WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.100 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we're going 00:00:02.100 --> 00:00:04.160 to start by looking at an object. So I just want 00:00:04.160 --> 00:00:06.019 you to, for a second, picture it in your mind. 00:00:06.120 --> 00:00:09.259 Okay. It's a stack of paper, but it's not, you 00:00:09.259 --> 00:00:11.880 know, A4 printer paper. It's not from a fancy 00:00:11.880 --> 00:00:14.519 notebook. It's certainly not parchment. No. It's 00:00:14.519 --> 00:00:19.079 a stack of rough, industrial -grade toilet paper. 00:00:19.779 --> 00:00:22.079 And written on this toilet paper in this tiny 00:00:22.079 --> 00:00:25.239 cramped handwriting is a masterpiece of world 00:00:25.239 --> 00:00:27.260 literature. And it's not just a masterpiece in 00:00:27.260 --> 00:00:30.239 the artistic sense of the word. This stack of 00:00:30.239 --> 00:00:33.320 toilet paper is a weapon. Right. It's a manifesto. 00:00:33.420 --> 00:00:35.859 It represents a man deciding that even if you 00:00:35.859 --> 00:00:37.920 lock him in a cage, even if you take his name 00:00:37.920 --> 00:00:40.179 away, and even if you strip him of every last 00:00:40.179 --> 00:00:43.420 shred of his dignity, he is going to speak. We 00:00:43.420 --> 00:00:45.780 are, of course, talking about... The life and 00:00:45.780 --> 00:00:48.840 the incredible legacy of Ngego Atyongo, we lost 00:00:48.840 --> 00:00:52.200 him very recently, May 28th, 2025 to be exact. 00:00:52.259 --> 00:00:54.200 So recent. And all the obituaries, you know, 00:00:54.200 --> 00:00:56.500 they called him a giant, a literary titan. But 00:00:56.500 --> 00:00:59.700 I feel like those words, they're almost too clean. 00:00:59.799 --> 00:01:02.320 They're too polished. I agree completely. They 00:01:02.320 --> 00:01:04.719 don't capture the dirt and the danger and just 00:01:04.719 --> 00:01:07.439 the sheer audacity of what this man's life was. 00:01:07.620 --> 00:01:09.359 I think you're right. Titan makes him sound like 00:01:09.359 --> 00:01:11.159 a statue, something cold and made of marble. 00:01:11.679 --> 00:01:13.599 But when you look at the source material we have 00:01:13.599 --> 00:01:15.939 in front of us today, I mean, the comprehensive 00:01:15.939 --> 00:01:19.439 biography covering nearly nine decades, his prison 00:01:19.439 --> 00:01:21.879 diaries, his philosophical essays, the whole 00:01:21.879 --> 00:01:25.879 picture, and you realize his life was messy. 00:01:25.900 --> 00:01:29.230 It was violent. And it was so incredibly human. 00:01:29.569 --> 00:01:31.849 This is not a story about some guy sitting in 00:01:31.849 --> 00:01:34.530 an ivory tower writing pretty sentences. No, 00:01:34.590 --> 00:01:37.170 this is a story about a man who turned language 00:01:37.170 --> 00:01:40.250 itself into a battlefield. Yes. And that really 00:01:40.250 --> 00:01:42.870 is our mission for this deep dive. We want to 00:01:42.870 --> 00:01:45.310 understand how a boy who was born into the British 00:01:45.310 --> 00:01:48.409 Empire, who was given the name James, transformed 00:01:48.409 --> 00:01:51.989 himself into Nujage, a man who ended up on the 00:01:51.989 --> 00:01:54.209 shortlist for the Nobel Prize basically every 00:01:54.209 --> 00:01:57.189 year for two decades. And maybe more importantly, 00:01:57.409 --> 00:02:00.109 why he decided that writing in English, the very 00:02:00.109 --> 00:02:02.609 language that had made him world famous, was 00:02:02.609 --> 00:02:05.329 actually an act of betrayal. That's it. That's 00:02:05.329 --> 00:02:08.129 the central conflict. The war between English 00:02:08.129 --> 00:02:10.810 and Gikuyu. It sounds so academic when you say 00:02:10.810 --> 00:02:12.509 it like that. But for him, it was absolutely 00:02:12.509 --> 00:02:15.490 life or death. So let's go back. We have to go 00:02:15.490 --> 00:02:17.449 back to the beginning to really get this. Let's 00:02:17.449 --> 00:02:21.090 set the scene. The year is 1938. The place is 00:02:21.090 --> 00:02:23.849 Kamirithu in what was then called the Kenya colony. 00:02:24.650 --> 00:02:28.569 And Yuga enters the world. But he's not exactly 00:02:28.569 --> 00:02:32.229 coming into a small, quiet family, is he? No. 00:02:32.669 --> 00:02:34.629 Not at all. I mean, this is one of those facts 00:02:34.629 --> 00:02:36.729 that just floors you immediately when you start 00:02:36.729 --> 00:02:39.449 reading about him. He was born James Ngugi. His 00:02:39.449 --> 00:02:42.169 father, Tiong 'ua Duka, had four wives. Four. 00:02:42.330 --> 00:02:44.889 Four wives. Yeah. Ngugi was the son of the third 00:02:44.889 --> 00:02:46.990 wife, Wanjiku. Yeah. In total, there were 28 00:02:46.990 --> 00:02:49.990 children. 28. Just, I mean, just pause on the 00:02:49.990 --> 00:02:52.150 logistics of that for a second. The dinner table. 00:02:52.750 --> 00:02:54.969 The sleeping arrangements. How do you even keep 00:02:54.969 --> 00:02:57.189 track of everyone's names? It's a village within 00:02:57.189 --> 00:02:59.349 a village. It really is. But we have to look 00:02:59.349 --> 00:03:02.870 past just the shocking number. This family structure 00:03:02.870 --> 00:03:05.750 tells us something absolutely crucial about the 00:03:05.750 --> 00:03:08.330 agrarian society he was born into. It was a society 00:03:08.330 --> 00:03:11.050 that was deeply, fundamentally connected to the 00:03:11.050 --> 00:03:12.930 land. Everything revolved around the soil. Yeah. 00:03:13.050 --> 00:03:16.009 But, and this is the big but that hangs over 00:03:16.009 --> 00:03:19.310 his entire childhood, he was born in 1938. Right 00:03:19.310 --> 00:03:21.710 in the thick of the colonial squeeze. Precisely. 00:03:22.139 --> 00:03:24.319 The sources we have really dig into this piece 00:03:24.319 --> 00:03:26.800 of legislation, the British Imperial Land Act 00:03:26.800 --> 00:03:30.939 of 1915. Which sounds incredibly boring and bureaucratic. 