MEMBERS OF GROUP: ASTRID ØSTERGAARD, CHARIS SIEUNARINE, SHEKERA

BOYCE, JAMILA PATEL

COURSE : LITS 3303 MODERN CRITICAL THEORY

TITLE: TUTORIAL PRESENTATION NOTES

LECTURER: DR. RICHARD CLARKE

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NGUGI WA THIONG’O:

“LITERATUE & SOCIETY: THE POLITICS OF THE CANON!” (1973)

MARXIST POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY THEORY

Background

Born 5 January 1938

Kenyan writer, playwright and literary critic

Works include: novels, plays, short stories, essays and children’s literature

Earlier he wrote in English, later in Gikuyu (Kenyan language)

Actualizes the debate on why African writer write in

English/French/Portuguese/etc. instead of their own native language

Born “James”, changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Social realist, Marxist, intellectual activist

Goal: Decolonizing the mind (anti-colonial)

Tend to nationalism

“Africaness” instead of “Blackness”

Thinks that the colonized land should be returned to the native people of Kenya

Spent years in jail in Nigeria, because his writings did not please the government

[political prisoner]

Major figure in the African Renaissance

Friend of Edward Kamau Braithwaite (Barbadian author) also changed first name to

Kamau similar to Ngugi’s first name James which he dropped.

Has taught at Yale, New York University and University of California

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Bibliography

The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)

Weep Not, Child, 1964, Heinemann, 1987, Macmillan 2005

The River Between, Heinemann 1965, Heinemann 1989

A Grain of Wheat, 1967 (1992)

This Time Tomorrow (three plays, including the title play, "The Reels", and "The Wound

in the Heart"), c. 1970

Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics,

Heinemann, 1972

A Meeting in the Dark (1974)

Secret Lives, and Other Stories, 1976, Heinemann, 1992

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (play), 1976, African Publishing Group (with Micere Githae

Mugo and Njaka)

Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play; with

Ngugi wa Mirii), Heinemann Educational Books (1980)

Petals of Blood (1977) Penguin, 2002

Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross), 1980

Writers in Politics: Essays, 1981

Education for a National Culture, 1981

Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, 1981

Devil on the Cross (English translation of Caitaani mutharaba-Ini), Heinemann, 1982

Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, 1983

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986

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Mother, Sing For Me, 1986

Writing against Neo-Colonialism, 1986

Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Mathagu), 1986 (children's

book)

Matigari ma Njiruungi, 1986

Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief (Njamba Nene na Chibu King'ang'i), 1988 (children's

book)

Matigari (translated into English by Wangui wa Goro), Heinemann, 1989, Africa World

Press 1994

Njamba Nene's Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene), (children's book), 1990, Africa

World Press

Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, Heinemann, 1993

Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-

Colonial Africa (The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1996), Oxford University

Press, 1998

Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow), 2004, East African Educational Publishers

Wizard of the Crow, 2006, Secker

Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Basic Civitas Books, 2009

Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir, Harvill Secker, 2010

In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir, Pantheon, 2012

Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening, New Press, 2016

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“Literature & Society”

Written in 1973 after his Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (see

bibliography). Ngugi opens his article by problematizing the African literary canon because it

tends to give preferential treatment to Western authors and thus neglects the works of the non-

western, i.e. African, Asian, South-American authors (3). He claims that this tendency is ruled by

a fear of tarnishing the great Western authors and he find that this “fear of tarnishment is linked

to another tendency in the area of theory:

the almost total omission of colonial, racism and ideologies of repression and their

opposites, anti-colonialism, anti-racist struggles and ideologies of liberation, in the

debates about the constitution of modernity and post-modernity” (3)

In favor of this Ngugi presents not only a critique of the African literary canon but also a more

general critique of the modernity and post-modernity and its struggle to embrace non-western

culture.

Ngugi claims that the African literary canon is based on imperialism and the domination in the

colonial phase, since the “literature syllabus, its presentation, the machinery for determining the

choice of texts and their interpretation were all in integral part of imperialism” (3). The structures

from the colonial era are inherited in today’s neo-colonial society. However there seems to be

one major difference: In the classical colonial era the cultural imperialism only supplemented the

occupation while today cultural imperialism is “the major agency of control under neo-

colonialism” (3). Formerly culture was an important part of succeeding in the imperialistic

occupation, and today – Ngugi claims – culture have become the overriding element which

dominates in neo-colonial society.

