Ngugi inspires graduands with call to take up ‘intellectual arms’
Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o speaks during a book signing ceremony to celebrate the golden jubilee of his first book ‘Weep Not Child’ in Nairobi. KCA University awarded Ngugi an honorary doctorate. PHOTO | AFP
I was fortunate to have participated recently in KCA University’s graduation ceremony at which Ngugi wa Thiong’o was awarded an honorary doctorate.
In the process I had the pleasure of getting to know the celebrated author, and also his wife Njeeri.
Myth became reality, and what a delightful reality it turned out to be. For both Ngugi and his wife are as cheerful as they are humble, great listeners and generally wonderful company in which to find oneself.
As chairman of the University’s Council, I spoke before the morning climaxed with Ngugi’s address, concluding my remarks with this quotation from his 1982 novel, Devil on the Cross: “Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes.”
It is such thoughts, I said, that made us welcome him with open arms at the university, and to bestow upon him the doctorate. (It adds to 10 others, from all over the world – this being the first in Kenya for this “prophet in his own camp”.)
Later, once suitably robed and conferred with his honour, the almost-Nobel Laureate addressed us, keeping us hanging onto every word of his beautifully constructed and powerfully delivered message.
Ngugi told us he comes from a big family of four mothers, one father, and several siblings. After working on the land during the day, in the evening they would gather in one of his mothers’ houses and tell stories. He valued those evening sessions, describing them as formative in his early education.
At the centre of his world was his mother Wanjiku and the KCA occasion took him back 69 years, to his village in Limuru. “I was nine,” he remembered, “a calico cloth, my only wear, hanging from the right shoulder, when she looked at me and asked me if I would like to go to school.
I could hardly believe my ears, for I could not then understand how she was able to read my secret desires. Not the least of my joys was the prospect of wearing a shirt and shorts for the first time. The dream of education was clearly hers before it became mine, but I embraced it fully.
For years she supervised my homework, asking questions, gently but relentlessly, till she had a sense of how I had done. I poured out everything to her attentive ears.”
It took him some time to realise that she could not read or write, he explained, as she acted as if she could, always spot on with her advice and guidance. He remembered the moment when he came home and announced that he had scored one hundred per cent in his schoolwork.
“She asked me: is that the best you could have done? I was not sure about the hundred percent thing myself, whether indeed it meant the best, but whatever the score, she wanted to know if I had put in my best.” It seemed to Ngugi that his mother valued the effort even more than the actual result.
Her love of the best was matched only by her hatred of arrogance, Ngugi also revealed, with humility in achievement being very important to her. As it clearly is to him until today.
Wanjiku also believed in the notion of “the way”. This moral path, the right way, did not always mean following the easiest or the most popular path.
She chastised her son for doing wrong, becoming even sharper with her words if he offered the excuse that other children in his company had also behaved badly.
These ideals would help him when at Makerere, as a second year undergraduate student, he told his fellow students that he was writing a book. “You, write a novel?” they scoffed.
One could understand their scepticism, he reflected, as in 1962 Kenya was still a colony and no African there, or anywhere in East Africa, had published a novel.
But his mother was not surprised: she just wanted to know if it would be the best.
The novel was good enough to win first place in the East African novel writing competition, and he found a publisher who issued it under the title The River Between. It was the second of his novels, the other being Weep Not Child.
Ngugi entered Makerere in 1959 as a colonial subject, he told us, and left in 1964 as a citizen. Between subject and citizen he had written two novels, three plays, six short stories, and over 60 pieces of journalism – and still graduated top of his class.
“I believe that the ideals of the best, honesty, humility, public service, the right path, ideals embodied in my peasant mother, fit with those of KCA University,’ he confirmed.
“Kenya must demand the best from each of us and from our universities. We must be at the forefront in new discoveries in the arts, technology and innovation. We have a glorious history to be proud of: at a time when Britain ruled over half the world, Kenya was the first to take arms against the might of the British or any other European Empire.”
He called on us “to do what may seem impossible, to take up intellectual arms to make Kenya lead the world in the arts, science, technology”.
We can do it, he knows, if we do not let greed and the ideology of every-person-for-themselves corrupt our ideals.
“Our actions matter. Our ideas matter. Our examples matter. Don’t say, you are not a leader. What you do can be the candlelight that lights the way.” Amen to that.
