Recovering the Original

7/27/2019 Recovering the Original

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/recovering-the-original 1/4

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

Recovering the OriginalAuthor(s): Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'oSource: World Literature Today, Vol. 78, No. 3/4 (Sep. - Dec., 2004), pp. 13-15Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40158475 .

Accessed: 04/06/2013 04:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma and University of Oklahoma are collaborating with JSTOR to

digitize, preserve and extend access to World Literature Today.

htt // j t

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bruo

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40158475?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


http://www.jstor.org/stable/40158475?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bruo



ESSAYS

Recoveringh e OriginalNGUGI WA THIONG'O

He lay on his tummyon a high table in the assemblyhallwith all the studentsand staffpresent.Two teachersheld his

head and legs and pinned him to the table and called him

monkey, as the third whiplashed his buttocks. No matter

how horribly he screamed and wriggled with pain, theywould not let him go. ScreamMonkey.Eventuallythe shorts

split and blood spluttered out, some of it on the shirts of

thosewho held him down, and only thendid they let him go.He stood up barely able to walk, barely able to cry, and he

left, never to be seen in the precincts of that governmentschool or any other again; I have never known what hap-

pened to him. His fault?He had been caught in the act of

speaking Gikuyuin the environs of the school,not once,not

twice,but several times. How did the teachers come to dis-

coverhis sins?

Speaking African languages in the school compoundwas a crime.Ifa studentcaughtanotherspeakingan African

language,he would pass a token called a monitorto the cul-

prit,who would carry t around his necktillhe caughtanoth-

erspeakingthe forbiddentongues;he would pass the dread-

ed thing to the new culprit,and so on childrenspying on

one another,all day, or even trickingeach other into speak-

ing the leprous language. The one with the monitor at the

end of the day was the sinner and would be punished. The

aboverecipientof whiplashes had been a sinner for so many

weeks that it looked as if he was deliberatelydefying thebanon Gikuyu.The teachers were determined to use him as an

exampleto teach othersa lesson.

This was the Kenyaof the fifties in the last century.The

country was then a British settler colony, with a sizeable

white settlement in the arable heartland, which they then

called White Highlands. But from its colonization in 1895,

Kenyawas always contested, the forces of colonial occupa-tion being met by those of national resistance, with the

clashbetween the two sides climaxing in the armed conflict

of the fifties,when Kenyans grouped aroundMau Mau (or,more appropriately, Kenya Land) and the Freedom Armytookto the forestsand mountains to

wagea

guerrillastrug-gle against the colonial state. The outbreak of the war was

preceded by a heightened nationalist cultural awareness,

with songs, poetry, and newspapers in African languages

abounding.The outbreak of the war was followed by a ban

on performancesand publications in Africanlanguages. A

similar ban applied to African-run schools they were

abolished.

I first went to Kamanduraprimary,a missionaryset-up,in 1947.But we must havebeencaughtup by thenew nation-

alist awareness,because there were rumorsthat missionaryschoolswere deliberatelydenying us childrenrealeducation

(Guthimira ianaugi). Such schools were alleged not to be

teaching Africans enough English, and some of us were

pulled out of the missionary school and relocatedto Man-

guu, a nationalist school where the emphasis was on the

historyand cultureof Africans. nreligion,some of thenation-

alistschools,which called

themselves independent,

aligned themselves with

the orthodox church,

thus linking themselvesto the unbroken Christ-

ian tradition of Egyptand Ethiopia, way back

in the first and fourth

centuries of the Christian

era.

I was too young to

know about this linkage;all I knew was thatI was

going to a school where

we would be taught

"deep" English along-

side other subjects and

languages, in our case,

Gikuyu. I can't rememberif the English in the nationalist

school was "deeper" than that taught in the previousschool I doubt if there was any differencein approachto

the teachingof English but I do recallthata compositionin

Gikuyuwas good enough to have me paradedin frontof the

class, in praise. That is how to write good Gikuyu, the

teacher said after reading it aloud to the class. So in the

nationalistschool of my early primaryschooling,mastering

Gikuyu and knowing Englishwere not in conflict.One got

recognitionfor masteringone or both.

Thispeacefulco-existenceof Gikuyu and Englishin the

classroomchangedsuddenly a few years later,when the Af-rican independent schools were shut down, with some of

them resurrectedas colonial state-run nstitutions.Manguu

Text copyright © 2004 by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. From The Geniusof Lan-

guage: FifteenWritersReflecton TheirMotherTongue,ed. Wendy Lesser

(Pantheon,2004),103-11.Reprintedby permissionof the authorand

theWatkins/LoomisAgency.

c'3

c

Iu

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004 • 13

This content downloaded from 115.119.146.174 on Tue, 4 Jun 2013 04:44:18 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions






was one of theseandtheemphasison humil-

iating the Gikuyu language-users, as the

pre-condition or acquiringEnglish,was the

most immediate outcome of the changes. It

was under the new dispensationthat terror

was unleashed onGikuyu.

