Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African dictator novel

Abstract

This article places the Kenyan intellectual Ngũgũ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) in what has until now been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels. Dictator novels unmask the intrinsic fallibility of power. The purported omnipotence of the dictator is undermined by dictation: that is, by his power’s reliance on the shifty and ambiguous medium of language, which these novels reveal to be a medium of democratic dialogue not of dictatorial control. Wizard of the Crow also performs power in the sense of staging power’s operations, dramatising its precariousness and exposing its crimes to censure. It also permits an understanding of the over-determined origins of dictatorship: in the legacies of colonialism, the lingering interference of Western states and corporations, and the failures of national leadership. The aims of the paper are, firstly, to demonstrate the longevity and efficacy of a decidedly topical literary tradition that has among its effects the illumination and explanation of enduring forms of colonial exploitation in Africa, and secondly to show how, especially through the reading strategies that it encourages, Ngũgũ’s novel resists this state of affairs and forecasts democratic alternatives to it.