00:03:30.979 --> 00:03:32.840 It sounds like something you'd skim past in a 00:03:32.840 --> 00:03:35.280 history textbook. But what it actually meant 00:03:35.280 --> 00:03:39.219 on the ground for a family like Njigi's, it was 00:03:39.219 --> 00:03:42.840 catastrophic. How so? It wasn't just paper. This 00:03:42.840 --> 00:03:45.780 act declared that all land in Kenya essentially 00:03:45.780 --> 00:03:48.599 belonged to the British crown. It legally turned 00:03:48.599 --> 00:03:51.180 native Kenyans into tenants at the will of the 00:03:51.180 --> 00:03:53.819 crown. On their own ancestral land. On the land 00:03:53.819 --> 00:03:56.599 their families had farmed for generations. So 00:03:56.599 --> 00:03:58.800 Njigi is born into this family that is historically 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:01.719 agrarian. Their entire identity is defined by 00:04:01.719 --> 00:04:04.159 their relationship to the soil. But that very 00:04:04.159 --> 00:04:06.979 soil is being legally stolen from right out from 00:04:06.979 --> 00:04:08.520 under their feet. They're sharecroppers in their 00:04:08.520 --> 00:04:11.030 own home. That's exactly what they were. The 00:04:11.030 --> 00:04:14.150 tension is baked in from day one. He is born 00:04:14.150 --> 00:04:16.930 into a world that is already shrinking, already 00:04:16.930 --> 00:04:19.069 being taken away. And then when he's just a teenager, 00:04:19.269 --> 00:04:23.230 that shrinking world just, it explodes. It explodes. 00:04:23.290 --> 00:04:26.269 We're talking about the Mau Mau uprising. 1952 00:04:26.269 --> 00:04:28.509 to 1960. Right. And, you know, history books 00:04:28.509 --> 00:04:31.250 often summarize the Mau Mau as an armed rebellion, 00:04:31.529 --> 00:04:34.660 which is true. But that phrase is too neat. Too 00:04:34.660 --> 00:04:36.980 clinical. It is. We need to understand the texture 00:04:36.980 --> 00:04:39.860 of this conflict. This wasn't two formal armies 00:04:39.860 --> 00:04:43.899 meeting on a battlefield. This was a dirty, terrifying, 00:04:44.180 --> 00:04:46.980 psychological war. It was happening in the forests. 00:04:47.100 --> 00:04:49.040 It was happening in the villages. It was happening 00:04:49.040 --> 00:04:52.180 inside people's homes. And for Nyuga, a young 00:04:52.180 --> 00:04:53.779 boy at the time, this wasn't something he was 00:04:53.779 --> 00:04:56.240 reading about in the newspaper. No. It was in 00:04:56.240 --> 00:04:58.480 his living room. Literally. Tell us about that. 00:04:58.560 --> 00:05:00.480 The personal toll on his family was immense. 00:05:00.800 --> 00:05:03.769 It was. His older brother. Wangi, a man he looked 00:05:03.769 --> 00:05:06.149 up to, joined the Kenyalan and Freedom Army, 00:05:06.290 --> 00:05:09.449 the Mau Mau. He went into the forests to fight, 00:05:09.529 --> 00:05:11.850 and he was eventually killed. Another brother 00:05:11.850 --> 00:05:13.870 was shot and wounded during this state of emergency. 00:05:14.649 --> 00:05:17.350 But the detail from the biography that always, 00:05:17.529 --> 00:05:20.670 always haunts me is about his mother. Wanjiku. 00:05:20.910 --> 00:05:24.529 Yes. She was arrested and taken to a home guard 00:05:24.529 --> 00:05:28.269 post. Now, the Home Guards were local Kenyans 00:05:28.269 --> 00:05:30.990 who collaborated with the British. And this is 00:05:30.990 --> 00:05:33.170 so important. It pitted neighbor against neighbor, 00:05:33.329 --> 00:05:35.850 cousin against cousin. It tore the fabric of 00:05:35.850 --> 00:05:38.269 the community apart. Completely. And at this 00:05:38.269 --> 00:05:42.269 post, she was tortured. The sources are clear 00:05:42.269 --> 00:05:44.810 on this. She was beaten. She was interrogated. 00:05:44.850 --> 00:05:47.610 They wanted her to betray her sons to tell them 00:05:47.610 --> 00:05:49.810 where the fighters were hiding. And she refused. 00:05:50.089 --> 00:05:52.290 The strength that must have taken. Unimaginable. 00:05:52.699 --> 00:05:54.699 So you have to put yourself in young Njigi's 00:05:54.699 --> 00:05:57.560 shoes. This is his reality. His brother is being 00:05:57.560 --> 00:05:59.540 hunted in the forest. His mother is being tortured 00:05:59.540 --> 00:06:02.459 by their neighbors. His home is a war zone. And 00:06:02.459 --> 00:06:05.100 while all of this is happening, where is he? 00:06:05.160 --> 00:06:07.079 This is the great paradox of his early life. 00:06:07.180 --> 00:06:09.279 He's at school. He's at school. Yeah. And not 00:06:09.279 --> 00:06:12.379 just any school. In 1955, he gets accepted into 00:06:12.379 --> 00:06:14.699 Alliance High School. Which was the school. It 00:06:14.699 --> 00:06:16.720 was the prestigious institution for Africans 00:06:16.720 --> 00:06:20.310 in Kenya. But, and this is the key, it was modeled 00:06:20.310 --> 00:06:22.629 entirely on the British public school system. 00:06:23.029 --> 00:06:26.410 Think cricket, Shakespeare, Christian hymns, 00:06:26.410 --> 00:06:29.310 the whole nine yards. So just try to picture 00:06:29.310 --> 00:06:31.470 this. You have a teenager. He's wearing a crisp 00:06:31.470 --> 00:06:33.810 school uniform. He's learning the rules of cricket. 00:06:33.949 --> 00:06:36.829 He's reading Shakespeare, reciting English poetry. 00:06:37.129 --> 00:06:40.069 And a few miles away, his family is being destroyed 00:06:40.069 --> 00:06:42.470 by the very system that is educating him. The 00:06:42.470 --> 00:06:44.889 cognitive dissonance must have been deafening. 00:06:44.889 --> 00:06:47.459 It's almost impossible to comprehend. And there 00:06:47.459 --> 00:06:49.959 was this one specific visual memory he wrote 00:06:49.959 --> 00:06:52.279 about later in his life that just crystallizes 00:06:52.279 --> 00:06:54.540 the whole thing. What was that? He finished his 00:06:54.540 --> 00:06:57.040 first term at Alliance, this pristine bubble 00:06:57.040 --> 00:06:59.439 of colonial order and discipline, and he walked 00:06:59.439 --> 00:07:01.579 home to his village, Lamuru. He was expecting 00:07:01.579 --> 00:07:03.620 to see his house, the family compound, everything 00:07:03.620 --> 00:07:07.689 he knew. And it was gone. Just gone. The British 00:07:07.689 --> 00:07:10.389 forces had razed the entire village to the ground. 00:07:10.509 --> 00:07:12.670 The whole village? The whole thing. It was part 00:07:12.670 --> 00:07:14.990 of this collective punishment strategy they had. 00:07:15.170 --> 00:07:17.610 They would just burn everything down to cut off 00:07:17.610 --> 00:07:20.410 any possible supply lines to the Malfighters 00:07:20.410 --> 00:07:23.230 in the forest. So he's just standing there, a 00:07:23.230 --> 00:07:26.230 schoolboy, his head full of English grammar and 00:07:26.230 --> 00:07:28.949 Christian theology, looking at a pile of ash 00:07:28.949 --> 00:07:32.600 where his home used to be. Wow. That's a moment 00:07:32.600 --> 00:07:35.560 that would forge anyone's consciousness. He wrote 00:07:35.560 --> 00:07:37.899 about it later, something like, by losing my 00:07:37.899 --> 00:07:41.180 home, I became more aware of it. Yes. It's almost 00:07:41.180 --> 00:07:43.740 like the trauma forced him to see things with 00:07:43.740 --> 00:07:46.399 this intense, unbearable clarity. And that clarity, 00:07:46.439 --> 00:07:48.839 