Ngugi wa Thiong’o, passed away at the age of 87 and was cremated a few days later. He will never again speak or be seen, but though gone, he will forever remain with us and the generations to come, through his writing.
Like millions of literature lovers all over the world, I met Ngugi wa Thiong’o through his books, in our school library. Along with his works, I read books by Chinua Achebe, Peter Abrahams, Elechi Amadi, and Wole Soyinka, among others. I also read tens of contraband books smuggled to school. Some like ‘My Dear Bottles’ by David Mailu were too hot to read in the open; so we read them under our desks.
That was a time of my great awakening, a discovery of literature as the door to a world I never knew existed. I could therefore step out through this door and sit at the banks of River Honia or look at the home of Nyambura across the valley. These works captured my imagination so profoundly that decades after my first reading of The River Between, I can still see and hear Muthoni say, “Tell Nyambura, I see Jesus.”
We will not remember him for the Nobel Prize he never won, but by the millions of ‘Nobel Prizes’ we bestowed on him whenever the partisan Nobel Prize Committee overlooked him. Retrospectively, he might have had trouble getting a place to hang the Nobel Prize from Norway, because most of the space on the walls of his heart was taken up by the millions of laurels we had heaped on him!
At an early age, my special attachment to Ngugi wa Thiong’o was cemented by my elder brother (whose name is also Ngugi), then a student at Githiga Secondary School with one of his sons. This created an affinity with this Kenyan who walked tall in my world of literature. Henceforth, I kept telling myself that I could as well write captivating stories, “when I grew up,”
When I thought that I had grown up, (though a baby before him), and it was time to unveil the three books I had written, the person I wanted as one of my guests was Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Through a friend from Limuru, I was connected to another friend in Seattle who gave me his number.
I had never hosted a book event before and I wasn’t very sure of how to approach him, though I had been busy looking for his contact. When I summoned up courage and made the call, I was surprised by the attention he gave me. He congratulated me and then asked for details of each book. He then in a gentle fatherly tone, told me that as I write in English Language, I should also write in Gĩkũyũ, my mother tongue. He did not attend the event but sent James Murua, of Writing Africa to represent him.
Later, when I was setting up the Kendeka Prize for African Literature and I consulted him, he asked me, “Why do you want to help promote the English language? It’s like taking a piece of bread from a hungry child and giving it to an over-fed child. The English language doesn’t need your help.”
Though he was not happy with the Prize and saw it as a promotion of a foreign language at the expense of the dying African Languages, we remained friends. Through his encouragement, I wrote my first book in Gĩkũyũ language, my mother tongue. His joy was palpable when I sent him the manuscript. He wrote the blurb. This book has been translated into fifteen African languages and is in the process of publication.
In a continent excruciatingly slow to recognize its real heroes and using the case of Dedan Kimathi, a Kenyan freedom fighter, as a yardstick, it might take another half-century before a statue or monument is built in honour of one of our patriarchs in literature. But once again, Ngugi wa Thiong’o might not need a grudgingly given monument because he will always be remembered through the monuments of words he built and continues building in our hearts, through his writing.
Koma thayu Ithe wa Thiong’o.
***Andrew Maina is a Kenyan writer and founder of Kendeka Prize for African Literature. He is the author of two novels and five children’s story books. His latest short story, ‘Baba Linda is Dead’, has been published in Kalahari Review. He is married and blessed with three children
