Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're going
to start by looking at an object. So I just want
you to, for a second, picture it in your mind.
Okay. It's a stack of paper, but it's not, you
know, A4 printer paper. It's not from a fancy
notebook. It's certainly not parchment. No. It's
a stack of rough, industrial -grade toilet paper.
And written on this toilet paper in this tiny
cramped handwriting is a masterpiece of world
literature. And it's not just a masterpiece in
the artistic sense of the word. This stack of
toilet paper is a weapon. Right. It's a manifesto.
It represents a man deciding that even if you
lock him in a cage, even if you take his name
away, and even if you strip him of every last
shred of his dignity, he is going to speak. We
are, of course, talking about... The life and
the incredible legacy of Ngego Atyongo, we lost
him very recently, May 28th, 2025 to be exact.
So recent. And all the obituaries, you know,
they called him a giant, a literary titan. But
I feel like those words, they're almost too clean.
They're too polished. I agree completely. They
don't capture the dirt and the danger and just
the sheer audacity of what this man's life was.
I think you're right. Titan makes him sound like
a statue, something cold and made of marble.
But when you look at the source material we have
in front of us today, I mean, the comprehensive
biography covering nearly nine decades, his prison
diaries, his philosophical essays, the whole
picture, and you realize his life was messy.
It was violent. And it was so incredibly human.
This is not a story about some guy sitting in
an ivory tower writing pretty sentences. No,
this is a story about a man who turned language
itself into a battlefield. Yes. And that really
is our mission for this deep dive. We want to
understand how a boy who was born into the British
Empire, who was given the name James, transformed
himself into Nujage, a man who ended up on the
shortlist for the Nobel Prize basically every
year for two decades. And maybe more importantly,
why he decided that writing in English, the very
language that had made him world famous, was
actually an act of betrayal. That's it. That's
the central conflict. The war between English
and Gikuyu. It sounds so academic when you say
it like that. But for him, it was absolutely
life or death. So let's go back. We have to go
back to the beginning to really get this. Let's
set the scene. The year is 1938. The place is
Kamirithu in what was then called the Kenya colony.
And Yuga enters the world. But he's not exactly
coming into a small, quiet family, is he? No.
Not at all. I mean, this is one of those facts
that just floors you immediately when you start
reading about him. He was born James Ngugi. His
father, Tiong 'ua Duka, had four wives. Four.
Four wives. Yeah. Ngugi was the son of the third
wife, Wanjiku. Yeah. In total, there were 28
children. 28. Just, I mean, just pause on the
logistics of that for a second. The dinner table.
The sleeping arrangements. How do you even keep
track of everyone's names? It's a village within
a village. It really is. But we have to look
past just the shocking number. This family structure
tells us something absolutely crucial about the
agrarian society he was born into. It was a society
that was deeply, fundamentally connected to the
land. Everything revolved around the soil. Yeah.
But, and this is the big but that hangs over
his entire childhood, he was born in 1938. Right
in the thick of the colonial squeeze. Precisely.
The sources we have really dig into this piece
of legislation, the British Imperial Land Act
of 1915. Which sounds incredibly boring and bureaucratic.
It sounds like something you'd skim past in a
history textbook. But what it actually meant
on the ground for a family like Njigi's, it was
catastrophic. How so? It wasn't just paper. This
act declared that all land in Kenya essentially
belonged to the British crown. It legally turned
native Kenyans into tenants at the will of the
crown. On their own ancestral land. On the land
their families had farmed for generations. So
Njigi is born into this family that is historically
agrarian. Their entire identity is defined by
their relationship to the soil. But that very
soil is being legally stolen from right out from
under their feet. They're sharecroppers in their
own home. That's exactly what they were. The
tension is baked in from day one. He is born
into a world that is already shrinking, already
being taken away. And then when he's just a teenager,
that shrinking world just, it explodes. It explodes.
We're talking about the Mau Mau uprising. 1952
to 1960. Right. And, you know, history books
often summarize the Mau Mau as an armed rebellion,
which is true. But that phrase is too neat. Too
clinical. It is. We need to understand the texture
of this conflict. This wasn't two formal armies
meeting on a battlefield. This was a dirty, terrifying,
psychological war. It was happening in the forests.
It was happening in the villages. It was happening
inside people's homes. And for Nyuga, a young
boy at the time, this wasn't something he was
reading about in the newspaper. No. It was in
his living room. Literally. Tell us about that.