that way of seeing, it followed him when he left 00:07:48.839 --> 00:07:51.339 Kenya for the first time. It did. In 1959, he 00:07:51.339 --> 00:07:53.990 goes to Maker University in Uganda. He calls 00:07:53.990 --> 00:07:56.470 this his educational migration. And honestly, 00:07:56.569 --> 00:07:59.209 you have to understand, Maker in the early 60s, 00:07:59.209 --> 00:08:01.290 that was the place to be. It sounds like it was 00:08:01.290 --> 00:08:03.850 the intellectual capital of East Africa. Of the 00:08:03.850 --> 00:08:05.430 continent, really. People have compared it to 00:08:05.430 --> 00:08:07.389 the Harlem Renaissance. You had all these brilliant 00:08:07.389 --> 00:08:09.230 minds converging from all over Africa. It was 00:08:09.230 --> 00:08:11.930 just this hotbed of political thought, literary 00:08:11.930 --> 00:08:15.029 debate, post -colonial dreaming. The air must 00:08:15.029 --> 00:08:18.490 have been electric. And it's here, in 1962, that 00:08:18.490 --> 00:08:20.730 we get one of those moments that, if you love 00:08:20.730 --> 00:08:23.000 literature, you just wish you could have been 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:25.120 a fly on the wall for. The African Writers Conference. 00:08:25.500 --> 00:08:27.819 And this is where he meets Chinua Achebe. The 00:08:27.819 --> 00:08:29.899 giant himself. I mean, Achebe had already published 00:08:29.899 --> 00:08:31.959 Things Fall Apart a few years earlier. He was 00:08:31.959 --> 00:08:34.340 a global celebrity. And Njige was just a student 00:08:34.340 --> 00:08:37.259 named James. Nobody. A nobody. Yeah. But he had 00:08:37.259 --> 00:08:39.600 these manuscripts, these stories he'd been working 00:08:39.600 --> 00:08:42.200 on. And he works up the courage. And you just 00:08:42.200 --> 00:08:44.919 have to imagine the nerves to approach Achebe. 00:08:45.080 --> 00:08:48.080 Just walking up to him. Excuse me, Mr. Achebe. 00:08:48.200 --> 00:08:50.480 I know you're very busy, but would you mind just... 00:08:50.860 --> 00:08:53.139 Looking at my scribblings. Something like that. 00:08:53.279 --> 00:08:55.039 And what's amazing is that Achebe didn't brush 00:08:55.039 --> 00:08:57.159 him off. He could have. He was a busy, famous 00:08:57.159 --> 00:09:01.120 man. But he took the manuscripts. He read what 00:09:01.120 --> 00:09:03.620 would eventually become Weep Not Child. And he 00:09:03.620 --> 00:09:06.090 was blown away. He saw the genius in it immediately. 00:09:06.269 --> 00:09:08.450 He sent it directly to his own publisher, Heinemann, 00:09:08.529 --> 00:09:12.230 in London. And in 1964, A Week Not Child is published. 00:09:12.529 --> 00:09:13.909 And we should clarify for our listeners, this 00:09:13.909 --> 00:09:15.669 wasn't just, you know, a new book came out. This 00:09:15.669 --> 00:09:18.950 was a historic event. It was a landmark. It was 00:09:18.950 --> 00:09:21.909 the first novel in English ever to be published 00:09:21.909 --> 00:09:24.389 by a writer from East Africa. He literally broke 00:09:24.389 --> 00:09:26.629 the seal. He opened the door for everyone else. 00:09:26.769 --> 00:09:29.470 And he didn't stop. He followed it up almost 00:09:29.470 --> 00:09:32.039 immediately. with The River Between in 1965. 00:09:32.419 --> 00:09:35.519 I remember reading The River Between in college. 00:09:36.080 --> 00:09:38.320 It's this beautiful, tragic story. It's almost 00:09:38.320 --> 00:09:41.059 like a Romeo and Juliet, right? A boy from a 00:09:41.059 --> 00:09:43.179 Christian convert family falls for the daughter 00:09:43.179 --> 00:09:46.440 of a traditionalist leader. That's the core conflict. 00:09:46.990 --> 00:09:49.809 It's all about that cultural rift caused by colonization. 00:09:50.029 --> 00:09:52.570 It deals with female circumcision, with religion, 00:09:52.730 --> 00:09:55.490 with tradition versus modernity. It's a stunning 00:09:55.490 --> 00:09:57.889 book. And it made him a star. An absolute star. 00:09:58.129 --> 00:10:00.210 He was put on the official school syllabus in 00:10:00.210 --> 00:10:02.789 Kenya. Can you imagine? The boy whose village 00:10:02.789 --> 00:10:05.029 was burned down by the state is now required 00:10:05.029 --> 00:10:07.730 reading for the state schools. He was the golden 00:10:07.730 --> 00:10:10.850 boy of African literature. So by the mid -60s, 00:10:10.850 --> 00:10:13.110 he's on top of the world. He's James Ngugi, the 00:10:13.110 --> 00:10:15.210 celebrated author. He wins a scholarship to go 00:10:15.210 --> 00:10:16.929 to the University of Leeds in England. He's going 00:10:16.929 --> 00:10:18.870 to the heart of the empire. You'd think he'd 00:10:18.870 --> 00:10:20.789 just settle into a comfortable life as an academic, 00:10:20.990 --> 00:10:23.190 a celebrated post -colonial writer. You would 00:10:23.190 --> 00:10:26.509 think. But Leeds is where that comfortable James 00:10:26.509 --> 00:10:29.090 identity starts to crack. He goes there to study, 00:10:29.169 --> 00:10:32.149 but he ends up getting radicalized. What happened 00:10:32.149 --> 00:10:35.210 in Leeds? Was it just the rainy English weather? 00:10:35.590 --> 00:10:38.330 The weather probably didn't help, no. But it 00:10:38.330 --> 00:10:40.690 was the intellectual climate. He started reading 00:10:40.690 --> 00:10:44.250 France Fanon. Specifically, he read The Wretched 00:10:44.250 --> 00:10:46.350 of the Earth. And for anyone listening who hasn't 00:10:46.350 --> 00:10:48.269 read Fanon, can you just explain why that book 00:10:48.269 --> 00:10:52.440 is so... Explosive? Fanon was a psychiatrist 00:10:52.440 --> 00:10:55.340 from Martinique who ended up joining the Algerian 00:10:55.340 --> 00:10:57.879 revolution against the French. And his work is 00:10:57.879 --> 00:11:00.360 just, it's searing. He argued that colonization 00:11:00.360 --> 00:11:02.460 isn't just about stealing land or resources. 