Two Luminaries of Literature Provide Window into African Life

EDITORS’ NOTE: This week The CIHA Blog looks at the insights provided by the memoirs of two literary greats, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, highlighting how the colonial era shaped gender relations and land tenure in ways that continue to have an impact on humanitarianism today. We thank Ugo Nwokegi for this post and, as always, welcome your comments.
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by G. Ugo Nwokeji

I am not a literary person, but a historian of Africa since 1500, with research interests in the slave historical demography, and commerce and culture in Atlantic and global contexts. I must confess to not have ever shown a deep interest in literature (except for the James Hardly Chase thrillers I read recreationally during high school days in Nigeria). I did however read Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child back then, along with popular novels by other African luminaries, who are pioneers of African literature – Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ferdinand Oyono, Camara Laye, Peter Abraham, among others, because they were staples in the syllabi. I had a fetish for “material reality,” and for me literature, being largely fiction, was the antithesis of that, and poetry truly irritated me.

Yet, as I have become a historian of culture, I have come to realize that literature, including fiction, depicts reality in the ethnographic sense of society that it invariably conveys. Novelists write fiction, but they are actually representing real life. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart solidified my understanding of the central role of yam in precolonial Igbo life, an understanding that helped me to advance a new interpretation about the relationship between the gendered division of labor and the gendered structure of the transatlantic slave trade. Placed in comparative context, this regional interpretation cast a whole new light on the interregional variations in the sex composition of captives sent to the Americas from all across Atlantic Africa.

Having discovered how empowering literature can be, I wasted no time in visiting the work of literary luminaries – this time, not their fiction but their memoirs when collaborating on a chapter on father involvement (“Father and Parent Involvement Across Africa: A Time of Transition”). I turned mostly to two men of literature born five years apart – Achebe and Ngugi – to see how they experienced their father’s involvement in their lives. Both embrace modernity and revere their respective African cultures – Nigerian Igbo and Kenyan Kikuyu – a disposition that endows them with the sagacity to capture the nuances in the tension between tradition and modernity under respective models of British colonialism in Africa in which they lived their formative years – settler colonization in Kenya in the case of Ngugi and non-settler model in Nigeria in the case of Achebe.

Despite their contrasting childhoods, in terms of family structure, class and father experience, and British colonial model, both Nugi’s and Achebe’s fathers fitted generally into what may be characterized as the general African pattern, at least in their own time – father aloofness. In Dreams, Ngugi describes his father, Thiong’o, as head of a polygamous family who “fairly aloof [and] talked very little about his past,” unlike “[o]ur mothers around whom our lives revolve.” Achebe’s monogamous missionary family also suggests father aloofness, and he devotes only approximately two pages of his Education of a British Protected Child in the chapter “My Dad and Me,” and only slightly more in There Was a Country. But father aloofness does not equal absence of or necessarily minimal involvement. While both Achebe’s parents were involved in his education, Ngugi’s father “had no say” in his; it was a decision between him and her, who footed the bill of his primary education and gave all she had to ensure the best education for her brilliant child. The distance between Ngugi and his polygamous father was so wide that Ngugi had to rely on third-party accounts to reconstruct some of the most important events in his father’s life. Yet Ngugi’s father participated actively in his children’s socialization. When he was not scolding them with insults he picked from his one-time British employers for whom he had served as a domestic help in Nairobi, he was sharing his own food with them and teaching them manners.

The fundamental difference in the way Achebe and Ngugi experienced father involvement seems to be ultimately attributable to the different models of colonization in Kenya and Nigeria. A combination of two factors – mild weather and some of the most fertile lands on earth – made the Kikuyu highlands a target of British settlement, much like South Africa and Zimbabwe. The British colonizers took most of the land from the Kikuyu, turning the latter into squatters in the ancestral lands. This was a big deal because the Kikuyu, like most African societies, lived off the land. The displaced Kenyans had little choice than to take up precarious employments in White-owned farms and as domestic servants for the increasing population of Whites in both the rural and urban areas. Land alienation resulted in extreme commodification of land that still marks Kenya’s economic and cultural life today. Ngugi’s father managed to acquire a piece of land in Kamirithu from his savings working for a White family as a domestic servant. But a more privileged Kenyan, Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu, quickly claimed this land, exploiting the colonial legal system. Undeterred, Ngugi’s father forged on with life, and quickly established himself, by local standards, as a successful goat and cattle farmer. However, when years later his entire herd perished following a mysterious epidemic visitation, he was left a bitter and changed man. This experience emasculated the once-proud patriarch who had felt secure enough, as Ngugi noted in Dreams, to leave each wife “to tend her house as she saw fit now tried to micromanage the entire homestead.” Bouts of abusive rage on his polygynous family culminated his kicking out Ngugi’s mother, along with her children.

By contrast to the extreme precarity of life in a settler colony, in Achebe’s Nigeria, as in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and other colonies with harsher climates and less arable land than the Kenyan highlands, rural land was not alienated from the indigenes and there was relatively low demand for it, such capitalist rural enclosures were virtually nonexistent. British citizens were in fact prohibited from acquiring land in Nigeria. At any rate, the Achebe would not have been on the receiving end of dispossession because Achebe’s father’s status was similar to Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu‘s, but then Achebe’s father had no need to usurp rural land because it was worth little in his non-settler context. Secure from the precarity of life inherent in land alienation Achebe’s monogamous family in Nigeria was far more serene than Ngugi’s.

