Homecoming, page 1
About Apollo Africa
The original Heinemann African Writers Series was launched in 1962 with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass and Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia Shall Be Free, with Achebe himself acting as an editorial advisor. Over the next 40 years, the series continued to publish the best writing from across the African continent.
One of the founding aims of the Heinemann series was to make books by African writers available to as wide a readership as possible. Apollo Africa – a collaboration between Black Star Books and Head of Zeus – is proud to continue this work, ensuring novels, essays, poetry and plays from the original series are once again made available to readers all over the world.
Also by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
NON-FICTION
Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language
in African Literature
Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir
Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer’s Awakening
In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir
Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir
FICTION
Weep Not, Child
The River Between
A Grain of Wheat
Wizard of the Crow
Petals of Blood
Matigari
HOMECOMING
Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (James Ngugi)
Foreword by Ime Ikiddeh
Black Star Books and Head of Zeus would like to thank the following organisations: The Miles Morland Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and Africa No Filter. This publication was made possible through their support.
First published in 1972 by Heinemann Educational Publishers
This edition published in 2023 by Black Star Books and Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Copyright © Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1972
The moral right of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This reprint is published by arrangement with Pearson Education Limited.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB): 9781035900435
ISBN (E): 9781803288802
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
I would like to thank:
REVEREND JOHN GATU
NGIGI NJONJO
MAINA WA KINYATTI
PIO ZIRIMU
NGATHO MUTHUMU
GRANT KAMENJU
and many friends whose provocative discussions
are always frank, free, and fruitful.
In memory of the late
CYRUS MWANGI KAMUNDIA
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Author’s Note
Part One: On Culture
Towards a National Culture
Kenya: The Two Rifts
Mau Mau, Violence and Culture
Church, Culture and Politics
Part Two: Writers in Africa
The Writer and His Past
The Writer in a Changing Society
Chinua Achebe: A Man of the People
Wole Soyinka, T.M. Aluko and the Satiric Voice
Okot p’Bitek and writing in East Africa
Part Three: Writers from the Caribbean
A Kind of Homecoming
What is My Colour, What is My Race?
George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin
George Lamming and the Colonial Situation
Appendix
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Foreword
‘I am not a man of the Church. I am not even a Christian.’ Those were the storming words with which James Ngugi opened his talk to the Fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa in Nairobi in March 1970, reproduced in this collection as Church, Culture and Politics. He had hardly ended his address when a wiry old man visibly choking with anger leapt to the floor, and, shaking his walking-stick menacingly towards the front, warned the speaker to seek immediate repentance in prayer. The old man did not forget to add as a reminder that in spite of his shameless denial and all his blasphemy, the speaker was a Christian, and the evidence was his first name. Ngugi had never given serious thought to this contradiction. Now it struck him that perhaps the old man had a point, and the name James, an unfortunate anomaly, had to go. This volume of essays is James Ngugi’s first major publication under his new name. Those who might retort with ‘What’s in a name?’ should ask themselves why several African countries have changed their names during the last fifteen years, and why in the Republic of Zaïre (itself a recent adoption) a name-changing revolution has swept through an entire Cabinet. The change in Ngugi’s name is in itself perhaps of little consequence. What lends it some importance for our purpose is its significance in the wider context of the writer’s beliefs, particularly as the heresy which shocked the Presbyterian congregation in Nairobi forms an essential part of those beliefs. This foreword cannot attempt a detailed evaluation of Ngugi’s thought. What it seeks to do is merely to direct the reader’s attention to some of its major features as revealed by these essays, and offer a few background comments in addition towards a richer appreciation not only of the essays themselves but also of the writer’s creative work.