00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:05.620 It's a psychological disease. A disease? Yes. 00:11:05.759 --> 00:11:08.360 It forces the colonized person to hate themselves, 00:11:08.679 --> 00:11:10.799 to see themselves through the eyes of the colonizer, 00:11:10.879 --> 00:11:13.940 to internalize their own inferiority. And Fanon 00:11:13.940 --> 00:11:16.240 argued that true liberation requires a violent 00:11:16.240 --> 00:11:20.220 rupture. A complete, total rejection of the colonizer's 00:11:20.220 --> 00:11:22.860 values and language. That must have hit Njiki 00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:25.860 like a ton of binks. Here he is, the perfect 00:11:25.860 --> 00:11:29.080 product of colonial education, reading a book 00:11:29.080 --> 00:11:31.700 that tells him his entire education is actually 00:11:31.700 --> 00:11:35.259 a form of enslavement. Precisely. The biography 00:11:35.259 --> 00:11:37.080 notes he was supposed to be writing his thesis 00:11:37.080 --> 00:11:39.620 on Caribbean literature. He just abandoned it. 00:11:39.799 --> 00:11:42.500 He couldn't do it anymore. He shifted his focus 00:11:42.500 --> 00:11:44.980 entirely to the work of George Lamming and this 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:48.379 concept of peasant revolt. So his thinking is 00:11:48.379 --> 00:11:51.159 shifting. It's a seismic shift. He realizes that 00:11:51.159 --> 00:11:53.460 literature shouldn't just be about the polite 00:11:53.460 --> 00:11:56.080 anxieties of the educated elite. It should be 00:11:56.080 --> 00:11:57.740 about the struggle of the common people, the 00:11:57.740 --> 00:12:00.399 peasants, the workers. And this leads us to the 00:12:00.399 --> 00:12:02.919 crisis of identity. We start to see the first 00:12:02.919 --> 00:12:06.159 major outward change. The name. He comes to the 00:12:06.159 --> 00:12:10.000 conclusion by 1970 that James is a brand. It's 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:12.179 the brand of the oppressor. It's a slave name. 00:12:12.279 --> 00:12:15.100 So he drops it. He drops it. He becomes Nugiwa 00:12:15.100 --> 00:12:18.419 Tiongulnjika. Son of Tiong 'o, reclaiming his 00:12:18.419 --> 00:12:20.419 Gikuyu identity. But he doesn't stop with the 00:12:20.419 --> 00:12:23.019 name. He goes back to Kenya. He gets a job as 00:12:23.019 --> 00:12:25.179 a professor at the University of Nairobi. And 00:12:25.179 --> 00:12:27.580 he immediately decides to pick a fight with the 00:12:27.580 --> 00:12:30.600 entire academic establishment. A huge fight. 00:12:30.799 --> 00:12:33.220 He wants to abolish the English department. It's 00:12:33.220 --> 00:12:35.000 known as the famous abolition of the English 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:37.759 department memo that he co -wrote. And it caused 00:12:37.759 --> 00:12:40.220 an absolute firestorm. I have to play devil's 00:12:40.220 --> 00:12:41.940 advocate here for a second because I can just 00:12:41.940 --> 00:12:45.860 hear the faculty meeting now. Okay, be reasonable. 00:12:46.500 --> 00:12:49.919 English is the global language. It's the language 00:12:49.919 --> 00:12:53.240 of commerce, of science. If we shut down the 00:12:53.240 --> 00:12:55.259 English department, aren't we just hurting our 00:12:55.259 --> 00:12:59.039 own students' futures? That was exactly the argument 00:12:59.039 --> 00:13:01.360 made against him. The more conservative faculty 00:13:01.360 --> 00:13:03.960 members were outraged. They said things like, 00:13:04.080 --> 00:13:06.559 we need to study Shakespeare and the great tradition 00:13:06.559 --> 00:13:09.929 to understand the world. So what was his counter 00:13:09.929 --> 00:13:12.230 argument? His argument was actually very nuanced. 00:13:12.529 --> 00:13:15.429 He wasn't saying don't read Shakespeare or burn 00:13:15.429 --> 00:13:17.889 English books. He was asking a much more fundamental 00:13:17.889 --> 00:13:20.870 question. He was asking about centrality. Explain 00:13:20.870 --> 00:13:22.649 that. What's the difference? Well, think of like 00:13:22.649 --> 00:13:25.389 a map of the world. For centuries, the map of 00:13:25.389 --> 00:13:27.909 literature had London at the very center and 00:13:27.909 --> 00:13:30.269 everything else. African literature, Indian literature, 00:13:30.429 --> 00:13:33.759 Caribbean literature was. out there on the margins. 00:13:33.940 --> 00:13:36.480 It was other. Exactly. Commonwealth literature 00:13:36.480 --> 00:13:39.759 or some other condescending term. G. Gay argued 00:13:39.759 --> 00:13:42.360 that an African university should put Africa 00:13:42.360 --> 00:13:45.240 at the center of its own map, spawn with African 00:13:45.240 --> 00:13:47.659 oral traditions, start with African writers, 00:13:47.860 --> 00:13:50.919 then move outwards to the Caribbean, to African 00:13:50.919 --> 00:13:53.500 -American literature. And yes, study European 00:13:53.500 --> 00:13:55.940 literature, too, but see it as one part of the 00:13:55.940 --> 00:13:58.909 world, not as the center of the universe. So 00:13:58.909 --> 00:14:00.710 it's about shifting your perspective. It's about 00:14:00.710 --> 00:14:02.629 looking at the world from where you are actually 00:14:02.629 --> 00:14:05.429 standing, not from where your former colonizer 00:14:05.429 --> 00:14:07.750 is standing. That's it. He called it re -centering. 00:14:08.110 --> 00:14:10.529 But as you can imagine, this made him a lot of 00:14:10.529 --> 00:14:12.830 powerful enemies. He was rocking the boat in 00:14:12.830 --> 00:14:15.070 a big way. And it wasn't long before he moved 00:14:15.070 --> 00:14:17.529 from rocking the academic boat to rocking the 00:14:17.529 --> 00:14:19.700 political boat. And this is what leads us directly 00:14:19.700 --> 00:14:21.700 to the prison cell and the toilet paper. Right. 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:25.139 Section three. So the year is now 1977. He's 00:14:25.139 --> 00:14:27.639 back in Khmeri Thu, his hometown, the place that 00:14:27.639 --> 00:14:30.159 was destroyed. And he decides, with a friend, 00:14:30.240 --> 00:14:33.080 to start the Khmeri Thu Community Education and 00:14:33.080 --> 00:14:35.639 Cultural Center. The first big project is to 00:14:35.639 --> 00:14:38.620 put on a play. Ngahike Ndinda, which translates 00:14:38.620 --> 00:14:41.659 to I will marry when I want. Now, you have to 00:14:41.659 --> 00:14:44.159 understand, this was not a play in some fancy 00:14:44.159 --> 00:14:46.360 theater in Nairobi where the elite would come 00:14:46.360 --> 00:14:49.259 and sip wine during the intermission. No. This 00:14:49.259 --> 00:14:52.799 was community theater in the truest, most radical 00:14:52.799 --> 00:14:55.460 sense of the word. He and the villagers literally 00:14:55.460 --> 00:14:58.779 built an open -air theater out of wood and dirt. 00:14:59.289 --> 00:15:01.629 The actors weren't professionals from the city. 00:15:01.809 --> 00:15:04.009 They were the villagers themselves. The local 00:15:04.009 --> 00:15:06.730 people. Peasants, factory workers, the unemployed, 00:15:07.090 --> 00:15:09.570 the people whose lives the play was about. And 00:15:09.570 --> 00:15:11.409 the script. He didn't just hand them a script. 