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In accordance with this Ngugi wants to examine and discuss four themes of this article:

1. Literature and society and particularly the role of literature in cultural education

2. Literature and colonization

3. Literature and the national liberation process

4. Literature and the decolonization of the mind by posing the question: what can be done

now in the post-colonial era? (4)

1. Literature and society and particularly the role of literature in cultural education

First of all Ngugi states that literature is social since it “results from conscious acts of men and

women in society” (4). As we saw with Goldmann, Ngugi also seems to associate with the idea

of the individual and the collective being interactively connected: The individual writes

“socially”, since she writes to or for somebody who also is a part of society. “At the collective

level literature embodies in word-images the tensions, conflicts and contradictions at the heart of

a community’s being and becoming” (4), he puts it, and add that literature “shapes our attitude to

life, to the daily struggles with nature, within communities and within our individual souls and

selves.” (4) Thus Ngugi thinks that literature is both part of the individual and the collective level

in society.

Basically Ngugi is here trying to show us that literature is not just some surrealistic entity which

does not connect with society and the structures therein:

“As a process and an end, it is conditioned by these social forced and pressures

because imagination takes place within economic, political, class and race contexts.

Arising from its thoroughly social character, literature is partisan: it takes sides

more so in a class society” (4)

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We see here how Marxist thinking sneaks into Ngugi’s essay; especially when he emphasizes

that every writer comes from a particular class, gender, race and nation (4).

Ngugi attempts to show which different levels the human being goes through when entering a

society: First of all he finds that nature is the most fundamental state of the becoming of a

society, since “man himself is of nature” (5). Secondly human is also a social being, since she in

her struggle with surviving enters into relationships with other human beings. The third level is,

Ngugi finds, like Marx, the most basic level of a community and is based on the economic

arrangements and alignments plus the power relations which follow (5). This community

develops into a political system which in the end will evolve into a constitution of cultural

relations, which then evolves into different institutions and ideologies such as education, laws,

religion, orature, literature, arts, intellectual, moral and ideological forces (6). What we see here

is basically the base-superstructure figure we know from Marx: “It is a dialectical process with

everything acting on one another to produce the everchanging complexity that goes under the

name of society” (6).

In the light of this Ngugi finds that it is the ruling class which controls and influence the

intellectual and cultural forces and therefore also the literature and dominant values of a society

(7).

Discussion questions

Based on the background knowledge of Ngugi and his life, can it seem at little peculiar

that he benefits from a capitalistic society when “preaching” Marxist values? Is there a

contradiction between Ngugi’s lived life and his ideal values?

How do you see the Marxist influence in Ngugi’s text?

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2. Literature and colonization

Since Ngugi sees literature as a social product of conscious intellectual and imaginative

acts of men and women operating at the three levels of the individual, collective and the

aesthetic, literature is therefore seen as partisan (4). Echoing Lukacs, Ngugi uses this claim to

anticipate the effects that colonization had upon the African people. Colonialism is baptized

by Ngugi as a practice not a theory, a historical process not an abstract metaphysical notion

and a relationship of power, at the political and cultural level.

In reference to Walter Rodney who has written that Europe underdeveloped Africa,

Ngugi claims that Africa overdeveloped European capitalism through four stages. The first

stage is the mercantile phase [Africans sold as commodities], the second is Industrial

capitalism [scramble for Africa], thirdly classical colonialism [territorial occupation of

Africa] and last of all, finance capitalism [European money capital still proposes and

disposes in the era of neo-colonialism](7-8).

Drawing strength from CLR James (8) and Amilcar Cabral (9), Ngugi outlines the aims

of colonialism and its long term effects upon the cultural identity of the African people

through the Western literary tradition. Colonialism, Ngugi says aimed first at the land, what

the land produces and the people who work it (8). This took the form of direct settler

occupation as in the white settler systems of Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa where the

colonial state was run by white settlers for white settlers, or in the form of purely politico-

economic control where in the case of Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana, the colonial state was run

with the help of indigenous institutions and personnel. Both systems followed similar

patterns with similar ends: economic and political control (8).

