Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o

  As we talked, he dialed somebody, and soon the newspaper that contained one of my articles was spread before him. I was sure of a deal.

  “I want to tell you my honest opinion,” Jack said. “I have read and liked your articles. I like the way you write, how you use words, but a few months in this desk, and it’s all gone, the individual voice, the something you have. Please don’t let us ruin what you have. Your future lies between hard covers.”

  He wished me all the best as he led me to the door. It was all polite, but what I then most needed was a job, not a future in hardcovers.

  I turned to the Sunday Nation. The paper and its sisters, the Daily Nation and Taifa Leo, were publications of East African Newspapers (Nation series) Ltd., later the Nation Media Group, owned by the Aga Khan. Established between 1958 and 1960, they were the newest kids on the block, competing with the oldest newspaper in the country, the East African Standard, which Alibhai Mulla Jeevanjee had started in 1902 but sold in 1905 to British businessmen, who turned it into a daily. The old, aligned with white-settler interests, was no match for the new, aligned with inclusive change. Their very titles, Nation and Taifa,13 looked to a life after the colony. Soon after, the Sunday Post went out of business for good. The Sunday Nation reigned supreme on Sundays.

  V

  My first article in the Sunday Nation appeared in May 1962. A few more, and they gave me a regular column, under the title As I See It, bylined James Ngugi.

  Writing a weekly column was a challenge. I had no background in journalism. I was used to writing academic papers for class, but I soon came to sense the difference between the footnoted academic paper, with numerous citations and references, and the journalistic essay aimed at a mass audience. I learned to make only one point, in a structure of beginning, middle, and end, but the subject or theme had to come right at the beginning.

  Initially, getting a different subject for each Sunday was equally challenging. But I came to learn how to pick my subject from the general news during the week. Mine really was opinion journalism, and it had parasitic relations to the news gathered and written by others in the dailies. But I also dug into my literary heritage, writing, in a popular form, what I encountered in my studies as an English honors student. So the names of writers and books that I read in or outside the classroom would find their way into some of the write-ups.

  Having to rely on my take on some aspect of current news also meant developing a personal view on what was unfolding in Kenya and Uganda, and sometimes in Africa and the rest of the world. I had not formed a comprehensive worldview, but I grew up in a race-structured society where white was wealth, power, and privilege and black was poverty, impotence, and burden, where white was indolence and black was diligence, a society where whites harvested what blacks planted. This dichotomy gave me a frame through which I saw the world. Amid contradictions, incoherence, and half-formed opinions, I came to develop themes that would later find their way into my fiction and nonfiction, particularly the issues raised by inequalities of power and wealth in society.

  In fact, concerns over the social conditions of the ordinary working man and woman were to be found in many of my articles, alongside those that focused on education, pan-Africanism, freedom of the press, and suspicions about extremism. Most consistent was my belief in art and literature and theater as being central in the emerging new Africa. In the case of theater, I even called on the Makerere College Dramatic Society to organize a touring company. Twelve months after the article was printed, faculty and students launched the Makerere Travelling Theatre.

  If there is any overarching theme in my articles of the Makerere period, it would be humanism, with art and culture occupying a venerable place. To me, humanism implies real human care. Thus the As I See It column in the Sunday Nation of September 9, 1962, was titled “What About Our Neighbors?” I focused on the plight of beggars as the neighbor we meet in the streets but don’t want to acknowledge. This helped me raise the question of social mutual care: I looked forward to a time when “Kenya will be in a position to cater for the economic and social welfare of all her citizens,” but also cautioned that “a social welfare state cannot be built on begging abroad—a thing which every newly independent country is forced to do.”

  In another column, on April 14, 1963, I commended the East African Literature Bureau for producing books in vernaculars. In so doing, I argued, the bureau “not only helped the children, who would otherwise have had to depend on translations alone, but has helped those African authors writing in the vernacular.”

  Time and again, I came back to the language question. While I appreciated English, I was also concerned about the place of the other languages, particularly Kiswahili.

  For instance, in the Sunday Nation of September 23, 1962, under the heading, “Swahili Must Have Its Rightful Place,” I started by lamenting the fact that African writers were “forced to tame the music and strifes in their own souls by having to use a foreign language. This was not because the African languages were necessarily inferior to French or English but because “the study of vernacular languages especially in secondary schools and colleges has been totally neglected.” This neglect of indigenous languages remained “a black spot in the whole of colonial education in Africa.” I challenged writers in general and African writers in particular to produce more work in these languages to ensure enough material for reading and study, concluding, ”I do not think for a moment that we can ever be a nation of any importance unless we have a language of our own through which our national aspirations and spiritual growth can be expressed.”

