James Ngugi

An African Novelist with Gandhian Message

V. SIVA RAMAKRISHNAN

I

“Twenty years ago”, says Claude Wauthier in his book, The Literature and Thought of Modern Africa (1966), “publi­cation of a book by an African author was still an isolated occurrence; nowadays hardly a month passes without some novel, ethnographic monograph, political pamphlet or study on political economics coming from the pen of an African writer. “M. Wauthier himself cites some 600 works of about 150 African writers. The works are in French, English and Portuguese, French predominating. Of these, English novels are about 60 and the out­standing African novelists in English mentioned, about a dozen. Though small for a whole continent, this does not compare unfavourably with a score or so of India’s half a dozen pioneers–K. S. Venkataramani. R K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Manohar Mulgaokar and Raja Rao.

The novel, it is said, is a product of leisurely times. This is only a half truth. The tension-torn West of the twentieth century has witnessed a far greater churning out of fiction than it did during the sedate Victorian times; the New world, its daily alarums and excursions notwithstanding, throws out a prodigious quantity of thrillers, brain-teasers, rib-ticklers and pure entertainers. Compared with this avalanche what comes out of the Third World is just a trickle.

The reasons for this exiguous fare are not far to seek. The novelist in English, whether he is in Africa orin India, is not born to the language and it takes years of grueling effort to master its syntax, grammar and idiom. The novelist is not a mechanic and to write a novel, he needs to be imaginative and genuinely inspired. Not many in the Third World have that mastery of English and few are genuinely inspired. The result is a thin rill.

There is a real danger that even this rill may cease to flow in the years to come – if it has not already done. The systematic girding at English as an alien language and its downgrading in the educational curriculum has almost sapped the incentive to learn it, not to speak of acquiring even a modest proficiency. The “development” ethos, besides, has encouraged technical knowledge and training at the expense of the mind-building humanities.

The pre-independence environment in most countries of Asia and Africa was not, however harsh the conditions of colonial rule may be, uncongenial to creative work in English. There were writers and there was a readership, discriminating and critical.

Some wrote because they could not help writing, like R. K. Narayan (of India). Some others, like K. S Venkataramani (of India), wrote under the compulsive power of the ideals they cherished-freedom from foreign rule and a burgeoning rural life.

Thematically a pattern is discernible in the novels of African writers in English. They were impelled to write in pre-independence days, intellectually and emotionally, by the humiliation they felt under colonial rule. “African literature is politically committed,” declared Senegal’s former poet-President, Leopold Sedar Senghor, way in 1956. They raised aloft the banner of freedom against the colonial master and his precursor and generally his ally the Christian missionary. They were also inspired by the abominable slave trade of a dead past and its reprehensible modern version, the apartheid. And in post-independence era they have gone hammer and tongs at political chicanery and bureaucratic in­sensitivity.

The committed African literature is, ipso facto, a literature of protest–against foreign rule, slavery, racial discrimination. There is a positive side to this attitude, which is concerned with the revival of the values of the traditional (tribal) African society. As a distinct literary movement or tradition, this goes under the name of “Negritude.”

“The pilgrimage to the origins of African culture is often just another aspect of the fight for independence,” says M. Wauthier and points out that African writers seek to show that:

1. African society was democratic before the coloniser set foot on the soil and was free from caste or class conflict;

2. African religion is dominated by belief in one god, the creator and omnipotent;

3. African folklore is the expression of a rich oral literature;

4. the African empires were no less grand than those of Europe at that time.

II

Among African novelists who are described as “the angry young men” the 43-year old James Ngugi (also known as Ngugi wa Thiong’o), stands foremost. His three novels, which have earned for him a well-deserved reputation, mark him out as a writer of passionated longings and deep convictions. The Gandhian era in India is evidently one of the sources of his inspiration. He sticks to conventional language and idiom but as he weaves his webs of enchantment, there is the sure touch of the master craftsman.

Born in 1938 in Kenya, Ngugi was educated at the Makerere University College, Uganda and the University of Leeds. He has been a journalist and a teacher having edited Pen point and Zukaworked on the Sunday Nation and taught at Nairobi, Makerere and Northwestern Universities. He was the Head of the Depart­ment of Literature at the University of Nairobi, when he was reported to have been arrested for political reasons.

The Ngugi triology consists of “Weep Not, Child” (1964), “The River Between” (1965) and “A Grain of Wheat” (1967) ­all published in the African Writers Series of Heinemann.

The story of “Weep Not, Child” is essentially a saga of the family of Ngotho, a farmer of Mahua village. With two wives and five sons, one of whom dies in the Second World War, Ngotho longs for the return of his ancestral lands taken away by the Westerner “with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other.” The land thus snatched away by the foreigner was really a gift of god to Gikuyu and Mumbi, the Adam and Eve of Kikuyuland of Kenya.

