The Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o is the author of an immense body of work inspired by the myths and legends of his country, but also by its political destiny from the colonial occupation to the present day. Translated fragmentarily into French, Ngugi is little known in the French-speaking world. The recent publication by Vents d’ailleurs of the first volume of his memoirs is an opportunity to get to know the work and thought of this exceptional writer better.
” Oh yes, I am really very happy. I am delighted to have this opportunity to reconnect with my French-speaking readers, thanks to the publication of Dreaming in times of war, the first volume of my memoirs. This process actually started with the trial volume Decolonize the mind appeared a few years ago. »
Thus speaks Ngugi wa Thiong’o, giant of contemporary African letters. Octogenarian, Ngugi is the author of an immense, protean work, shared between novels, short stories, essays and plays. This work is characterized by its fidelity to traditional literary forms and vernacular languages and also by its inclusion in the European tradition of literary activism. The Kenyan’s name has been regularly cited for several years for the Nobel Prize in Literature, won last year by another African, the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah.
A committed writer
Born in 1938, in Kamarithu, Kenya, Ngugi has lived in the United States for more than forty years. In the 1980s, he had to flee his country where his criticism of the Kenyan ruling class had earned him a long year of detention in a high security prison. At the origin of the ire of the Kenyan authorities, his satirical play Ngaahika Ndeenda (“ I will get married when I want “), which depicted the fortunes and misfortunes of landless peasants, exploited by corrupt elites. A committed writer, the Kenyan novelist and playwright explores through his work the misdeeds of neocolonial politics in Africa. His positions in favor of the marginalized of History make the writer an heir of Zola, Hugo or even Tolstoy.
A radical heir, as the author implied during a videoconference interview he gave to RFI: “ I am committed in the sense that I am campaigning for the economic emancipation of the working classes. Coming from a peasant background myself, I worked as a young boy in the pyrethrum fields. My brothers and my sisters worked in tea plantations belonging to European settlers. It is therefore quite natural that I became interested in the question of the economic and social empowerment of the marginalized strata of our societies. Even today, I remain attached to this cause because, for me, it is the only way towards a fairer world. »
Translated into French in a fragmented way, the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o is still too little known to the general French-speaking public. In the years 1970-1980, the publication in quick succession in France of his first great novels with the titles Wheat will spring (Julliard, 1969), Child, don’t cry (CEDA/Hatier, 1983) or even blood petals (Présence Africaine, 1986), aroused a first wave of interest for this author. In 2011 appeared the volume of his critical and literary essays Decolonize the mind (La Fabrique), where the writer calls on African authors to write in their mother tongues, as he did himself, abandoning English in favor of Kikuyu. The publication in the wake of the French version of the first volume of his memoirs, Dreaming in times of war, promises to be a new stage in the discovery by French-speaking readers of the dissident universe of Ngugi.
A cathartic experience
Written in a more direct and intimate style, Dreaming in times of war is part of a series of three autobiographical volumes that Ngugi devoted to the first twenty-six years of his life, tracing the ever-changing circumstances in which he evolved until the end of his university studies. Long reluctant to the idea of autobiography, Ngugi confided how the experience of remembering and restoring the past was cathartic, even liberating, for him. And to add: It was my wife who pushed me to write these memoirs, reminding me that I had to do it for my two youngest children, who were born in the United States. They wanted to know what kind of little boy I was. I thank my wife because in the end I had a lot of fun recounting those childhood years. I was already in California when I wrote these pages about my childhood in Kenya in the early 1940s. »
After a first introductory chapter, the autobiography opens with the author’s polygamous family: the father who shares his hut with the goats at night. The aging writer has forgotten nothing of the family concession, divided between the four wives, including the author’s mother, Wanjiku, and the twenty-four children of the patriarch. Ngugi has also not forgotten the changing landscapes of the village, following the felling of forests and the pyrethrum fields that approach the houses. We will see that the tension running through Ngugi’s life story was not only landscape and geographic.
The evocative title of this first part of the memoirs refers to the social, political and international turbulence in which the author’s childhood and adolescence took place, in a colonized Kenya. His country was successively shaken by the Second World War, then the uprising of the Mau-Mau guerrillas and the brutal repression of this anti-colonial resistance by the British administration. The title also refers to the pact that, as a little boy, the author-narrator concluded with his mother, his guardian angel, promising him to always ” do his best ” and of ” keep dreaming, even in times of war “.
However, the “war” is omnipresent in these pages. It is the backdrop of childhood. It is familial when the author’s mother, a victim of domestic violence, is forced to leave the family home with her children to take refuge with her father. It is social when Ngugi’s father is despoiled of his land under a written contract which now replaces the ancestral custom of collective land sharing and oral commitment. It is finally political with the colonial domination which despoiled the Kenyans of their lands, their gods and their languages.
The trial of Jomo Kenyatta
All is not lost, however, because freedom is at the end of the tunnel with the emergence of great nationalist figures who stand up to the settlers and their courts, as did Jomo Kenyatta, at his trial for sedition in the Kapenguria court. Some of the most eloquent pages of Ngugi’s childhood narrative are devoted to Kenyatta’s trial and the fascination this historic leader held for his people.
” People today have no idea what Jomo Kenyatta meant to us when we were young, emphasizes the author of Blood Petals. He looked like a giant. A character straight out of mythology books, he was, for our generation, greater than Mandela. I conscientiously followed the news of his trial in the press, which was itself a factory of legends. Paradoxically, a few years later, it is the same Kenyatta who will have me locked up in a penitentiary under high security, but throughout my childhood and adolescence, he was my hero. »
” I’m basically a storyteller Ngugi likes to repeat. It is indeed as a storyteller that he summons up his childhood years, brilliantly restoring the atmosphere of traditional evening gatherings, his fascination for the stories told there, and the magical universe of the school which will save him from the turmoil of war. How the dream of taking his destiny into his own hands, while bearing in mind the fractures of the traditional order in which he grew up, made Ngugi the immense writer he has become, will be the subject next week of the second part of this column.
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Dreaming in times of war. childhood memories, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Translated from English by Jean-Pierre Orban and Annaëlle Richard. “Pulsations” collection, published by Vents d’ailleurs, 258 pages, 22 euros.