It will be seen that although the essays are grouped under three separate sections, they are vitally linked up by their dominant concerns, which are, put rather imperfectly and with particular reference to Africa: the confusion in values that has resulted from a drastic historical change in the political, economic and cultural ethos; the effect of such confusion on both society and the individual psyche; and the need to retain what is ours and recreate from it a new set of living values. The point of departure is the beginning of colonial rule and Christian missionary activity, with a reaching back to the slave trade seen as the earlier and more barbaric form of colonialism. In short, Ngugi is concerned here with the very subjects that have dominated African writing and the utterances of our more sensitive nationalist leaders for about half a century. Colonialism and capitalism are identified here as twin brothers whose mission is to exploit the material wealth of subject peoples, and who, in order to gain acceptability and perpetuation, enlist the services of their more sly but attractive first cousins, Christianity and Christian-oriented education, whose duty it is to capture the soul and the mind as well. Thus, history and values are distorted and reversed, and social order, disrupted beyond recognition, is replaced by another that is both foreign and unjust. With local variations, the African story is the same for Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America. It then becomes in these places a betrayal of trust by an indigenous élite, that has taken over power with the active support of the people, to continue the same inequitable system as the colonial oppressors. Two essays, ‘Church, Culture and Politics’ and ‘The Novelist and his Past’ carry the burden of this argument.
These essays are packed with an interest that goes beyond the writer’s repetition of old themes. Here, freed from the limitations of fiction – for there are limits to what a writer can create and to what he can meaningfully communicate through fiction – Ngugi can make explicit statements informed and carried through by a passion and intellect which are only in circumscribed evidence in his best creative work. Most of the essays are dialectical in approach, and yet their messages remain at all times unambiguous and direct. They are often erudite without meaning to be so, and differ from the novels in dimension, in tone, and in the clarity of commitment. The fire that so often blazes within them is lit by indignation whose burning base is total conviction. Whatever critics might think of the preoccupations of these essays, it remains true that there can be no end to the discussion of the African encounter with Europe, because the wounds inflicted touched the very springs of life and have remained unhealed because they are constantly being gashed open again with more subtle, more lethal weapons. In any case, as an African who grew up in Kenya during the most turbulent days of that country’s colonial history and who is now living through its aftermath, Ngugi’s sentiments should surprise no one.
In order to clear up any doubts that may arise, two points of a background nature may be helpful here. The first has to do with Ngugi’s Marxist thinking. One cannot go very far in these essays without being assailed by well-known phrases like ‘the ruling classes’ and ‘the exploited peasant masses and urban workers’, but if anyone regards these as empty traditional slogans then he cannot have known much of the history of Kenya. The irony is that it was the experience of social and economic relations in Britain, more than in Kenya, that actually settled Ngugi’s socialist conviction. Starting from a commonsense appraisal of the situation in his country at independence, in particular, the need for a redistribution of l
But although Ngugi sympathizes with the Marxist idea of the ‘workers of the world’, it is important to point out that he sees the experience of the black man as being unique in the world and as having a certain basic unity. He has re-emphasized this in a recent letter to me dated 4 September 1971 in which he writes:
… for I believe that we as blacks have suffered doubly under colonialism and capitalism, first, as part of all the working masses, and then as blacks. By which I mean that a white worker by the very nature of his position was a beneficiary of the colonialist and racist exploitation of Africa and of black people everywhere.
This forms part of what he has described as the ‘black dimension’ to his beliefs, and a year’s stay in the United States between 1970 and 1971 more than confirmed his views.
The origins of the ‘black dimension’ are to be seen in Ngugi’s early interest in the Caribbean which he mentions in the essay ‘A Kind of Homecoming’. That interest led him between 1965 and 1967 into an intensive research into the literature of the West Indies, an exercise which yielded the essays on the Caribbean in this volume. If the Caribbean essays exhibit a certain learned quality which many of the others do not, it is because they are the product of what was a scholarly research. The writer in fact would place little value on that quality. What was of greater importance to him was his discovery, through the novels he studied, of Africa’s dominant presence in the West Indian consciousness, of the writers’ agonizing sense of exile and persistent groping for some form of cultural identity. Ngugi’s study does not stop with writers of African descent; it includes, for example, V. S. Naipaul whose attitude to the cultural problem in the Caribbean is cynical, often condescending and contemptuous. I think Ngugi interprets Naipaul with more seriousness than he deserves. But this by no means invalidates the kinship of the experience avowed by writers like Lamming, Braithwaite and Patterson.
It should be clear that Ngugi’s conception of society is of a complex in which politics, economics and culture are inextricably tied up, and nowhere on that spectrum can he see capitalism offering any hope of progress and social justice that can be said to be accessible to all. In a post- colonial society and in a setting which in doctrine and practice runs counter to traditional communal values and works against the total involvement of the people in what is theirs, capitalism has nothing to recommend it. In that short talk to Makerere students, ‘The Writer in a Changing Society’, which incidentally brings together all the major themes of his novels, play and short stories, he is in fact recommending a socialist programme as the ideal means of harnessing all African aspirations when he says: ‘For we must strive for a form of social organization which will free the manacled spirit and energy of our people so we can build a new country, and sing a new song.’
