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Mukoma: Neo is asking me if I can see.
Neo: Mukoma is as blind as a bat and the stage lights don’t help.
Mukoma: Yeah, they don’t help. But it’s fine though.
Neo: I feel very small to speak at an event that celebrates Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Mukoma wa Ngugi, who needs no introduction, is professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, and happens to be the fourth-born child of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Nyambura wa Ngugi. We sit with Mukoma today as an intellectual, but also as a child of the man we speak of today. Karibu Mukoma.
Mukoma: Asante sana. Let me begin by thanking you all for being here. It’s important for me to be here with writers and activists.
Neo: Pole sana for the loss of your father. I think it’s very easy, with our public mourning, to forget that this is your father, and the father of your siblings. I just want to acknowledge that and offer pole zangu na za wengine ambao are in this room. May you find comfort.
Mukoma: Thank you, Neo. Earlier on somebody was talking about having had to read my father’s books in school. I had to do the same thing. I have read his books, all of them actually. But it’s not enough, realising how important he was, because at some point he is just my father. Just Baba to me.
Neo: One of the things that I have been thinking about is what it means to have a public figure that was once rejected but is now ireclaimed. You know, the moment you die, Kenya is like, “the son of the soil!” But what does that mean and how do you navigate, as a member of this family, your personal grief and that of the public?
Mukoma: I’m not sure. This is a new world for me. This is new in terms of dealing with grief but at the same time understanding the work he was doing. One of my favourite memories of my father is when he would come to town, because we lived in Limuru, and he would bring me books like Famous Five, Secret Seven in a brown paper bag. Once I was talking to a teacher of mine when I was doing my undergraduate work and I was saying, “here is this decolonisation figure, yet he is buying me books by Enid Blyton who actually was a racist.” But that teacher told me, “well, you have to read everything.” But I do have that memory of him coming home with that brown paper bag. And I would devour the books.
Neo: I mean, we all have contradictions over who we read…
Mukoma: That’s true. I don’t believe in cancel culture because I am a professor and we have to read everything. For example, I read Joseph Conrad, maybe not V.S. Naipaul, that’s a bridge too far. I teach about the Enlightenment, Emmanuel Kant, Hegel, even though Hegel said Africans have no history; because in some ways we were also formed by them through colonialism. We need to understand what colonialism did to us, to my father’s generation, to the generation before, and also to the GenZ, and in my case GenX. There are ways in which colonialism damaged us, and I think we all need to understand that. And so Decolonising the Mind by my father becomes very important to know, as Chinua Achebe says, when the rain began to beat us. We are talking about trauma, about what colonialism did to our parents and how we inherited the trauma.
Neo: Personally I don’t think it’s just inherited trauma, it’s also that we still perpetuate the same kind of imperial project. One of the things that is foremost in my mind right now is a kind of silencing that happens in the present postcolonial moment where you are not allowed to think.
Mukoma: I sent out a tweet where I said my father used to beat my mother and that caused a rift so big we couldn’t bridge it. But first I want to be very clear, I loved him, I am mourning him, and there is that pain as well. But, the worst thing we do to ourselves is silence. Some of us may go “cia mucii ti como” kana in English, dirty linen shouldn’t be put out in public. We have to stop that because that is how we perpetuate the trauma. Speaking out comes with a cost, we all know that. We’re full of activists and writers here so we all know it comes with a cost, but the idea of silence, of cia mucii ti como, what are we doing to ourselves and why should we keep perpetuating that?
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Neo: That’s interesting. And I think you wrote something a while back and it might be in The Rise of the African Novel about the Makerere conference where Rebecca Njau and Grace Ogot spoke to the men about the interconnectedness of oppression. It was in this conference, full of African writers of English expression, where the women in the room asserted that we cannot speak about our emancipation without speaking about the ways in which all these forms of oppression are connected. Whether it’s race, class, or gender. And while many of them, as Marxists, were talking about the class struggle, the women were also saying we can’t talk about the class struggle without talking about the gender issue.
