A glimpse into Mukoma's consciousness
Two generations of Kenyan writers, Mukoma wa Ngugi (left) with his father and Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Photo/FAMILY ALBUM
By MWENDA wa MICHENIPosted Wednesday, July 21 2010 at 10:26In Summary
- Mukoma wa Ngugi: a poet, essayist and novelist.
- Writer considers blind afro-optimism as dangerous as afro-pessimism
Mukoma wa Ngugi has written a lot of poetry including a collection titled Hurling Words at Consciousness, and essays for different publications. The essays can be found in publications such as BBC Focus On Africa Magazine where he is a columnist and Nairobi's Business Daily newspaper.
Last year, the writer who has been living in the US, took a different direction with the release of Nairobi Heat published by Penguin. Even before readers in some African countries like Kenya get a chance to buy copies from home bookshops, the detective novel has been highly debated elsewhere. It’s a story that explores race issues, justice and identity. At another level, his novel manuscript, The First and Second Books of Transition, has been picked to compete for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing.
To understand the forces that have shaped this politically conscious writer, Africa Review organised an interview. Here, Mukoma wa Ngugi who is the son Kenyan’s literary icon Ngugi wa Thiong'o speaks his mind, freely.
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What compelled you to write Nairobi Heat?
The story, at least the seed of it, found me. I came home late one night and found a white woman, dressed in a cheer-leader outfit passed outside my door. I did not know her; she must have been at a party or on her way there. I called the police for an ambulance and the policeman who accompanied it was African-American. They promptly took her away but that set-up stayed with me and it eventually morphed into the novel – where in Madison Wisconsin, an African American detective is investigating the murder of a white woman and his main suspect is an African. From my end, I did the best I could with the story, but as to whether I achieved what I set out to do very much depends on the reader. If the reader’s imagination is excited by the novel, then yes.
Its been described as stereotypical and largely (mis)informed by your Diaspora experiences; a story removed from the Nairobi realities that the book attempts to depict. Was this deliberate?
There are two things here. The first is that we have to distinguish between the author, the authorial voice (which in my view pretty much functions like a character interacting with the reader) and the world view of the characters.
Ishmael’s view of Africa, the Diaspora, US racial and class dynamics are vastly different from mine. Ishmael is coming to Nairobi/Africa as an African-American. He is conscious that he views Africa in an ambivalent way. So throughout the novel he fights for his own understanding of Africa and his relationship to Africans, and indeed to his own blackness and American identity. He is constantly re-evaluating himself.
I on the other hand was born in Evanston, Illinois to Kenyan parents but we left when I was a few months old. I grew up in Kenya so I am traveling in the opposite direction in relation to Ishmael. My relationship to the US is as complex as his is to Kenya.
But I have no ambivalences in relation to my Kenyaness. If my understanding of the social realities is wrong, my Diaspora experiences are not the culprit – we are wrong for many reasons most of them having little to do with the location one writes from. By the same token, proximity may not make one’s analysis more correct. I think this line of literary criticism exhausts itself quickly.
The second thing, and to me this is more serious, is that Afro-Pessimism is being replaced with unquestioning Afro-optimism. Afro-pessimism (best exemplified by the 2000 Economist Africa Cover Story titled - The hopeless continent) keeps the positive coming out Africa out of view. So there was a concerted effort to also talk about the positive things coming from the continent. But now accusations of Afro-pessimism are being used to silence constructive-criticism. There is pressure for the writers to create a happy cover story for Africa especially when in conversation with Westerners.
Both Afro-pessimism and unquestioning Afro-optimism are terrible trappings because we end up in a situation where we cannot have honest re-evaluations and dialogue. And without honest critical dialogue there can be no basis for positive change. I for one will not be part of the Africa-hakuna-matata-tourist-attracting writing crew.
It was launched in South Africa by Penguin. Does this mean you have no faith in Kenyan publishers and the Kenyan book market? Why so and what must be done to improve publishing in this part of the world?
I have a lot of faith in Kenyan publishers (East African Educational Publishers and Story Moja in particular) and independent African Publishers such as the Cassava Republic Press, Kwela Books and Farafina. In fact both EAEP and Cassava were interested in publishing Nairobi Heat but we had signed over the Africa rights to Penguin.
To improve publishing means an overhaul of the whole publishing system - the writer, the reader, the publisher, and the education ministries each have their own role to play. For now it looks like traditional publishers are mainly interested in producing textbooks and I think this has stifled creative works. Independent African publishers are producing creative works but they need readers in order for them to thrive as a business.
We need more literary journals and literary prizes for primary, high school and university writing. We need regional magazines and regional prizes. In other words we need to have a literary system that makes it possible for a child in Kangemi to become a writer – we need to create the steps between dreaming to reality, a paved literary road that nurtures writing talent from childhood into adulthood.
The last time you were in Nairobi, you hinted at lack of serious literary agents and publishers in Africa. How has this affected the quality of African writing and portrayal of Africa in the literary world?
Well, a good number of us are working with Western literary agents who are familiar mostly with Western publishers. This in turn means that they are likely to represent books that will be assured a Western audience. This means that there are good books that have Africans as their primary audience that are not being published. But in the absence of viable publishing in most African countries, even African literary agents would have a problem.