00:15:11.669 --> 00:15:13.809 That's what was so revolutionary about it. It 00:15:13.809 --> 00:15:15.929 was co -written with the community. It was heavily 00:15:15.929 --> 00:15:19.230 improvised. It was organic. It changed night 00:15:19.230 --> 00:15:21.289 to night based on the audience's reaction. And 00:15:21.289 --> 00:15:23.820 what was it about? It dealt with their actual 00:15:23.820 --> 00:15:26.399 real life problems. It was about land grabbing 00:15:26.399 --> 00:15:29.179 by the new black elite, the post -independence 00:15:29.179 --> 00:15:31.879 betrayal of the Mao Mao ideals, the exploitation 00:15:31.879 --> 00:15:34.480 of workers. It was their own story being told 00:15:34.480 --> 00:15:37.059 back to them in their own language. It sounds 00:15:37.059 --> 00:15:39.720 incredibly democratic, almost like a town hall 00:15:39.720 --> 00:15:43.460 meeting, but with music and drama. So why on 00:15:43.460 --> 00:15:45.340 earth did the government care about a little 00:15:45.340 --> 00:15:48.240 village play? Because dictatorships are absolutely 00:15:48.240 --> 00:15:50.340 terrified of ordinary people talking to each 00:15:50.340 --> 00:15:52.159 other. And realizing they have the same problems. 00:15:52.360 --> 00:15:55.059 And realizing they have a common enemy. The president 00:15:55.059 --> 00:15:58.840 at the time was Daniel Arup Moy, a very authoritarian 00:15:58.840 --> 00:16:03.120 figure. His regime, the Can You regime, realized 00:16:03.120 --> 00:16:05.299 that this play wasn't just entertainment. It 00:16:05.299 --> 00:16:07.679 was a rehearsal for revolution. It was empowering 00:16:07.679 --> 00:16:09.700 people. It was empowering people to see their 00:16:09.700 --> 00:16:13.120 own reality clearly and to question it. And for 00:16:13.120 --> 00:16:15.690 a dictator... That is the most dangerous thing 00:16:15.690 --> 00:16:17.929 in the world. So they shut it down. Brutally. 00:16:18.269 --> 00:16:21.470 After just six weeks of performances, the government 00:16:21.470 --> 00:16:24.190 banned the play. They revoked the license. And 00:16:24.190 --> 00:16:26.870 then a few weeks later, on New Year's Eve, the 00:16:26.870 --> 00:16:30.029 police came for Nuget. Can you describe the arrest? 00:16:30.370 --> 00:16:33.370 Oh, it was classic authoritarian style. A midnight 00:16:33.370 --> 00:16:36.269 raid, police swarming his house. They turned 00:16:36.269 --> 00:16:38.889 his entire library upside down, throwing books 00:16:38.889 --> 00:16:41.120 everywhere. Looking for what? And this is interesting. 00:16:41.179 --> 00:16:43.059 The sources say they confiscated the script of 00:16:43.059 --> 00:16:45.840 the play, of course, but they also very specifically 00:16:45.840 --> 00:16:48.480 confiscated his personal copies of books by Marx 00:16:48.480 --> 00:16:51.080 and Lenin. They were looking for evidence of 00:16:51.080 --> 00:16:53.299 subversive thought. They were trying to build 00:16:53.299 --> 00:16:55.759 a political case against him. Exactly. And they 00:16:55.759 --> 00:16:58.620 took him away. He was sent to Comedie Maxim Security 00:16:58.620 --> 00:17:01.600 Prison. Without trial? No trial, no charges. 00:17:01.840 --> 00:17:04.460 Just disappeared into the system. And Comedie, 00:17:04.500 --> 00:17:07.240 as we said, is a notorious place. What were the 00:17:07.240 --> 00:17:09.809 conditions actually like for him? It was a concrete 00:17:09.809 --> 00:17:12.130 hell. He wasn't just in a regular cell. He was 00:17:12.130 --> 00:17:14.890 put in a segregated block. This block had previously 00:17:14.890 --> 00:17:18.569 been used for the mentally deranged, as they 00:17:18.569 --> 00:17:21.289 called them. Gagey joked grimly in his diary 00:17:21.289 --> 00:17:23.089 that it was now being used for the politically 00:17:23.089 --> 00:17:26.529 deranged. He was locked in a tiny cage for 23 00:17:26.529 --> 00:17:29.589 hours a day. He was allowed one single hour of 00:17:29.589 --> 00:17:32.710 sunlight in a small yard surrounded by high walls. 00:17:33.049 --> 00:17:35.630 They took his name away from him again. He wasn't 00:17:35.630 --> 00:17:38.630 Gagey. He was just a number. Prisoner case 677. 00:17:38.950 --> 00:17:41.730 And crucially, they denied him access to books 00:17:41.730 --> 00:17:44.589 and writing materials. Which, for a writer, is 00:17:44.589 --> 00:17:47.410 a specific and deliberate kind of torture. It's 00:17:47.410 --> 00:17:49.609 like taking away a musician's hearing. And this 00:17:49.609 --> 00:17:51.630 is where the legend begins. In this absolute 00:17:51.630 --> 00:17:54.170 pit of despair, he decides he's not going to 00:17:54.170 --> 00:17:56.109 be broken. He's going to write a novel. An act 00:17:56.109 --> 00:18:00.500 of pure defiance. But he has no paper. So walk 00:18:00.500 --> 00:18:02.079 us through the mechanics of the toilet paper, 00:18:02.220 --> 00:18:04.019 because I think when people hear that, they imagine, 00:18:04.059 --> 00:18:06.160 you know, a nice soft roll of Charmin. Oh, no, 00:18:06.359 --> 00:18:08.960 no, no. This was prison issue toilet paper in 00:18:08.960 --> 00:18:12.619 1970s Kenya. You have to imagine the roughest, 00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:16.299 hardest, most abrasive paper possible. It came 00:18:16.299 --> 00:18:19.400 in individual sheets, not on a roll. And it was 00:18:19.400 --> 00:18:21.660 rationed. It was strictly rationed. You didn't 00:18:21.660 --> 00:18:23.539 just get as much as you needed. So he has to 00:18:23.539 --> 00:18:25.740 start hoarding it. He has to do this grim calculation 00:18:25.740 --> 00:18:28.240 every day. How many sheets do I actually need 00:18:28.240 --> 00:18:30.730 for, you know? No, for hygiene. And how many 00:18:30.730 --> 00:18:32.329 sheets can I save for the book? An impossible 00:18:32.329 --> 00:18:35.670 choice. And then he has to get a pen. He somehow 00:18:35.670 --> 00:18:38.329 managed to smuggle a pen or part of pen from 00:18:38.329 --> 00:18:41.150 a sympathetic guard. The accounts vary slightly, 00:18:41.289 --> 00:18:43.509 but he secured a writing instrument. And he's 00:18:43.509 --> 00:18:45.589 writing in a cell that is constantly being searched, 00:18:45.710 --> 00:18:48.289 right? This is incredibly risky. That's the constant 00:18:48.289 --> 00:18:50.730 tension of the story. The guards would do these 00:18:50.730 --> 00:18:53.789 random violent sweeps. If they found a manuscript, 00:18:53.950 --> 00:18:56.009 it would be destroyed instantly and he would 00:18:56.009 --> 00:18:59.799 be severely punished. Sent to solitary, beaten, 00:19:00.039 --> 00:19:02.640 who knows. So where did he hide it? He had to 00:19:02.640 --> 00:19:04.940 be clever. He would write on these small sheets, 00:19:05.059 --> 00:19:07.420 and then he would stack them, fold them, and 00:19:07.420 --> 00:19:09.279 tuck them into the most disgusting corners of 00:19:09.279 --> 00:19:10.900 the cell where he knew the guards wouldn't want 00:19:10.900 --> 00:19:13.240 to put their hands. He hid them amongst the filth. 