ermes and Mercury are gods of language and communication in the Greek and Roman mythologies respectively. They travel between the human and supernatural realms to ensure that oracular messages are properly interpreted. However, there is a portion of divine logos that humans can never demystify. Language creates ambiguity, and clarifies it, bending and binding rules. Languages of Africa, a salad bowl of ethnicities, make up almost a third of the world’s languages and celebrate their indigenous mythos. In this orbit of lingual patchwork, Gikuyu , spoken by the largest ethnic group, Kikuyu, in Kenya, rekindled Nagugi wa Thiong’s romance for the language of the cradle, whose love one can never forget. Rocked and lulled by the nostalgia for his mother tongue, he, in his own words, became ‘a language warrior’ (Interview, 2017). Paradoxically, the language war is waged by a masculine rescuer, but the feminine is recusant, which is Africa. The epic simile of the warrior illustrates not only his intention of confronting colonial impositions on African history but also on her linguistic consciousness, thus turning African literature into a battleground for African identity. Ngugi, l’âme of African literature, breathed his last in Buford, Georgia, United States, on May 28, at the age of 87.

Ngugi, Soyinka and Achebe – an African literary trinity – denounced British imperialists, but Ngugi also remained an incorrigible critic of post-colonial comprador alliances. In 1977, he was arrested and imprisoned for a year without trial for writing the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will Marry When I want); an incident that blew the lid off Kenya’s smug ruling elite as Ngugi was accused of employing performing arts and native language as a valid vehicle of empowerment. Gobsmacked! Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonial activist, was the president of Kenya. Ngugi’s imprisonment vindicated his lifetime stance against the post-colonial ruling cohorts and their willful connivance in crimes against the masses. In that particular piece, Ngugi used Marxist ideology to the fullest, reprobating Kenya’s neo-colonial turn as the masses felt betrayed; a typical story of former colonies taken over by dictators backed by the West. Incendiary in intent and content, it came close to provoking a political revolution and was declared a forbidden fruit. The playwright was put in a maximum-security prison.

It was during this time that Ngugi resolved to leave English for Gikuyu . The native returned to his language, carrying it to an exilic domesticity. He left Kenaya for the US as being an inmate in one’s homeland was the most excruciating form of exile. Another book in native Gikuyu that rankled the Kenyan establishment was the novel Caitaani m tharaba-In (Devil on the Cross, 1990) that he famously wrote on prison toilet paper. Only writers of the soul can turn their adversity into advantage. There are numerous examples of writers who have nurtured their muse behind the confines of prison bars. Prison literature is admittedly a setting for fictional alter egos. James Joyce once said of incarcerated writers, “Squeeze us, we are olives,” meaning the writers produce sublimer under coercive conditions.

Resilient and demurring, Ngugi was not deterred by the extremities of prison. In Devil on Cross, a visionary appeared, steering the ark of masses from post-colonial tides of autocracy. In tune with colonial ethos, war and warrior are Nagugi’s metaphors connoting dismantling of oppressive structure. Taking the symbolism further, warrior/ writer is a perfect analogy for political iconoclasm. Seared into his consciousness were the horrors of colonialism that sucked off Africa’s vital juices, and impregnated its mindscape and landscape with an alien language. To add insult to injury, Africa was left in the hands of an ensemble bred on the legacy of servitude:

“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 mold it, and those committed to breaking it up; those whose aim is 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.” (Devil on the Cross)

Ngugi’s stance against colonial oppression and Kenya’s dictatorial regimes was not mere reactionary-ism. It was a careful appraisal of injustice and slavery; anodynes of systematic discrimination. In his prison memoir, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, he states that “I don’t write for sentimental heroism, I am just a stammerer seeking articulate speech in scribbled words.’’ The preoccupation with African languages continues, as the colonial violence has caused Africa a lingual aphasia, something which Fanon had also dwelt on. Importantly, the stammerer here is becoming fluent; it seems that the weight of colonial language has blocked that orgasmic fountain of his native imagination. Needless to say, freeing oneself from the literal and imaginative yoke of colonialism is a recurrent theme. In Weep Not Child, the shop of a Berber barber becomes an anecdotal centre hosting the story of World Wars; tinged with local wit. The natives crow about their lonely wars of revenge against the White men:

“I don’t write for sentimental heroism, I am just a stammerer seeking articulate speech in scribbled words.” — Ng g wa Thiong

“That was a baby’s war. It was only fought here. Those Africans who went to that one were only porters. But this one… this one, we carried guns and we shot white men! ….. Yeeees. They are not the gods we had thought them to be. We even slept with their women!”

Apart from seeking intellectual supervision girding up his critique of colonialism Ngugi views physical resistance as a perfect remedy to post-colonial continuity of oppression; no surprise that the porters, figures of marginalisation, are emboldened. The white man is no longer the god. The eponymous Kurtz of Heart of Darkness, who became a god, actually was the devil of greed and violence. Conversely, it is not easy to part with the legacy of colonialism; a permanent pain is attached to it. This element of pain clears the air for a dialogue between Africa’s past and her present. To that end, exile triggers a stream of piercing trauma: “memories of colonial experience still haunt me. So does the violence to my family. When I see massacres in the Middle East or senseless police violence against black people in the streets of the USA, those images come back”. (Interview, 2017).