Mukoma: The Makerere conference is interesting because in The Rise of the African Novel I deal with the question of where does African literature begin? Most of us believe that African literature begins with Chinua Achebe but African literature is larger than that. You have early South African writers writing in the 1930s, you have Amharic literature that begins somewhere around the 1200s, Afro-Arabic literature that begins around the 500s. Plus the question of language. But in terms of interconnectedness, there is a speech that Ama Ata Aidoo gave, I think in Sweden, where she said the same thing but she was thinking of criticism where she said that African women writers were not receiving the same level of critical attention. This is something we still have to take seriously. I got a lot of flak because I boycotted an invitation to makerere university to give a talk. This was when they were doing their anti-homosexuality bill that criminalised homosexuality. But in addition to gender we can add sexuality. It’s more than saying let people love who they love. It’s also about getting people legal protections and getting them recognised by the constitution.
I agree with you and I like to use ‘interconnectedness’, I don’t like the word ‘intersectionality’. Interconnectedness is from people like Angela Davis, people in the struggle. Intersectionality is more academic. And for those of us in academia we really have to ask ourselves what we are doing. Because then intersectionality becomes more like a fashion, something that gets you a job, which is a real consideration, I’m not saying we shouldn’t use it, but for us in academia we have to find ways of, to quote Cabral, returning to the source.
I grew up in Kamiriithu, father in detention, exile, and so on, and I thought I understood poverty. I mean, because of the hardships we faced we didn’t have money anyway. But I went to Kariobangi and also Kibera, and there are levels of it. You have the more touristy stuff where you see the white people walking around and are part of the economy, but also you can go down, literally, down these sewers and end up with this old woman whose activist daughter has been murdered. So for us in academia I think that is where we should be and for me that’s where I am going. Also, in Kariobangi, there’s all this poverty and then there is a fence and on the other side of it is a golf course. If you want to understand contradictions in Kenya, for me that is the most immediate image. We’re going down this hill to go visit this woman whose daughter had been killed for activism, and then you have motherfuckers playing golf. Sorry about my language but I do get angry when I think about it.
And that’s what my father was about. He cared deeply. But he also understood that as an intellectual, he had a duty. I think my father realised very early on that his pen is a weapon, but not just his pen but that your body has to be on the line. Earlier on somebody also mentioned GenZ and my father. We need to support the GenZs even though we are GenX and we are tired and in our 50s. It’s like a call back to duty. What is happening in Kenya is what I call the termite ideology where the termite eats everything including the foundation itself. The termite doesn’t care whether the building falls down. We have a president who has a termite ideology so for him he’s going to eat until there’s nothing left.
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Neo: Let’s basically call it a criminal state because that’s what it is. But then without getting exhausted or giving up on the project of emancipation, and following Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work as an educator, a public intellectual and as a writer, as somebody who was a mwalimu like us, how do we then think of the university space and the business of knowledge production in this country where education is about manufacturing labour rather than thinking? What do we do?
Mukoma: We have to resist in any form. Another human being is a human being like me, kamundu kangi ni kamundu ta nii. We have to find different ways of resisting.
I was involved in a lawsuit against Trump and sometimes I laugh because in what world would I have thought that I would be involved in a lawsuit against the US president? But what’s happening is that Cornell students were protesting about Palestine – and we should think about what’s going on in Palestine as a genocide, there is no other way of thinking about it – but the university space had become so repressive to them. They had either been suspended, couldn’t go to campus, or had to tell the authorities if they were to do anything on campus, and at the same time Trump had come into power and was hunting them down. So in a lot of ways the university is complicit. But also it comes with a cost. I can’t remember how much money Trump removed from Cornell, but I think for Harvard it was a billion dollars.
In fact, Trump reminds me of Moi because what Moi did was go for the intellectuals. That’s how my father ended up in exile, Micere Mugo, these brilliant minds. Imagine the wealth of knowledge that we would all gain if it had been a different country. But the whole idea of going after knowledge production, if you are a dictator that’s what you do, that’s almost a textbook case. If I was a dictator I’d also go after the university.