00:19:13.319 --> 00:19:15.880 And he's not just writing a diary or a prison 00:19:15.880 --> 00:19:19.160 memoir. He's writing Devil on the Cross. Tell 00:19:19.160 --> 00:19:21.140 us about the story itself, because you'd expect 00:19:21.140 --> 00:19:23.559 something sad and reflective, but this book is. 00:19:24.059 --> 00:19:27.000 It's wild. It is absolutely wild. It's a surreal, 00:19:27.119 --> 00:19:31.000 magical, realist satire. The plot, if you can 00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:32.740 believe it, revolves around something called 00:19:32.740 --> 00:19:35.160 the International Competition in Modern Theft 00:19:35.160 --> 00:19:37.500 and Robbery. A competition for thieves. Yes. 00:19:37.559 --> 00:19:40.299 All the big shot thieves and robbers from all 00:19:40.299 --> 00:19:42.420 over the world who are really just stand -ins 00:19:42.420 --> 00:19:45.220 for corrupt politicians and capitalists gather 00:19:45.220 --> 00:19:48.880 in a cave to boast about their crimes. They compete 00:19:48.880 --> 00:19:51.099 to see who is stolen the most from the people. 00:19:51.870 --> 00:19:54.490 One character boasts about his plan to sell air 00:19:54.490 --> 00:19:57.450 to the masses. Another wants to sell Kenyan soil 00:19:57.450 --> 00:20:01.009 and pots back to the landless peasants. It's 00:20:01.009 --> 00:20:03.400 grotesque and hilarious at the same time. So 00:20:03.400 --> 00:20:05.619 he's taking the very people who imprisoned him, 00:20:05.720 --> 00:20:08.299 the corrupt elite, and he's turning them into 00:20:08.299 --> 00:20:11.220 these ridiculous, grotesque cartoons. Exactly. 00:20:11.259 --> 00:20:14.460 He is laughing at them. In the darkest hole of 00:20:14.460 --> 00:20:16.559 their prison, on the very paper that's meant 00:20:16.559 --> 00:20:19.200 for human filth, he is using his intellect and 00:20:19.200 --> 00:20:22.660 his humor to mock their power. It is the ultimate 00:20:22.660 --> 00:20:25.900 act of mental and spiritual resistance. But there 00:20:25.900 --> 00:20:28.440 is one more layer to this act of resistance, 00:20:28.660 --> 00:20:30.940 and this is arguably the most important decision 00:20:30.940 --> 00:20:33.680 he made in that cell. He's not writing this story 00:20:33.680 --> 00:20:36.740 in English. No. This is the moment of the great 00:20:36.740 --> 00:20:40.240 switch. Up until this point, all his famous novels, 00:20:40.359 --> 00:20:42.980 Weep Not, Child, The River Between, A Grain of 00:20:42.980 --> 00:20:45.420 Wheat, were all written in English. But in that 00:20:45.420 --> 00:20:48.000 cell, he had an epiphany. What was the realization? 00:20:48.279 --> 00:20:51.190 What changed? He wrote about it later. He realized 00:20:51.190 --> 00:20:53.009 that by writing his stories in English, he was 00:20:53.009 --> 00:20:55.329 enriching the language of the colonizer. He was 00:20:55.329 --> 00:20:57.230 speaking to the professors in Leeds and the critics 00:20:57.230 --> 00:20:59.390 in New York, but he wasn't speaking directly 00:20:59.390 --> 00:21:01.869 to the woman who sold vegetables in the market 00:21:01.869 --> 00:21:04.769 in Khmerithu. He wasn't speaking to his own mother. 00:21:04.890 --> 00:21:07.529 He was speaking over the heads of his own people. 00:21:07.730 --> 00:21:10.529 And he decided, right there in the dark, that 00:21:10.529 --> 00:21:12.650 he would never write another creative work, another 00:21:12.650 --> 00:21:16.069 novel, in English. From now on, he would write 00:21:16.069 --> 00:21:19.359 in his mother tongue. That is a massive career 00:21:19.359 --> 00:21:21.920 risk. He's a world -famous English -language 00:21:21.920 --> 00:21:24.339 author. He's essentially choosing to cut off 00:21:24.339 --> 00:21:26.440 his global audience. From a purely commercial 00:21:26.440 --> 00:21:28.900 standpoint, it was professional suicide. But 00:21:28.900 --> 00:21:31.940 for him, it was spiritual survival. He titled 00:21:31.940 --> 00:21:36.599 the manuscript, and it became the first modern 00:21:36.599 --> 00:21:39.500 novel ever written in the Gikuyu language. So 00:21:39.500 --> 00:21:42.220 he writes the book. He survives the prison. He's 00:21:42.220 --> 00:21:45.329 finally released in December of 1978. largely 00:21:45.329 --> 00:21:47.890 due to international pressure. He's recognized 00:21:47.890 --> 00:21:50.329 as an amnesty international prisoner of conscience. 00:21:50.769 --> 00:21:52.930 But he can't exactly go back to his old life. 00:21:53.170 --> 00:21:56.009 No, not at all. The Moi regime was furious that 00:21:56.009 --> 00:21:57.549 he had survived, that he hadn't been broken, 00:21:57.730 --> 00:22:00.309 and that he was still defiant. They immediately 00:22:00.309 --> 00:22:01.970 blocked him from returning to his university 00:22:01.970 --> 00:22:04.670 job. His family was constantly harassed and followed. 00:22:04.849 --> 00:22:07.390 He was a marked man. He was. And he realized 00:22:07.390 --> 00:22:10.289 that if he stayed in Kenya, he'd be killed. It 00:22:10.289 --> 00:22:13.230 was only a matter of time. So in 1982, he went 00:22:13.230 --> 00:22:15.740 into exile. And this begins the long period of 00:22:15.740 --> 00:22:18.920 wandering. He lives in the UK, then the US. He 00:22:18.920 --> 00:22:21.180 takes up teaching positions at prestigious universities, 00:22:21.680 --> 00:22:25.799 Yale, NYU, eventually UC Irvine. And it's during 00:22:25.799 --> 00:22:28.380 this time in exile that he writes the theoretical 00:22:28.380 --> 00:22:30.900 book that explains the decision he made in prison. 