Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, exponent of African literature and defender of minority languages, dies

BarcelonaThe Kikuyu writer, academic and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o died yesterday, Wednesday, at the age of 87. He is one of the few who, writing in Kikuyu – one of the languages of Kenya, the country where he was born in 1938 – had an international impact. From the British colonial period until the Land and Freedom Army revolt (1952-1962), which led to the country's independence. The history of his country and his childhood influenced his literature, in fact, he suffered political persecution at home and abroad (he was in exile from 1982 to 2002). I share them," explained in an interview with ARA.

In 2019, she received the Premi Internacional Catalunya, precisely "for her distinguished and daring literary work and for her defense of African languages, based on the notion of language as culture and collective memory." She has published more than thirty works, including fiction and essays, among which stand out Decolonizing the mind (1986; published in Catalan by Raig Verd in 2017), Move the center (1993; Green Ray, 2017), At the interpreter's house (2012; Raig Verd, 2017) and the story The vertical revolution (2019; Rayo Verde, 2019).

The love of stories

The writer explained to ARA that his first love was listening to other people's stories, and his second was reading them and making them his own. "After the'Old Testament cameTreasure Island, by Stevenson,Oliver Twist, by Dickens, and so many other books. I remember arguing with a friend for a long time because I told him he couldn't write a book without "permission to do so." If he wrote without permission he'd be arrested, I warned him. And he said, "No," he claimed.

In 1959 he began studying English at Makerere, and after finishing his degree he published his first novels, Weep not, child (1964) and The river between (1965). In the late 1950s, he was still a subject of the British Empire. When he made his debut, his country was already independent. At first, the government didn't interfere with his writing. In 1977, he premiered his first Kikuyu play, Ngaahika ndeenda [I'll get married whenever I want.] During that year, he became involved in the creation of an educational and cultural center in Kamiriithu. "Then I realized that if I wrote a work in English, it was only for a minority of the inhabitants, whereas by writing it in Kikuyu, I was addressing everyone: educated people, but also the working class and the peasants. I wrote in Kikuyu because I needed to. I wasn't responding to any theory I only had in my mind."

Constantly attacked

In Petals of blood and in And I will marry when I want, both from 1977, the author painted a stark portrait of neocolonial Kenyan society and advocated for the full use of native languages as opposed to European ones. They were widely echoed both nationally and internationally, and the post-colonial Kenyan government imprisoned him without charge in the maximum security Kamiti prison on December 31, 1977. He was released after a year. However, tensions with the government continued, as the writer continued to denounce the situation in the country. Finally, fearing for his life, he went into exile, first in London and then in the United States.

His final trauma came in 2004. He returned to Kenya to present Môrogi wa Kagogo (The Raven Wizard) (in the Spanish translation by Alfaguara) in Kikuyu. Eleven days before the book was released, four armed men entered the apartment where he was living with his wife and attacked them both. "They haven't taken away my desire to continue writing in my language or to return to Kenya. I was recently there to present a new book in Kikuyu. I've been treated much better. But the discrediting of African languages still exists. I've been humiliated so many times defending Kikuyu that I can't count them," he explains. However, he never gave up writing and defending minority languages.