Like Achebe before him, wa Thiong’o may yet hit a big miss

Ngugi did not win the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature even though some of his readers, going by the bets, had expected him to claim the prize.

Going by the patterns observable in the Nobel Prize dynamics, Ngugi will end up the same way that James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Rothe and, in Africa, Chinua Achebe did. All of these were indisputably great writers who, somehow, never sufficiently impressed the Swedish Academy into awarding them the Nobel.

It is presumed that writers are awarded the Nobel Prize because of their superior literary output, but some of those who are rejected lose out on the prize in spite of their great writing, especially if such writing deviates from the dominant ideological positions of the times.

This is why the likes of Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and Emile Zola were rejected: they did not buy into the idealism that was in vogue at their time of writing, instead focusing more on the realism of social problems afflicting the commoners.

DISCURSIVE ADVOCACY

On his part, W. H. Auden did not win the prize because he was inclined towards gratifying his lower needs — the same way as James Baldwin did.

So way back in the early 20th century, the Swedish Academy got swayed by ideology and, for Auden, personal morality rather than the sheer literariness of works, focusing more on the ideological and moral inclinations of the teller than the tale as an entity, mattered.

Given that the academy has continued this tradition, and going by the trends so far, Ngugi’s concern for cultural decolonisation may be the thing that puts off the Swedish Academy, even though it is his greatest contribution in the postcolonial enterprise of producing cultural knowledge of and on ourselves through subversion of the hegemonic position of the English language.

Ngugi’s discursive advocacy against the linguistic imperialism of English, and his overall preoccupation with cultural decolonisation places him at the oppositional end of the dominant thinking of the Swedish Academy and Europe generally.

His call to write in African languages and his socialist Marxist rhetoric threaten the very structures on which the global North’s dominance in the world is based.

In a way, Ngugi may be a victim of the northern world’s sense of their own importance as the epistemological and cultural centre of the world, such that even when they glance beyond their shores to where the rest of us are, they see either their kith and kin like Gordimer and Coetzee, or the linguistically fully converted like Wole Soyinka.

Since 1901 when the Nobel Prize was inaugurated, sub-Sahara and cultural Africa has so far produced only one literature laureate, Soyinka, with continental Africa producing three more — J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, representing the Caucasian presence in Africa, and Naguib Mahfouz for the Arabs — all of who are “also Africans.”

Europe, on its part, has had six out of 10 winners since 2004 alone, with Asia, Latin and North America sharing the other four.

WESTERN VALIDATION

Clearly, there is a disproportionate presence of Europeans among the literature Nobel laureates so far, which for the cynical or even the practical, reflects and perpetuates the age-old imperial notions of reason, articulacy, innovation and creative imagination as resident in the West, with darkness, silence and imitation as homed in the rest.

Well, this may be a positive thing for Africans because it puts us in a position where we can begin to understand that our expectation of Western validation of our thought patterns is flawed to the extent that such validation focuses on non-artistic attributes for their judgment.

If we can stop holding our breath every October and instead concentrate on vibrant discourse on the qualities of our literatures, we shall not only avoid the perennial disappointment of Ngugi not winning the Nobel, and instead acknowledge the contribution of our literary thinkers generally in helping us apprehend our conditions.

This is because the reason Ngugi has not won the Nobel is not because he does not deserve it. Indeed if ever there was a chance, in our lifetime, to see an eastern or central African win the Nobel Prize for Literature, that African is, no doubt, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Not only did he blaze the trail of East African writers with a focus on the ravages of colonialism in Kenya; he was acutely aware, even then, of the class element in the colonial enterprise, powerfully dramatised in Weep Not, Child and partly in The River Between, and how that was embraced by the post-independence generations of Kenyan leaders who appropriated the same colonial class structures for their gain, as seen in A Grain of Wheat.

The dominant concern in Ngugi’s early fiction, then, was with the extractionist regime of the colonial and the postcolonial state in Kenya, both of which Ngugi has unmasked in a way that no other writer from this region has done, using superior creative and stylistic choices.

In his drama, we find an attempt to confront the ghosts of Kenya’s history in his co-authored The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, reconstructing a past that the politicians would care little for, but which determines whether Kenya’s centre holds together in future or falls apart.

Of course in drama, Ngugi was not alone, and perhaps not even the best in the country, let alone the region.

But his involvement in drama demonstrates not just his multi-generic approach to literary imagination, but also his desire to involve the poor members of the society whose lives he reflects in what he writes.

The Kamiriithu Project was conceived and executed in this context, and in I Will Marry When I Want, literature transits in dramatic terms from theatre to village, much to the chagrin of the Moi regime that was scared of its subjects.

PHILOSOPHICAL BENT

Indeed, looking at how the shadow of colonialism and the struggles against it prescribes our imagination of contemporary Kenyanness, we see Ngugi as that organic intellectual, in the Gramscian sense, who gave voice to people of Kamiriithu in their determination to speak truth to power.

For that Ngugi, like Soyinka, paid the prize of incarceration, was scandalised by his more compliant pro-system colleagues and, ultimately, suffered the loneliness of exile in the prime of his life.

In his literary essays, Ngugi captures his curiosity and philosophical bent towards the global trends across time and space.

The widely cited Decolonising the Mind is easily a reference text in the politics of language in African literature, while Moving the Centre extends the debate on the cultural freedoms of historically disadvantaged peoples of the world, especially the people of colour.

It is a concern that preoccupies Ngugi in most of his later fiction and essays.

So Ngugi’s works are deserving of the Nobel Prize, but he may never get it because, like Achebe before him, Ngugi still dreams of the complete liberation of the people of colour and therefore does not embody the good nigger, as it were.

Worse for Ngugi, he comes from a dark continent that already received its token recognition via Soyinka, absolving the Swedish Academy of any charges of ignoring the largest, if largely oral and inarticulate, continent on earth.