Thescreamingstudent was being thrashed to take him out

of the darknessof his languageto the light of

Englishknowledge.I enjoyed English under all dispensa-

tions, but the image of the screaming student haunted me

and even puzzled me for a long time. The student was

hounded out of the school for speaking Gikuyu, the lan-

guage I had once been praisedforwritingwell. Maybethere

was somethingwrong with the teacherswho had so praisedme; the evidence of this was that they had all lost theirjobsunder the new colonial position on the importance of En-

glish. The new teachers,all African,all black, all Gikuyu,devised all sorts of methods for

associatingAfrican lan-

guages with negative images, including making linguisticsinners carry placardsthat asserted that they were asses. It

was a war of attrition hatgraduallyeroded pride and confi-

dence in my language. There was nothing this languagecould teachme, at leastnothing thatcould make me become

educated and modern. Gore to the students who spoke

Gikuyu;glory to those who showed a mastery of English.I

grew up distancing myself from the gore in my own lan-

guage to attainthe glory in Englishmastery.There were rewards. A good performancein English

meant success up the ladder of education. And it was this

that took me from Manguu, under its colonial tutelage, to

AllianceHigh School,

the mostprestigious

institution for

Africansat the time, and eventually to MakerereUniversity

College in Kampala, Uganda, where I studied Englishliterature.

It was there,at Makerere, n the sixties the heyday of

decolonization,with countryaftercountryin Africa becom-

ing independent that I wrote what eventually became The

RiverBetween;WeepNot, Child; nd several short stories and

plays,allof them in English.When laterIwent to LeedsUni-

versityin England,where I wrote the novel A Grain fWheat,I trulyfeltjoy in tryingto make Englishwords sing and cap-ture the color and contours of my life. During the composi-tion of A GrainofWheat,much of it done in my room at Bod-

ington, a student residence hall near the Yorkshire Moors(the setting of Bronte's WutheringHeights),I often playedBeethoven's Fifth Symphony in the background, and I

aspiredto similarlyweave several movements into a seam-

less whole. I wanted to climb on Englishwords to the high-est peak of the mountain of human experience. But whychoose Englishas the vehicle of my ambitions?It was not a

question of choice. By this time in my education, and with

everythingthat surroundedme atschools

in Africaand abroad,writing in Englishseemed the most natural thing to do. I

had been socialized into regardingwrit-

ing in English as normal and desirable,

even when the

subject

matter was the

drama of decolonization and independ-

ence, a majortheme in my work.

In all my writings I drew on the life

and culture of Gikuyu and Africanpeo-

ples. Theirhistory, particularly hatof anticolomalresistance,

was at the center of my writing.But this history and culture

were negotiated through Gikuyu and other African lan-

guages. Mau Mau fighters against the Britishcolonial state,

in theirhideouts in the forestsand mountains,did not strate-

gize and plan in English; hey talkedGikuyu,Kiswahili,and

otherKenyan anguages.YetI wrote as if theywere doing so

in English. I heard their voices in Gikuyu but wrote them

down inEnglish

sounds. WhatI wasdoing,

of course,was a

mental translation.This means that for every novel that I

wrote in English,therewas an originaltext.Whathappensto

this originaltext,since in factit exists only in the mind and is

not written down? It is lost, and we can only access it

through English. In my educated hands, Gikuyu language,

culture,and history came out wearing an English-languagemask.

I believe there is genius in every language. It does not

matter how many people speak it: the genius of a languageis not dependenton the quantityof its speakers.I was taking

away from the genius of Gikuyu to add to the genius of En-

glish. I was taking away from the product of one genius to

enrichthe form of another.

But language is not simply an arrangementof sounds.

Languageis the people who speakit. Therewas more to myact of writing in English than simply enriching it at the

expense of Gikuyu.I was takingaway fromthe people who

createdGikuyu and its genius, making sure that they could

only access the rendering of their history through another

tongue. Inmy earlywritings,I did not think aboutthis;Iwas

thrilled to see myself in print and reviewed in the English-

language press, in Africaand abroad.But the situationwas

beginning to annoy me. For whom was I writing?A Grainof Wheat ame out in 1967.1 was visiting Beirut,

Lebanon,when I got a copy of the London Observer, hich

carrieda tribute to thenovel. The warm sentimentwas the

same in the rest of the press reviews. But despite the very

good reception,Ifeltuneasy abouttheimplicationsof the lin-

guistic form. Backin Leeds, in an interview with a student

newspaper,I said that afterA GrainofWheat did not thinkI

would write novels anymore. Why? BecauseI knew about

whom I was writing but I did not know for whom I was

doing it. The people about whom I wrote so eloquently

The arrestof JomoKenyatta n Octo-

ber20,1952,during heMauMaurebellion.Kenyattaaterbecame he

firstprimeminister 1963-64)and first

president 1964-78)of Kenya.

