Traveling Theory: Ngugi's Return to English

Writers in Politics: A Re-engagement With Issues of Literature and Society, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Oxford: James Currey, 1997.

Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The Clarendon Lectures, 1996. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.

Writing has always been my way of reconnecting myself to the landscape of my birth and upbringing.

Not surprisingly the natural landscape dominates the East African literary imagination. This awareness of the land as the central actor in our lives distinguishes East African literature from others in the continent and it certainly looms large in my own writing from The River Between to Matigari.

--Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi made two powerful statements that were going to dominate the nature of his critical and cultural work in the 1980s and 1990s and to perhaps haunt him at the dawn of the twenty-first century. He argued, first of all, that his decision to write fiction in Gikuyu, an African language, constituted an epistemological break with his previous practices; he also argued that the essays collected in this volume signified his "farewell to the English language as a vehicle for any of my writing" (xiv). For a brief period in the late 1980s, Ngugi was so determined to fulfil his pledge to abandon English as his linguistic medium that he even made conference presentations to European and American audiences in Gikuyu and published a significant critical essay in his mother tongue in the prestigious Yale Journal of Criticism. But soon after the publication of this essay, Ngugi returned, without explanation, to his familiar role as a critic of imperial European languages writing in English. By the time he took up a senior professorship at New York University in the early 1990s, it was clear that Ngugi's effort to use Gikuyu as the language of both his fiction and critical discourse had been defeated by the reality of exile and American professional life. Ngugi tried to keep Gikuyu as an important part of his intellectual and literary work through MUtiiri, a journal he founded and edited through New York University, but in reading the criticism and fiction that he was presenting through this pioneering publication, one could not help noticing that his work was being haunted by the pressures of producing knowledge in an African language within the limits and demands of Western institutions of knowledge. What did it mean to produce a journal in Gikuyu when Ngugi was separated from his immediate readers and what he would consider to be the vital linguist resources of an African language? What dictated the themes and cultural grammar promoted by a Gikuyu journal produced in the heart of the most cosmopolitan city in the world?

In regard to the first question, Ngugi's efforts to produce a professional journal in an African language were impressive. The first volume of MUtiiri offered essays on specialized topics in fields such as sociolinguistics, computing, and social theory that had rarely been taken up in publications in African languages. At the same time, however, there was no doubt that Ngugi saw the function of the journal not simply as communicative (the sharing and dissemination of knowledge within a community of readers united by a certain set of experiences and interests), but also vindictive (he wanted to prove that an African language could perform certain linguistic, philosophical, and scientific functions as well as European languages). And thus even in its concern with things Gikuyu or African, the journal seemed to function under the anxieties created by its conditions of production and distribution.

In regard to the second question, then, the very professionalism of the journal, its impressive list of contributors and choice of subjects, reflected the Ngugi's need to "Africanize" the practice of producing knowledge...