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In order to make economic and political occupation complete and effective, the colonizer

tried to control the cultural environment- education, religion, language, literature, songs and

dances, every form of expressive practices- hoping in this way to control a people’s values,

their world outlook and hence their images and definitions of self. Adopting Amilcar’s

Cabral’s argument that “to dominate a nation by force of arms is, above all, to take up arms

to destroy, or at least to neutralize and paralyze its culture” (9).

Ngugi therefore works out that genocide as an alternative would simply leave a void of

domination and labour and that it is impossible to harmonize economic and political

domination of a people with a cultural personality. So to avoid these futile alternatives,

racism and racist doctrines were formulated through the culture which became an integral

part of the ‘permanent siege’ of the indigenous population.

Crude racist formulations were seen in the works of philosophers and prominent writers

such as David Hume (1735), Thomas Jefferson, Hegel and Trevor Roper (1960) who

assumed that African people were primitive and inferior. Ngugi also quotes Anthony

Trollope, the novelist as saying that the African was “idle, unambitious to worldly position,

sensual and content with little” (10). The English language itself is testimony of the

negativity in its representation of blackness with words like black market, black sheep,

blackmail, blacklist, blackspot (10) and other visual imagery that preference white over

black. The South African Apartheid system, Christianity and the commercial cosmetic

industry [specifically lightening creams] are all described as machines, doctrines and

manufacturers of racism, promoting whiteness over blackness (10).

Apart from cultural imperialism, the colonized was assaulted by European literatures of

three kinds in three principal ways: The refined tradition [Aesychlus, Sophocles, Rabelais,

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Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Thomas

Mann, Ibsen, Yeats, Whitman, Faulkner and Brecht to mention just a few] was rooted in

European history, culture, class, white images of the world which according to Ngugi

represented bourgeois bigotry and a spiritual wasteland; The explorer narratives [Richard

Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Robery Ruark’s Something of Value, Nicholas

Monsarrat’s The Tribe that Lost its Head, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Elspeth

Huxley’s The Red Strangers and A Thing to Love] used characterisations of Africans which

were either evil because they challenged white intrusion, good because they had the sense to

understand whites as higher, nobler and cooperated with whites against their own people or

in the case of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, savage and cannibalistic; The last group of writers

were driven by the racism of sympathy [ William Blake’s poem The Little Black Boy, Joyce

Cary, Karen Blixen, Alan Paton] who portray black characters in need of saving from their

reality of skin colour, compared to animals or submissive after being converted to

Christianity (13-15). Ngugi poignantly summarizes that “Colonialism rains death; and then it

exhibits charity by providing burial grounds to the victims” (14).

The totality of these three Western traditions, given their colonial context, offered an

aesthetic of acquiescence, undermining in the process the aesthetic of resistance (16).

Do you think there is merit in Ngugi’s claim that we have been wired to revere Western

writers?

Can you remember a piece of writing from the Western writers that you felt a level of

disdain for? Why?

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3. Literature and the national liberation process

National liberation is simply a dialectical negation of the colonial process (19). For colonized

people, the two most essential values are the land (according to Fanon) and their labor power. It

is that power acting on land that makes history. Making reference to Amilcar Cabral, we can

view the colonial process as “the negation of the historical process of the dominated people

through the violent usurpation of the freedom of the development of the national productive

forces.” National liberation is then a negation of negation. (19).

We can state that the national liberation is the phenomenon in which a given

socio economic whole rejects the negation of the historical process. In other words, the

national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality that people, its

return to history through the negation of the imperialist domination to which it was

subjected… National liberation exists only when national productive forces have been

completely freed from every kind of foreign domination. (19)

The economic and political struggle is waged under the banner of rational nationalism. It is the

black (in which Ngugi equates with Africans) and the white (British) people. This struggle takes

on the form of a race-caste structure under colonialism, and the economic and political struggle

under neo-colonialism. He goes on to state that “economic and political struggles are in complete

without cultural elements. Culture becomes the site of intense struggle. Indeed most national

liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer by repudiating his religious

and educational systems.””(20) The colonized take the oppressor songs and hymns and construct

something of an altered emphasis, interpretation and meaning. Ngugi uses the Mau Mau as an

example of national liberation. They rejected the colonizer’s interpretation of reality, by using

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the same Christian songs and hymns and even the Bible; interpret them for themselves,

emphasizing their struggle.

