To mark the occasion of his own eightieth birthday, the writer, in these two separate articles, first pays homage to the late Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and then writes a letter to his own country highlighting some of the disasters that have unfolded there in the past sixty years!
‘A man’s character is his fate.’
Heraclitus
(1)
In a memorable poem to the great Caribbean poet and playwright Aime Cesaire, the equally great Senegalese philosopher-poet Leopold Sedar Senghor (later president of his country), wrote these words: ‘To you, beloved brother and friend, my abrupt and brotherly salute!
From the black-backed gulls, the canoers of the deep seas, I have tasted your news,
mingled with spices and the odorous sounds of Rivieras of the South and the islands.
You sing the ancestors and the true princes
You break a star from the sky, just for cross-rhythm; and the poor throw at your naked feet, the rough mats of their year’s earnings, and the women their amber hearts and the dance of their torn souls.
My friend, my friend, you are coming!
I will await you- the harbor master knows- there under the lemon tree.
You will come to the feast of our expectation. When the soft light of sunset falls over our roofs!
Now that the distinguished and world-renowned Ngugi Wa Thiong’o has recently danced with his ancestors, I thought we should symbolically invite him, with Senghor’s words, to an Awujor, because of what he meant to all of us! But first, I would like to recall him, for the times- however brief- that I spent with him: someone whose character, decency and sacrifice became yardsticks for how man’s fate is intricately linked to his character: a marriage that, hopefully, will ensure that his perception of the world will be forged on the anvil of morality, nobility and service: qualities that, to me, form the only rationale for our being alive; and, then, if we are lucky, be remembered after we are dead, our bones rotten, eaten by worms; just in case we have forgotten our common denouement
Soon after my now deceased wife and I arrived in New York, in the summer of 1997, where I had been invited to teach at the Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York, we received an invitation from Wa Thiong’o, to go and visit him and his wife Njeere, across the river, in New Jersey.
At that time, Wa Thiong’o was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, holding the chair created to honor the German writer whose novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, is considered one of the greatest novels about the First World War. It is a novel that is taught in practically every world literature class at every university worth its salt in the USA. I strongly feel it should be required reading at the colleges of the University of Sierra Leone, if and when they undergo the required transition from archaic to contemporary lit- a subject that I am coming to, shortly!
Just before we sat down to a lovely lunch, cooked by Njeere, I told Ngugi that, in 1982, when I was teaching in Nigeria, I went on holiday to Kenya, because I wanted to see one of the great wonders in the world-the great flock of tens of thousands of birds on the shores of Lake Nakuru, but that I was also hoping to surprise him by showing up, , unannounced, at his place in Limuru.
‘I did get to see the magnificent birds, but couldn’t find anyone willing to take me to your place!’ I said.
He smiled, in his usual boyish manner, and did not seem surprised.
‘But the most incomprehensible part of my stay in Kenya,’ I said, ‘ was that when, after two weeks of a most enjoyable holiday there, the border guards would not let me cross into Tanzania, where I wanted to see the Mwalimu’s ( Nyerere) brand of Ujamaa (African socialism). ‘
‘What happened?’ Ngugi wondered.
‘They said the border was closed because of a diplomatic palaver between the two nations.’
‘Look,’ I recall saying to the guards. ‘I am a writer from West Africa, who has come all the way to Kenya not on any organisation’s free flight, but have paid for my ticket myself, and now you tell me I can’t cross into Tanzania?’
But they were dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrats, for whom no mention of the common struggle against colonialism —the Tanzanians against the Germans and the British, the Kenyans against the British —was a common history to unite them against the artificial and arbitrary boundaries drawn up by Europeans.
‘What happened in the end?’ Ngugi wondered.
‘They suggested I buy a ticket to fly to Addis Ababa, then on to Dar-res es Salaam. It was the most ludicrous idea, considering that I was already only a few miles away from Tanzania.’
Ngugi’s response was almost philosophical, as he expounded on the mental slavery of the mind, by neo-colonialism, which was perhaps the most pernicious form, for which he had advocated a decolonising, if we were to move forward, with the progress so urgently needed; rather than being stuck in a neo-colonial theatre of survival.
