Ngugi Wa Thiong Research Articles

THE PITFALLS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS DEPICTED IN MATIGARI BY NGUGI WA THIONG’O

The paper provides insights into how national consciousness is eroded in post-colonial Africa with reference to Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the impact of this erosion on the marginalized, largely impoverished masses, who continue to live on the periphery of society. The African elite (bourgeoisie), who are the new rulers after colonialism, become so obsessed with their own material enrichment and their new found power, that the ‘imagined state’, for which so many had fought and sacrificed their lives, becomes a mere pipe dream. It is with this background in mind that the paper intends to examine how the pitfalls of national consciousness highlighted by Fanon in his text ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ find resonance in Ngugi’s non-fiction work Matigari and the crucial issues that the text raises in terms of how the new rulers abuse their power and the mechanisms that they implement to entrench their authority. Through Ngugi’s use of the fictional protagonist Matigari, we are taken on a journey that unearths the rampant corruption and brute force of the regime as they strive to annihilate any opposition that dare question their abuse of power. Keywords : Post-colonialism, National consciousness, Othering, Oppressive regime _________________________________________ DOI > https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.2018.180102

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness as Depicted in Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong�o

The paper provides insights into how national consciousness is eroded in post-colonial Africa with reference to Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiongo and the impact of this erosion on the marginalized, largely impoverished masses, who continue to live on the periphery of society. The African elite (bourgeoisie), who are the new rulers after colonialism, become so obsessed with their own material enrichment and their new found power, that the imagined state, for which so many had fought and sacrificed their lives, becomes a mere pipe dream. It is with this background in mind that the paper intends to examine how the pitfalls of national consciousness highlighted by Fanon in his text The Wretched of the Earth find resonance in Ngugis non-fiction work Matigari and the crucial issues that the text raises in terms of how the new rulers abuse their power and the mechanisms that they implement to entrench their authority. Through Ngugis use of the fictional protagonist Matigari, we are taken on a journey that unearths the rampant corruption and brute force of the regime as they strive to annihilate any opposition that dare question their abuse of power.Keywords: Post-colonialism, National consciousness, Othering, Oppressive regime

The Journey Motif and The Re-Reading of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow, a Gikuyu Trilogy

This essay employs the journey motif to re-read three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Devil on the Cross, Matigari and Wizard of the Crow. It is argued here that these three novels form Ngugi’s era of Gikuyu fiction; they are chosen to represent his celebrated decision to freely tap from Gikuyu orature. Ngugi’s use of indigenous language in these novels bridges the historical and chronological gaps separating the three narratives; they constitute a trilogy that retells Ngugi’s parable about postcolonial Kenya and Independent Africa more generally. By exploring the different physical, metaphorical and psychological journeys that permeate the atmosphere of all three novels, this interpretation enhances their value in light of Ngugi’s broader political and social agenda.

The African Writer and Commitment in Art: a Critical Discourse of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Literature of Commitment, Social Vision and Stylistic Use of Satire in Matigari

<p>African writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o have not relented in their portraiture of the dehumanizing plights of the working class. Ngugi is a revolutionary writer conditioned by the colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial socio-political and economic quagmire and experiences surrounding him, and as such he has no choice than to use art as an avenue of expressing his ideology and vision about the multifaceted problems as pictured in his society. This paper therefore, examines commitment in literature with particular focus on the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s committed literature and social vision, his stylistic use of satire. The conceptual framework is Marxism using Ngugi’s Matigari. The study as a close textual analysis adopts the descriptive design.</p>

Self-Translation and Exile: A Study of the Cases of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Ariel Dorfman

In this article, we focus on the trajectories of exiled writers who act as self-translators and as “individuals who act purposefully in a social context” (Palumo 2009, 9). We discuss the extent to which exile has paved the way for self-translation and also transformed those exiled writers into individuals who act as self-translators, “ambassadors, agents” (Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014, 325) in the USA, “constantly fighting […] to restore [their] significance” (Brodsky 1994, 5). For the purposes of this study, we focus on the cases of the Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and of the Argentine-Chilean-American novelist and playwright, Ariel Dorfman. Both Ngugi and Dorfman have, in different ways, been forced out of their home countries, they have sought exile in the USA, and they have written and translated into (and out of) English throughout their lives. Our analysis of these two cases will use an adapted version of John Glad’s multidimensional model of the process of literary creation of exiled writers. By analyzing both these cases through an adapted version of Glad’s model, we hope to contribute to the discussion on self-translation and on exile as a fact that affects this activity directly and in different ways.