However, he processes the ordeal of prison as a middle ground for memory, developing a pragmatic ethic of ‘work harder’ (Interview, 2017) in the face of adversity. Nelson Mandela confessed in My Long March to Freedom that in prison, time stops. Ngugi delivers another counterpunch to the pain of exile, producing Wizard of the Crow (2006), a 768-page epic, a gelassenheit written in Gikuyu , and translated by the author. Magic realism in the hands of African writers becomes a wizardry of avant-garde allegory. In congruence with this, Ngugi caricatures the dictatorial system and deformities of global aid; an exhaustive refutation of global capitalism, media and financial institutions. Once again, it is the plight of the post-colonial Africa that Ngugi brings to the stage in a narrative cleft by levity and grotesque humour; the dictator Ruler of fictional Aburiria, a prototype of brutal Third World regimes, “was baffled by anyone not motivated by greed.” The US is least bothered by the Ruler’s inhuman treatment of the masses. It sends aid to build the Tower, which in a magic realist scenario is the tower of modern capitalism, and an architectural veneer of progress. However, the Ruler is challenged by a young graduate, fearing that “the world will become one corporate globe divided between the incorporating and the incorporated.” In this milieu, misogyny is promoted; foreign media focuses on the graphic picturality of famine in Africa; and the military is the continuity of the colonial army, “trained to hate its people.”

Giving it all, this voracious dissection of the post-colonial African dictatorship seals Ngugi’s deal with Gikuyu , a language of resistance he takes to heart, setting the stage for complex incarnations of his multilingual exile. Versed both in English and Gikuyu , Ngugi reaps the fruit of multilingualism. He does not push for writers to translate their work into English, but himself gets to the subtext of his decision to do translation based on an argument that “writing in another African language denies other Africans and other peoples access to their work” (Interview, 2017). Denial of one’s native language, for Ngugi, is a spiritual miss. Colonialism caused fossilisation of African languages, as in Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016), he recounts the “images of the numerous atrocities committed by the white settler regime in Kenya.” Taking a position ferem, “ [he] was benefiting from a history that had come to negate [his] history.”

Having placed himself in the crosshairs of assassinations, imprisonment and censorship, in his academic and theoretical writings, he turned to historical methodology, probing questions about colonialism’s raison d’être. In Decolonizing Mind (1986), Ngugi got to the bottom line that “colonialism normalises the abnormal.” In Wrestling with the Devil, he traded barbs with his post-colonial heirs of Africa “who can even break a progressive nationalist“. In Dreams in a Time of War (2010) he held that “written words can sing,” because for him “the totality of being” was African languages — a “base.” In its entirety, Professor Ngugi’s theoretical interventions opened up grounds for intellectual quandaries in academic circles.

To purge the pain of exile, Ngugi turned to memoir. “The memoir helps me explain myself,” (Interview, 2017) In his three memoirs - Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of Interpreter, and Birth of Dream Weaver – the loaded titles convey a latency of a self surrounded by memories and dreams taking a step back. The dreamer is an exilie in his homeland, weaving the alternative narratives (routes), to seek refuge, to take an exit and to embark on journeys. In his memoirs, he largely admits the split in consciousness caused by a simultaneous company with African and European literature since “being born and educated in a colony inevitably leaves scars.”

Ngugi enjoyed European literature, denounced its colonial entrepreneurs and went on to nourish his mother tongue. In his early work, which he called his apprenticeship phase, written in English—The Black Hermit, Weep Not Child, The River Between, and Petals of Blood— are steeped in events of colonial rule, a sight to behold Kenya’s ethnicities in collusion with colonials. The protagonist in Weep Not Child, is driven to suicide, absorbing the violence as the story is set in Kenya around the time of the Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960). The River Between shows a conflict between missionary Christianity and Gikuyu culture. Ngugi went against the grain to produce an African bildungsroman, accomplishing restoration of native life and its customs, rituals and religions and languages—the worst causality— while the colonial machine was being reinstalled by post-colonial bourgeoise.

Like Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written in Reading Gaol, Ngugi addresses the world from Kamiti Priosn in Free Thoughts on Toilet Paper; a text of personal fused with political leaving no room for speculation that an artist is a dreamer, but with a footing in humanity, a promethean wary of Africa becoming a land of Sisyphean recurrence: “ Was it only to enable a depraved few to carry on the colonial philosophy that the lives of countless poor men and women, and children, were sacrificed?”

Ngugi has joined his ancestral spirits, leaving behind a world in which children are bombed; lynched, detained and deported. Rest in peace.

The writer is an English-language poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems, Lahore, I Am Coming (2017), was published by Punjab University Press