It’s an event in Kenya: 45 years after it was banned, the play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will marry when I want) is performed again in Nairobi. Very critical of the colonial heritage in post-independence Kenya, and performed in the Gikuyu language, this play had earned prison in 1977, then exile for its two authors, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o who was regularly approached for the prize. Literature Nobel Prize.
With our correspondent in Nairobi, Florence Morice
” Let’s unite and organize “, launch in heart the actors. A cry of revolt to denounce the exploitation of the people by a small elite in post-independence Kenya. The statement is virulent, but for one of the authors Ngugi wa Thiong’o, still based in the United Statesif this text earned him a year in prison and then exile, it was for having dared to have it performed in the Gikuyu language and by Kenyan peasants and workers in his native town of Limuru.
” In colonial contexts, language has always been used as an instrument to control minds. Back then, children were beaten or punished if caught speaking their native language at school. “says the playwright.
Today, the actors are professionals. The play is performed in English and in Gikuyu at the national theatre, which appealed to the British director, Nash Stuart, it is, he says, the strength and the universality of the subject: ” The play is critical of postcolonial society. But all the topics covered still seem relevant today. Poverty, lack of opportunity, the gap between rich and poor, and not just in Kenya. »
Many enthusiastic spectators underline the topicality of the subject in a Kenya, hit in certain regions by a food crisis, while two multimillionaires will face each other in the presidential election next August.
• Choice of mother tongue
It was following this experience and this exile that Ngugi wa Thiong’o decided to his farewell to english », a language imposed by British colonization, and to only write in Gikiyu, his native language. A rare and strong choice, which marks the history of African literature, but also undoubtedly explains ” in part that this author celebrated in the English-speaking world and beyond is still relatively little known and translated in the French-speaking world “.
It is certain that the fact that he took this linguistic position of writing in his mother tongue certainly played a role, and he is undoubtedly placed in a category of local writers. In fact, there is a paradox: while his great merit is to write in his mother tongue, he pays for it in a way. This is the proof that his fight is necessary, it is the proof that it is absolutely necessary to assume this position which is little assumed.
Jean-Pierre Orban, translator of the first volume of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoirs, “Rêver en temps de guerre”, which has just been published in French