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.