Literature and Society: A Reading of theNarrative of the Crisis in the River between By Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Among other roles that literature could play, it actively participates to the daily actions of men in dealing with crises that humanity is often faced with, and it also sharpens and allows the rebirth of peoples. The River Between is one of the books of Ngugi where the text focuses on the crisis and some means of liberation for the Kenyan people. Through eminently literary formulas, Ngugi succeeds in finding tools needed to heal the Kenyan society and thus, the African people.

The Politics of Naming, Misnaming and Renaming in <i>The Trial of Dedan Kimathi</i> (1976) by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Githae Mugo

Ngugi and Mugo’s co-authored play, <i>The Trial of Dedan Kimathi</i> (1976), encompasses a vast vision of history and memory in the indigenous war of resistance against British colonialism. The play aims at focusing on the Kenyan masses-led struggle before and after constitutional independence. It intends to give ground to an insightful analysis of the politics of naming, misnaming, and renaming which, indeed, has been used as a way of fashioning and refashioning this part of Kenya’s history. To make it through, we will adopt an onomastic approach to further see how the two playwrights engage in (hi)story, historicity and memory (re)construction of the Mau Mau revolution and its leader Dedan Kimathi, and herocism and <i>memoria</i> building, and weave (hi)story and ideology with a view to breaking the psychological and economic bondage of the neo/colonial periods. In so being, it will be possible to point out how the protagonist, Dedan Kimathi, sets at defiance the colonialist’s politics of domination and exploitation in the colonial and post-colonial eras.

A Feminist Perspective in Ngugi Wa Thiong’s Novel “Petal of Blood”

A Feminist Perspective in Ngugi Wa Thiong’s Novel “Petal of Blood”

Barbara Harlow and the Necessity of “Renewed Histories of the Future”

Barbara Harlow and the Necessity of “Renewed Histories of the Future”

Letting-be: Dwelling, Peace and Violence in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood

It is dwelling that allows mortals to initiate themselves in time and space. As such, dwelling constitutes the event of being. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger stipulates that dwelling can only be achieved through harmonious relations among the constituents, earth, sky, mortals and gods (“divinities”), of the “fourfold.” Heidegger writes, “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling.” Initiating themselves in time and space is the great difficulty that the residents of Ilmorog, the remote village in postcolonial Kenya in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood is set, experience; in Petals of Blood, dwelling is what defines mortals’ being.

On the aesthetics of mimicry and proliferation: interrogations of hegemony in the postcolonial public sphere

This article examines innovative modes of interrogating spectacles of State power in postcolonial dictatorship novels. Authoritarian power in the postcolonial public sphere perpetuates itself through practices that reiterate the prerogatives of State reason, national progress, national unity and the indispensability of the potentate. All these are mobilized and deployed in order to produce indocile subjects socialised by dominant ideologies. Given that discourses of resistance have often ended up re-enacting modes of hegemonic power, authors employ tactics of resistance based on slender narrative and non-totalizing subversive acts that nevertheless constitute an unsettling menace to symbolic fabrics of dictatorial power. Using the theoretical approaches elaborated by Achille Mbembe, Homi K. Bhabha and Michel de Certeau, this paper examines narrative deconstructive practices that aim at opening up the postcolonial public sphere for the expression of marginal voices without endowing literary texts with explicit political teleologies. Examples are taken from the novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Sony Labou Tansi, Ahmadou Kourouma and Garcia Marquez. The article concludes that subversive reactions to postcolonial State power thrive on a threatening hybridity and a subversive collocation of significations like profanity/mythology, banality/exceptionality, life/death, laughter/lamentation that find their valence in the context of excessive and pervasive State power.Keywords: subversion, mimicry, rumours, postcolonial, dictatorship

The Power Play: Ferdinand Oyono’s ‘House Boy’ Through Michel Foucault’s Ideas of Power