“This land I hand over to you, man and woman. It’s yours to rule and till in serenity sacrificing
Only to me, your God, under my sacred tree     ......”

the God had said, according to a Gikuyu legend, which Ngotho relates to his family members one evening.

“Then came the war. It was the first big war. I was then young, a mere boy, although circumcised. All of us were taken by force. We made roads and cleared tile forest to make it possible for the warring White man to move more quickly. The war ended. We were all tired. We came home worn out but very ready for whatever the British might give us as a reward. But, more than this, we wanted to go to the soil and court it to yield, to create, not to destroy. But Ng’o! The land was gone. My father and many others had been moved from our ancestral lands. He died lonely, a poor man waiting for the White man to go. Mugo (Gikuyu seer of old) had said that this would come to be. The White man did not go. I grew up here, but working–working on the land that belonged to our ancestors.”

It was not a story told to beguile an idle hour; it sowed the seeds of revolt in the family against foreign rule. Boro, the first son who had already gone through the ordeal of the war, the White man’s war, and returned only to face unemployment, asked his father. “How can you continue working for a man who has taken your land? How can you go on serving him?” He walked out, without waiting for an answer.

The old man felt the humiliation of working for Mr. How­lands as a supervisor in his tea plantations. He was hoping that Howlands would go away and leave the land to him and his sons. But he was in for deep disappointment,

Walking round the plantations, Mr. Howlands, admiring the lands before him, asked Ngotho:

“You like all this?”

“It is the best land in all the country”, Ngotho said em­phatically. Mr. Howlands sighed. He was wondering if Stephen (his son) would ever manage it after him.

“I don’t know who will manage it after me........”
Ngotho’s heart jumped. He too was thinking of his children.

“Kwa nini Bwana (why, master)? Are you going to...?

“No” Mr. Howlands said, unnecessarily loudly.

“Your home, home..........”
“My home is here......”

The fact was that Mr. Howlands was as much devoted to his land as was Ngotho.

A general strike in the country brings about a sea-change in the situation. Ngotho stays away from work and incurs the wrath of Mr. Howlands. At a meeting held in connection with the strike at the town of Kipanso, the police bring in Jacobo, a prosperous farmer, to split the ranks of the strikers. Ngotho, in a moment of frenzy, assaults Jacobo, on whose land his own house stands, and loses both his house and work. From then on the family disintegration begins – Boro, Kori and Kamau, the three sons join the Mau Mau movement. With the arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and the confirmation of his sentence, terrorism breaks loose in the country.

Jacobo is murdered and so too Mr. Howlands – by Boro. But Ngotho, whose fury against foreign tyranny is roused, owns up the murder of Mr. Howlands, if only to demonstrate that he was no coward as one of his sons, Boro, seemed to have thought of him. He is tortured to death, Boro faces the hang­man’s noose, Kori is to suffer imprisonment for life and Kamau is nowhere to be seen. Even the women, Nyeri and Nyokabi, do not escape torture. The spirited Nyeri declares on one occasion:

“The White man makes a law or a rule. Through that rule or law or what you may call it, he takes away the land and many other things, all without people agreeing first as in the old days of the tribe. Now a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws against which that man was fighting. He is tried under those alien rules. Now tell me who is that man who can win even if the angels of God were his lawyers?”

The one silent witness to the happenings in the country and in his own family is the last son of Ngotho, Njoroge, who is sent to school by the whole family which believes that “education is the light of Kenya.” The education of the youngster goes on uninterrupted until, at the height of the Mau Mau movement, he is removed from school and tortured by the homeguards under the direction of Mr. Howlands.

“Njoroge had always been a dreamer, a visionary who consoled himself, faced by the difficulties of the moment, by a look at a better day to come.”

Njoroge tells Mwihaki, the girl whom he loves and loses. “Surely this darkness and terror will not go on forever. Surely there will be a sunny day, a warm sweet day after all this tribula­tion, when we can breathe the warmth and purity of God.”

Njoroge lives to see his ideals dashed to the ground, his faith shaken, and even the girl in whom he seeks to find an anchor turning away from him. In sheer despair, when he tries to put an end to his life, his mother comes along and commands weakly: “Let’s go home.” He is stung to the quick, the guilty man “who had avoided his responsibility for which he had prepared himself since childhood.” He would no longer be a coward.

The title of the novel “Weep Not, Child” is taken from Walt Whitman’s “On the Beach at Night”­–

Weep not, child
Weep not, darling
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not be long victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky... ...

Njoroge is the child who is told not to weep, as the “ravening clouds” that brought disaster to his family and to his own person would not long possess the sky when the country won her freedom. It did in 1963.

