Engaging Ngugi

Books Discussed:

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, by Patrick Williams. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, by Oliver Lovesey. New York: Twayne, 2000.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, by Simon Gikandi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Ngugi's Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation, by James Ogude. London: Pluto, 1999.

Critical Essays on Ngugi wa Thiong'o, ed. Peter Nazareth. New York: Twayne, 2000.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, currently Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, is one of Africa's best known and most widely discussed authors. In a clear affirmation of his significance, an international conference on his work in 1994 was attended by more than 200 scholars and resulted in the following year in the publication of tow volumes edited by Charles Cantalupo: The World of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts. Since then, the long-gathering "critical mass" of interest in Ngugi has resulted in a number of additional books, five of which will be reviewed here. Three of these are comprehensive studies of Ngugi's work; one is a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of his writings and career; and one is a monograph that examines Ngugi's novels in the context of Kenyan history. In what follows, I intend to interlace my remarks concerning these books with some comments of my own on Ngugi and a few of the most prominent issues his work raises.

The three general studies each undertake to broadly appraise Ngugi's work and ideas but they do so with differing degrees of critical rigor and refinement. Patrick Williams begins his preface by noting that "[d]espite his undoubted prominence [. . .] Ngugi's work has for some reason not received the extended book-length treatment it both needs and deserves" (no longer the case, as we shall see), at the same time acknowledging that his own book does not fill that need but simply is intended to serve as "a useful introduction" to Ngugi's writings (xi).

Recognizing that postcolonial studies places a good deal of emphasis on the connection between "the novel and national identity," Williams read Ngugi's fiction "as an increasingly politically committed anatomizing of the troubled development of twentieth-century Kenya" (17). As we shall see, especially in the discussion of Gikandi's and Ogude's books, the Kenyan history enacted in Ngugi's work is shaped by his dedication to a specific vision of the Kenyan nation. This is evident particularly with regard to Ngugi's treatment of Mau Mau—whose self-designation, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, clearly had a powerful influence on Ngugi in terms of the crucial linkage between land and freedom that is evident in his work. When it comes to Mau Mau, Ngugi frequently has been accused of recasting legend as history; but in view of Kenya President Daniel arap Moi's 1986 statement that "there should be no historical account of Mau Mau whatsoever," it is not surprising Williams impresses upon us the notion that Ngugi's writings "can be seen as part of what Walter Benjamin called 'the fight for the oppressed past'" (180), and that his privileging of "legends" is one important strategy in challenging the Kenyan establishment's self-serving manipulation of "facts" (179).

Chapters 2 and 3 of Williams's book deal, respectively, with Ngugi's first three novels, The River Between (1965), Weep Not, Child (1964), and A Grain of wheat (1967), and with the later novels Petals of Blood (1977), Devil on the Cross (1980), and Matigari (1986). The division makes sense, since Ngugi's novelistic ambition and the focus of his ideological concerns both intensify, starting with Petals of Blood. Indeed, Williams considers Petals of Blood sufficiently important to devote much of his concluding chapter to a discussion of the "divergence of responses" to the novel (166 ff.).

Williams's fourth chapter deals with Ngugi's essays, which, with...