Where it all started: Ngugi on life at Makerere and his literary career

Many Kenyans were disappointed two months ago that Ngugi wa Thiong’o did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But need Ngugi win the Nobel to be recognised by readers of literature as a great writer? Aren’t there hundreds of literary wizards out there who have never been celebrated with certificates and money? What about the oral storytellers? Or the comedians who entertain us every day? Isn’t what is important for the encounter between the audience and the storyteller shared dreams?

Evocation of dreams is what Ngugi sees as the import of the story, which would explain why he calls the latest instalment of his memoirs, Birth of aDream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (Harvill Secker, 2016). In this volume, Ngugi builds on the stories he told us earlier in Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir and In the House of the Interpreter.

The first is the story of growing up in the village and the other of encounter with institutionalised European education and culture at Alliance School. Birth of a Dream Weaver is all about what Ngugi found and imbibed at Makerere. But most important, it is about how he became a writer; what he created whilst at the fountain of knowledge.

The question prospective writers ask established writers all the time is: how does one become a writer? Sometimes the question is rephrased as: what does one need to do to become a writer? Ngugi’s answer is, “… I tell any who ask me for tips: Write, write, and write again; you’ll get it right. Writing is work, is devotion.”

And this message probably summarises how Ngugi became a weaver of dreams. For he had been brought up under regimes — in the village and at Alliance — that saw work as that what made one human and worthy of belonging with others. 

CELEBRATION OF HUMANITY

What Ngugi found at Makerere, as it emerges in Birth of a Dream Weaver, was an education system that demanded intellectual exertion. Although he doesn’t dwell much on what the real classroom experience, especially in literature, was like for him at Makerere, he offers enough hints for one to understand the demands of college education then.

Ngugi notes that in his graduating BA class, it was only him and Bahadur Tejani who were recipients of ‘Honours in English in the Upper Second Division.’ Essentially, as historians of colonialism have noted, colleges such as Makerere were meant to produce early African intellectuals, who, at the time Ngugi registered at the college, would probably take over from the departing colonialists. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that Ngugi arrived at a Makerere that was steeped in the English intellectual traditions and practices. Students and staff wore gowns to class — students red, staff black. Halls of residence were more or less communities of their own with specific traditions and cultures.

It is the competitive nature of the inter-hall rivalry that partly spurred Ngugi to start writing — plays and short stories. It is this spirit that animated his play ‘The Black Hermit’ — the first play in English to be performed at the National Theatre, Kampala.

‘The Black Hermit,’ a play whose lessons probably apply even more to Kenya today than when it was written, in many ways begins to define Ngugi’s literary awakening but more so, his concern with more universal issues. Here is Ngugi writing about culture clash. This is Ngugi concerned about the demands of one’s community on the individual.

But this is also Ngugi pre-empting the debates about the nation-state, in relation to the tribe and race. Yet, the cast of ‘The Black Hermit’ at Makerere defies the limits of race, tribe, gender and such other categories that would later come to delineate relations in the post-colonial state.

What Ngugi opts for when he casts ‘The Black Hermit’ at Makerere is a celebration of humanity in its cosmopolitanism. Ngugi extended this belief in the goodness of human beings into his writing for the newspapers. This is what he says about humanism: “If there is any overarching theme in my articles of the Makerere period, it would be humanism, with art and culture occupying a venerable place. To me, humanism implies real care. Thus the ‘As I See It’ column in the Sunday Nation of September 9, 1962, was titled ‘What About Our Neighbours?’

I focused on the plight of beggars as the neighbour we meet in the streets but don’t want to acknowledge. This helped me raise the question of social mutual care: I looked forward to a time when ‘Kenya will be in a position to cater for the economic and social welfare of all citizens’ but also cautioned that ‘a social welfare state cannot be built on begging abroad — a thing which every newly independent country is forced to do.”

Here Ngugi reveals his dreams about ‘his people’ — his community and country, but humanity in general as well. It is those that he interacts with who populate his early writings — the Nyambura and Muthoni of The River Between aren’t just fictional characters; the first is moulded from the image of the woman who later became his wife, the second from the image of a woman he had tried to impress.

SHARP DRESSER

Waiyaki of the same novel was inspired by the legendary Kikuyu colonial chief. Even some of the characters in A Grain of Wheat are people that he actually worked with when he had a vacation temp job at the then East African Agricultural and Forestry Research Organization, at Muguga.

What Ngugi reveals in Birth of a Dream Weaver is how his literary dreams and their products, plays, short stories, newspaper articles, novels and works of criticism were all inspired by real places, peoples, activities and moments. In this memoir you will find Ngugi, the shy young man at parties at Makerere — although, like many of his generation and class, he was what fashionistas would call a ‘sharp dresser’. You will meet Ngugi, the budding writer, chaperoning Langston Hughes around Kampala. Then there is Ngugi the journalist, writing on topics ranging from debates on local art, culture and literature to regional and international politics.

But this is also an ode to the lost glory of Makerere; of ‘what would have been’ had the dreams of independence not been betrayed before the fruits of the anti-colonial struggle ripened. Ngugi pays homage to many of his fellow Makerereans, his predecessors and peers; teachers and students; dead or alive; resident in Africa or scattered to the four corners of the world by the political upheavals that rocked Uganda and other African nations in the 1960s and ‘70s.

However, it is surprising that for such a lyrical story, and even with a very sharp understanding of the nature of the colonial empires, Ngugi appears to solely blame the collapse of Uganda on Idi Amin. Milton Obote, a fellow Makererean, comes in for mild criticism. Yet Amin was a product of a time and his murderous regime was a by-product of circumstances that institutions such as Makerere could have foreseen.

The real anticlimax to the story is this analogy at the end of the narration, “By the time Idi Amin’s eight years of terror were over, a civilian Amin had already assumed the throne of my beloved Kenya. His name was Daniel arap Moi. He made children sing his praises for getting yellow corn from America in times of hunger he had created. He orchestrated marches all over the country with the slogan Karamu chini (sic), Down with the pen.” Really? Isn’t this overstretching the metaphor?

Overall though, Ngugi tells a marvelous story of his times at Makerere, his rise and growth as a writer. But it is also a story of the dreams and efforts of the Europeans who were determined to nurture — their prejudicial views and ways aside — and establish a class of ‘modern’ Africans in a continent emerging out of the terror and plunder that colonialism meant for many of its people.

The Makerere, Kampala and therefore Uganda that emerge in Birth of a Dream Weaver are amazingly hospitable places. Today one can only dream about such conviviality in that university, city and country.