By Mursi Saad El-Din I often wonder why it is that African writers receive so much attention and support from the West, especially in England and France, as well as the US lately. Does it stem from genuine admiration? Is it on account of a feeling of guilt about and remorse for what these countries have inflicted on Africans during the colonial era? Or is it a sort of patronising pat on the back? Frankly, I don't really know. That African politicians and writers have been adulated, I have no doubt. Consider how Nelson Mandela has been glorified, how Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize long before Naguib Mahfouz. Soyinka was appointed chair in one of the American universities, as the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe had before him. Another African writer who is highly esteemed in the West is the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to Chris Ayres, reviewing Ngugi's latest novel in the Books Supplement of the London Times, Wizard of the Crow "took almost a decade to write" and "is an impish and hallucinatory satire on dictatorship" Ngugi was brought up in Kenya under British rule, studied English literature, and joined Leeds University. His first name was originally James, but he dropped this English Christian name, in favour of Wa Thiong'o, while in detention for several years On his return from Leeds, he lectured at University College in Nairobi. Likewise, his first creative writings were in English, the language imposed by the colonizer. But the change came, according to his preface to his book Writers in Politics, when he moved "from an intense involvement in the Department of Literature and its lively debates at the University of Nairobi to an equally intense involvement in the cultural life of peasants and workers... For me, it was a decade of tremendous change; towards the end, I had ceased being a teacher and had become a student at the feet of the Kenyan peasant and worker." Having decided to write in Gikuyu, some of Ngugi's novels were later translated into English by him, as in the case of Wizard of the Crow. This is set in a fictional African Free Republic, controlled by an unnamed Ruler who toes the line to the sinister Global Bank in New York. In an interview with Ayres, Ngugi says "In the 20th century, most African dictatorships were Western- backed. People don't recognise the enormous resources of Africa: diamonds, gold... Yes there is corruption in Africa -- but it takes two to tango." In August 2004 Ngugi returned to Kenya where some unfortunate incidents took place. Four men broke into his high-security apartment and raped his wife. The trial is still continuing, with Ngugi making frequent trips back to appear in court. Ngugi's Writers in Politics, a collection of essays published by Heinemann in its series "Studies in African Literature", reads like a manifesto. Written in a compressed style, it outlines his position on such issues as "Literature and Society", "Literature in School", "Kenyan Culture: The Struggle for Survival" and "Return to the Roots". "The search for relevance", Ngugi writes, "immersed me in many ideological debates ranging from questions of culture and education to those of language, literature and politics." Although the essays deal mainly with the situation in Kenya, the struggles in Kenya "should not be seen in isolation from what is happening in Africa, Asia, Latin America -- the whole world." I would add that Ngugi's outlook in this small but very important book is shared by a whole generation of Third World writers.