The personal toll on his family was immense.
It was. His older brother. Wangi, a man he looked
up to, joined the Kenyalan and Freedom Army,
the Mau Mau. He went into the forests to fight,
and he was eventually killed. Another brother
was shot and wounded during this state of emergency.
But the detail from the biography that always,
always haunts me is about his mother. Wanjiku.
Yes. She was arrested and taken to a home guard
post. Now, the Home Guards were local Kenyans
who collaborated with the British. And this is
so important. It pitted neighbor against neighbor,
cousin against cousin. It tore the fabric of
the community apart. Completely. And at this
post, she was tortured. The sources are clear
on this. She was beaten. She was interrogated.
They wanted her to betray her sons to tell them
where the fighters were hiding. And she refused.
The strength that must have taken. Unimaginable.
So you have to put yourself in young Njigi's
shoes. This is his reality. His brother is being
hunted in the forest. His mother is being tortured
by their neighbors. His home is a war zone. And
while all of this is happening, where is he?
This is the great paradox of his early life.
He's at school. He's at school. Yeah. And not
just any school. In 1955, he gets accepted into
Alliance High School. Which was the school. It
was the prestigious institution for Africans
in Kenya. But, and this is the key, it was modeled
entirely on the British public school system.
Think cricket, Shakespeare, Christian hymns,
the whole nine yards. So just try to picture
this. You have a teenager. He's wearing a crisp
school uniform. He's learning the rules of cricket.
He's reading Shakespeare, reciting English poetry.
And a few miles away, his family is being destroyed
by the very system that is educating him. The
cognitive dissonance must have been deafening.
It's almost impossible to comprehend. And there
was this one specific visual memory he wrote
about later in his life that just crystallizes
the whole thing. What was that? He finished his
first term at Alliance, this pristine bubble
of colonial order and discipline, and he walked
home to his village, Lamuru. He was expecting
to see his house, the family compound, everything
he knew. And it was gone. Just gone. The British
forces had razed the entire village to the ground.
The whole village? The whole thing. It was part
of this collective punishment strategy they had.
They would just burn everything down to cut off
any possible supply lines to the Malfighters
in the forest. So he's just standing there, a
schoolboy, his head full of English grammar and
Christian theology, looking at a pile of ash
where his home used to be. Wow. That's a moment
that would forge anyone's consciousness. He wrote
about it later, something like, by losing my
home, I became more aware of it. Yes. It's almost
like the trauma forced him to see things with
this intense, unbearable clarity. And that clarity,
that way of seeing, it followed him when he left
Kenya for the first time. It did. In 1959, he
goes to Maker University in Uganda. He calls
this his educational migration. And honestly,
you have to understand, Maker in the early 60s,
that was the place to be. It sounds like it was
the intellectual capital of East Africa. Of the
continent, really. People have compared it to
the Harlem Renaissance. You had all these brilliant
minds converging from all over Africa. It was
just this hotbed of political thought, literary
debate, post -colonial dreaming. The air must
have been electric. And it's here, in 1962, that
we get one of those moments that, if you love
literature, you just wish you could have been
a fly on the wall for. The African Writers Conference.
And this is where he meets Chinua Achebe. The
giant himself. I mean, Achebe had already published
Things Fall Apart a few years earlier. He was
a global celebrity. And Njige was just a student
named James. Nobody. A nobody. Yeah. But he had
these manuscripts, these stories he'd been working
on. And he works up the courage. And you just
have to imagine the nerves to approach Achebe.
Just walking up to him. Excuse me, Mr. Achebe.
I know you're very busy, but would you mind just...
Looking at my scribblings. Something like that.
And what's amazing is that Achebe didn't brush
him off. He could have. He was a busy, famous
man. But he took the manuscripts. He read what
would eventually become Weep Not Child. And he
was blown away. He saw the genius in it immediately.
He sent it directly to his own publisher, Heinemann,
in London. And in 1964, A Week Not Child is published.
And we should clarify for our listeners, this
wasn't just, you know, a new book came out. This
was a historic event. It was a landmark. It was
the first novel in English ever to be published
by a writer from East Africa. He literally broke
the seal. He opened the door for everyone else.
And he didn't stop. He followed it up almost
immediately. with The River Between in 1965.
I remember reading The River Between in college.