00:22:31.039 --> 00:22:34.039 He writes his manifesto, Decolonizing the Mind, 00:22:34.240 --> 00:22:37.400 published in 1986. This is such a seminal text. 00:22:37.519 --> 00:22:40.200 If you read one nonfiction book by Ngege, this 00:22:40.200 --> 00:22:42.240 is the one to read. The central argument revolves 00:22:42.240 --> 00:22:45.400 around this idea of the memory bank. Yes. Can 00:22:45.400 --> 00:22:47.099 you break that down for us? What does he mean 00:22:47.099 --> 00:22:49.440 when he says a language is a memory bank? He 00:22:49.440 --> 00:22:51.880 argues that a language isn't just a neutral tool 00:22:51.880 --> 00:22:54.059 like a hammer or a telephone that you can just 00:22:54.059 --> 00:22:57.119 pick up and use. A language, he says, carries 00:22:57.119 --> 00:23:00.140 the entire collective history, the values, the 00:23:00.140 --> 00:23:03.029 worldview of a people. When you speak a language, 00:23:03.230 --> 00:23:05.430 you are downloading a culture. So if you lose 00:23:05.430 --> 00:23:08.250 your language. You starve your memory bank. You 00:23:08.250 --> 00:23:10.430 cut yourself off from your own history. It's 00:23:10.430 --> 00:23:12.529 like a form of collective amnesia. He has this 00:23:12.529 --> 00:23:15.490 incredibly powerful quote in the book. The colonized 00:23:15.490 --> 00:23:17.690 trying to claim the colonizer's language is a 00:23:17.690 --> 00:23:20.000 sign of the success of enslavement. I want to 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:22.019 push back on that again because it's a very controversial 00:23:22.019 --> 00:23:25.700 idea. I have friends who grew up in Nairobi or 00:23:25.700 --> 00:23:28.599 Lagos or Mumbai, and they speak English as their 00:23:28.599 --> 00:23:32.079 first language. Are they enslaved? Is he saying 00:23:32.079 --> 00:23:34.019 we should all go back to speaking only indigenous 00:23:34.019 --> 00:23:36.259 languages and cut ourselves off from the world? 00:23:36.400 --> 00:23:38.480 That is the most common criticism, and it's a 00:23:38.480 --> 00:23:41.019 fair question to ask. Is he being an isolationist? 00:23:41.259 --> 00:23:45.359 Is he being an unrealistic purist? Gurdjieff 00:23:45.359 --> 00:23:48.019 clarified this many times later in life, especially 00:23:48.019 --> 00:23:51.819 right up to his death in 2025. He was not saying 00:23:51.819 --> 00:23:54.230 don't learn English. I mean, he was a master 00:23:54.230 --> 00:23:56.250 of the English language. He taught literature 00:23:56.250 --> 00:23:59.269 in it at Yale. Exactly. His formula was what 00:23:59.269 --> 00:24:01.910 he called mother tongue plus. He believed you 00:24:01.910 --> 00:24:03.730 should be rooted in your mother tongue first. 00:24:03.970 --> 00:24:05.750 That should be the foundation of your house. 00:24:05.789 --> 00:24:07.230 It should be the language of your home, your 00:24:07.230 --> 00:24:09.549 culture, your emotions. Then you can add English, 00:24:09.609 --> 00:24:11.230 you can add French, Swahili, Mandarin, whatever 00:24:11.230 --> 00:24:13.829 you want as extra rooms to that house. But the 00:24:13.829 --> 00:24:16.710 foundation has to be solid. If you build the 00:24:16.710 --> 00:24:19.460 extra rooms without a solid foundation, the whole 00:24:19.460 --> 00:24:22.279 house collapses. Yeah. His phrase was, empowerment 00:24:22.279 --> 00:24:24.400 comes from mother tongue plus other languages. 00:24:25.039 --> 00:24:27.559 It's an additive process, not a subtractive one. 00:24:27.720 --> 00:24:29.940 I like that. That makes a lot more sense. It's 00:24:29.940 --> 00:24:32.079 about adding to your own culture, not replacing 00:24:32.079 --> 00:24:34.900 it. Precisely. He wanted Africans to engage with 00:24:34.900 --> 00:24:37.240 the entire world, but to do so from a position 00:24:37.240 --> 00:24:40.140 of strength rooted in their own identity. So 00:24:40.140 --> 00:24:43.420 he spends 22 long years in exile. He calls himself 00:24:43.420 --> 00:24:46.240 a literary migrant. And then finally, in 2002, 00:24:46.579 --> 00:24:49.750 Daniel Arap Moi retires. The dictator is gone. 00:24:50.029 --> 00:24:52.549 The political climate in Kenya changes. It's 00:24:52.549 --> 00:24:55.230 finally safe to go home. Or so he thought. He 00:24:55.230 --> 00:24:58.549 decides to return in August of 2004. And it was 00:24:58.549 --> 00:25:00.549 supposed to be this triumphant hero's welcome. 00:25:00.970 --> 00:25:03.869 Huge crowds were expected at the airport. A month 00:25:03.869 --> 00:25:06.309 -long tour of the country was planned. He arrives 00:25:06.309 --> 00:25:09.410 with his wife in Jiri. And then the story takes 00:25:09.410 --> 00:25:12.230 a turn that is just, it's heartbreaking. It's 00:25:12.230 --> 00:25:14.789 almost too cruel to be believable. It is gut 00:25:14.789 --> 00:25:16.880 -wrenching. Just a few days after he arrives 00:25:16.880 --> 00:25:19.640 back in Nairobi, armed men break into his high 00:25:19.640 --> 00:25:21.920 -security apartment complex. This wasn't a random 00:25:21.920 --> 00:25:24.480 burglary. They knew who he was. They assaulted 00:25:24.480 --> 00:25:27.220 Njugye. They sexually assaulted his wife in front 00:25:27.220 --> 00:25:29.440 of him. They burned his face with lit cigarettes. 00:25:29.700 --> 00:25:32.319 It was an act of extreme calculated violence. 00:25:32.619 --> 00:25:35.400 Oh my God. After 22 years of dreaming of home, 00:25:35.559 --> 00:25:38.160 this is the welcome he gets. It shattered the 00:25:38.160 --> 00:25:40.799 dream and the twist. And this is something that 00:25:40.799 --> 00:25:42.799 feels like it's straight out of a dark, tragic 00:25:42.799 --> 00:25:45.299 novel, was that when the police eventually arrested 00:25:45.299 --> 00:25:48.779 three suspects, one of them was his own nephew. 00:25:49.059 --> 00:25:51.920 His nephew? Yes. The son of his brother. Right. 00:25:52.319 --> 00:25:54.140 It suggests that this might have been a politically 00:25:54.140 --> 00:25:56.799 motivated hit or maybe it was a family dispute 00:25:56.799 --> 00:25:58.740 over land that had been twisted by political 00:25:58.740 --> 00:26:01.559 forces of never fully clear. But it showed that 00:26:01.559 --> 00:26:04.500 the violence and the rot in the system hadn't 00:26:04.500 --> 00:26:06.940 just vanished because the old president was gone. 00:26:07.079 --> 00:26:09.299 And yet and this is the part that always amazes 00:26:09.299 --> 00:26:11.259 me about him. He didn't turn his back on Kenya 00:26:11.259 --> 00:26:13.539 after that. He didn't. Most people would have 00:26:13.539 --> 00:26:16.900 fled and never, ever look back. And who could 00:26:16.900 --> 00:26:19.700 blame them? But he continued to visit. He continued 00:26:19.700 --> 00:26:22.720 to engage. He continued to write Ndikuyu for 00:26:22.720 --> 00:26:25.339 the Kenyan people. He just refused to let the 00:26:25.339 --> 00:26:27.400 violence silence him, just like he refused to 00:26:27.400 --> 00:26:29.279 let the prison silence him. And it wasn't just 00:26:29.279 --> 00:26:31.799 in Kenya where he faced these indignities. There's 00:26:31.799 --> 00:26:34.599 another story from 2006 in San Francisco, of 00:26:34.599 --> 00:26:36.759 all places, that really highlights the other 00:26:36.759 --> 00:26:39.319 side of his struggle, the persistent racial dynamics 00:26:39.319 --> 00:26:41.859 in the West. The Hotel Vitale incident. This 00:26:41.859 --> 00:26:44.910 one, honestly. It just makes my blood boil every 00:26:44.910 --> 00:26:47.809 time I read about it. So here is Diego Watiango. 