  While I applauded African culture and its centrality in emergent Africa, I also warned against an uncritical worship of the past. In the Sunday Nation of August 5, 1962, under the title “Let Us Be Careful About What We Take from the Past,” I wrote strongly against two customs: bride-price and female circumcision. I argued that the two had outlived their purpose and original rationale. Bride-price, dowry as it is sometimes called, had been turned from a kind of marriage insurance, as in the past, “into a profitable commercial enterprise.” I was harsher on female circumcision, which I said is “brutal and shows a callousness to human suffering. It is quite nauseating to see some obviously very young girls being subjected to this, even on the verge of independence.” I took issue with some who called themselves enlightened and yet “condone the custom, who make the ordinary man feel that it has something special to do with his culture or with the more mystical African personality.” I called upon leaders of opinion to come out in the open and condemn this with one voice: “It must be attacked mercilessly from all sides.”

  In time I built a following in Kenya and, closer home, among my fellow students. But theirs was more of a general admiration that I wrote a regular column in a national newspaper than a critical engagement with what I wrote. The exception was J. Njoroge. He thought I was selling out to a newspaper owned by the Aga Khan. To my rejoinder that they never interfered with pieces, that they never dictated what I say or any of my opinions, he countered by saying there was no such a thing as a completely independent journalism, that one wrote within the general consensus of a newspaper. A newspaper had a world outlook and journalists worked within that outlook, that if they tried to go outside, they would find themselves without a job. He would have preferred I stick to creative writing. But I didn’t abandon my journalism.

  A collage by Barbara Caldwell of As I See It and Commentary articles from Sunday Nation / Daily Nation written by Ngũgĩ

  In the five years of my stay at Makerere, I wrote more than eighty essays, mostly under As I See It, but also as general features in the Nation Group of newspapers and in other newspapers and magazines. The weekly retreat into the streets was obviously good catharsis from the world of textbooks, because my classwork didn’t suffer at all, except for a few papers handed in late.

  Journalism published in newspapers was my first major foray into writing. However, when later I got an invitation to the First Int
ernational Conference of Writers of English Expression to be held in Makerere in June 1962, it was clearly not because of my journalism but my then modest literary output.

  8

  Transition and That Letter from Paris

  I

  I could hardly believe it. I’m a second-year college student, and I’m being invited to a gathering of literary giants? The letter even suggested that one of my works, “The Return,” would be discussed in the short-story session.

  “The Return” tells the story of a man who comes home from a concentration camp looking forward to resuming life where he left it at the time of his arrest. It seemed to him that life must have stood still waiting for his return. But even in his absence life has flowed on. History rolls on; people have moved on; things can never be the way he imagined they would be. At first he feels let down, as if life and history had cheated him; he thought of ending his life by drowning himself in a river, but standing by the river and watching the continuous flow of the water, he reads a message and finds the strength to live.

  It was first published in Penpoint number 11 in October 1961. It was then reproduced in Transition in January 1962. Transition was a new magazine, the first issue dated November 1961. Its founder, Rajat Neogy, was born and raised in Kampala. His mother was the deputy headmistress of the Kololo School; his father, the headmaster of another primary school. Rajat Neogy, his brother Rathin, and his sister Chitra were schooled in Kololo and the Old Kampala Secondary School.1

  Rajat’s entrepreneurial skills began to show at the Old Kampala Secondary where he brought out a nicely produced magazine, cyclostyled and well bound, that he named Friends. The name is symbolic of what later animated the news magazine, Transition, which he started after returning from further studies in England: its pages were a meeting ground of literary friends. In its literary ambition, content, production, and presentation, the magazine was unlike anything seen in Kampala before, its very title suggesting liminal space between the old and the new. It was one of the signs of the New Uganda.

  Neogy became a fixture of the social scene in Kampala. His parties, unlike others around Makerere or among the expatriate set around Kololo, were a literary salon that attracted writers, artists, and singers of all races, heralds of a new, confident Uganda. It was at one such party that I first met Barbara Kimenye. Whether making an entrance, sitting down, or moving around the room, she talked and interacted with guests with the ease of one who was aware of her looks and dress, indeed one who accepted the fact that all eyes, male and female, were fixed on her person and motion.

  I was surprised when she came over to where I sat, told me she had read my story in Transition, and talked to me as if I were an established writer. It became a habit: every time we met at Rajat’s parties, she would find the time to sit by me and talk about writing. It seemed a contradiction. This tall, party-dressed, beautiful lady, private secretary to Kabaka, king of Buganda, from a mysterious background with alluring hints of sojourns in Jamaica, England, Tanganyika, and Uganda had this keen interest in such mundane things as writing, particularly by a student whose claims to fame were a short story in Transition and a few others in an English Department magazine.

  She did finally mention her own interest in writing. Barbara would turn out to be one of the leading writers in Uganda and Africa, the author of the Moses series and one of the most articulate voices of the new Africa. Behind the party glamour was a very sensitive soul and an incredibly playful imagination.

  Transition, a magazine around which budding writers grouped, soon attracted some of the leading African intellectuals within and outside Uganda. At the time of my invitation, however, Transition was still in its childhood. Was it possible that my appearances in Penpoint had occasioned the letter from Paris, from an organization that called itself the Society for Cultural Freedom? But then, not every contributor to Penpoint had been called to the feast. Could those people in Paris have known about the piece in Transition? The magazine marked my own literary transition from a student who wrote for a department’s venue to a writer in the world. Not that I believed it, the designation of a writer, but I concluded that it was my appearance in Transition that made readers outside the walls of Makerere take note of me.