It's this beautiful, tragic story. It's almost
like a Romeo and Juliet, right? A boy from a
Christian convert family falls for the daughter
of a traditionalist leader. That's the core conflict.
It's all about that cultural rift caused by colonization.
It deals with female circumcision, with religion,
with tradition versus modernity. It's a stunning
book. And it made him a star. An absolute star.
He was put on the official school syllabus in
Kenya. Can you imagine? The boy whose village
was burned down by the state is now required
reading for the state schools. He was the golden
boy of African literature. So by the mid -60s,
he's on top of the world. He's James Ngugi, the
celebrated author. He wins a scholarship to go
to the University of Leeds in England. He's going
to the heart of the empire. You'd think he'd
just settle into a comfortable life as an academic,
a celebrated post -colonial writer. You would
think. But Leeds is where that comfortable James
identity starts to crack. He goes there to study,
but he ends up getting radicalized. What happened
in Leeds? Was it just the rainy English weather?
The weather probably didn't help, no. But it
was the intellectual climate. He started reading
France Fanon. Specifically, he read The Wretched
of the Earth. And for anyone listening who hasn't
read Fanon, can you just explain why that book
is so... Explosive? Fanon was a psychiatrist
from Martinique who ended up joining the Algerian
revolution against the French. And his work is
just, it's searing. He argued that colonization
isn't just about stealing land or resources.
It's a psychological disease. A disease? Yes.
It forces the colonized person to hate themselves,
to see themselves through the eyes of the colonizer,
to internalize their own inferiority. And Fanon
argued that true liberation requires a violent
rupture. A complete, total rejection of the colonizer's
values and language. That must have hit Njiki
like a ton of binks. Here he is, the perfect
product of colonial education, reading a book
that tells him his entire education is actually
a form of enslavement. Precisely. The biography
notes he was supposed to be writing his thesis
on Caribbean literature. He just abandoned it.
He couldn't do it anymore. He shifted his focus
entirely to the work of George Lamming and this
concept of peasant revolt. So his thinking is
shifting. It's a seismic shift. He realizes that
literature shouldn't just be about the polite
anxieties of the educated elite. It should be
about the struggle of the common people, the
peasants, the workers. And this leads us to the
crisis of identity. We start to see the first
major outward change. The name. He comes to the
conclusion by 1970 that James is a brand. It's
the brand of the oppressor. It's a slave name.
So he drops it. He drops it. He becomes Nugiwa
Tiongulnjika. Son of Tiong 'o, reclaiming his
Gikuyu identity. But he doesn't stop with the
name. He goes back to Kenya. He gets a job as
a professor at the University of Nairobi. And
he immediately decides to pick a fight with the
entire academic establishment. A huge fight.
He wants to abolish the English department. It's
known as the famous abolition of the English
department memo that he co -wrote. And it caused
an absolute firestorm. I have to play devil's
advocate here for a second because I can just
hear the faculty meeting now. Okay, be reasonable.
English is the global language. It's the language
of commerce, of science. If we shut down the
English department, aren't we just hurting our
own students' futures? That was exactly the argument
made against him. The more conservative faculty
members were outraged. They said things like,
we need to study Shakespeare and the great tradition
to understand the world. So what was his counter
argument? His argument was actually very nuanced.
He wasn't saying don't read Shakespeare or burn
English books. He was asking a much more fundamental
question. He was asking about centrality. Explain
that. What's the difference? Well, think of like
a map of the world. For centuries, the map of
literature had London at the very center and
everything else. African literature, Indian literature,
Caribbean literature was. out there on the margins.
It was other. Exactly. Commonwealth literature
or some other condescending term. G. Gay argued
that an African university should put Africa
at the center of its own map, spawn with African
oral traditions, start with African writers,
then move outwards to the Caribbean, to African
-American literature. And yes, study European
literature, too, but see it as one part of the
world, not as the center of the universe. So
it's about shifting your perspective. It's about
looking at the world from where you are actually
standing, not from where your former colonizer
is standing. That's it. He called it re -centering.
But as you can imagine, this made him a lot of
powerful enemies. He was rocking the boat in
a big way. And it wasn't long before he moved
from rocking the academic boat to rocking the
political boat. And this is what leads us directly
to the prison cell and the toilet paper. Right.
