adminThinkers in politics and consumers of literature and culture in the Global South received with mixed feelings the prospect of Ngugi wa Thiongo winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. The feelings were mixed because Ngugi is a titanic political and cultural thinker of the decolonial category, yet the Nobel Prize is largely seen as a reward elected for loyal servants of the imperial and colonial empire, of which Ngugi wa Thiongo is definitely not.
In 1895, before his death in 1896, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, a Swedish scientist and the inventor of dynamite bequeathed his handsome estate towards the honour of any men and women of the world who distinguished themselves in duty “to the greatest benefit to humankind.” When Wole Soyinka received the Nobel honours for Literature in 1986 and became the first black writer to do so, African literary critics and decolonial thinkers such as Chinweizu observed that Soyinka was being rewarded for his service to Eurocentricism.
Soyinka, though an undisputed African literary and cultural luminary, is held with suspicion in decolonial circles, especially for his contempt and brutal criticism that he reserved for Negritude and the Negritude movement. Rather arrogantly and contemptuously, Wole Soyinka, in his typical haughty manner thought that for Negroes of the world to make noise about Negritude was similar to a tiger making a fuss about “tigritude,” a waste of time.
In resistance to the cultural imperialism of the English language wa Thiongo changed his name from James to Ngugi. In fierce cultural activism, Ngugi and a few colleagues forced the University of Nairobi to change the Department of English to the Department of Literature. From then Ngugi produced all his literature first in his Gikuyu mother tongue and would later translate his renditions to English for the benefit of a wider audience.
For that and other works of African political and cultural activism, Ngugi wa Thiongo is counted as an iconoclast of Decoloniality, valorised throughout the world, especially in the Global South. To be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature would have meant that Ngugi wa Thiongo would have sold out to Empire or that Empire would have compromised itself to Ngugi wa Thiongo. To most thinkers of the Global South, evidence of the coloniality of the Nobel Prize for Literature is in how a clear candidate, Chinua Achebe was to his death ignored. Decolonial thinkers and activists, in the Eurocentric scheme of things are not doing any service to the benefit of mankind, but are troublesome dissidents.
The American, Robert Allen Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Cynics, sceptics and other critics have called the American song writer, singer and writer a Donald Trump of the cultural industry, what is telling however, is that he has been rewarded for innovation within the sphere of American cultural sensibility, not service to humankind.
Thoughts from the Underside of Modernity
In conceptualising the “Philosophy of Liberation” as a province of Decoloniality in 1969, Enrique Dussel emphasised that the philosophy of liberation can only be produced by peoples who dwell in the “underside of modernity,” victims of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and imperialism. Perpetrators and beneficiaries of coloniality cannot imagine liberation for human kind because they profit from domination.
The philosophy of liberation and Decoloniality at large could only be produced by intellectuals, political leaders and cultural activist of the Global South such as Ngugi wa Thiongo and others. In defence of the argument that Nelson Mandela also espoused a decolonial sensibility of life, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni insists that only one who had walked under the shadow of death, behind bars for 27 years could produce such a philosophy of reconciliation and theory of humanity as the late Mandela did.
The dehumanising experiences of colonisation and enslavement squeezed out of Africans and other peoples of the Global South some of the most humanising poetry and philosophy of life. In 1967, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia declared that “humanism” was to be the guiding philosophy and national culture of the African country that had until the 24th of October 1964 been called Northern Rhodesia. While Northern Rhodesia was a country of white Britons and their black African serviles, Zambia under the spirit of humanism was to be the country of black and white citizens, a country of humankind. The humanism that Kenneth Kaunda declared was against racism and apartheid and for the equality of human beings.
Separately but similarly, Senegalese intellectual Alinoune Diop and Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah spoke and wrote of the “African Personality.” The African personality described qualities of an African who safeguarded his own freedom and the freedom of others, including settlers and visitors to Africa.
An African with an “African Personality” did not intend revenge upon his colonisers and enslavers but sought to teach them humanity and restore them to the familihood of mankind which they had through greed and hatred lost. In arguing for a “return to the source” another decolonial African leader and thinker, Amilcar Cabral of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde did not mean a return to Africa’s precolonial past and primitive paradise, but a return to the common familihood of men and women in the world, regardless of skin colour and geographic origins.
To African decolonial thinkers and leaders who resisted and fought colonialism, the real fall of man from grace was the time when enslavers and colonisers classified human beings according to race and degraded Africans and other peoples of the Global South to the status of animals and beasts of burden. Thinking from the plantations, prisons and exile, African thinkers and leaders produced art and philosophies of liberation that sought to liberate Africans and also rehabilitate the white oppressors and exploiters. Decoloniality and the ethics of liberation were born from Africans and other peoples of the Global South, from the underside and the darker side of western modernity.
Entertainers and Liberators
The service to humankind that writers and musicians like Bob Dylan have delivered and continue to deliver is that of protest at best and entertainment at most. Credit to him, Bob Dylan is remembered for some anti-war and civil rights lyrics in his body of musical work. Here and there, the musician and writer has been an American critic of America and a Eurocentric critic of Eurocentricism, but at most he is the celebrity of Blowing in the Wind and of moving Like a Rolling Stone while effectively Knocking on Heaven’s Door, among other trendy hits.
These beautiful songs have tickled Americans and pricked their conscience at times, but not saved humanity. Bob Dylan’s has been a musical and cultural profession and career while Ngugi wa Thiongo’s has been a vocation. Ngugi wa Thiongo’s novel, Devil on the Cross, of 1980 for instance was originally written on toilet paper in a prison cell.
The novel bemoans the resurrection of colonialism and the rise of a greedy African post-colonial elite that conspires with Empire to exploit the poor. It is in this novel that Ngugi wa Thiongo fictively predicted that at this rate of capitalism, one day soon oxygen will be tinned and bottled to be sold for profit. Not only in this particular novel, but in the entire archive of his work, Ngugi wa Thiongo engages with grave human problems in Africa and beyond, and asks important questions about the human condition.
It just happens that in this world, African and black struggles for liberation and humanisation are not exactly service to humankind, or the stuff of the Nobel Prize. It might as well be a tragic paradox to expect that Empire will one day recognise the fighters against it and reward them. Ngugi wa Thiongo and others in Africa and the Global South are liberators and not entertainers.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who lives in South Africa: [email protected].
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