Duel on the ridges: Is Ngugi losing his younger readers?

Limuru. A Christian university. A hall filled to capacity. Standing room only. The poster on the wall, bearing pictures of father and son, calls it a 'duel on the ridges.'

In the hall, the old professor and his son, also a professor, sit next to each other. The crowd, most of them young university students in their early 20s, whisper excitedly, curious to witness the battling out between their visiting professor — Mukoma and the legend of a man they have heard all their lives — Ngugi.

He likes to sing and dance to Kikuyu music, the old professor does. So, when it time for him to read an excerpt, he stands up and starts singing. There is no jukebox today, no bar scene with barmaids called Beatrice, so the old professor has to sing by himself as he walks to the podium. Some members of the audience join in. The moderator of the session, Dr Joyce Nyairo, falls into step with him, dancing along. She escorts him to the podium where Ngugi continues to dance, ready to read from his work.

LANGUAGE USE

The old professor stands at the podium in his animal print shirt, a small bodied man. He chooses to read an excerpt from his latest book, Kenda Muiyuru (The Perfect Nine). It is the Gikuyu epic of Muumbi and Gikuyu. It is performed and executed well, but some in the audience are lost.

Ironically, the language warrior’s choice to write and read in his mother tongue has excluded tens of the members in the audience. Had he chosen to read in English, then those who didn’t speak his mother tongue could be included, not excluded, from the myths and laughter and jokes.

The old professor is asked to share his wisdom and he does, speaking of the power of imagination. "Imagination is the greatest democratic equaliser," says he. "I realised that I was breaking jail every night, that I could break prison walls every night and be home with my children."

He spoke, making a very profound statement. Perhaps aware that he is speaking to the Twitter generation, readers used to Instagram stories and 140 characters, Prof Ngugi is quick to add that writing is hard work, and that one must have the drive to work and keep working even when shrouded by doubt. A concept Prof Mukoma wa Ngugi sums up neatly by saying that a writer is half confidence and half doubt.

Prof Ngugi then gets disarmingly honest, speaking of how he doesn’t write for prizes. He recalls with amusement how journalists camped outside his house when the Nobel Prize was to be announced. And how the journalists were so disappointed when he didn’t win that his wife had to invite them in and console them. "I prefer to think about the Nobel of the heart, when readers tell me how much they could identify with the stories in my books," he says.

Perhaps it is this stark honesty and his soft, sincere and honest manner in which he speaks that disarms the witty moderator Dr Nyairo. For though she publicly disagrees with Ngugi’s mother tongue philosophy and sounded quite un-amused by how Ngugi the ‘chronicler of peasant suffering’ was quick to shake hands with the ‘fallen angels of our second liberation’ in an article published in the Saturday Nation in 2015, Dr Nyairo doesn’t take Ngugi to task on these matters.

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Interestingly, even when Ngugi shrugs off the question about which contemporary young writers in Kenya inspire him and chooses instead to speak of his family which is full of writers, and of ambiguous current young writers who write in their mother tongues, but whom he couldn’t even name, Dr Nyairo lets it slide.

In the end, some people in the audience confessed to having found it easier to relate to Prof Mukoma’s arguments; that prizes matter because they ensure that stories are written; that structures need to be out in place and ladders put up to bridge the space between dreams of writing books and actual book production.

As for Prof Ngugi’s old argument of having a base in African languages and writing in them, many found that alienating. For as V.S Naipaul said once, our ideas of literary pleasures and narratives have changed in the last 100 years.

At the end, there was no duel. It was an appearance of father and son and not to spoil the enthusiastic hosts, questions with substance were kept hidden so as not to spoil the expectations of the impressed, seeking audience who likened the huge turnout to that of the visit of the Kubamba music TV show.

Dr. Nyairo who is known for a penchant for unflinching questions can now share with Saturday Nation readers more on what she actually thinks about the generational and subject divide between the two Ngugis and between the generational expectations that is not being met.

The writer is a high school teacher and writer represented by Storm Literary Agency. She is also one of the three judges of the monthly African flash fiction literary prize 100 Words.