Section three. So the year is now 1977. He's
back in Khmeri Thu, his hometown, the place that
was destroyed. And he decides, with a friend,
to start the Khmeri Thu Community Education and
Cultural Center. The first big project is to
put on a play. Ngahike Ndinda, which translates
to I will marry when I want. Now, you have to
understand, this was not a play in some fancy
theater in Nairobi where the elite would come
and sip wine during the intermission. No. This
was community theater in the truest, most radical
sense of the word. He and the villagers literally
built an open -air theater out of wood and dirt.
The actors weren't professionals from the city.
They were the villagers themselves. The local
people. Peasants, factory workers, the unemployed,
the people whose lives the play was about. And
the script. He didn't just hand them a script.
That's what was so revolutionary about it. It
was co -written with the community. It was heavily
improvised. It was organic. It changed night
to night based on the audience's reaction. And
what was it about? It dealt with their actual
real life problems. It was about land grabbing
by the new black elite, the post -independence
betrayal of the Mao Mao ideals, the exploitation
of workers. It was their own story being told
back to them in their own language. It sounds
incredibly democratic, almost like a town hall
meeting, but with music and drama. So why on
earth did the government care about a little
village play? Because dictatorships are absolutely
terrified of ordinary people talking to each
other. And realizing they have the same problems.
And realizing they have a common enemy. The president
at the time was Daniel Arup Moy, a very authoritarian
figure. His regime, the Can You regime, realized
that this play wasn't just entertainment. It
was a rehearsal for revolution. It was empowering
people. It was empowering people to see their
own reality clearly and to question it. And for
a dictator... That is the most dangerous thing
in the world. So they shut it down. Brutally.
After just six weeks of performances, the government
banned the play. They revoked the license. And
then a few weeks later, on New Year's Eve, the
police came for Nuget. Can you describe the arrest?
Oh, it was classic authoritarian style. A midnight
raid, police swarming his house. They turned
his entire library upside down, throwing books
everywhere. Looking for what? And this is interesting.
The sources say they confiscated the script of
the play, of course, but they also very specifically
confiscated his personal copies of books by Marx
and Lenin. They were looking for evidence of
subversive thought. They were trying to build
a political case against him. Exactly. And they
took him away. He was sent to Comedie Maxim Security
Prison. Without trial? No trial, no charges.
Just disappeared into the system. And Comedie,
as we said, is a notorious place. What were the
conditions actually like for him? It was a concrete
hell. He wasn't just in a regular cell. He was
put in a segregated block. This block had previously
been used for the mentally deranged, as they
called them. Gagey joked grimly in his diary
that it was now being used for the politically
deranged. He was locked in a tiny cage for 23
hours a day. He was allowed one single hour of
sunlight in a small yard surrounded by high walls.
They took his name away from him again. He wasn't
Gagey. He was just a number. Prisoner case 677.
And crucially, they denied him access to books
and writing materials. Which, for a writer, is
a specific and deliberate kind of torture. It's
like taking away a musician's hearing. And this
is where the legend begins. In this absolute
pit of despair, he decides he's not going to
be broken. He's going to write a novel. An act
of pure defiance. But he has no paper. So walk
us through the mechanics of the toilet paper,
because I think when people hear that, they imagine,
you know, a nice soft roll of Charmin. Oh, no,
no, no. This was prison issue toilet paper in
1970s Kenya. You have to imagine the roughest,
hardest, most abrasive paper possible. It came
in individual sheets, not on a roll. And it was
rationed. It was strictly rationed. You didn't
just get as much as you needed. So he has to
start hoarding it. He has to do this grim calculation
every day. How many sheets do I actually need
for, you know? No, for hygiene. And how many
sheets can I save for the book? An impossible
choice. And then he has to get a pen. He somehow
managed to smuggle a pen or part of pen from
a sympathetic guard. The accounts vary slightly,
but he secured a writing instrument. And he's
writing in a cell that is constantly being searched,
right? This is incredibly risky. That's the constant
tension of the story. The guards would do these
random violent sweeps. If they found a manuscript,
it would be destroyed instantly and he would
be severely punished. Sent to solitary, beaten,
who knows. So where did he hide it? He had to
be clever. He would write on these small sheets,
and then he would stack them, fold them, and
tuck them into the most disgusting corners of
the cell where he knew the guards wouldn't want
to put their hands. He hid them amongst the filth.
