African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 6c
Ngugi wa
Thiong’o
Ngugi the Academic
Ngugi’s (attached)
essay “The Writer in a Neo-colonial State”, first published in 1986 in a
publication called “The Black Scholar”, and subsequently as part of the 1993 book
“Moving the Centre”, helps this project of ours considerably.
Ngugi taught at Nairobi University and later in the USA. As
much as he is a novelist, he has also been an academic.
In this essay Ngugi takes a long look back over the period
from the end of the Second World War, and divides it roughly into three - the
fifties, the sixties, and the seventies; liberation struggle; victory and
independence; and neo-colonialist reaction. He considers the way that the
literature affected these passages of history, and was affected by them
We have not used such a schema, nor did we start with the
Second World War, but Ngugi’s overview does chime in with our series to an
extent. Clearly, in nearly all the countries of Africa, neo-colonialism has
taken hold, and maintained its grip. Ngugi problematised it in his way, and so
have we, in our way.
In 2011, a quarter of a century after Ngugi’s essay was
written, an African country – Libya - has been attacked by the imperialists
with full-scale military force, bombed, shelled, rocketed and invaded. Libya
was the first country in Africa to become independent after the world wars, and
it was the only one to have achieved parity, in its general standard of living,
with the European countries on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea from
Africa.
Now Libya is being catastrophically underdeveloped. Neo-colonialism
is still with us but now armed, brutal, direct, naked colonialism is back, as
well.
There is an immense amount of wisdom in Ngugi’s essay. Do,
please, read it.
Ngugi concludes: “as the struggle continues and intensifies,
the lot of the writer in a neo-colonial state will become harder and not
easier.”
This is our lot. For as much as heroes have gone before, and
for as much as the written record is priceless and indispensable, yet we who
remain will have to do it all again, and in conditions of even greater
difficulty. We have no right to expect less, or to expect less of ourselves.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Ngugi
wa Thiong’o, The Writer in a Neo-colonial State, 1993.
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