ABAKU: Ngugi's failure to win a Nobel is not surprising

For the second time in four years, Kenyan novelist, scholar and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o may have come close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. But literary watchers around the world cannot be much dismayed at the repeated ‘overlooking’ of one of the finest writers of our age.

For one, the Swedish Academy has, in the past 112 years or so of its existence, come to be distinguished for its – pardon my language – notorious obsession with ‘unpredictability’ in selecting recipients for the world’s highest academic accolade.

After Arthur Miller and three-time Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie were overlooked for 1997, a committee member was said to have insisted that awarding them the prizes would have made it “too predictable, too popular”!

Writers of every generation, their persuasions and backgrounds notwithstanding, have, since 1901 when the maiden batch of laureates was honoured, borne this sad irony in mind. Which, again, is this: the best of writers in any particular age may not emerge winners of the Nobel Prize at all.

In this class, one can easily identify the likes of James Baldwin, Graham Greene, Jorge Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Anton Chekhov – a writers’ writer in the very meaning of that phrase.

Mzee Ngugi, in my opinion, should have long since made that trip to Stockholm. And even if he eventually doesn’t, it can never be on account of inferiority in his literary offerings.

There is no other African writer, either living or dead, who has demonstrated a deeper commitment, and contributed more significantly, to African literary thought on the world stage, since Kampala.

FOLLOWED IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS

Two of his black African compatriots, Chinua Achebe and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka have more than done justice in defining and preserving Africa’s exclusive place in the global literary milieu. Ngugi has faithfully followed in their footsteps, only by a route none of them have dared to take – he courageously decided, in 1977, to part with English for his first language, Gikuyu.

But giving flesh and blood to the spirit of Kampala was surely a bold culmination to the philosophical aspirations that were first hatched when African writers converged in the Ugandan capital from across the continent to discuss what should constitute African literature; its essential nature, features and future. That meeting was held in 1962.

Kissing the world’s most widely spoken language goodbye may be daring enough, especially against what I may call ‘the global establishment’, but add that to his irreverent satirisation and unparalleled leftist temperament towards successive governments in Kenya, and you get a dual point pen of non-conformism, threshed both in writer and personality.

Granted, proven craftsmanship and political activism are recurrent credentials of most winners.  Yet Ngugi once propagated the re-christening of departments of English across African universities to become departments of Literature.

Juxtaposing Ngugi’s brand of political consciousness with his thematic visions as a missionary of African literature can make one understand how the Swedish Academy’s intense Eurocentrism may be a serious determinant of the writer becoming a Nobel laureate.

Mr Abaku is a Nigerian poet and essayist based in Lagos.