Kisii tour and why Ngugi sent Chris back to the West

The central administration of Kisii University and the East African Educational Publishers Limited threw Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o and I together again recently.

As old buddies, we rekindled our relationship, bringing back our old memories in the struggle for liberation of literature and culture in Kenya. Ngugi was invited to deliver a lecture on ‘Ethnicity, Diversity and Devolution,’ at Kisii University on August 31, 2015, during which  Prof Peter Amuka of Moi University and I were discussants.

Mr Kiarie Kamau and I travelled with Ngugi from Nairobi and slept in Kisii, gave the lecture and slept in Kisumu on the second day and left for Nairobi on the third day. We agreed with Prof Peter Amuka to meet in Kisii.

The August 31 audience consisted of Prof John Akama, vice-chancellor and author, Prof Maurice Amutabi, a historian of no mean reputation, and the students who filled every space in the library to listen to Ngugi. There were scholars from many universities of the Western Kenya region — many of them our former students — and teachers in Kisii County. I was happy to unite with them.

Cord leader Raila Odinga, who later referred to Ngugi as “my brother Ngugi wa Thiong’o,” turned up at the event and electrified the audience with memories of their detention. Raila’s entourage was just the right people to hear Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s speech on literature and our devolution at county level. Raila reminded them of how Ngugi and him shared a degree called “PG (Prison Graduate),” and how in the past regimes, saying “no” to the government led to one’s detention.

TRICK OF THE MIND

Suddenly, the events that led to Ngugi’s detention after writing Ngaahika Ndeenda replayed themselves. Never before had I realised the contribution of the Kenyan doyen of letters to my life. Never before had I realised that my forthcoming literary aubiography was so intertwined with Ngugi’s.

In our interaction in the 2000s at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Ngugi and I entered a Kiswahili speaking competition. He was way ahead of me in his spoken Kiswahili. When I came back to Kenya, I gave Ngugi a run for his money. I went and sat at the feet of Pwani University’s Prof Rocha Chimera, an expert in fasihi, lugha and Kiswahili theatre, imbibed Swahili words and sentences and beat Ngugi in written Kiswahili.

It had been many years since we were separated, going different ways since the late 1970s. We met in Dar es Salaam, together with, Dr Henry Chakava, and talked to William Burt, the Canadian millionaire who has been funding the Burt Award for Literature at the National Book Development Council of Kenya. Before the Kisii University lecture, however, Ngugi and I had never had time to talk more deeply about our lives.

Mr Kiarie Kamau, EAEP managing director and chief executive, sat behind us in the Jambojet from JKIA to Kisumu and listened to us silently until we were picked from the airport by the Kisii University vehicle. He only interrupted us once to tell us how he had dropped his own added name, “James.”

“How many lives do you have?”, Ngugi asked me as soon as we were settled in the aircraft .

“Why?” I asked.

“I was downstairs in the office of the Department of Literature in the Education Building at the University of Nairobi the other day and you were introduced to me as Prof Wanjala,” Ngugi began. “You looked very young. But when I went upstairs to join you people to celebrate the 50 years of my novel, Weep Not, Child, I found you looking older. Were you playing tricks with my eyes?”

“Me, playing tricks with your eyes?” I asked, laughing. “The person you saw downstairs was Dr Alex Nelungo, my son. And I am your old friend Chris Wanjala!”

“But this is where I beat you!” Ngugi started again ernestly. “I beat you here because I once put the name ‘James’ in an envelope and I wrote up there, ‘Return to giver!’ But as for you, I realise that Chris has robbed Lukorito his rightful inheritance. How do you see it? Why don’t you send Chris to the West and give Lukorito enough room to rule himself?”

Ngugi was always against things Western, and now he was making me think about my past, present and future in terms of my name. I have renamed my family in my forth-coming autobiography.

I again met Ngugi in British Columbia, Vancouver in 2007. We also met one of Okot p’Bitek’s daughters and exchanged views about our families and our former students. I was Ngugi’s student and his colleague from September 1968. Now as elders we had children who are now creative writers and scholars. I told him about Robert Serumaga’s sons in Uganda.

GREAT MAN

“We are a big community!” he said. “We and our offspring are a big literary community.” In politics like the Kenyattas, the Railas, Ogingas, the Nyagahs, the Mois and the Aworis. In literature like the Ngugis, Okots, Serumagas, Wangusas and Wanjalas.

When I told Mukoma wa Ngugi, Ngugi’s son, how it was wonderful to spend an entire weekend with his father, he wrote and said: “Prof, I wish I had been there but I will ask Baba to tell me all about it on his return.”

“Then you must organise a conference to which all our offspring can come!” Ngugi said.

Ngugi was not just concerned with theatre and literature. We talked ceaselessly about the Ngibuini Kaguru family and their manufacturing of Ujiplus and Picana; Gachamba, the Kenyan inventor of an aircraft, and Prof Francis John Gicaga, former vice-chancellor of the University of Nairobi, who chaired the Nyayo Car Project. They were all from Nyeri County. In the colonial days, people like them would have had their hands chopped off to prevent them from inventing anything.

“I have never met Moi,” Ngugi said. “I don’t’ know how he is as a person.”

I reminded Mukoma wa Ngugi about the magnanimity of his father: “Your dad is a great man,” I wrote. “He gives pride and honour to everyone he meets. He met a 12-year girl called Kerubo at Hotel Nyaoke, where we stayed on our first night. The child wants to be a paediatrician when she grows up. She introduced us to her father, a lecturer in linguistics at Maseno University. Her father was my student at Egerton University. The professor appreciated her hair style and allowed her to take photographs with him. He proudly mentioned her in his lecture at the Kisii University the following afternoon.”

Instead of me introducing him to people and talking about his family of many writers, Ngugi was self-effacing and quick enough to do it. Ngugi appreciated the work the University of Nairobi is doing on heroes and heroines like Dedan Kimathi, Wangari Maathai, Otenyo and Elijah Masinde in the Kisii and Luhya anti-colonial resistance movements.