The problems of Africa aside, my wife and I enjoyed our time there, and soon it was time for us to get back to the Big Apple, after the two writers had agreed to keep in touch. However, the next time I saw Ngugi was after we had both moved to the West Coast, on different literary appointments, with Wole Soyinka being the palm oil that cooked those literary stews!
It so happened that one of the casino entrepreneurs in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Las Vegas was a fellow named Glen Scheffer. Before becoming a successful businessman, he had studied at the University of California, Davis, followed by his going to the famous Iowa Writers’ MFA program in Iowa City. After graduating, his intention had been to become a writer; but once the grim reality hit him- ‘that it was not for profit, but in the service of mankind ( humankind), in blood, sweat and tears,’- as William Faulkner told his Swedish audience, when he delivered his Nobel Prize lecture, Scheffer opted for the less protracted, less painful and less unsure path: he became a stockbroker, in New York City, and made lots of money!
Years later, he was managing casinos – the most famous being Mandalay Bay – in Las Vegas: a city of phantasmagoria and neon lights; a place adorned with the sometimes gaudy replicas of famous temples and statutes of Middle Eastern and Oriental civilisations; a place where geysers of water in parks, and artificial waterfalls, cabaret shows and other fantasies drew large crowds from around the world; Las Vegas, where men – mostly actors from bygone eras- go to try to rekindle their fame; and where young women from the heartland of America flock to enhance various careers that Hollywood might not be opened to, to let them succeed! In short, it was a city of big dreams, fortunes made and lost!
When he was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Program, one of Scheffer’s fellow aspiring writers and friend was a man named Richard Wiley. By some amazing coincidence —call it the conspiracy of the gods, or the rhapsody of angels —both men eventually ended up in Las Vegas: Scheffer, as I have already mentioned, as a casino businessman, while Wiley became a professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at UNLV. Before joining the Iowa Writing Programme, Richard Wiley had spent a couple of years teaching in Nigeria, where he met Wole Soyinka, and, in due course, the two of them became friends.
There is something to be said about flowers blooming in a desert; something about the unexpected and inspiring eloquence of Mother Nature, when she brings together the colours of the rainbow of human complexity and daring, to the unbelievers! Call it the dream world of the writer; his ambitious audacity; the insurrection by the artist/ writer; but that is what being a teacher and writer is all about, isn’t it? So, once he was ensconced at the University of Las Vegas English Department, Richard Wiley got the burghers there to extend an invitation to Wole Soyinka, asking the great playwright to travel to Sin City and give a lecture at the university.
It was a great coup getting a literary Nobel Laureate to give a lecture in a city famed for gambling and the discreet and not-so-discreet pleasures of the flesh! But, as mentioned earlier, Las Vegas is a city of dreams and imagination; somewhere where it is not uncommon to see an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, in a theatre, on the same night that people were gambling heavily, next door, in the same building!
Soyinka’s arrival was very fortuitous, as Richard Wiley arranged a meeting between the playwright and Glen Scheffer: two men with a deep passion for creative writing, even if one had not followed his initial dream.
At that time, 1998-2000, besides his other roles, Wole Soyinka was the president of The International Parliament of Writers, based in Paris, whose ‘Cities of Asylum program’ had evolved after the Ayatollah Khomenei had issued a Fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie; the idea for the parliament being that threatened writers could be provided the safety and some comfort, to be able to ply their trade.
There were already institutions in several European cities playing hosts to threatened writers, but, for some time, Wole Soyinka had been looking for a North American city to host a threatened writer.
‘Why not Las Vegas?’ Richard Wiley reportedly suggested.
Given its reputation as Sin City, Wole Soyinka had never considered Las Vegas as a place to host an international writer. But why not? After all, when he and Ngugi were imprisoned, at different times, in their home countries, the only writing material they had was toilet paper, and the devil knows what not to make of African prisons!
Fortunately, for writers, the outcome of the meeting between these three literary aficionados eventually led to a generous donation by Glen Scheffer for the establishment of The International Institute of Modern Letters at the university; after which, I became the first writer-in-residence under the programme in the USA. Later, at a wine session attended by the president and other grandees of the university, Wole Soyinka was persuaded to become a non-resident Visiting Professor there, thus allowing the university to claim quite another coup!