It is in this light, although he is not offering a new philosophy, that Ngugi must be seen as a writer who is also a thinker, and whose depth of thought and degree of commitment are yet to be attained by many African writers. These essays reveal a militancy not commonly associated with his creative work. It is of interest that his appreciation of other African writers in this volume is from the point of view of their apprehension of the African problem and what serious hope they can offer for the well-being of their society. Ngugi’s great strength lies in his realization that in the search for social well-being, questions arising from the experience of yesterday must lead to a consideration of the here-and-now as a basis of hope for the yet-to-come. Not only ‘where the rain began to beat us’ and how severely, but also how to save ourselves from perpetual exposure, and our house from flood.
Ime Ikiddeh
University of Ife
Nigeria
Author’s Note
The present collection of essays is an integral part of the fictional world of The River Between, Weep Not Child, and A Grain of Wheat. Most of them were written at about the same time as the novels; they have been products of the same moods and touch on similar questions and problems. There are differences. In a novel the writer is totally immersed in a world of imagination which is other than his conscious self. At his most intense and creative the writer is transfigured, he is possessed, he becomes a medium. In the essay the writer can be more direct, didactic, polemical, or he can merely state his beliefs and faith: his conscious self is here more at work. Nevertheless the boundaries of his imagination are limited by the writer’s beliefs, interests, and experiences in life, by where in fact he stands in the world of social relations. This must be part of the reason that readers are curious about a writer’s opinion on almost everything under the sun – from politics and religion to conservation of wild life! The writer is thus forced either by the public or by the needs of his craft to define his beliefs, attitudes and outlook in the more argumentative form of the essay.
Two things I might here explain: the emphasis, in this collection, is on politics and on West Indian fiction. Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society. The relationship between creative literature and these other forces cannot be ignored, especially in Africa, where modern literature has grown against the gory background of European imperialism and its changing manifestations: slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Our culture over the last hundred years has developed against the same stunting, dwarfing background.
There is no area of our lives which has not been affected by the social, political and expansionist needs of European capitalism: from that of the reluctant African, driven by whips and gunpowder to work on the cotton plantations of America, the rubber plantations in the Congo, the gold and diamond mines in southern Africa, to that of the modern African worker spending his meagre hard-earned income on imported cars and other goods (razor blades and Coca Cola even), to bolster the same Western industries that got off the ground on the backs of his peasant ancestors and on the plunder of a continent. Yet the sad truth is that instead of breaking from an economic system whose life-blood is the wholesale exploitation of our continent and the murder of our people, most of our countries have adopted the same system. There has been little attempt at breaking with our inherited colonial past – our inherited economic and other institutions, apart from blackanizing the personnel running them. There has been no basic land reform; the settler owning 600 acres of land is replaced by a single African owning the same 600 acres. There has been no change in the structure and nature of ownership of various companies, banks and industries; the two or three European directors go away to be replaced by two or three indigenous directors – the companies remain foreign-owned. There has been no socialization of the middle commercial sector; the Asian dukawallah goes away, to be replaced by a single African dukawallah. There has not been much structural reform of the educational system; the former white schools remain as special high standard schools, attended only by those who can afford the exorbitant fees. Of course there have been advances: our destiny is now in our own hands. And much has been done – much is still being done – even within stifling, inherited systems. But the lack of structural transformation of our societies means that our economies and other institutions will continue, as in the past, to be tied to the West. We shall then end up being just mediators between Western cities and African villages. Do we think that Western capitalism and the classes that run it have suddenly changed their motives and interests in Africa? Aid, loans, Oxfam and other freedom from hunger campaigns – where has this disinterested philanthropy, not manifest when Europe was in actual political control of Africa, suddenly emerged from? What Norman Leys in his book Kenya said of the supposed change of the Kenya settlers’ attitude to Africans (under the pressure of the Indian challenge for equality, the white settlers suddenly discovered they and they alone could protect the African from the Indian menace) can be said of the Western interests and motives behind their desire to protect Africa from socialism!