  Then I remembered that the letter had come to me through the Makerere Extra-Mural Department. I had once shown Gerald Moore one of the early drafts of the manuscript of what I then called “The Black Messiah.” He invited me to his campus house, and on the veranda, he talked a great deal about the new Nigerian writers, the magazine Black Orpheus, the Mbari Clubs in Nigeria, and the writers, the guitar-playing Wole Soyinka in particular. Moore talked about them with the familiarity of social friends. When finally he came around to my manuscript, he asked me if some black women had blue eyes. I asked why. Because, he said, I had described one of the women characters in “The Black Messiah” as having beautiful blue eyes. I was so embarrassed that I hardly paid much attention to what else he said about the manuscript. I just wanted to go back to my room and correct this business about blue eyes. I had read too many novels by white writers, and was seeing a black African woman through European eyes.

  I assumed that Gerald Moore, the East African point man for the conference organizers, must have put my name forward after reading “The Black Messiah.” I was never quite sure, just as I was not sure why Makerere had been chosen as the venue of the first ever continent-wide Conference of African Writers of English Expression, unless with the aim of stimulating writing in East Africa, assumed to be lagging behind West and South Africa.

  Whatever prompted the invitation and the venue, it was thrilling when June 1962 came and I found myself among the big names of the time, which included Ezekiel2 Mphahlele, the main organizer, and Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, and Arthur Maimane—all South Africans in exile; Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, J.P. Clark, and Donatus Nwoga, all from Nigeria; Kofi Awoonor (then going under the name Kofi Awoonor-Williams) of Ghana; and our East African contingent of Grace Ogot, Rebecca Njau, and three Penpoint writers, Jonathan Kariara, John Nagenda, and me. Rajat Neogy and his Transition were very much present: it was as if the magazine and the conference were born of the same moment of East Africa in transition and needed each other. From the Caribbean came Arthur Drayton; and from the United States, Langston Hughes, who had recently published Ask Your Mama, and Saunders Redding, then a prominent African American critic.

  Langston Hughes gave the gathering breadth of geography and depth of history. He was one of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, which had influenced the founders of Négritude. He had been to the Black Writers Congresses in Paris in 1956 and Rome in 1959, both attended by the great names of the black world, among them Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Sédar Senghor, and Richard Wright. Thus Hughes’s presence in Kampala gave the Makerere conference symbolic connections to the Rome and Paris Congresses, both organized by the great literary magazine Présence Africaine, founded and edited by Alioune Diop.

  I knew less about Hughes’s works and connections with history than his celebrity status; the year before, Arna Bontemps, poet and novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, had visited Makerere and talked to us about Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance, and their friendship and collaboration.

  The proceedings were held in Northcote, my home turf, so I felt like a host to a pan-Africanist gathering that began June 11 and ended on June 17, 1962.

  The conference, hailed as the first get-together of African authors writing in English anywhere in the world, was convened by the Mbari Writers’ and Artists’ Club of Ibadan, Nigeria, in collaboration with the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of Makerere College, and sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom. There was some self-reinforcement going on here, since the Mbari Club had been set up in 1961 with the help of the Congress of Cultural Freedom.

  It was an impressive gathering of twenty-nine writers, five editors of political and literary reviews, four critics, representatives of five publishing hou
ses (British and American, but mostly British), and three observers from French-speaking countries—forty-five participants in all.

  The conference was divided into discussion papers, critics’ time, with sessions on the state of the novel, the theater, poetry, and the short story in general, plus one session on the short story in East Africa, which meant my work and that of John Nagenda and Jonathan Kariara.

  II

  The conference had left out writers in African languages, so it was interesting that the opening session was dominated by heated discussions of what constituted African literature, generating a scathing response from one who was not even there. Obi Wali argued, in an article in Transition number 10, an issue devoted to a review of the conference, that African literature written in European languages was leading to a dead end.

  But for me, a writer in his very beginnings, the most important discussions were not about philosophy and ideology but rather the specifics of texts, elements of the craft of writing.

  In the novel session, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night occupied center stage as different models of realism. Alex La Guma was then under house arrest and Dennis Brutus was in prison, both for their anti-apartheid activism. Brutus’s collection of poetry, Sirens Knuckles Boots, and La Guma’s A Walk in the Night had just been released by the Mbari writers club of Nigeria. Brutus’s clarity of images was often compared and contrasted, in his favor, with Christopher Okigbo’s Arcanum. In person, Okigbo was one of the more accessible writers in the conference. Years later, he would die as a soldier on the side of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War. At the conference, he was an energetic, charismatic young man who dismissed the critics who said his writing was dense and inaccessible and that he was overinfluenced by Gerald Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot with what became a famous quip. He said he wrote his poetry for poets.