Every so often, a TTBOOK project will take us to unexpected places. For Anne and me, Ethiopia was one such place. Two years ago we attended a conference in Addis Ababa, where 40 writers and humanists from around Africa came together to talk about culture, philosophy and post-colonialism. We interviewed a number of those scholars, and since then we’ve recorded more interviews for our radio series "Ideas From Africa."
We just re-aired one of those shows, "Jazz Migrations," and we’re now putting together the next episode in this series. The show’s title, "Decolonizing the Mind," comes from a famous book by the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who believes African writers should write in their native languages rather than the colonial languages of English or French.
"The first thing the colonizer does is always impose their language as the language of power. So they demonize the language of the colonized and they glorify the language of the colonizer. It becomes the language of intelligence, of education, of intellectual exploration," Ngugi told me when we spoke recently. "I’m not against English, but I’m against a hierarchy of languages. English was the language of power during colonial times. It is the language of power in some parts of Africa today — say, in Kenya."
Ngugi was once regarded by the repressive Kenyan government as one of his country’s most dangerous people. On New Year’s Eve, 1977, he was arrested and locked up in a maximum security prison. Then, in a remarkable act of defiance, he wrote a novel in his native Gikuyu language — the first modern novel written in Gikuyu — on prison-issued toilet paper. This became one of the defining events in modern African literature. And that novel he wrote in prison? It’s a modern classic - later published in English as "Devil on the Cross."
Today, Ngugi is one of the world’s great writers and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize. Now 83, he lives and teaches in California, where he continues to write fiction. His new novel, "The Perfect Nine," tells the creation story of the Gikuyu people.
Interviewing Ngugi about his life and career was a great privilege. He’s eloquent and profound — and also quite funny. And yes, he tells the story of how he wrote a novel in prison despite being under continual surveillance.
Stay tuned for "Decolonizing the Mind" in a few weeks!
—Steve
Photo of Ngugi wa Thiong’o by Steve Zylius, UCI 2019