When Abdulrazak Gurnah recently won the Nobel Prize in literature, those who heard the news had one of two immediate reactions. The first was, "Who?" But those who admired his work were elated. Gurnah himself was stunned. In fact, when he first got the congratulatory call, he assumed it was a prank. He’s only the sixth African writer to win the prize and the first Black author since Toni Morrison in 1993.
Gurnah grew up in Zanzibar, an archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. When he was 18, a violent uprising in 1964 forced him to flee to England, where he began to write and later became a professor of English and postcolonial literature. The Swedish Academy praised Gurnah for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.” Over the years, his books have received rave reviews but rarely sold well. Several books had even gone out of print, and English-language publishers are now scrambling to meet the sudden demand for Gurnah’s work.
Decolonization is also the recurring theme of another African master, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. In this weekend’s show, “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngugi tells the story of how he was arrested by the repressive Kenyan government in 1977 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.”
–Steve