And he's not just writing a diary or a prison
memoir. He's writing Devil on the Cross. Tell
us about the story itself, because you'd expect
something sad and reflective, but this book is.
It's wild. It is absolutely wild. It's a surreal,
magical, realist satire. The plot, if you can
believe it, revolves around something called
the International Competition in Modern Theft
and Robbery. A competition for thieves. Yes.
All the big shot thieves and robbers from all
over the world who are really just stand -ins
for corrupt politicians and capitalists gather
in a cave to boast about their crimes. They compete
to see who is stolen the most from the people.
One character boasts about his plan to sell air
to the masses. Another wants to sell Kenyan soil
and pots back to the landless peasants. It's
grotesque and hilarious at the same time. So
he's taking the very people who imprisoned him,
the corrupt elite, and he's turning them into
these ridiculous, grotesque cartoons. Exactly.
He is laughing at them. In the darkest hole of
their prison, on the very paper that's meant
for human filth, he is using his intellect and
his humor to mock their power. It is the ultimate
act of mental and spiritual resistance. But there
is one more layer to this act of resistance,
and this is arguably the most important decision
he made in that cell. He's not writing this story
in English. No. This is the moment of the great
switch. Up until this point, all his famous novels,
Weep Not, Child, The River Between, A Grain of
Wheat, were all written in English. But in that
cell, he had an epiphany. What was the realization?
What changed? He wrote about it later. He realized
that by writing his stories in English, he was
enriching the language of the colonizer. He was
speaking to the professors in Leeds and the critics
in New York, but he wasn't speaking directly
to the woman who sold vegetables in the market
in Khmerithu. He wasn't speaking to his own mother.
He was speaking over the heads of his own people.
And he decided, right there in the dark, that
he would never write another creative work, another
novel, in English. From now on, he would write
in his mother tongue. That is a massive career
risk. He's a world -famous English -language
author. He's essentially choosing to cut off
his global audience. From a purely commercial
standpoint, it was professional suicide. But
for him, it was spiritual survival. He titled
the manuscript, and it became the first modern
novel ever written in the Gikuyu language. So
he writes the book. He survives the prison. He's
finally released in December of 1978. largely
due to international pressure. He's recognized
as an amnesty international prisoner of conscience.
But he can't exactly go back to his old life.
No, not at all. The Moi regime was furious that
he had survived, that he hadn't been broken,
and that he was still defiant. They immediately
blocked him from returning to his university
job. His family was constantly harassed and followed.
He was a marked man. He was. And he realized
that if he stayed in Kenya, he'd be killed. It
was only a matter of time. So in 1982, he went
into exile. And this begins the long period of
wandering. He lives in the UK, then the US. He
takes up teaching positions at prestigious universities,
Yale, NYU, eventually UC Irvine. And it's during
this time in exile that he writes the theoretical
book that explains the decision he made in prison.
He writes his manifesto, Decolonizing the Mind,
published in 1986. This is such a seminal text.
If you read one nonfiction book by Ngege, this
is the one to read. The central argument revolves
around this idea of the memory bank. Yes. Can
you break that down for us? What does he mean
when he says a language is a memory bank? He
argues that a language isn't just a neutral tool
like a hammer or a telephone that you can just
pick up and use. A language, he says, carries
the entire collective history, the values, the
worldview of a people. When you speak a language,
you are downloading a culture. So if you lose
your language. You starve your memory bank. You
cut yourself off from your own history. It's
like a form of collective amnesia. He has this
incredibly powerful quote in the book. The colonized
trying to claim the colonizer's language is a
sign of the success of enslavement. I want to
push back on that again because it's a very controversial
idea. I have friends who grew up in Nairobi or
Lagos or Mumbai, and they speak English as their
first language. Are they enslaved? Is he saying
we should all go back to speaking only indigenous
languages and cut ourselves off from the world?
That is the most common criticism, and it's a
fair question to ask. Is he being an isolationist?
Is he being an unrealistic purist? Gurdjieff
clarified this many times later in life, especially
right up to his death in 2025. He was not saying
don't learn English. I mean, he was a master
of the English language. He taught literature
in it at Yale. Exactly. His formula was what
he called mother tongue plus. He believed you
should be rooted in your mother tongue first.
That should be the foundation of your house.
