That's the hunch from The Literary Saloon, which correctly predicted Herta Müller's win last year, and has already put up an author page for the Kenyan writer. The Saloon notes that Ngũgĩ' wa Thiong'o's odds of winning literature's highest international honor are predicted at 6:1 by Ladbrookes--odds that have swiftly shot up these last few weeks.
I'd be thrilled to see this happen. Ngũgĩ has been a passionate fiction writer, playwright, and essayist for nearly five decades. While his politics of language and his dramatic story of activism, imprisonment, and exile have perhaps brought him the most renown, Ngũgĩ's creative work have had untold influence not only on Kenyan culture, but on all of African literature, and beyond. It is not surprising that contemporary writers are still grappling with and responding to what Ngũgĩ has put into the world. Ultimately, Ngũgĩ manifests profound power and purpose in literature. He has fiercely worked towards the intersection of art and conscience -- sometimes with results that are lukewarm, othertimes that are extraordinary. Whatever we may make of his politics, this is an artist who accepts risk, and its consequences, both on the page and off. It is a powerful legacy, and still -- still -- in the making.
And personally, if I might indulge in an inward sensibility, a Ngũgĩ win would be an exciting cymbal-crash to cue my own looming experience in Kenya, writing and reading and delving into the nation's literary culture.
Only four authors from Africa have ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature, out of the 102 times that it has been awarded and 106 individuals who have received the honor. Among them, you can count J.M. Coetzee (South Africa, 2003), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, 1991), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt, 1988), and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1986). Also, it's worth noting that Doris Lessing, the English writer who won the Nobel in 2007, grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
Interestingly, given Ngũgĩ's longtime commitment to writing his work in Gikuyu before translating it into English, he would be the first author writing in an indigenous African language to win the Nobel (though it must be noted that Mahfouz wrote in Arabic, and remains the only Arabic-language author to win the prize). I've described my sympathetic dissent to Ngũgĩ's ideas on language here.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in British-ruled Kenya as James Ngugi in 1938, and now teaches English at the University of California, Irvine. His first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962 as a celebration of that nation's independence. Later in that decade, he was teaching English Literature at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and was part of the movement that changed the department name from "Department of English" to "Department of Literature" -- an influential strategy across the continent that put world literatures at the center of universities. The philosophy behind this movement fueled a great deal of Ngũgĩ's later writing.
He was already a popular and public figure when his play I Will Marry When I Want, written with Ngugi wa Mirii, was performed in Kenya in 1977 (the same year Petals of Blood was published). Sharply championing equal rights in a society that was then under autocratic rule, and centering the voices (and languages) of working class and peasant people, Ngũgĩ was incarcerated without charge in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, he decided to write in Gikuyu from then on. Caitani Mutharabaini (translated into English as Devil on the Cross in 1982) was the first of this new phase of his writing life. It was written in prison on toilet paper.
Ngũgĩ was released after he became a worldwide figure as a prisoner of conscience (Amnesty International did a good deal in elevating his profile). But he was still blacklisted by the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship, and he heard rumors of plans for his assassination. Ngũgĩ ended up living in exile in Britain and the United States from 1982 through 2002. He was not forgotten in Kenya, though. Consider this remarkable feat of censorship, as described on the author's website:
His next Gikuyu novel, Matigari, was published in 1986. Thinking that the novel’s main character was a real living person, Dictator Moi issued an arrest warrant for his arrest but on learning that the character was fictional, he had the novel “arrested;” instead. Undercover police went to all the bookshops in the country and the Publishers warehouse and took the novel away. So, between 1986 and 1996, Matigari could not be sold in Kenyan bookshops. The dictatorship also had all Ngugi’s books removed from all educational institutions.
Ngũgĩ visited Kenya for the first time in decades in 2002, after Moi finally left office; he was greeted by a cheering crowd of thousands.
Related:
- Ngũgĩ on Fiction in Kenya
- A Literary Language: Decolonizing the Mind
- Ngũgĩ' wa Thiong'o, Interviewed
- Literary Kenya
- How Not to Write About Africa
- Thrice Told Tales: How Stories Became Reality in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow
By Ngũgĩ' Wa Thiong'o (amazingly, this is not a comprehensive list):
Fiction:
- Devil on the Cross
- Petals of Blood
- A Grain of Wheat
- The River Between
- Matigari
- Secret Lives, and Other Stories
- Weep Not, Child
- Wizard of the Crow
Plays:
- The Black Hermit
- This Time Tomorrow (includes three plays - the title play, The Reels, and The Wound in the Heart)
- The Trial of Dedan Kimathi
- I Will Marry When I Want (Ngugi wa Mirii, co-author)
Nonfiction:
- Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
- Writers in Politics: A Re-engagement with Issues of Literature and Society
- Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics
- Education for a National Culture
- Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary
- Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya
- Mother, Sing For Me
- Writing against Neo-Colonialism
- Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom
- Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of Arts and the State in Africa
- Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance
- Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir
Image Credit: Negritude
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