But charity, as the saying goes, should start at home! It was thus that Glen Scheffer turned his attention to his alma mater, the University of California at Davis, and made what I believe was an even bigger donation to it, for the establishment of an International Centre for Writing and Translation. After a rigorous search for a writer to head it, the choice was whittled down to two international African writers, born in the 1930s: the Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach and the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.
Both men had not only distinguished themselves as writers but, as most readers will recall, had paid a heavy price of imprisonment for their political views; in Breytenbach’s case, spending seven years in an Afrikaner prison, for daring, as an Afrikaner, to oppose the racist Apartheid regime. For reasons best known to the selection committee, Ngugi got the call to head the institute.
Not too long afterwards, he came to Las Vegas when the distinguished American novelist Russell Banks had just succeeded Wole Soyinka as president of The International Parliament of Writers. As the guests of Glen Scheffer, all of us writers- Soyinka, Banks, Wiley, and yours truly- had a wonderful evening at the Mandalay Bay Casino Complex. It would be the last time that I would see Wa Thiong’o. Now, he and Banks have danced with their ancestors, but they have left a monumental legacy for the world to think, write about, and learn from them for years to come!
(2)
Much has been made about Ngugi’s decision to write in his native Gikuyu and his insistence that other African writers should consider doing likewise in their mother tongues! As an African writer whose Mother tongue’s orthography was only recently developed, one in which I have limited competence- the language itself being one of the smallest in the region- I shall leave it to the scholars, critics, and language historians to continue the dialogue about Ngugi’s post-prison decision to write in Gikuyu!
But allow me to make these observations: Language is inherited power; the assertion and evocation of our being, usually with a verve of splendour and pride. Mother tongues are the pre-eminent vehicles of these expressions. To use them is a sacred rite and a duty to our mothers! Mother tongues give us the spellbinding power of oral narratives, when we extol the beauty, wonder, and joy of our heritage, when we dramatise our vision of the world and perform our rituals, with or without embellishment. In the hands of the narrator or poet, this type of language also teaches moral values, respect for our traditions, nobility, and a sometimes skewed view of the world from the writer. On the other hand, the Official language is invariably a form of domination: one that seeks to launder our brains clean of the existence and worth of The Mother Tongue. Invariably, the Official Language has images, symbols, and metaphorical connotations alien to the conquered mind. It demands obedience to another religion, the universe of another God. In short, it colonises the mind!
All over the African continent, the most destructive form of colonialism was not the seizure of land, cattle, natural resources, or the destruction of old empires and castles. It was the determined conquest of the mind of the native, so that he sees himself as sub-human, inferior, and second-class to the conqueror!
Consequently, for writers like Wa Thiong’o, post-colonial literature could not escape the brutal diktat of colonial history: the hangings, castrations, sexual genital mutilation of women, in the colonial detention camps, so that they would not produce ‘any more terrorists!’ Faced with the horrors of what had happened to the Gikuyu for daring to oppose British colonialism, Ngugi chose to serve as a singer of tales and healer of the wounds in the souls of his people by decolonising himself of the merits of an imposed language. In short, he became a spokesperson for those who wanted the primal power of their language back, whose beauty the colonial regime had tried to steal from them. He chose to speak to them directly, in the language that the British had been afraid of: the secret Language of the Mau Mau!
But, for me, perhaps Ngugi’s greatest contribution to literature was that when, as a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, he wrote a paper that propounded the following thesis:
“If there is need for a study of the historic continuity of a single culture,’ why can’t this be African?” Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we view other cultures in relationship to it?”
Needless to say, as soon as he had the chance, when he became professor and head of department, and with the input of two other distinguished East African writers —the poets Okot p’Bitek and David Rubadiri —the English department was renamed The Department of Literature. After which, as they say in Nigerian pidgin- oder wan den follow!
I cannot conclude this essay on Things Remembered about Ngugi without addressing the Nobel Prize controversy. For about the last fifteen years or so of his life, there was a lot of chest-beating and the angry pounding of drums by his supporters about why he had not been given the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was ‘ well qualified!’ As a fellow writer, I subscribe to the contention that he deserved the prize, but aren’t we directing our angst at the wrong corridors, at the wrong source, for this oversight?