It should be the language of your home, your
culture, your emotions. Then you can add English,
you can add French, Swahili, Mandarin, whatever
you want as extra rooms to that house. But the
foundation has to be solid. If you build the
extra rooms without a solid foundation, the whole
house collapses. Yeah. His phrase was, empowerment
comes from mother tongue plus other languages.
It's an additive process, not a subtractive one.
I like that. That makes a lot more sense. It's
about adding to your own culture, not replacing
it. Precisely. He wanted Africans to engage with
the entire world, but to do so from a position
of strength rooted in their own identity. So
he spends 22 long years in exile. He calls himself
a literary migrant. And then finally, in 2002,
Daniel Arap Moi retires. The dictator is gone.
The political climate in Kenya changes. It's
finally safe to go home. Or so he thought. He
decides to return in August of 2004. And it was
supposed to be this triumphant hero's welcome.
Huge crowds were expected at the airport. A month
-long tour of the country was planned. He arrives
with his wife in Jiri. And then the story takes
a turn that is just, it's heartbreaking. It's
almost too cruel to be believable. It is gut
-wrenching. Just a few days after he arrives
back in Nairobi, armed men break into his high
-security apartment complex. This wasn't a random
burglary. They knew who he was. They assaulted
Njugye. They sexually assaulted his wife in front
of him. They burned his face with lit cigarettes.
It was an act of extreme calculated violence.
Oh my God. After 22 years of dreaming of home,
this is the welcome he gets. It shattered the
dream and the twist. And this is something that
feels like it's straight out of a dark, tragic
novel, was that when the police eventually arrested
three suspects, one of them was his own nephew.
His nephew? Yes. The son of his brother. Right.
It suggests that this might have been a politically
motivated hit or maybe it was a family dispute
over land that had been twisted by political
forces of never fully clear. But it showed that
the violence and the rot in the system hadn't
just vanished because the old president was gone.
And yet and this is the part that always amazes
me about him. He didn't turn his back on Kenya
after that. He didn't. Most people would have
fled and never, ever look back. And who could
blame them? But he continued to visit. He continued
to engage. He continued to write Ndikuyu for
the Kenyan people. He just refused to let the
violence silence him, just like he refused to
let the prison silence him. And it wasn't just
in Kenya where he faced these indignities. There's
another story from 2006 in San Francisco, of
all places, that really highlights the other
side of his struggle, the persistent racial dynamics
in the West. The Hotel Vitale incident. This
one, honestly. It just makes my blood boil every
time I read about it. So here is Diego Watiango.
He is a distinguished professor at the University
of California, Irvine. He is a perennial Nobel
contender. He is a world -renowned intellectual.
He's staying at this fancy upscale hotel in San
Francisco for a conference. Right. And an employee
approaches him in the hotel lobby and just orders
him to leave. Just assumes he's a vagrant or
that he doesn't belong there. Assumes he doesn't
belong. harasses him, tries to eject him from
the premises. It was this stark, brutal reminder
that he can be a literary giant in the classroom
or at a lecture, but in the lobby of a fancy
American hotel, to some people, he's still just
a black man who is out of place. The sources
say the African diaspora and the academic community
went absolutely crazy over this. Rightfully so.
It sparked this huge online debate about Professor
Njege versus the Invincible Man. It just proved
his point so perfectly that colonialism and its
legacies aren't just about politics or land.
It's about how we see each other. It's about
the power of the gaze. Despite all this trauma,
despite the racism, his literary output in the
21st century was just incredible. It's like he
never slowed down. I want to talk about Wizard
of the Grove. This came out in 2006 and it is
a brick of a book. It's over 700 pages long.
It's this sprawling, hilarious, brilliant satire
on dictatorship. It deals with a fictional ruler
who gets a mysterious illness and who wants to
build a tower to heaven, a literal tower of Babel,
so he can speak to God directly. And he wrote
the entire thing in Gikuyu first. He wrote all
1 ,000 plus pages of the original manuscript
in Gikuyu. And then, and this is the ultimate
flex, he translated it into English himself.
He was proving a point. He was showing the world
that the Gikuyu language could handle complex,
modern, satirical, magical, realist themes just
as well as any European language could. And then
much later in his life, there's The Perfect Nine
in 2020. This one feels different. It feels almost
like a capstone to his entire career. I think
it is. It's an epic novel in verse. So it's written
as poetry. And in it, he goes right back to the
very beginning, to the origin myth of the Gikuyu
people. The myth says that the Gikuyu people
descend from the Giver Supreme, who created the
father, Gikuyu, and the mother, Mumbi, and they
had nine daughters. And usually in these kinds
of myths, the focus is always on the men, the
sons. Right, the patriarchs. But Ngegi, in his
80s, decides to flip the camera. He focuses the
entire story on the daughters, the perfect nine.