The white man’s quest for power in Africa led to what Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981) refers to as Colonizing and Decolonizing of minds. It is a power game that was perfected by the colonial administration in Cameroon to ‘rescue Africans from themselves’ as they take control over them and what belonged to them. This paper explores the manifestations and use of power in the novel houseboy by Ferdinand Oyono through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of power. The text depicts the black man’s plight on the hands of the colonial masters. Through Toundi’s diary, Oyono gives a detailed account of desperate human beings whose services are exploited, whose bodies are tortured and imprisoned, and whose lives are subjected to slow painful death in ‘Blackman’s Grave’ and buried naked in prison cemetery like common criminals. Against this bleak and dangerous backdrop, black men like Toundi, to some extent, redefined their spaces and identities through formidable resistance. The argument advanced in this paper is that Oyono’s’ Houseboy’ offers a counter narrative that depicts the social, cultural and political sensibilities of African people.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Cultural Theory and Its Significance in Translation

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Cultural Theory and Its Significance in Translation

Ayi Kwei Armah's secular egalitarian Africa: an authentic vision or a utopian dialectic

ABSTRACTConscious of the socio-political degeneration of the African continent, most African writers have embraced political theories in their artistic speculation on the future of Africa. Authors like Osmane Sembene and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have offered Marxist views in their writing whereas others like Wole Soyinka and Kofi Awoonor have favoured African traditional worldview as useful framework for a more coherent African cultural and political regeneration. Nevertheless, one author who stands out in the artistic search for the ideal vision for a better future Africa is Ayi Kwei Armah. Armah's discontent with Africa's present socio-political condition and his obsession for a radical change in Africa results in, what I will argue as, his adoption of utopian literary form to formulate an alternative “vision of a [better] future” (KMT 140) Africa. In Osiris Rising and KMT: In the House of Life, Armah rejects the practices of social class and religion in Africa and proposes secular and egalitarian values for adoption in a future pan African commonwealth. In this article, I examine Armah's vision for future Africa through the critical perspectives of literary utopia and argue that his vision, though plausible and desirable, retains brazen idealism in the present established world order.

An Analysis of Social Genocide in A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul and A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

An Analysis of Social Genocide in A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul and A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Conceptual Worlding of Literature

AbstractThe central claim of this article is that the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, known above all for his advocacy of African-language writing, performs in his essays a conceptual worlding of literature that serves to diversify its semantic content and thereby enable the recognition and expanded production of otherwise marginalised literatures. The logic of this conceptual worlding is read through a cosmopolitan-vernacular optic, which presupposes that Ngugi’s interventions can neither be defined as ethnically particularist nor as expansively cosmopolitan. Rather, his approach 1) combines multiple literary ‘ecologies’, in Alex Beecroft’s sense, and 2) attempts to reroute the temporality of ‘literature’ so that it is no longer reducible to Eurochronology. What unites these interventions is that they both draw on and attempt to recalibrate ‘world literature’ as a symbolic value in response to a postcolonial predicament. Three texts provide the empirical focus of the article: the department circular “On the Abolition of the English Department” that Ngugi co-authored in 1968 with Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba; the essay “Literature and Society”, first written in 1973; and “Memory, Restoration and African Renaissance”, which is the third chapter in Something Torn and New from 2009.

Reggae as Subaltern Knowledge: Representations of Christopher Columbus as a Construction of Alternative Historical Memory

In this article, I examine how identity is not being “rediscovered” in reggae music, but rather produced through a re-telling of history that blends trauma and witnessing. Albert Memmi underscores the importance of re-telling history in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) when he rightly declares that the greatest consequence of colonialism was the exclusion of the colonized from both history and their community (151). Representations of Christopher Columbus, largely through first-person testimony, illustrate a metonym for how reggae music can be useful for the diffusion and endurance of a counter-discursive epistemology to undermine Western knowledge and culture as hegemonic. These musicians re-write themselves into history and forge a community by raising doubts over the problematic encounter between Columbus and indigenous peoples, an encounter often perceived as one of the fundamental moments for the development of modern American civilization. Such a project is not unique to Jamaica. According to Kenyan postcolonial theorist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “most national liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer, by repudiating the religion of the oppressing nation and class and the entire education system of the colonizer” (27). Although not a liberation movement in and of itself, reggae and Rastafari have sought to revise history since for these musicians, the “truth” surrounding the encounter has been one-sided and misrepresented. Indeed, in Reggae Wisdom (2001), Anand Prahlad discusses how reggae musicians take on the role of teacher in order to “focus on specific areas of history and culture that have been distorted by the texts found in colonial school systems or in other forms of hegemonic propaganda” (33). Reggae musicians, in an act of counter-discursive difference, reduce Columbus, viewed as heroic in the Western world (the United States still celebrates Columbus Day as an official holiday), to a liar, thief, slaver, and pedophile. Central to the alternative epistemology in reggae is the revision of Western historical figures often credited with Western expansion to present him as a villain of the Antilles.