Su

d

c

I

14 • WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004







would neverbe in a position to readthe dramaof their lives

in their own language. On looking back, what I now find

strikingwas that I thought of notwritinganymorenstead of

switching anguagesto write in the one accessibleto the sub-

jectsof the narratives. still accepted Englishas the only pos-sible means of

my literarydeliverance. What a choice is

implied in my response!Writein English or not at all. And

indeedmy nextnovel,PetalsofBlood,which came out in 1977,was written in English although littered with Gikuyu and

Swahiliwords almost as if, in the text, I was announcingthe contradiction n my position and practice.

Two events in my life changed my relationshipto En-

glish and Gikuyu. In 1976,while a professorof literatureat

NairobiUniversity,Iwas invited to work at KamirithuCom-

munity Educationand CulturalCenter,a village nearLimu-

ru town, thirtyor so kilometersfrom Nairobi.Itwas an edu-

cation and culturalprojectcharged with providing literacyskills and culturalmaterial.Dramaticperformancebecame a

naturalmeans ofachieving

both. The Kamirithucommunityspoke Gikuyu,and therewas no way thatwe could workin

the village without working in the language of the commu-

nity. For the first time in my life, I was being forcedby the

practicalneeds to face the Gikuyulanguage.NgaahikaNdeen-

da(in English,I WillMarryWhen Want),co-authoredwith

Ngugi wa Mirii, was the immediate outcome, and it was

receivedwarmly by the community.But t was receivedwith

hostility by the postcolonial state. The performance took

placeon November 11,1977;on December31,1was arrested

by the Kenyan government and detained at Kamiti Maxi-

mum SecurityPrison.I have written about this in many of

my books,principallyDetained:A Writer's risonDiary.What I have not mentioned in those narratives is the

parallelbetween those events at Kamirithu n 1977and those

of my primary-schoolexperiencealmost thirty years earlier.

This was the first time I had been seriously engaged in writ-

ing in Gikuyusince thatearlyeffortat Manguu in its nation-

alist phase. The teachersand the students of the nationalist

school had praised me for writing in Gikuyu. In the same

way, the receptionof the play by the community years later

was fabulous. The applause in the primaryschool was fol-

lowed by the takeover of the school by the colonial state,with terrorunleashed on the speakersof the language in the

schoolcompound.The screamingstudent was forced out of

the school. In my case, the community's applause was fol-

lowed by my imprisonment;I was forced out of all class-rooms and later into exile.

It could be argued that it was my contact with

Kamirithu hat reconnected me with the genius of Gikuyu.To a certainextent, this is true. The peasantryhad retained

their faith in the language. They kept it alive by using it. I

learnt a great deal from them. But it

was in Cell 16, at a maximum-security

prison, that I really came into contact

with the genius of Gikuyu. I had been

imprisoned by an Africangovernmentfor

writing

in an African

language.Why?Thequestionmade me revisit the

language,colonialism,andmy relation-

ship to both. I had to find a way of con-

necting with the language for which I

had been incarcerated. twas not a mat-

ter of nostalgia. I was not being senti-

mental.Ineeded to makethatcontact n

order to survive. It was an act of resist-

ance. So Iwrote thevery first novel ever

written in Gikuyu, on toilet paper, in a

room provided "free"by the postcolo-nial state. The novel, CaitaaniMutha-

rabaini,waspublished

in1980

to oral

critical review. It was subsequentlytranslated into English under the title

Devil on theCrossand came out in 1982to literary acclaim in the English-

languagepress but this time only afterit had been reviewed by the communi-

ty. By the time I came out of prison in

1978, the decision had already been

made. I would no longer write fiction in English (except

throughthe translationof anexistingGikuyutext); rom then

onward,Gikuyu would be the primary anguage of my cre-

ative acts.I have not looked back since.

Devil on the Crosswas followedby Matigari,

nd I have

just finished a manuscriptthat I startedin May 1997.When

MurogiwaKagogo omes out, it will be the longest novel ever

writtenin Gikuyu.(TheEnglishtranslationwill be publishedunder the title WizardoftheCrow.)

More important has been the rise of other novelists,

poets, and playwrightsin Gikuyu.A new literaturehas been

born.If this traditionhas a discerniblebeginning and a loca-

tion, it is in Cell 16, in Kenya's KamitiMaximum SecurityPrisonin 1977-78.Or maybe it was earlier,on the day I wit-

nessed the plight of the screamingstudent. In trying to run

away fromhis plight, perhapsIwas runningtowardhis fate.

Only the genius of the languagekeptme alive to tell the tale.

University fCalifornia,rvine

editorial note:NgugI's latestnovel,WizardoftheCrow,s forth-

comingfrom PantheonBooks.Forordering nformation, isit

the PantheonWeb site (www.randomhouse.com/pantheon).

Cover of TheGeniusof

Language:FifteenWrit-

ers Reflecton Their

MotherTongue,ed.

Wendy Lesser (2004)

I

3

Coverof NgugfsMoving the Centre:The

Struggle or Cultural

Freedoms 1992)

u

Iu

WORLD LITERATURE TODAY • SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2004 • 15





Documents

Recovering the Original