Ngugi was not the first deserving writer to not receive the prize. There were many others including the brilliant James Baldwin; the great Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges; the innovative Cuban Alejo Carpentier, generally regarded as the father of Magic Realism; the Mexican Carlos Fuentes; the Irishman James Joyce; the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare; and the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, just to name a few; and, as Wole Soyinka said, when he received the prize, in 1986, ‘ we should have captured this thing, a long time ago;’ presumably referring to either Cesaire or Senghor; notwithstanding Soyinka’s criticism of some of the tenets of Negritude!
But back to where I feel we should be directing our anger. Look around the African continent. It has been more than SIXTY years since the majority of her countries became INDEPENDENT. Yet she remains the only place without major continental, transnational prizes for writers, artists, scientists, architects, film-makers ( except for perhaps the Stallion Prize of Burkina Faso), designers, and sculptors!
I understand that after the Japanese creator of the Nomma Award, for literature published in Africa, decided to stop funding it, after more than ten years, it was his hope that an African government or philanthropist might step in to keep the prize alive. But none came forward; so the award died! Look around the continent, and you will find billionaires and multi-millionaires who could have stepped in. In West Africa, we keep our dead, sometimes for three months, until a huge amount of money has been collected to, as they say, send them away in style! We have some of the most elaborate and shockingly expensive wedding ceremonies here; we make massive donations to politicians who, once in office, plunder, steal, and send hundreds of millions of dollars to Western banks, whose citizens are aware of our profligacy. Except for the long, protracted fight to get the Benin Bronzes back ( although an act by the British Parliament prevents the British Museum, the main recipient of the massive LOOT and PLUNDER, from returning the theft), seldom do we recover any pillaging of our wealth! Yet, the writers who, as Wole Soyinka beautifully put it, ‘ are usually the first to smell the reactionary sperm, before the rape of a nation takes place;’ those who, in my view, make their creative imperatives the watch words at the border post of our morality, those who seek to probe our conscience, to give us the greatest, most lasting respect, are virtually ignored. At the same time, the lucky few have to rely on the generosity of Western institutions and foundations to be able to tell our stories!
Invariably, most candidates considered for the Nobel Prizes have already been honoured at home! They are treated with awe and respect in their home countries, whether by governments or philanthropists. Their books are read by their people; their scientific discoveries have had a profound impact on local lives. The Nobel Committees, whose deliberations are more secretive than whether Donald Trump is going to bomb the Iranians, are aware of this. As I mentioned earlier, in praise of Glen Scheffer, of Mandalay Bay, who sponsored me in Las Vegas, and Ngugi at Davis, California, charity begins at home! When we are charitable to our artists and scientists, when we celebrate their moral and selfless achievements, the sponsors of foreign prizes around the world will take notice.
Finally, to end this homage to one of the titans of African literature, it is worth mentioning that neither he, nor Chinua Achebe, nor John Pepper Clark, nor Wole Soyinka, or, for that matter, the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, would have qualified to teach at Fourah Bay College, because, ( wait for it), they do not have GRADUATE DEGREES!!!
The irony here is not only laughable, but the pretentiousness has the ring of the toad calling the serpent a fool! Here are writers, including two Nobel Laureates, who did not only put African and Caribbean literature on the world map, who have been invited to teach at practically all the Ivy League and other important universities in the USA, and, in Soyinka’s case, at Cambridge University, in the U.K.; here are writers, on whose work thousands of papers and doctoral dissertations have been written, and other rewards made, yet, they would not have qualified to teach at THE GREATEST UNIVERSIRTY IN AFRICA !!!!! (The pun is intended)
Perhaps I should get them, including the dead, a copy of ‘The Rise and Fall of Fourah Bay College’ to read, so that they could breathe fresh air, modernity, and vision into the place!!! Hopefully, after it has woken up from its long archaic slumber, while other African universities were progressing, innovating, creating and expanding, it might then launch a massive campaign to get comfortable Sierra Leoneans, who might decry the conditions at the college, to put their money where their mouths are, and then, the English Department could change its name, or a new Dept. of Creative Arts might emerge; to which the college needs to invite the now established major new voices of Sierra Leonean writers and artists, under seventy years old, to breathe new life and vision into our artistic and moral milieu
From his new home, I am sure Ngugi wa Thiong’o will come to visit us and lend his support.
Syl Cheney-Coker’s latest book is his Memoir, Jollof Boy: The Early Years, published in the Sierra Leone Writers Series, and available at home and on Amazon.com
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