Off to Kariokor with Ngugi for ‘nyama choma’

On the surface, Weep Not, Child, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s first published novel, would seem to have come slightly late in the history of African literature.

It was completed at Northcote Hall, Makerere University College in 1962, ten years after the publication of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, and it was published in 1964, six years after the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

Within this historical timeline, Ngugi’s novel appears to be a work suspended between two distinct moments of literary history.

On one hand, the work appears to belong, not to the first generation of African writers, but to a second “post-colonial” generation.

Unlike his predecessors, Ngugi can claim to have drawn his works on models of African writing, a library that was available to him as he set out to write his novel.

As he told Dennis Duerden in a 1964 interview, he had read Achebe and Ekwensi who, together with a group of Caribbean writers, set his imagination flying. Moreover, by the time Ngugi started writing, the idea of African literature had firmly been established.

The historical conference of African writers held at Makerere University in 1962, which Ngugi attended, was evidence of the coming into being of African writing. At this conference, Ngugi, an apprentice novelist, would rub shoulders with the makers of the new canon of letters.

Given the existence of this canon, it could be said that Ngugi didn’t suffer the anxiety of transitive beginnings; Weep Not, Child was born into an ever-expanding family of scribes and critics.

On the other hand, however, Weep Not, Child carries within its language and structure a deep anxiety about the possibility or impossibility of writing.

Ngugi has written about this anxiety in considerable detail in Dreams in a Time of War, where he looks back on in his own childhood desire to become a writer without the authorisation of the institutions of colonial power.

In retrospect, we can read Njoroge’s struggle to be educated and his striving to acquire a proper sense of himself as part of the crisis of writing. Ngugi’s project in Weep Not, Child was to write a narrative in which Njoroge, his alter ego, would be able to produce a Bildung — a completed picture of himself — against the violence of colonial control and violence.

The tragic tone of the novel, the source of most of its power, results from the tension between what Njoroge imagines himself to be and the historical forces that work against this imagined, ideal self. The tragic tone is in turn enhanced by the moments of melancholy attendant to Njoroge’s education — the loss of the land, the father’s ineffectualness, and of the spiritual homelessness that makes the young protagonist perpetually estranged. But perhaps the major source of melancholy in the novel is Njoroge’s relationship with his mother, the woman who gives him unconditional love, sends him to school, but cannot protect him from the violence of the times.

Melancholy in literature is, of course, an aesthetic effect that depends on an individual reader’s relationship to a text and its shifting contexts of reading. For me, rereading Weep Not, Child returns me to a site of memory.

My encounter with Weep Not, Child will not take place until 1968, four years after the publication of the novel. I’m in Standard Six at Tumutumu Intermediate School and being a voracious reader, I have exhausted the two bookcases that constitute the school’s library. I have turned to bribing girls at the neighboring high school to borrow the novels they are reading for their examinations. It is from one of the girls that I borrow that now rare orange and white paperback with the nativity scene cover drawn by Eli Kyeyune. Oh, holding that text in my hands feels magical. It will be the first work of fiction that will speak to me, in English, of a world so close to me that I feel as if I’m reading the life back into the fiction.

Weep Not, Child brings a new dimension to the already known world — the landscape, the school, the social classes, and the violence of history — but it does so in the authorised language of the institution of literature. At the same time, the novel relives lingering anxieties about the fragility of the new order of things. Like Njoroge, I have embraced school as the path to social mobility, but all around me there are signs of the post-colonial crisis and the possibility of a catastrophe. Weep Not, Child instructs me about the unfinished business of decolonisation and replays the terror and fear that we have been taught to forget so that we can move on with our lives.

Finally, for a young person with literary aspirations, Weep Not, Child authorises the project of writing and of literary scholarship. For 1968 is not a good year for aspiring artists. With the landing of two Americans on the moon, our teachers remind us that we have entered the age of science.

At Tumutumu Intermediate School, the prominent writers the school had produced, including Gakara wa Wanjau and Jonathan Kariara, are being forgotten. In 1968 Tumutumu families travel to Nairobi in buses to witness the “crowning” of two former pupils of the school, Francis Gicaga and James Kamwere, with degrees in engineering. In my six grade class, no one wants to be a writer when they grow up.

Everyone wants to be either a civil engineer (like Gicaga), or a land surveyor (like Kamwere). Unable to declare loudly that I would like to be a writer when I grow up, I read the borrowed a copy of Weep Not, Child silently, under the table, waiting and hoping that the science fad will soon die.

An absent author does not count as a role model. If I seem to identify wholly with Njoroge, it is because I can’t imagine him as the product of another person’s imagination. He exists for me as an expression of a reality I have lived and a life I have known. Indeed, up until I arrive at the University of Nairobi at the end of 1976, I never associate the novel with a living person; the work is the product of a vague institution that goes by the name of James Ngugi, the name on the cover. Even at the university, my encounter with the author is from a distance — I sneak into the seminar room to hear him discuss the novels of Chinua Achebe in their social context, but I’m too shy to talk accost him in the corridors, a common practice among students at the university.

And then in the year I’m supposed to formally take his class, he is arrested and detained.

But fate has to do its work. In 1980, twelve years after I first read Weep Not, Child, the author and I will share an office at Heinemann East Africa, on the ninth floor of International House, thanks to the foresight of Henry Chakava.

How I relish what appears to be my moment of arrival! There he is, one of the most prominent writers in Africa, sitting across the desk from me, a recent graduate of the department where he was now barred from teaching. Although I am very young at the time, I have been entrusted with the task of editing Ngaahika Ndeenda and Caitaani Mutharabaini. And as if that is not enough to boost my ego, I seem to have crossed the line that divides the writer and reader.  Between going through gallery and page proofs, we discuss the politics of orthography and of African literature.

Occasionally he takes me to lunch at Kariakor market in his old pick up truck. As we wait for the nyama choma, we talk about the events and places that inspired his novels; but rarely do we discuss the emotions that went into the making Weep Not, Child. I sense that these are too deep and personal to be rehearsed in everyday conversation.

As we drive through the city streets, no doubt followed by the agents of the state who trail him everywhere, I think of Njoroge, the child forbidden to weep.

The writer is a Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, and editor, PMLA