III

“The River Between” is a more purposive and less poignant story than “Weep Not, Child.” Waiyaki, the protagonist is caught between two worlds, the tradition-bound world of his tribe and the world of the new converts to Christianity. The tribal customs include ceremonies connected with second birth and circumcision, both male and female, to which the foreign missionary and the new converts are totally opposed. Kamteno, to which Waiyaki belongs, and Makuyu are the two ridges round which the story revolves and they represent the tribal tradition and the anti-tradition respectively.

Waiyaki is looked upon by his father, Chege, as the saviour of the tribe from the assaults of an alien religion and as the custodian of the “purity” of the tribe. Waiyaki, who has the benefit of the “White man’s” education, finds himself both in and out of the tribe. Take circumcision, for example. In the tribal view, the boy who endures the pain of the (crude) operation demonstrates his courage and the girl grows “healthy and beautiful in the tribe”

Muthoni, the daughter of a zealous convert and preacher, rebels against her father and opts for circumcision because: “I want to be a woman. I want to be a real girl, a real woman knowing all the ways of the hills and the ridges.” I want to be a woman made beautiful in the tribe; a husband for my bed; children to play around the hearth.” But Muthoni dies after her circumcision when the wound becomes septic. Waiyaki, though he believes that “a people’s traditions cannot be swept away overnight and that way lies disintegration.” neither appreciates the erotic and ecstatic dances that precede the ceremony nor Muthoni’s action of disobedience. The only question which people had asked was “Why did she do it” Why? Why? And even for Waiyaki the question remained, “Why?”

Waiyaki believes, and believes intensely, that education–the secret and magic of the White man’s conquest–is the key to the freedom of the Gikuyu. “Education for unity, unity for Political freedom”–this is the message he spreads as a teacher, as a pioneer who opens people’s schools in the ridges.

Nonetheless, Waiyaki the visionary is misunderstood by both camps, his tribesmen of Kameno on the one side and the Christian converts of Makuyu led by Joshua on the other. He faces a hostile world, jealousy being the motive-force of some of the men who turn against him. Complicating the situation is his love for Nyambura. daughter of Joshua, who longs for him but does not want to disobey her father, as did her younger sister Muthoni, or go against her new religion. But circumstances force her to a posture of defiance, when religion blinds people to the truth.

The novel ends rather abruptly, leaving Waiyaki and Nyambura to the judgment of the Village Council for their alleged acts of betrayal of the tribe.

The plot is thin but the narrative is gripping. Ngugi’s message of unity through education is driven home effectively There are passages of great beauty. For example, this one about the rainy season:

“Njahi was the season of the long rains. It was the favourite season with all the people. For then, everyone would be sure of a good harvest. The peas and beans, bursting into life, gave colour and youth to the land. On sunny days, the green leaves and the virgin gaiety of the flowers made your heart swell wilh expectation. At such times women would be seen in their shambas (fields) cultivating; no, not cultivating, but talking in a secret language with the crops and the soil. Women sang gay songs. The children too. And the plants, and all the trees around, swaying a little as if they were surrendering themselves to the touch of the wind, seemed to understand the joy of mothers. You could tell by the bright faces of the women that they were happy.”

Ngugi seems to uphold or affirm in “The River Between” the conservative point of view though a critic (Ngubiah) thinks that “Ngugi sees no hope in conservatism.” But Ngugi is as much for tradition as for the new learning so long as the latter does not smother or snuff out the former. “Yes, in the quietness of the hill, Waiyaki had realised many things. Circumcision of women was not important as a physical operation. It was what it did inside a person. It could not be stopped overnight. Patience and above all, education, was needed. If the White man’s religion made you abandon a custom and then did not give you something else of equal value, you became lost. An attempt at resolution of the conflict would only kill you, as it did Muthoni.” Here is an echo of what that eminent scholar-journalist of India, N. Raghu­nathan, strove to assert week after week in Swatantra. In the “‘Sotto Voce” paper dated the 9th May, 1953, he said: “You cannot trample in the dust family loyalties, filial pieties and tradi­tional mores, and yet hope to remould it all again as if it were plastic powder.”

“The River Between” is the river Honia – the cure – that separates the ridges of Kameno aod Makuyu facing each other in hostility, vengeful. Perhaps, in the long run, it would cure them of their rivalry, being the common source of water. Has it not already brought together Waiyaki and Nyambura?

