Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi” and Decolonizing the Mind

By Angela Okune

On April 28, 2017, our friend and colleague, Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o spoke to an intimate group at the University of California, Irvine. Structured as a talk about his play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o opened by discussing the play he wrote with Micere Githae-Mugo, which was produced at UCI in 2014. The play was documented on video, and a trailer is available here: http://drama.arts.uci.edu/trial-dedan-kimathi. The one-hour film about the making of the UCI play is available here.

During his talk, Professor Thiong’o described his interest in correcting the dominant version of history where Dedan Kimathi, the leader of the armed uprising by Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau), is portrayed as a barbaric killer. Thiong’o explained how this maligned leader is in fact a hero for the Kenyan people. Through this play, Thiong’o aimed to engage with Kenyan history and draw linkages between the Kenyan experience and the outside world.

In this talk, Thiong’o also spoke about the play’s use of prison as a metaphor and how that relates to larger imperialist processes. He offered examples of the plantation, the colony, prison, and the modern nation state which all share a broader theme of confinement. The struggle of Kimathi in prison was part of that struggle against colony, political, psychological and cultural confinement.

This theme of confinement led Professor Thiong’o into a discussion of a key point he has written about: imprisonment of the mind and the importance of language in this process. As Thiong’o explained, language has always been central to colonial politics and the empire. If that is so, he asked, how can language be a method of resistance?

“I get very angry when people talk about Black English as if it were broken. No, it is not, it is a space of resistance [like jazz and hip hop]. In Africa, it is a very different form. Many leaders from anti-colonial movements are highly educated in terms of the language of the empire. But ultimately we have a problem. The problem is this – the psychological bonds of language are very strong.

So for me, I have tried to get outside the framework. [By writing largely in Kikuyu, his mother tongue.] Because I can. There are others who cannot. Where languages are concerned, I want to see languages relating to each other not in a hierarchy but as a network. There is no language that is more of a language than another.”

Featured Image Source: http://showcase.arts.uci.edu/2015/Oge/Oge-Agulue.html