Southbank Centre, London, UK, on an autumnal afternoon, and there I am, with hundreds of others, expectantly waiting for him.
It is the 25th birthday for Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing, and as the clock ticks close to 2pm, we know that among the literary luminaries gathered here in London, the man of the hour, capo di tutti capi, will be here any minute.
And as we take our seats in Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Susheila Nasta, the Founding Editor of Wasafiri, invites the author-journalist Aminatta Forna to, in turn; invite the renowned novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic, and social activist we have all been waiting for.
The man is non-other than distinguished Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
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| Prof. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and I, Southbank Centre, London, UK (October 31, 2009) |
He respectfully sits there listening as the well-deserved accolades are rolled out by Aminata Forna, formerly an award-winning BBC television journalist and author of The Devil that Danced on Water, who is now introducing him. At the mention of the moniker of social activist, a telling smile lights up Ngugi’s otherwise contemplative countenance.
He takes off his jacket to reveal his trademark African shirt and approaches the podium with an ease that belies familiarity with the stage. The expectation is now palpable. And he does not disappoint.
His somewhat husky-croaky voice fades a bit, but nothing that a sip of water would not sort out. Within no time he has our brains cracking over his assertion that ‘linguistic feudalism leads to linguistic Darwinism’.
Linguistic feudalism, he explains, is a hierarchical view of language that ascribes aristocratic status to some languages while relegating others to the confines of a tribal language.
To elaborate this point, he invites us to consider that in the United Nations, four out five languages of the Security Council are European languages, a situation that puts these languages at the top of the linguistic hierarchy.
He soon argues that no language has inherent readability or writability, but rather that marginalisation, through lack of usage, confines a language to the grave.
And here lies his gripe with African governments, who through education continue directing resources to the advancement of Anglophone languages at the expense of native tongues. Considering that death of any language is death of a piece of humanity – after all where would we be if Latin and Greek were left to die? Clearly the loss is Africa’s.
In multi-ethnic Africa, he dismisses as misguided the notion that writing in vernacular should be discouraged because it is divisive, while writing in English is unifying.
To claim that African languages deepen cultural divide while English unites, even when it is obvious that majority do not speak English, he explains, is not only self-defeatist, but is also what he termed as ‘normalisation of the absurd’.
He dismissed as a myth the idea that monolingualism is good for the cohesiveness of the state. He asserted that, linguistic feudalism that portrays some languages as more important than others is flawed. “To create the synergy of being that enriches all cultures,” he suggested, “ we should strive to destroy the single centre.”
The solution, he argued, lies in the power of translations in enabling travel of ideas between and within languages. Translations would lead to a shared commonality of political and economic practices. A point that is easy to comprehend when we consider that without translations the European renaissance would have come a cropper, and without translations of the bible Christian evangelism would be worse for it.
And of course not to forget that were it not for translations, humanity would have missed out on accessing thoughts recorded in Greek and Latin. How successful would Shakespeare have been without translations, Ngugi mused.
In his concluding remarks, he said, “Language is the oxygen to arts.” Not to deprive the arts their lifeline, Ngugi would like to see a future in which translation between and within African languages becomes the buzzword.
And he does make a significant point when he says that we need to dispense with the debilitating view of African languages as inherently divisive and English as the uniting saviour. With this view, African languages will continue on a servitude journey of enriching the English language as they cascade to their own demise.
Writing in Gikuyu, Dholuo, Maasai, and translating into say Kikamba, Luhya, Ekegusii, or vice versa would encourage transfer of ideas, and would most likely be more unifying than divisive.
But, as Ngugi acknowledged, for budding writers, institutional indifference remains an impediment of considerable note. Few, if any publishers are willing to handle material in native languages. Limiting as that is, it is of little consolation that literary awards in Africa promote use of English at the expense of African languages.
To the profit-driven publishers, as well as to the youth who consider vernacular languages to be backward and thus detrimental to one’s status; it is probably wise to heed Ngugi’s final words at the end of his learned talk: “To suppress a language is to suppress growth and development.”
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