IV

“A Grain of Wheat” is a complex, powerful novel exploring the psychology of a haunted man – haunted by an act of treachery to a hero of Kenya’s freedom movement. On the eve of Kenya’s freedom on 12th December, 1963, the people of Thabai village want to honour Mugo whom they consider as their legitimate leader, the one who was indifferent to praise or reward who was modest and unassuming after all the suffering he had undergone with courage and fortitude. A legend had grown around him as to how he went to the rescue of a woman who was whipped in the trench during the Emergency days. But Mugo was only embarrassed, no, tortured in soul, by all the attention that was given him and the praises showered on him. Did he not know within himself that it was he, and none else, who was responsible for the arrest and subsequent public hanging of Kihika, the fiery patriot? Kihika’s life was inspired by Gandhiji and nourished by the thoughts of the Bible. On one occasion, long before he took the plunge, he told his friends:

“It is a question of unity. The example of India is there before our noses. The British were there for hundreds and hundreds of years. They ate India’s wealth. They never listened to the political talk–talk of a few men. What happened? There came this man Gandhi: Mark you, Gandhi knows his White man well. He goes round and organises the Indian masses into a weapon stronger than the bomb. They say with one voice: “We want freedom.” The British laughed; they are good at laughing. But they had to swallow their laughter when things turned out serious. What did the tyrants do? They sent Gandhi to prison, not once but many times. The stone-walls of prison could not hold him. Thousands were gaoled; thousands more were killed. Men and women and children threw themselves in front of moving trains and were run over. Blood flowed like water in that country. The bomb could not kill blood, red blood of people, crying out to be free: “God! How many times must fatherless children howl, widowed women cry on this earth before this tyrant shall learn?” (Ngugi, from a distance, is uninhibited and permits himself the novelist’s prerogative of a measure of exaggeration.)

Unlike Gandhiji, however, Kihika doesn’t believe in non-­violence. He kills Robson, the District Officer, and carries a price on his head. A week after the killing, he comes into the life of Mugo.

It was a Friday night and Mugo had returned home, tired. As he lay stretched on his bed after a frugal meal, with whistles and gunshots tearing the night of curfew-bound Thabai, there was repeated knocking at his door, The knock, continuous and insistent, made him jump to the door only to see Kihika. With “tears in his whisper”, Kihika declared: “Yes. I shot him (Robson). I have been wanting to finish him – all these months”. He wanted Mugo to work underground for the Mau Mau and for this purpose, to meet him at an appointed place in the forest for directions.

Mugo was a distracted soul on the day fixed for the meeting. Thoughts, lofty and low, assailed him. The Lord returned Abraham’s son when he offered the boy as a sacrifice upon the mountain in the land of Moriah, Kihika’s matchet would fall on his, Mugo’s, neck if he failed to meet him. Could he not save himself from it? If Moses had died in the reeds, who would ever have known that he was destined to be a great man? Could he not escape death like Moses? There was also the reward of money to be reckoned with, and would it not make him prosperous? Mugo went straight to the District Officer and informed him with a “Victorious rage” of the whereabouts of Kihika. Kihika was caught and publicly hanged at Rung’ei Market.

Mugo escaped death but lost the peace of his soul. He was himself taken to a detention camp when he assaulted a homeguard in an attempt to rescue a woman. But he never cried when tortured, nor begged for mercy. His stoic calm was mistaken for heroism by the other detainees who became bold by his example.

On the eve of freedom, Mugo is pressed by the villagers–­and a few among them were freedom-fighters–to speak to the people at a public meeting. They also expect the traitor – Karanja his name – to be publicly accused of causing the death of Kihika and put to shame or worse. Mugo protests, prevaricates, and becomes a ghost of his own self. But at a crucial moment when the traitor was to be named at the public meeting, he walks up to the platform through the crowd and declares: “You asked for Judas. You asked for the man who led Kihika to this tree, here. The man stands before you, now. Kihika came to me by night. He put his life into my hands, and I sold it to the White man. And this thing has eaten into my life all these years.” Mugo then disappears from the life of Thabai.

Mugo was at least redeemed by this confession but there were other tares in the field, traitors to the cause of freedom who went about without a scruple. These – Karanja, General R, Lt. Koinandu, Gikonyo – each of them wrapped in a sordid episode, and several others, simple and pure, fill the wide canvas of “A Grain of Wheat.” Two of them Mumbi, the sister of Kihika, and Gikonyo, her husband, stand out, vivid and vital. The Mumbi-Gikonyo story lends not only a romantic flavour to the novel but also supplies its tragic element. Mumbi, the woman scorned, is also Mumbi the defiant. She is the Nora Helmer of “A Grain of Wheat.” Gikonyo is the wronged man but he has a large heart to forget and forgive.

The title of the novel derives from I Corinthians 15 : 36 :

“Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain.”

Men like Kihika must first die like the seed, like the grain of wheat, before freedom sprouts.

V

Ngugi’s novels are novels of ideas. Two prominent ideas stand out:

1. One must have roots in one’s own culture, however strong the fascination be of alien cultures. (Gandhiji said the same thing when he maintained that though he would allow the winds to blow about his mansion, he would not be blown off his feet.)

2. Education is power, the key to a better life, rich and purposeful.