Reading aloud as Interface between Written and Oral Literatures in Britain, Ireland and Kenya

Literary criticism, especially in Europe, has not sufficiently shown and acknowledged the reciprocal interaction between oral and written traditions. Though it is easy to believe, with the theory of new historicism, that early written literature took over material from oral literature, the passage from print literature to the oral tradition rarely comes to consideration. The objective of this paper is, using the theory of orature, to show, with the examples of the works by Charles Dickens, William Carleton and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o that went from written literature to oral literature, that reading aloud serves as a process in went back to oral literature through. It is hoped that the realisation of the oral appropriation of printed literature in this process will change our approach to it and lead us to develop it as an alternative form of literary acquisition that is more efficient in some contexts.

Subversion or Subservience?

Postcolonial literature is supposed to be a battleground on which an active pursuit of decolonization should continue in every possible way. African literature written in the language of the Empire does not appear to be completely anticolonial. Ngugi wa Thiong’o feels a need for linguistic decolonization of African literature. According to him, African literature manifests the domination of the Empire by using their language. He classifies the works of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka as Afro-European literature. But is taking up the language the same as accepting the standards of the colonizer? The language question has many implications, especially when it comes to African literature. We see that Achebe attempts to decentralize control over language by extensively modifying it. My paper examines how the Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka have developed their own written English vernacular codes and the way they Nigerianize their texts using pidgin English in their dialogue—the English that is actually used by some Nigerians. My paper also shows that there are other manifestations of imperial domination apart from the linguistic hegemony in African literature. The English of the Empire has been domesticated by Achebe and it has effectively become the language of literary expression, but a preference for the White Man’s codes and customs is seen in sociocultural settings. There was cultural domination in the country, which is still at work in present day Nigeria. My paper shows that the domestication of the English language is able to carry the weight of the African culture, but these authors point out that internal indigenous structures are flawed and these deficiencies allow the apparently dead seeds of hegemony to germinate all over again in native soil. So, in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s words, the decolonization of the mind has not yet taken place. In this paper I include my personal experiences of and interactions with the westernized Nigerian and their apparent Afro-European lifestyle. The years I have spent in Nigeria have brought me in contact with the westernized educated Igbos and Yorubas of the South, and my description of their day-to-day tendencies explicitly show that there is a serious imperial effect deeply rooted in the Nigerians.

English

This study examines the representation of corporeal difference as one of the fundamental ideologies on which the power dynamics of colonial and postcolonial polities are based. The analyses in this study are anchored on postcolonial theory with regard to issues such as power, race, centre/margin and decolonisation while the various notions of corporeality discussed here are informed by the works of theorists like Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe and Michael Taussig. With textual examples from novels by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Sony Labour Tansi and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the paper argues that the body is a pertinent starting point for reflection on subjectification given that (apart from its analogical efficiency) it represents the vital entity on which basic considerations of self and other are imagined and refracted in concrete political practices. Though the asymmetries between the colonizer and colonized bodies have undergone transformation in the postcolony, the realities of the postcolonial regimes are still hinged on corporeal differences that make distinctions, however subtle, between bodies with surplus power and those with a deficit of power, depending on their aggregate positionality with regard to the centres of power, especially the State. The body of the potentate becomes the incarnation of this difference, hence making it a frequent creative topos. This study comes to the conclusion that the African novel constitutes a central and critical locus in the debate of the decolonisation of the mind and the deconstruction of epistemological grounds of difference. This is carried out through a variety of narrative structures, one of the most effective of which is the postcolonial dictatorship novel form. The textual inscription of the body underlines the consistent role of African literature as artistic intervention in colonial and postcolonial political practices, thereby foregrounding human equality as an indispensable pre-condition for a democratic and egalitarian society. Key words: African, body, power, subject, postcolonial, hegemony, subversion.