A written literature also develops alongside people’s oral literature. This was integral to their

cultural assertion. In the case of the African the very act of putting words on a paper was itself a

testimony of his creative capacity (21). Ngugi sees this step as on towards self-definition and

acceptance of the environment from which they have been estranged by years of Eurocentric

education. The Mau-Mau intelligentsia asserted the primacy of their languages (22). They

published works in both English and in their respective African languages, using what was meant

to confine as a weapon of the struggle. They took the language of Europe to criticize colonialism

or simply to emphasize their negritude. From the slave narrative of Equiano and others to the

fictional narratives of Chinua Achebe, the literature produced celebrated the struggle against

colonialism and asserted the African presence in the world.

Literature, at its critical best, defines a people in terms of actors and not the acted up. (22) For

Ngugi, Achebe’s early novels create a realistic, authentic depiction of a pre-capitalist Africa and

show a people in constant struggle with their natural and social environment. The tragic hero of

the novel, Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo is praised for his for committed suicide instead of

submitting to a world in which he was in charge of making his own history. His act of killing a

colonial messenger is as symbolic as it is prophetic. (22) The new messenger class, the new

errand boys of the international capitalism who make total liberation difficult: for on the surface

they are black like any other black. But they play the role of messenger to perfection in a neo-

colonial context (22). Similarly in the works of Sembrene Ousmane, Alex la Guma, Vierira and

Agostinho Neto, the emphasis of class is very relevant, they depict the working people as having

the power to change their history. They have the capability to shape and make history through

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their struggles against both the colonial and the neo-colonial state. The older submissive,

cooperating and the appreciative African of the European colonial imagination are gone.

Ngugi views literature as a reflection of society; its social significance is of paramount

importance. Since capitalist or neo-capitalist society is divided between a ruling minority idle or

elite class and a dominated majority, working class, true authentic literature is produced for and

by the majority. Progressive literature, therefore, reflects the inevitable struggle between the

minority and the majority class. Ngugi is calling for the production of a peasant and working

class literature in Kenya.

4. Literature and the decolonization of the mind by posing the question: what can be

done now in the post-colonial era?

According to Ngugi the ex –colonized cannot afford to be indifferent to the roles and functions

of literature in our society. Ignoring the question of ‘What is at the centre and at the periphery to

their detriment’ has caused a sense of complacency in embracing their culture. Ngugi posits that

all schools, colleges and community centres should be at the primacy and centrality of literature.

It is through literature that African people from the continent and diaspora find it crucial in

redirecting the consciousness of shared and individual sense of self.

Ngugi also posits that by placing African literature at the centre, does not automatically mean

that it would become isolated. He uses Discourse on Colonialism(36) as an example, where he

believe that civilizations that withdraw into themselves, end up being suffocated into their own

self-enclosure. Therefore a healthy balance between what should be emitted into African culture

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and literature is needed for the continuation of African culture. Culture contact is what Ngugi

believes is the oxygen of any civilization. The literature of other countries serves as a way for

opening a dialogue of understanding between multiplicities of cultures. However, the culture and

literature must have undergone a similar historical experience in order for it to be mutually

beneficial.

Literature shouldn’t be only a question of the primary text; it should serve as a body of criticism.

The criticism of specific novels, poems, dramas and essays can be viewed as source of liberation

from a set of narrow biases.

The practice of African orature is also a very important aspect of African and diasporic culture.

Ngugi states that orature should not be solely thought of as a form of verbal art, instead it should

be viewed as a resistance aesthetic of the entire anti- colonial struggle through the vast body of

oral songs and poems and in the accompanying performances.

Ngugi believe that African literature, particularly in the post- colonial era highlight the struggle

between western and native belief. Ngugi states that literature is about wealth, power and values

and their effect on the quality of human lives and relations. True creative power for African

culture can only take place through the people’s control and distribution of their production. It is

only then, that they will experience economic and political liberation from western ideology and

imperialism.

Discussion Questions

Can the ex-colonized ignore the functions of literature?

Does placing African literature at the centre make it isolated?

How essential is African orature as it relates to African and diasporic culture?