I think this is why we have to support independent initiatives such as Cassava Republic Press that has taken its mantra of “feeding the African imagination” very seriously.
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You also went into the responsibilities of publishers (Storymoja festival 2009) operating in Africa as corporate citizens to authors and the community. Talk freely about this.
Well, if you consider the amount of money generated by publishers such as Heinemann and how little they have given back, you cannot but help think they are just as exploitative as the next Western corporation. Surely, Heinemann should have set up a Chinua Achebe first book prize by now. It should have set up a writer’s foundation that caters to younger writers even if only in the self-interest of having future writers to exploit. Now, the argument is that like any other business, publishers have to make money in order to stay afloat.
But I think there is also a moral responsibility, a duty even to give back when money is being made out of the talents of the dispossessed. I mean without nurturing future generations of readers and literary critics, how else will African literatures grow? Let us not forget that Africa is an immense continent with a population estimate of 800 million – yet how many young writers can one name? We are in the hundreds but in reality we should be in the thousands. We have a huge problem and the corporate publishing industry has a huge role to play in the solution. As I said, every entity involved in the writing industry, from writers to publishers have a role to play.
Most of the Literature coming out of Africa, especially published by the big name today, is by young writers (The Caine Prize generation) in the Diaspora. Their take on Africa cannot be the same as Chinua Achebe’s and the earlier generation of writers then based in Africa and writing mostly for Africans, not for Caine Prizes. In your view, is this a good thing? Why?
Each generation of writers builds on the literature that is there, and has been there before it. This generation then takes that literature and lets it grow in different directions. This is how we end up with a literary tradition, the constantly new growing on the backs of yesterday’s innovations. If you want to understand the continuities and differences between my generation and that of Chinua Achebe, think about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel.
In Things Fall Apart, that which eventually nationalists will fight for is very clear – Igbo culture is well defined, and even though in English that the characters are speaking in Igbo. What is at stake as the colonising culture meets African culture, and who the enemy is, and what must be done are understood rightly or wrongly, as being very clear. Hence Okwonkwo can be categorical, he can refuse to bend and consequently, to bring in King Lear, he breaks.
In Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, what ails Nigeria is not so clear – the enemy is not as clearly defined, cultural lines not so demarcated. The characters are in state of melancholy, they really can’t articulate what ails them. Yes, its neo-colonialism but how do you talk about an enemy twice removed and represented by a black face installed by misguided nationalism?
And in terms of culture, what is there to recover when our generation has never really experienced that culture? As an entity outside the colonial encounter?
So Habila’s novel cannot be realist and linear like Things Fall Apart – it is fractured. And in order to try to make sense out of this reality, the novel has to have multiple narrators. It is in my opinion Waiting for an Angel is the novel from my generation of writers that captures what it meant to grow up in the lazy, destructive, and stomach only dictatorships of the 1980’s and 1990’s. These were the dictatorships led by the greedy elite that Frantz Fanon termed as “good for nothing” in Wretched of the Earth. They have contributed nothing – not better roads, hospitals, universities, schools, or national industries. They have been good for nothing.
The rich African Idioms, wise philosophies and social systems have been out of the picture especially in what is fashioned as contemporary African writing, music, dance, literature even poetry and theatre. Where do you see this moving to in future and is it a good thing especially in the context of societies and cultural identities?
I think we need to talk seriously about African philosophy – lets debate the Ezes, Wiredus and Houtondjis. This is where the struggle for the African minds is taking place. I also think that sooner or later my generation of writers will have to seriously deal with the language question. For now we are holding it at bay. But sooner or later we will have to contend with T.S. Elliot’s maxim that a writer’s first responsibility is to his or her own language.
There are many art/culture projects around the continent that are driven by foreign funding. In your opinion, how is this shaping future African realities? Is this a good thing or should Africa go back to the drawing board?
This is a huge problem. National cultures cannot be undergirded by foreign funding. The problem with the African elite is that they have no sense of culture and no ambition beyond the stomach. Western capitalists understood that a nation with culture makes better business decisions – the Rockefellers and Carnegies. A nation with a sense of culture has a sense of what it is worth. It can take pride in what is locally manufactured and at same time be weary of outside exploitation. Interestingly enough, the US went into depression when its capitalists abandoned national capitalism for global capitalism, when immediate profit took the place for long-term investment within the country in not just industry but also in the arts.
The African elite, and they are the ones with the money have no notion of legacy building, or being remembered through endowments – it’s the politics of the stomach, of immediate money-making and spending, usually abroad. Consider that some African governments are selling or leasing land to foreign governments for growing cash crops. What could be more cynical than this? Instead of having African farmers growing what those countries need for sale, our governments are cutting out the farmers all together. How then can the elites at the helm of such governments be expected to be thinking about the arts and culture?
With that said, I think those in the writing industry, from independent publishers to the writers lucky enough to make a living out of their work (or a semblance of it); we have a duty to insurgency. We need to pool our resources no matter how meager and underwrite some of our own adventures. I would like to see a conference that brings my generation of writers in dialogue with my father’s generation – but surely such a meeting cannot be primarily sourced by foreign funding.
