When truth is hunted: The award-winning Kenyan author on having his work hunted and why the hunters will never win

Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – who wrote a bestselling book on toilet paper in prison – argues that scholars use words to sort facts from fiction, even when threatened

IN THEIR BEGINNINGS, ideas which later changed the world profoundly were fugitives. The first Christians hid in catacombs so they could voice their beliefs, and Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina. In its early years, the Catholic Index Librium Prohibitorum (The Index of Forbidden Books), which lasted from 1559 to 1966, resulted in books going up in flames, and the cursed authors imprisoned, exiled or dead. Not only were Giordano Bruno’s books indexed but he lost his life for refusing to deny the fugitive ideas they carried. His words of defiance – “You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it” – led to him being stripped naked with his tongue tied down before being burnt at the stake. But his ideas lived on.

The pattern is the same nowadays. First they hunt down the authors. Then they hunt down the ideas. Or they hunt down the author and the ideas. Hunting is the most appropriate description of the process. We do not hunt tame or domestic animals. We hunt wild ones. The aim is to silence ideas that challenge established truths.

Throughout British rule in Kenya (1895-1963), the colonial state regularly banned songs and dances it deemed to be defiant. The ban was not very successful because people would simply vary the dance moves or hum the melody without voicing the offending words. The state also banned books of poetry in African languages and followed this by jailing the offending parties.

Being hunted down by one’s own state is a bitter pill to swallow. But for as long as one is not run down by knife, bullet or poison, the fightback spirit of the hunted can generate creative outputs that thwart the intentions of the hunter. Some of these creations may come to impact the world.

I want to illustrate this with a short chronicle of my own experience as the hunted. In 1968, a group of us at the University of Nairobi called for a change and reorganisation of the teaching of literature, advocating the centring of African literature in the curriculum, and then Caribbean, African-American, Asian and Latin American literature, followed by English, European and Euro-America literature. This would turn out to be the earliest major challenge to the dominance and assumed centrality of English national literature. The then-attorney general accused us of wanting to abolish Shakespeare.

A year later, I resigned from the University of Nairobi in protest against the government’s infringement of academic freedom. I did not think it was the task of the state to decide which of the guests invited by student bodies could or could not speak at the university. I was without a job but my old university, Makerere (in Uganda), extended a helping hand and offered me a one-year writing fellowship. Another helping hand came from Northwestern University (in the USA), which offered me a position as visiting associate professor of English and African studies. So from Makerere I went to Evanston. The period 1969-1972 became my first experience of exile, but it was self-imposed.

It was a productive mini-exile. I published Homecoming, which would turn out to be the first major work of literary and cultural criticism published in east Africa. I returned to Nairobi in 1972 and rejoined the department, where I became chair.

One of my concerns was always how to make literature and scholarship actively relate to general society. I did not want to see the literature that I loved being confined to a gated community.

We tried many innovations – among them public lectures open to all and travelling theatre, which meant our students taking theatre to the people, performing in villages and towns during the long vacations and, eventually, some of us relocating to Kamirithu village to work in community theatre directly. There were consequences.

At midnight on 31 December 1977, armed police raided my house and confiscated copies of the script of Ngaahika Ndeenda/I Will Marry When I Want, whose performance the government had earlier stopped. On 1 January 1978 I found myself in a maximum-security prison.

Prison was meant to silence me. But it was during my one-year confinement that I wrote a novel, Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ, translated into English as Devil on the Cross, written on toilet paper. This would turn out to be the first modern novel in the Gĩkũyũ language. Even then, its publication in 1982 led to the publisher losing his finger to a machete attack following months of telephone threats to deter him from publishing the work.

It was during the same year of incarceration that I thought more intensely about the politics of language, especially the unequal power relationship between English and African languages. These thoughts would, years later, lead to my book Decolonising the Mind.

Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

CREDIT: Daniel Anderson

When I was released from prison in December 1978, following the death of the first president, his successor would not allow me to resume my old job at the university or take up another in any of the colleges in the country. The relentless hunting had started. In 1982, I was in London for the launch of Devil on the Cross, and Detained, my memoir of prison, when I got information about a very “red-carpet” welcome for me on my return home. I found myself in exile – but this time real, forced exile.

This was the period when I experienced the life of a scholar without a home. I did not have a residency and I was on a visiting visa, so every time I left the country I dreaded the moment of return. Always being detained at Heathrow airport. Questions. Explanations. The dread of going out; the dread of coming back.

Eventually Britain did give me a residency permit, and then Yale, in 1989, extended another helping hand with an offer of a regular visiting professorship of English and comparative literature.

CREDIT: Ellis van der Does

It’s only recently, with declassified documents, that I learnt the extent to which Daniel arap Moi’s government was obsessed with me. In an article in the Sunday Nation of Kenya in 2017, the author Odhiambo Opiyo, who read the declassified material of the period, tells the details of this obsession.

It was during my London years that I published Decolonising the Mind. Recently The Observer chose the book as one of 100 political classics that shaped the modern world. I felt a little teary for, despite the years in between, I could not help but go back to my prison cell in 1978.

My case is not unique in Kenya, Africa or the world. Hunted scholarship and art is a reality in history yesterday and today. Scholars continue to use words to ask questions; authority uses words to issue answers. The scholars don’t confuse fact with fiction. They separate fiction from fact to arrive at truth. Authority infuses truth with falsehood to turn its own fiction into fact. The scholar uses the pen to win arguments. Authority uses the sword to force a win. Haunt, hunt and hound. Jail, kill or force the scholar to flee. The state authority formula: Prescription, Proscription, Prosecution and Persecution. The scholar’s formula: Doubt, Question, Ask and Learn.

By the very nature of their trade, using words to force a different look at whatever seems obvious, given and settled, the two formulas are bound to clash. And so scholars and artists will always find themselves haunted by fear or hunted by the hounds of an intolerant authority. The question is then one of refuge and sanctuary for their lives and ideas. Living, they can always tell the tale.