But we as academics have a duty to return our knowledge. Some of my early memories are when we were given a task by a teacher in primary school to go talk to our grandmothers and get a folk story and then we’d translate it to English and we wouldn’t bring it back to her. We do the same thing with the PhDs, we come to extract knowledge, but then we can’t even leave as much as a pamphlet with the people we have been talking to.
But also on language, going back to my father, if you interview somebody, you have a duty to summarise knowledge to the language that person speaks. Four or five years ago we did an event with my father at St. Paul’s University. I was there as a visiting professor. They have a bible translation centre, and I was talking to one of the priests there and he said the reason they have a bible translation centre is because they believe God cannot speak to you in a foreign language.
Neo: Going back to language, and as a student of one of Ngugi’s students, Professor James Ogude, who is also one of the biggest scholars of Ngugi alongside Simon Gikandi, one of the questions we constantly revisited was how do we take seriously what Ngugi teaches us about our languages and cultures but at the same time avoid the pitfalls of cultural puritanism? This puritanism by people who have appointed themselves “custodians of african culture” then it becomes a way to ostracise others. We have the anti-homosexuality bills and whatever. It’s this masking of African culture that is dangerous.
Mukoma: It’s dangerous. I’m the co-founder of the Sahel Kiswahili prize and I’m having an internal debate because we’re supposed to hold the award ceremony in Dar es Salaam, but you know what they did to Boniface Mwangi, and all that. So I’m having that internal debate, do I go or do I not go. There is Kiswahili nationalism, there is Gikuyu nationalism, and so on. But also, your language is just your language, it’s the language you speak to your grandmother. I find it difficult when thinking about it… let’s say you are born in Nairobi then when you go see your grandmother you need a translator. It’s ridiculous. We however have to be cautious. Your language is your language but you can’t use it for cultural nationalism. Amongst the Gikuyu we have words like nduriri which means “those other people” in isiXhosa they have amakwerekwere which is people who are just making noise, so there are ways one can use language as a way of dehumanising others and consequently xenophobia, and even killing them. But still I will say your language is your language, but we shouldn’t use language as a weapon to destabilise. The politicians use language as a way of division.
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Neo: In the wake of Ngugi’s death, how do we imagine freedom as a people in the absurdity of the Kenyan state, the absurdity of Suluhu’s government, Museveni’s government, Kagame’s, the absurdity of the Jumuiya and the continent? How do we free ourselves living in this climate?
Mukoma: Also we have to worry about climate change!
I think we just have to tell the truth. That’s what my father did, he told the truth. As best as he could. We tell the truth as best we can because without truth we have nothing. Without truth we are in a darkness and then it becomes easier to be manipulated as a people. When I was here in February, I went to Limuru to a bar, a local, and the question I had then was how the hell did Gikuyu elect Ruto? I don’t mean along ethnic lines, like how? But also more generally how did Kenyans elect Ruto? Ruto had said he was a hustler, so he wasn’t hiding. And I think now there is a hustler fund. How do you elect someone who is promising wheelbarrows, as opposed to something more.
I would say, political truth. But to get there there is wisdom. And I think it is very important for GenZ to read the resistance. There is a long history of resistance that I think we need to study. So the likes of Fanon, Cabral, I mentioned Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, and so on. We can’t resist if we don’t have that history. We can’t move forward if we don’t know the history of Mwakenya, for example. My father’s ideas began as an intellectual when he started thinking about political change. So we have to read about Mwakenya, the December Twelve Movement, RPP, and so on. We have to know that history.
Neo: You are right. We can’t be the same people celebrating Ngugi and ridiculing Boniface Mwangi.
Mukoma: No, we actually can’t.
Neo: We’re going to end it here. We could speak until tomorrow.
Mukoma: I don’t feel like we are done yet!
Neo: If you were to give us a take away, something for us to remember of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, your father, and, one thing to take home of Ngugi wa Thiong’o the intellectual, the political activist, things beyond being your father, what would it be?
