African Revolutionary Writers, Part 6c
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Ngugi the Academic
Ngugi’s (attached) essay “The Writer in a Neo-colonial State”, first
published in 1986 in a publication called “The Black Scholar”, and subsequently
as part of the 1993 book “Moving the Centre”, helps this project of ours
considerably.
Ngugi taught at Nairobi
University and later in the USA. Therefore as much as he is a novelist, he has
also been an academic.
In this essay Ngugi takes a
long look back over the period from the end of the Second World War, and
divides it roughly into three - the fifties, the sixties, and the seventies;
liberation struggle; victory and independence; and neo-colonialist reaction. He
considers the way that the literature affected these passages of history, and was
affected by them.
We have not used such a scheme,
nor did we start with the Second World War, but Ngugi’s overview does correspond
with our series to an extent. Clearly, in nearly all the countries of Africa,
neo-colonialism has taken hold, and maintained its grip. Ngugi problematised this
in his way, and so have we, in our way.
In 2011, a quarter of a
century after Ngugi’s essay was written, an African country – Libya – was attacked
by the imperialists with full-scale military force, bombed, shelled, rocketed
and invaded. Libya was the first country in Africa to become independent after
the world wars, and it was the only one to have achieved parity, in its general
standard of living, with the European countries on the other side of the
Mediterranean Sea from Africa.
Now Libya is being
catastrophically underdeveloped. Neo-colonialism is still with us, but now armed,
brutal, direct, naked colonialism is back, as well.
There is an immense amount of
wisdom in Ngugi’s essay. Do, please, read it.
Ngugi concludes: “as the
struggle continues and intensifies, the lot of the writer in a neo-colonial
state will become harder and not easier.”
This is our lot. For as much
as heroes have gone before, and for as much as the written record is priceless
and indispensable, yet we who remain will have to do it all again, and in
conditions of even greater difficulty. We have no right to expect less, or to
expect less of ourselves.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Ngugi
wa Thiong’o, The Writer in a Neo-colonial State, 1993.
