
all must return. He was definitely one of the greatest writers of in
the world. He gave us – Africa and the world at large – a profound depth of beauty,
thought and inspiration with his work.
He was also, in my view, the most representative of the
spirit of Africa, of the numerous colossal figures of the word, that have been
Africa’s contribution to the world and its literature. At childhood, his life
was interwoven with that of the Kenyan people fighting against British colonialism,
with all the consequences of this history.
He was named James
Ngugi at birth. This was name he used to publish his first novel Weep Not
Child. But he threw away the slave master's name, renaming himself in line
with the ways of his forbears.
He did not just criticise the past of colonial subjugation.
Realising, as a true intellectual should, that he owed a debt of intervention
for social progress to posterity, he organised and fought against post-colonial
tyranny and paid dearly for it.
He was detained by the Kenyan state and tortured severally.
The greatest of torture dwelt on him was however not when he was in jail. In
2004, several thugs, linked to the tyrannical regime of President Daniel Arap
Moi's thugs broke into his house at night, tortured and burnt him. But it did
not end there. They brutalised and raped Njeeri, his wife, forcing him to
watch.
But why do I call him the greatest African writer? He is the
only great African writer that has been writing in his own language of Gikuyu,
since 1980, when he wrote Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (in English: Devil on the
Cross). He then translates into English, only thereafter.
Many a writer cannot even write do-re-mi in their
mother tongue not to talk of a work of literature, even when they speak it
fluently. But their grasp of English or French (or Portuguese or Spanish) would
put even Shakespeare and Voltaire to shame in their graves.
Will we ever have another Ngugi, whose words bore the lived
commons of our ancestors, in our lifetime?
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