The Sunday Mail
THIS week, we carry the final part of an interview by The Sunday Mail Society correspondent Moses Magadza (MM) with Tee Ngugi (TN). Ngugi talks about his father Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his siblings, who are all published authors. He also touches on his father’s exile status. Read on . . .
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MM: Your siblings — Nducu wa Ngugi, Mukoma wa Ngugi and Wanjiku wa Ngugi — are all published authors, showing your father’s influence on his family. What is your view about belonging to an artistic family?
TN: When we were young, we would sneak into our father’s home library when he was not in. For that one hour or so, we escaped from the hustle and bustle of the homestead into a calm meditative space. For that one hour, one listened to one’s thoughts and travelled to different parts of the world, and met different characters.
The funny thing is that no one saw the other sneaking into the library, and, strangely, we were never there at the same time. We only found out, years later, that we all used to escape into that world. People tend to think that the writing happened naturally and at the same time. We started writing at different times. And we all struggle with different aspects of writing.
MM: What has been your personal relationship with your father, Ngugi wa Thiong’o? What does he say and think about your music?
TN: I have a close personal relationship with my father as do all his other children. Professionally, I greatly admire his books, especially “A Grain of Wheat” and “Petals of Blood”, and some of his short stories. As far as his ideological positions are concerned, there are points of convergence and points of divergence. My father loves music. At the age of 74, he started learning how to play the piano. He is an unabashed cheerleader of my music.
MM: Do you think you are a writer or musician?
TN: This is a difficult one. Developing a musical idea to the point where it becomes a song gives me great satisfaction. Seeing people liking the song is equally satisfying. Quite frankly, writing gives me a headache. I struggle to bring the characters to life and to discipline those ghostly plotlines into literary passages.
But when you finally bring out the story in your head to a page, nothing beats the sense of exhilaration. I am a writer who escapes to the therapeutic embrace of music after a bruising battle with writing.
MM: There was recent coverage of your father’s private life in the media, that is, his health and marital life. What is your view about all these issues?
TN: Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a man who has his private issues and struggles. People have read and loved his books for so long that they forget he is also of flesh and blood. Like many people, he has gone through medical issues. And like many people, there have been challenges in his personal life.
MM: What are your favourite amongst your father’s works and why?
TN: “A Grain of Wheat” is one of the greatest books I have ever read. “Petals of Blood” comes second. In both books, the characters are double-hearted. In an essay “Weep Not, Child: A Cross Generational Conversation”, I wrote of Mugo, a character in “A Grain of Wheat”: “Mugo, the anti-hero, exemplifies the complexity of self that Salman Rushdie spoke of: a self which, depending on the situation, could be brave or cowardly, loyal or treacherous.”
All the characters, even the villains, are multidimensional and conflicted. All of them struggle with inner issues we can all relate to. In the two books, the authorial vision comes from a credible development of character and
plot.
My least favourite of my father’s books are those in which the author’s ideas find themselves in his characters. I think Simon Gikandi, in “Reading the African Novel”, puts it better when he writes that the challenge for the political writer is to ensure that the views of his characters are a result of “a logical development of the interaction of the characters and their situations”.
MM: What is your reaction to your father’s long exile from Kenya?
TN: My father escaped into exile after learning of a plot to permanently silence him.
So, exile was imposed on him. I do not know what he thinks. My own thinking is that he still fights for the Kenyan and African agenda wherever he is.
Returning for the sake of returning is not, in my view, helpful. The important thing is that he keeps advocating the African agenda to the world.
MM: As artistic Ngugi siblings, how do you relate with one another? Do you compete? Do you do art because you are the great Ngugi’s children?
TN: We are very close. There is encouragement, not rivalry. Like I have said, we each came to writing at different times after each felt an urge to do so. There was no family meeting at which a resolution was passed demanding that we all write. I think each individual process was organic. We have different writing styles and strengths. We all fight with writing demons.
MM: How do you relate with being Kenyan in the context of your father’s troubled relations with the former President Daniel arap Moi?
TN: I narrate the arrest of my father in the essay “We are Orphans of our Dreams”. We suffered after his arrest because everyone was afraid to be associated with us. Special Branch officers always kept an eye on our home, even after my father had fled into exile.
People would cross to the other side of the street to avoid meeting us. Few people dared visit our home. Some parents asked their children not to associate with us. So, we learned to rely on ourselves for emotional sustenance.
We received death threats. We saw on television our father’s effigy being burnt and being stamped on in government-sponsored demonstrations. But children are nothing if not resilient. A few years later, we all left the country that had, in some ways, rejected us.
MM: What do you think is the role of the arts in Africa today?
TN: It sounds like a cliché but I believe art can cure the ills that plague the world — racism, tribalism, xenophobia, sexism, ageism. We can commune together in art because art speaks a language we can all understand.
MM: What should we expect from you musically from now on?
TN: More experimental sound. More borrowing from traditional melodies and rhythms. More of moving, vocally, from my comfort zone.
