A Conversation with Ngugi wa Thiongio

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is a much admired writer in India. More significantly, and quite appropriately, his admirers exceed the "reformed Indians" (to adopt Ngugi's phrase) of the Englit academy. Grassroots activists, civil rights defenders, journalists, and writers in various languages are in communication with his work. Several of his works have been translated into the South Indian language of Telugu. ¹ Not surprisingly, some of these translations were done by the well-known activist poet in Telugu, Varavara Rao—when he was himself in prison.

Ngugi's visit to India was occasioned by an international conference on the Nationality Question. The conference, organized by the All India People's Resistance Forum (an activist front), was held in Delhi in February 1996. In his two-week visit Ngugi made two presentations at the conference and traveled to other Indian linguistic regions to give talks and meet people. ² As a small testimony to his reception in India it could be pointed out that during his visit everyday several newspapers published articles on him, translations from his work (in Indian languages), and interviews with him.

From being a trenchant and persistent critic of colonial and neocolonial regimes, Ngugi's concerns today seem to be with the work of culture in the shadow of global, financial capital (or "capitalist fundamentalism," as he calls it). The culture of his concern now ranges from the most elemental to the highly rarefied, from the language of voice and song to that of music and film. The term he uses to map this range is "technology" in the widest sense. In our efforts to decolonize our minds from the devastating effects of colonial and neocolonial control, Ngugi argues, we must begin to gather and grasp our resources and means of imagination: "Technology is certainly one of the means of production of images. But once one has acquired the technology, what stories does one tell with one's pen, what pictures does one draw with one's camera, and what song does one sing with one's microphone? This depends to a certain extent on the degree to which we have decolonized the languages of image making the film language and the languages of sound."

Ngugi describes the activity of "decolonizing the means of imagination" as an ongoing struggle to "move the center" of culture not only from its assumed location in the West, but also from the privileged groups in various societies to other domains "that are other linguistic centers through which we all can look at the globe." The task of the critical intellectual today, Ngugi argues, is to make possible communication or dialogue between languages that have been marginalized by the assumed centrality of the West. In order to move the work of culture in this direction, Ngugi and his wife Njeeri have started the journal Mutiìri—a journal devoted entirely to publishing in Gikuyu language. The journal encourages translations from any language in the world into Gikuyu: "This is only a tiny step in a long journey." He said that the conference on the Nationality Question itself exemplified a move toward such a dialogue and hoped that "this will be followed by more steps so that we can intensify the dialogue."

DV: Interestingly, there appears to be an unbroken continuity of themes you deal with in your writings—concerning modern institutions such as education, religion, political system, etc.—but the forms in which these are explored vary from novel to novel (detective thriller, oral/ folk narratives, political fables, realistic narratives, etc.). In other words, documentary themes prevail but formal experimentation continues. Given your position that content must eventually determine form, how would one explain this discontinuity of form and content, on the one hand, and continuity of documentary themes, on the other?

NG: The themes are created by historical situation in Africa—colonialism and resistance against colonialism are persistent themes; in the present...