Ngugi: A Postcolonial Novelist

Pages:168-170
Sunita Chahal (Department of English, I.G.N College, Ladwa, Haryana)

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (b.1938), whose work includes novels, plays, short stories and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children’s literature, is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. Ngugi’s literary beginnings are marked by the reality of decolonization in his writings he has brought an inevitable end of the narrative of colonization that has dominated African writing for at least two centuries: “my writing was an attempt to understand myself and history, to make sense of the apparently irrational forces of the colonial and postcolonial. My experience of Kenya had been as white settler colony into which I was born. Everything had been in terms of black and white. White was wealth and power. Black was poverty and subjection to another. But certain happenings, even in colonial Kenya, were beginning to challenge that neat demarcation and I had no vocabulary by which to understand and name what I was seeing and feeling” (Globalectics, 17). Colonialism was no longer the central facet of African life when Ngugi started writing his novels. On the contrary, the narrative of independence dominated the context in which his novels are produced, the emergence of new nations in which, it is hoped autonomy and freedom would be instituted on the African continent in general and Kenya in particular. Ngugi’s postcolonial identity explains both his relation to-and difference from-the pioneering generation of African writers. Like Achebe and the first generation of modern African writers, Ngugi is interested in a fairly coherent set of questions and ideasthe process of colonization and its effect on African cultures and African selves; the efficacy and limit of old tradition in the constitution of new African identities; and the imperative of decolonization. Ngugi’s novels face the difficult question raised by the English tradition he has inherited through his colonial education: could a literature committed to decolonization be produced in English and other European languages and their literary traditions? Although Ngugi is now famous for his break with English in his novel writing career, his position on the question of language and literary tradition is evident in the argument that African writers had no choice but to use the European language; “We were guided by it and the only question which preoccupied us was how best to make the borrowed tongues carry the weight of our African experience by, for instance, making them ‘prey’ on African proverbs and other peculiarities of African speech and folklore” (Decolonising,7). Ngugi is a product of three powerful cultural institutions whose appeal and influence is to outlive official colonialism: the Christian missions, the colonial school and university, and the European literary canon. Ngugi’s relationship to these institutions and the process of colonization is marked by a subtle distinction which reveals the universal story of colonization and decolonization in Africa.