Mukoma: His dedication to truth. It came at a cost and that’s how he ended up going to jail and exile, and so on. But I think he was a truth teller. But at the same time, I would like to say something about my mother, Nyambura wa Ngugi, because when my father was in detention and exile, it was my mother who kept us alive. Literally. There are these rumours that she was a government spy. I will tell you one quick story and then I will stop. I remember very vividly, around 1982/83. Then, if you wanted to get on Moi’s side, you had to denounce your dissidence. But our mother called us to a meeting and said she never wanted us to do that. If she was a government spy, she would have encouraged us.
One last story. I was in Ghana researching slavery and I went to W.E.B. Du Bois’ mausoleum where he was buried. Shirley Du Bois who was more radical, more panafrican than Dubois himself is also buried there. During my trip I was left with a question: why was his grave bigger than hers? As a writer I am interested in that because someone had to make that decision. What were they thinking? Why?
Maybe I will end with a question: why?
Neo: Same as Winnie Mandela and Nelson Mandela.
Mukoma: Exactly.
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Ngũgi wa Thiong’o was a writer who, like most others, used his personal life and experiences to draw up a broader outline of the human condition, and found points of contact that offered resonance at a critical juncture in Kenya’s history, one in which he came of age. His lucid, unpretentious writing has been taught to generations of Kenyan learners – for context, my mother and I both studied Ngũgi’s The River Between as a set text in secondary school. As a teenager, reading Ngũgi did not bear the same significance as it did later on. For many secondary school students, the impact of the radical texts we read in our English and Kiswahili literature classes was watered down in deference to the mode of teaching that prioritized rote memorization as opposed to critical analysis, done for the sole aim of getting through the final exams.
In November 2013, on the invitation of the Council of African Studies and the Yale Africa Students Association at Yale University, my alma mater, Ngũgi was invited to give a talk as one of a series of ‘Africa Week’ events there. I attended the event, as did many other African students and affiliates of the university, during a blisteringly cold day. The room was packed. I remember how pleasantly surprised I was at Ngũgi’s warmth, personability and approachability, and to this day, have the note he scribbled down for me, a budding writer at the time, that reads, ‘Write, write, write again, you will get it right. NWThiongo, 11/11/2013.’
As a university student abroad, suddenly, ideas and themes that we had dissected while reading Ngugi’s The River Between in our high school English literature classes became more urgent, more apparent, despite the wide span of time gumming the interval between when the book was first written and published, and when it came to bear down its truths in an explicit way, bringing into sharper relief the fact of a stalled, unripe liberation made manifest in the inescapable need for western validations and alignments such as attending university abroad.
I was curious to hear what he’d have to say nearly fifty years later, to find ourselves in contact for the first time not on Kenyan soil, but in an institution that exemplified Western intellectual hegemony, despite the bent of his life’s work that called Africans to pay heed to our indigeneity.
Ngũgi is no stranger to contradiction, to scrutinizing and grappling with it and to the totalizing reinvention that emerges from this. He dropped his first English name, and after 1977, true to his stance on the ills of writing in the colonizer’s tongue, did not write any of his major works in English. His early work takes account of the difficulties at the turn into postcolonial Kenya where tradition, Christianity and modernity collide, and later, being a strong critic of neocolonial regimes, he becomes a kind of symbol for decolonization; his near purist stance on the need and importance to return to our pre-colonial truths especially pertaining to the use of language have been the subject of debates that are still ongoing. However, this can appear somewhat in conflict with the large portions of his life spent in the UK and US, the benefits he attained from his alignment with western structures of education and influence, even while considering the truth of the dangers of persecution he faced at home – these came from allegations of being a threat to capitalist democracy throughout the Moi regime in the eighties, as well as a politically motivated attack in the early 2000s – as a reason to stay away. Regardless, the paradoxes are clear, but it is also clear that concessions can be made – have been made – when navigating existence in a world that leans away from the identities that hold less power.
Earlier this year, a friend took the time to explain to me that a book I read and that had deeply engaged me – Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouologuem – had, for all it’s hard-hitting expositions against colonialism in Francophone West Africa, still failed to consider women beyond certain prescriptive lenses that remain mired in patriarchal standards, and within that, encouraged a subterranean, normalized violence towards women in our reading of a work which had wholesale acclaim as a work of literature that was formally and linguistically inventive in addressing the topic of colonialism.