He reimagines the very foundation of his societies
being matriarchal. It's a profoundly feminist
retelling of his own people's genesis. He's saying
our culture is valid and beautiful, but our culture
also grows and evolves. And that book made history
at the International Booker Prize. It did. In
2021, he became the first person ever to be nominated
for the International Booker Prize as both the
author and the translator of the same book. It
was the ultimate validation of his entire philosophy.
Which brings us to the elephant that's been in
the room for this entire conversation, the Nobel
Prize in Literature. The perennial bridesmaid.
Every single October for something like 20 years,
you'd see the articles, you'd see the betting
odds, and everyone would say, this is the year,
this has to be Ngege's year. It became an annual
ritual. I remember in 2010, the betting markets
had him as the absolute hands -down favorite.
It was a sure thing. Journalists were literally
camped out on his lawn in California, cameras
ready, just waiting for him to get the call from
Sweden. And then the Swedish Academy announced
the winner was Mario Vargas Llosa. A great writer,
of course. Yeah. But the sense of disappointment
in Kenya, across Africa, and in the literary
world was just palpable. It felt like a snub.
But Mjegi's reaction to this. It tells you everything
you need to know about the man's character. What
did he do? He went outside to all the disappointed
photographers and journalists on his lawn, and
he started comforting them. He comforted the
paparazzi. He was joking with them. He said things
like, I'm more worried about you guys standing
out here in the heat all day. He completely refused
to be bitter or angry. He said his real prize
was his readers. He passed away on May 28, 2025.
He was 87 years old. He'd had health struggles
for a while. He was a prostate cancer survivor.
He'd had kidney failure. He had a triple bypass
surgery in 2019. His body was failing him in
his later years, but his mind, his intellect
was sharp as a tack right until the very end.
And when he died, the tributes, as we said, they
just poured in from everywhere. Wolf Soyinka,
Barack Obama, the president of Kenya. But what
struck me reading through them was that people
weren't just praising his storytelling. They
were praising his fight. His fight against mental
colonization. Exactly. He fundamentally changed
the way a generation of African and post -colonial
writers thought about their own tongues, their
own cultures. And we should also mention... He
literally passed the torch on. His children,
T, Makoma, and Duke, Wanjiki, four of them are
published authors. It's a literary dynasty. It
is. He didn't just write books. He bred storytellers.
The gene continues. So as we wrap up this deep
dive, I want to try and synthesize this incredible
life. We have a boy who watches his village get
burned to the ground by the empire. He masters
the empire's language. He becomes its literary
darling. And then he rejects it all to write
on toilet paper in a cage. He was beaten. He
was exiled. He was ignored by the Nobel Committee.
But he never, ever stopped writing. I think the
through line, the one word that connects it all
is dignity. He believed you cannot be a fully
human, fully free person if you are viewing yourself
through someone else's eyes, whether that's the...
colonizer's eyes or the dictator's eyes or the
racist's eyes. You have to reclaim your own vision,
your own language, your own way of seeing the
world. There's one final thought I want to leave
our listeners with. It's a provocation that he
made in an interview in 2023. People often talk
about things like Kenyan English or Nigerian
English or Indian English, you know, these valid
local dialects. Oh, he hated that idea. He called
it a normalized abnormality. He flat out said
Kenyan English is nonsense. He repeated his old
line. The colonized trying to claim the colonizer's
language is a sign of the success of enslavement.
That is a harsh thing to say. It's an uncomfortable
thought. It's meant to be uncomfortable. He's
asking us a very pointed question. Why are you
so comfortable with the language of power? Why
do you still believe that standard English is
the ultimate measure of intelligence or sophistication?
It's a question that doesn't have an easy answer,
but I think that's what he did his whole life.
He forced us all to ask the hard questions. And
he showed us through his own life that you can
lock a man in a cell, you can give him nothing
but toilet paper to wipe himself with, and he
can still write a story that will be translated
into a hundred languages and will outlive the
dictator who put him there. You cannot imprison
an idea. Thank you for listening to The Deep
Dive. We'll see you next time.