British violent counterinsurgency against Kikuyi armed uprising during the 1950s further exacerbated Ngugi’s turbulent adolescent life. During the early 1950s, the dispossessed Kikuyi commenced a guerrilla-style war against the British – the Mau Mau – in a forlorn attempt to recover their land. Back from fighting for the British during the Second World War, Nugui’s older brother joined the Mau Mau fighters in the hills, a fact that exposed his family to violent reprisals by the British in their effort to suppress the insurgency. Ngugi’s memoirs brought home many truths about the Mau Mau in a way I could not have gleaned from the work of professional historians –how serious the rebellion and how brutal the British anti-Mau Mau counterinsurgency were, and how life was for the average Kikuyi Kenyan during those years. Only through the kind of vivid portrayal could a post-independence West African like me appreciate the full import of that era in the opposite corner of British Africa during the turbulent late colonial years.

As the impact of land alienation and British anti-Mau Mau counterinsurgency shows, the memoirs of Ngugi and Achebe illuminate important facets of the recent African historical experience besides father involvement.

Africanist gender studies have highlighted how the fortunes of African women declined under the colonial rule. Ngugi’s story vividly illustrates the precarity of women’s life under the colonial “customary law” regime. When his father ran into hard times, he began to extort the earning of his wives made from the land and his daughters made from wage labor in the farms and factories. When Ngugi’s mother escaped his father’s growing abuse to her well-to-do father, but customary practices designed specifically obviate women’s independence delayed her attainment of use rights to land that would have facilitated an independent existence for her. This handicap made it difficult for her to fend for Ngugi and his siblings, who had joined their mother after their father expelled them from the compound they grew up in.

The increased marginalization of African women under colonialism also took symbolic forms. Among the precolonial Kikuyu, it was acceptable for people to bear their mother’s given name as surname, a precolonial-era phenomenon that I have been researching among my own Aro Igbo culture, which, like that of Ngugi’s people, ended during the colonial period. Ngugi’s full name was Ngugi wa Wanjiku, until he approached the threshold of colonial modernity – the school. The teacher registering Ngugi on his first day at school was incredulous when Ngugi gave his name, as Ngugi recounts in Dreams. “He asks me my name. I say Ngugi wa Wanjiku, because at home I identified with my mother. I am puzzled when this is greeted with giggles in the class. Then he asks me: What’s your father’s name, and I say, Thiong’o. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is the identity I shall carry throughout this school” (p. 61). In one stroke of the pen, Ngugi’s mother’s name was replaced by his grandfather’s, just like happened to my Aro people. The change in surname further illustrates how people of literature capture real life, many aspects of which often escape the attention of historians and social scientists.

Apart from revealing to us that the Kikuyu used their mother’s name as surname before British colonialism, Ngugi’s Dreams illustrates another important aspect of precolonial Africa – the violence that marked many African societies during the late nineteenth century. Ngugi informs us that his paternal grandfather “was originally a Masai child who strayed into a Gukuyu homestead  … either as war ransom, a captive, or an abandoned child escaping some hardship like famine.” Thus, Ngugi grew up in a second-generation uprooted and assimilated Masai patrilineage within the Kikuyu milieu of Kamirithu. For his part, Achebe also reveals in his two memoirs that his own grandfather was a refugee in Ogidi, having fled from a civil war in another town during what would have been about the same as Ngugi’s grandfather’s travail, circa 1880s. Although unlike Ngugi’s grandfather, Achebe’s paternal grandfather’s experience does not appear to have involved cross-cultural adaptation because it is likely that he fled from another Igbo town, both cases speak volumes of the violence, displacement and pervasive migration that marked late nineteenth-century Africa.

Even the contrasting childhoods of both Achebe and Ngugi – Achebe the son of a missionary and Ngugi the son of a man whose life ranged from domestic servant for a white Nairobi family to smallholding farmer to abjection – speak volumes about the social mobility possible in colonial Africa. While Achebe the grandfather manifested the precarious existence of late precolonial Africa, his son (Chinua Achebe’s father) and daughter inlaw both obtained Western education and occupied relatively privileged positions in the colonial order. Despite the travails of Thiong’o (Ngugi’s father), his son Ngugi, who as a child thought that education was part of “desires impossible to fulfill,” went on to achieve worldwide fame in the literary world in the order of Achebe. Thus, nothing demonstrates both the precarity and possibilities for dramatic social mobility in British colonial Africa more than the memoirs of the literary giants.

The life experience that Ngugi captures in his two memoirs are useful, not just because they narrate a compelling human story or because it portrays the experience of a world-renowned luminary, but because it gives us a window into the complexity of African life and the fast and furious changes that marked twentieth-century Africa. In the context of the British anti-Mau Mau counterinsurgency of the 1950s, I should add that the positive and forgiving disposition of Ngugi’s generation of the African intelligentsia – those that came of age around the independence period, who saw and experienced colonial state repression – is quite simply exemplary.

In hindsight, the indifference toward literature earlier in my life was naïve; literature speaks to real life. Many a literature teacher mentioned this countless times, but it always sounded like a cliché, which came in through one ear and exited through the other. I know better now, thanks to the work of Ngugi, Achebe and others.

Dr. Nwokeji is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.