2008 Woodie Awards
Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Living Legacy
By: Alex Park, News Editor
Issue date: 11/30/07 Section: Features
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In his memoir of a career spent in the Kenyan resistance against British rule, Warhiu Itote describes a scene in Burma during World War II, where, during a conversation with a black American soldier, he became of aware of his mental condition as a colonial subject for the first time.
"Some of you will believe it when you're told that the white way of life, the white religions, everything white is the best thing for Africans to believe in and follow," the soldier asked to the future general's astonishment. "Then who will be willing to fight for your freedom?" Itote, like so many other Kenyans of the time, realized then that he was unwittingly suffering from a colonization of the mind.
On Wednesday, Macalester hosted one of Africa's great intellectual liberators.
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, the 69-year-old champion of African self-identity, was among the first in the post-colonial era to suggest that African writers should speak their own languages, tell their own stories, and honor oral traditions as much as the West honored its classics-and to be taken seriously for it.
Born in Kenya, Ngugi attended undergraduate school at Makerere University in Uganda. As a writer, he championed the Kenyan post-colonial experience in a series of widely-acclaimed English language novels.
Yet at the time Ngugi was building a reputation as an influential thinker, an independent Africa was well in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy. Colonialism had almost entirely eroded, but in its place, the new leadership had come short of the expectations of everyone except the most cynical foreign observers.
In the earlier part of the 1960s, leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lamumba and Gamal Abdel Nasser were the Ahmadinejad's and Chavez's of their day. They made broad claims about the inevitability of African unity, the impervious strength of African socialism, and a soon-to-come day of reckoning for the Western governments that had kept them down until then. Praised at home and ridiculed by Western governments, they were all but gone within half a generation, their plans for progress and unity failing to materialize.
"Some of you will believe it when you're told that the white way of life, the white religions, everything white is the best thing for Africans to believe in and follow," the soldier asked to the future general's astonishment. "Then who will be willing to fight for your freedom?" Itote, like so many other Kenyans of the time, realized then that he was unwittingly suffering from a colonization of the mind.
On Wednesday, Macalester hosted one of Africa's great intellectual liberators.
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, the 69-year-old champion of African self-identity, was among the first in the post-colonial era to suggest that African writers should speak their own languages, tell their own stories, and honor oral traditions as much as the West honored its classics-and to be taken seriously for it.
Born in Kenya, Ngugi attended undergraduate school at Makerere University in Uganda. As a writer, he championed the Kenyan post-colonial experience in a series of widely-acclaimed English language novels.
Yet at the time Ngugi was building a reputation as an influential thinker, an independent Africa was well in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy. Colonialism had almost entirely eroded, but in its place, the new leadership had come short of the expectations of everyone except the most cynical foreign observers.
In the earlier part of the 1960s, leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lamumba and Gamal Abdel Nasser were the Ahmadinejad's and Chavez's of their day. They made broad claims about the inevitability of African unity, the impervious strength of African socialism, and a soon-to-come day of reckoning for the Western governments that had kept them down until then. Praised at home and ridiculed by Western governments, they were all but gone within half a generation, their plans for progress and unity failing to materialize.
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