I had been incredibly taken by this larger narrative, by the frenzy surrounding Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Secret Lives of Men which brought Bound to Violence back into literary discussions, that I had become incapable of taking note of the banality of patriarchal mores, how deeply they are stitched into our lives, and regrettably, our imaginations, our art, as well. My friend reminded me that we have come too far, and spoken too much, for any critique of so-called great works to remain devoid of a feminist reading, for their writers to be given a pass, so to speak. In thinking about Ngũgi’s life and legacy, it is imperative that we consider this as well – the fact that the abuse of his first wife, Nyambura, falls short of the expectations we should have of a man such as himself. His son, Mukoma wa Ngũgi, revealed this information in a series of posts on X. As Ouloguem’s work illustrates, it is not new, or unique, that Ngũgi should fall within that category as well: revolutionary writers who fail to consider women within what should be a wide oeuvre that demands liberation, freedom, self-determination for all. Is it yet another contradiction, or is it an indictment of the indelibility of patriarchal stains, that Ngũgi’s ideologies of freedom stopped short just where they did?
But we know that Ngũgi’s capability to address contradiction exists, in his writing, and in his life. In 2021, Ngũgi was once again invited to Yale to give a lecture as part of the African Writers in Conversation series, where he reiterated his stance on decolonization with a focus on American universities. At the end of the lecture, a question is asked: “How do we speak of the decolonization of the American university when universities sit on land that was acquired through the state’s violent and forceful seizure of indigenous land? If we are committed to the objectives of decolonization,how can we move beyond symbolic gestures to acknowledge this reality?” He replies, in part, “Even recognition alone is important […] we have to confront that in order to do something about it.” Earlier in the talk, he mentions that “America was founded on two conflicting ideals, freedom and slavery” and the fact that for white settlers on Native American land escaping religious persecution elsewhere, “their freedom was erected on the unfreedom of others.” In The River Between, Ngũgi used the theme of female circumcision to exhibit possibilities of women’s struggle for agency and selfhood, even if the choices presented to the characters have their limits within the realms of tradition, religion and domesticity. So when we learn that Ngūgi physically abused his wife, it calls into question certain limitations surrounding revolutionary ideologies, and those who present them. What should it say to us, then, that a man lauded for his contributions to literature and postcolonial discourse staked around a central conceptualisation of freedom, exhibits a certain reticence to extend the same to his personal life? What does it mean to roughen the terrain when it comes to questions of the role of women in the complex landscape that preceded and followed independence – his own mother is the one who prompted his entry into formal schooling, as he mentions in his memoir, Dreams in a Time of War – but to leave it untouched in the realm where it should arguably have been expressed most profoundly: his marriage? What does freedom mean, and what does it look like – what kind of freedom is being pursued when women are not well fixed within its imagery, descriptions, and life force? And what does it mean when we fail to acknowledge this when we talk about Ngũgi?
I am aware that often, we assign greatness to individuals who we assume should perfectly embody ideals that we feel should automatically be a part of who they are based on what we have perceived from them, perhaps as some kind of heuristic that would create an ease of ideological alignment. Yet, to be human is to be complex, it is to bear contradictions that we likely identify with more than we do with any other strict paragons of identity. Ngũgi did not escape this. Ngũgi’s impact and legacy will continue to be felt for years to come, for his contributions to ideas on language, belonging and literature. Ngũgi also abused his wife.
I invite us to consider those who stood alongside Ngũgi in developing a register for freedom, whose capacities supplement those that were not fully apparent in Ngũgi’s body of work and life. For instance, Mĩcere Mũgo, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o’s contemporary and collaborator, was a writer and scholar who unequivocally applied feminist frameworks to her work, and whose name we should remember in the ways that we might Ngũgi’s. To take Kenyan literature in its totality, from poetry to plays to novels; to engage with all the writers and the varied backgrounds from which they write, is to take the contradictions that Ngũgi lived, and let them live on without conflict, but with care and consideration to honestly reflect the human condition.