adminNgugi wa Thiongo was pacing up and down the stage as he militantly stated that “if you speak all other languages and not your mother tongue you are a slave,” scanning the audience the way charismatic Pentecostal preachers do “and if you speak your mother tongue and any other language you are powerful,” the mother tongue is the principal starting point.
For the seventy-nine-year-old novelist and essayist, black students in the Global South have a generational responsibility to bring their mother tongues, the oral traditions of their communities into the university system as part of its decolonisation and liberation from trappings of imperial Eurocentricism. Africa has not only been siphoned of its natural resources but also its cultural goods that when not commoditised for sale in the global cultural industry have been exoticised as the stuff of primitive peoples that is only good for feeding the curiosity of tourists and researchers from Europe and America.
The colonialists called native languages vernacular languages, postcolonialists call them indigenous languages, Ngugi wa Thiongo and other decolonial thinkers prefer to call them mother tongues, a description that signifies the cultural importance of local languages that are imaginable as part of the anatomy of a people’s motherland. Vernacular languages are negligible articles of colloquial cultures, indigenous languages are cultural artefacts of the local environment that can be curated and kept in the museum for their preservation and memorialisation, and mother tongues are valuable spiritual and cultural body parts of the motherland that cannot be traded or reduced for anything.
It was with the gravitas of a cultural and political patriot of the Motherland and defender of the mother tongue that Ngugi wa Thiongo addressed a packed Great Hall of the University of the Witwatersrand on the evening of 2 March 2017, even high school pupils from nearby schools braved the rains and the darkness of the alleys of Johannesburg to come and encounter one of Africa’s monumental minds. “Our mother tongues,” Ngugi emphasised “carry a memory and a history that is our very starting point in our journey of life in the world.”
Talisman of the Last Mau Mau
South African university students can be a disappointingly disruptive and unpredictable lot. Last year the University of Cape Town hosted the acclaimed philosopher Judith Butler, a thinker who has provided the world with the vocabulary of feminism and other protest cultures, a vocabulary which protesting South African students use with relish. One is really not in the game in South African militant student circles if one does not talk of “bodies” and “spaces,” does not invoke “intersectionality” and mention the “hierarchy of oppressions,” all of which are trendy Butler terms and concepts.
Ironically, the UCT students disrupted Butler’s lecture and asked her to leave, peacefully but fast, and go back where she came from with her unwanted wisdom. There was fear at Wits that Ngugi’s lecture will be disrupted and the university embarrassed, especially as student militants invaded the stage and sang struggle songs before Ngugi appeared. Some timid fellows had started flocking out of the Hall in fear and disappointment as slogans and war cries rang from the stage, with some militants doing the famous Toyi Toyi dance. The lecture was as good as lost and administrators even asked Ngugi not to approach the Hall for his dignity and safety.
The university administrators had underestimated the extent to which the name and aura of Ngugi had become a global talisman; Ngugi is no Judith Butler, but an intellectual Mau Mau warrior who has been to jail, exile and back because of the intellectual and cultural struggles for decolonisation in Africa. With a slow priestly walk he climbed the stage to whistles, slogans, ululations and struggle songs. Struggling students see themselves in Ngugi and Ngugi sees himself in the struggling students, a connection was established, a rapport set, and the conversation began. At his ripe old age, Ngugi is still the cruel and brutal observer of facts and dispenser of nuances; he boasts a critical mind that locates meaning in mundane details, a real critical humanist with a photographic memory, a good sense of humour too, humour that has been the juicy soup with which his novels are consumed.
The Meditations of Ngugi wa Thiongo
Professor Tawana Kupe set the tone with a catchy contextualisation of the public lecture that paid homage to Ngugi’s track record in African literature and struggles against cultural imperialism in the world. Xolela Mangcu, a professor of sociology based at UCT explained the strategic importance of Ngugi’s message in the present world. Speaking grandfatherly to start with, Ngugi insisted that a giant map of the world be shown on the hall behind him as he spoke, causing laughter and surprise. It was a trap, a trap that only an experienced griot can set up to ensnare a curious audience. Soon enough the bomb dropped. How can a continent so big, rich with so many people and so much resources compared to other continents be poor, he asked. It was unmathematical and illogical that the naturally rich continent survives from donations from naturally poor continents; it is witchcraft of the first sort, something must be done.
African scholars should plead guilty to the crime of wearing masks, cultural masks that prevent them from seeing themselves and their societies clearly. It is the duty of every African in the university and outside to ensure that African oratures become part of the system of power, commerce and justice in the continent, even love should be sought, found and made in African idioms. That African languages were peripherised and marginalised in the university system was an imperial design, that they continue to be excluded many years after political decolonisation is the negligence of African governments and policy makers, the treachery of the university in Africa.
The Empire that runs the world that people can see and experience every day is powerful and dangerous, but what is deadly are empires of the mind, psychic dominations and mental enslavements, invisible spiritual and cultural chains that fasten down the hearts and minds of Africans. “They have generously given us their accents in exchange for access to the resources in our continent,” he said, as he ran his eyes over an audience of wigged heads, tinted heads, lightened skins and a shrill of fake white nasalisation of speech by black students, the coconuts as they are called in South Africa.
“No language is more language than another language,” in reality “no language is naturally powerful, languages are given power by those that use them and give them life.” There is a myth; Ngugi said, a “not so clever myth that mother tongues divide people according to tribes and colonial languages unite people from different tribes in the nation,” the truth is that “only ten percent of our people use these colonial languages, how can the unity of ten percent of our people become the unity of the nation, or the continent?” African governments should put in place policies and set aside budgets for the development of mother tongues that are better cultural tools for nation building than colonial languages that are used by a minority of educated elites who cannot claim to be the nation, the nation is defined by the masses of peasants and workers in the African informal sectors of the economy and the polity, “the schooled middle class should stop pretending to be the nation in Africa.”
African languages should be developed, dictionaries written and vocabularies developed enough to allow them to be usable as formal languages of instruction in the university, politicians should not dramatise support for African languages for political expediency without investing in their promotion and canonisation.
With the authority of a trusted and loved speaker, Ngugi admonished students to link their protests and struggles with the aspirations of greater society and Africa at large. Students must abandon the selfishness of thinking that their immediate needs are the liberation itself, there is a whole world outside the immediate experience and needs of students, there is a need for militants to think in societal and not just student terms. Sensitively, Ngugi reminded the audience of the importance of Pan-Africanism, a liberatory African ideology that is undermined by such toxic nationalisms as xenophobia, racism, tribalism and nativism.
A decolonial Journey
Ngugi wa Thiongo’s first novel was Weep Not Child that was published in 1964. At the time Ngugi’s imagination was set against colonial cultural and political conquest. The River Between, a novel of 1965 fictionalised the Mau Mau uprising, rebellion, and the cultural clashes that colonialism brought.
Many works of fiction and essays were to follow. In his intellectual journey Ngugi embraced African communalism, Marxism, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and postcolonialism. His latest rendition, Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe is a decolonial treatise in which Ngugi perfects his argument of moving the centre from Europe and America to the Global South. Like Chinua Achebe before him, Ngugi wa Thiongo is one African writer who has achieved fame in the two provinces of writing; fiction and essay. Both Ngugi and Achebe have achieved global acceptance and acclaim as not only novelists, entertainers, but also philosophers and theorists of the Global South.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
Londile Moyo
Online Reporter