00:26:48.509 --> 00:26:50.789 He is a distinguished professor at the University 00:26:50.789 --> 00:26:54.410 of California, Irvine. He is a perennial Nobel 00:26:54.410 --> 00:26:57.009 contender. He is a world -renowned intellectual. 00:26:57.410 --> 00:27:00.029 He's staying at this fancy upscale hotel in San 00:27:00.029 --> 00:27:02.710 Francisco for a conference. Right. And an employee 00:27:02.710 --> 00:27:05.750 approaches him in the hotel lobby and just orders 00:27:05.750 --> 00:27:08.170 him to leave. Just assumes he's a vagrant or 00:27:08.170 --> 00:27:10.309 that he doesn't belong there. Assumes he doesn't 00:27:10.309 --> 00:27:13.180 belong. harasses him, tries to eject him from 00:27:13.180 --> 00:27:16.579 the premises. It was this stark, brutal reminder 00:27:16.579 --> 00:27:19.420 that he can be a literary giant in the classroom 00:27:19.420 --> 00:27:21.900 or at a lecture, but in the lobby of a fancy 00:27:21.900 --> 00:27:25.000 American hotel, to some people, he's still just 00:27:25.000 --> 00:27:27.390 a black man who is out of place. The sources 00:27:27.390 --> 00:27:30.089 say the African diaspora and the academic community 00:27:30.089 --> 00:27:32.650 went absolutely crazy over this. Rightfully so. 00:27:32.809 --> 00:27:36.509 It sparked this huge online debate about Professor 00:27:36.509 --> 00:27:39.369 Njege versus the Invincible Man. It just proved 00:27:39.369 --> 00:27:41.930 his point so perfectly that colonialism and its 00:27:41.930 --> 00:27:43.950 legacies aren't just about politics or land. 00:27:44.130 --> 00:27:46.019 It's about how we see each other. It's about 00:27:46.019 --> 00:27:48.299 the power of the gaze. Despite all this trauma, 00:27:48.460 --> 00:27:51.660 despite the racism, his literary output in the 00:27:51.660 --> 00:27:53.980 21st century was just incredible. It's like he 00:27:53.980 --> 00:27:56.240 never slowed down. I want to talk about Wizard 00:27:56.240 --> 00:28:00.109 of the Grove. This came out in 2006 and it is 00:28:00.109 --> 00:28:02.410 a brick of a book. It's over 700 pages long. 00:28:02.529 --> 00:28:05.450 It's this sprawling, hilarious, brilliant satire 00:28:05.450 --> 00:28:07.990 on dictatorship. It deals with a fictional ruler 00:28:07.990 --> 00:28:10.490 who gets a mysterious illness and who wants to 00:28:10.490 --> 00:28:13.170 build a tower to heaven, a literal tower of Babel, 00:28:13.190 --> 00:28:15.250 so he can speak to God directly. And he wrote 00:28:15.250 --> 00:28:18.049 the entire thing in Gikuyu first. He wrote all 00:28:18.049 --> 00:28:20.670 1 ,000 plus pages of the original manuscript 00:28:20.670 --> 00:28:23.750 in Gikuyu. And then, and this is the ultimate 00:28:23.750 --> 00:28:26.509 flex, he translated it into English himself. 00:28:27.279 --> 00:28:30.180 He was proving a point. He was showing the world 00:28:30.180 --> 00:28:32.740 that the Gikuyu language could handle complex, 00:28:32.960 --> 00:28:36.680 modern, satirical, magical, realist themes just 00:28:36.680 --> 00:28:39.279 as well as any European language could. And then 00:28:39.279 --> 00:28:41.079 much later in his life, there's The Perfect Nine 00:28:41.079 --> 00:28:43.660 in 2020. This one feels different. It feels almost 00:28:43.660 --> 00:28:46.000 like a capstone to his entire career. I think 00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:48.559 it is. It's an epic novel in verse. So it's written 00:28:48.559 --> 00:28:51.180 as poetry. And in it, he goes right back to the 00:28:51.180 --> 00:28:53.319 very beginning, to the origin myth of the Gikuyu 00:28:53.319 --> 00:28:56.029 people. The myth says that the Gikuyu people 00:28:56.029 --> 00:28:58.710 descend from the Giver Supreme, who created the 00:28:58.710 --> 00:29:01.190 father, Gikuyu, and the mother, Mumbi, and they 00:29:01.190 --> 00:29:03.230 had nine daughters. And usually in these kinds 00:29:03.230 --> 00:29:05.349 of myths, the focus is always on the men, the 00:29:05.349 --> 00:29:08.890 sons. Right, the patriarchs. But Ngegi, in his 00:29:08.890 --> 00:29:12.450 80s, decides to flip the camera. He focuses the 00:29:12.450 --> 00:29:15.210 entire story on the daughters, the perfect nine. 00:29:15.680 --> 00:29:18.700 He reimagines the very foundation of his societies 00:29:18.700 --> 00:29:21.440 being matriarchal. It's a profoundly feminist 00:29:21.440 --> 00:29:24.779 retelling of his own people's genesis. He's saying 00:29:24.779 --> 00:29:27.680 our culture is valid and beautiful, but our culture 00:29:27.680 --> 00:29:30.980 also grows and evolves. And that book made history 00:29:30.980 --> 00:29:33.380 at the International Booker Prize. It did. In 00:29:33.380 --> 00:29:36.240 2021, he became the first person ever to be nominated 00:29:36.240 --> 00:29:38.460 for the International Booker Prize as both the 00:29:38.460 --> 00:29:40.960 author and the translator of the same book. It 00:29:40.960 --> 00:29:43.319 was the ultimate validation of his entire philosophy. 00:29:43.559 --> 00:29:45.440 Which brings us to the elephant that's been in 00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:47.779 the room for this entire conversation, the Nobel 00:29:47.779 --> 00:29:50.519 Prize in Literature. The perennial bridesmaid. 00:29:50.519 --> 00:29:52.859 Every single October for something like 20 years, 00:29:52.900 --> 00:29:54.220 you'd see the articles, you'd see the betting 00:29:54.220 --> 00:29:56.519 odds, and everyone would say, this is the year, 00:29:56.619 --> 00:29:59.240 this has to be Ngege's year. It became an annual 00:29:59.240 --> 00:30:02.839 ritual. I remember in 2010, the betting markets 00:30:02.839 --> 00:30:05.460 had him as the absolute hands -down favorite. 00:30:05.559 --> 00:30:07.940 It was a sure thing. Journalists were literally 00:30:07.940 --> 00:30:10.440 camped out on his lawn in California, cameras 00:30:10.440 --> 00:30:12.559 ready, just waiting for him to get the call from 00:30:12.559 --> 00:30:14.480 Sweden. And then the Swedish Academy announced 00:30:14.480 --> 00:30:17.680 the winner was Mario Vargas Llosa. A great writer, 00:30:17.740 --> 00:30:19.980 of course. Yeah. But the sense of disappointment 00:30:19.980 --> 00:30:23.339 in Kenya, across Africa, and in the literary 00:30:23.339 --> 00:30:26.460 world was just palpable. It felt like a snub. 00:30:26.819 --> 00:30:30.809 But Mjegi's reaction to this. It tells you everything 00:30:30.809 --> 00:30:32.630 you need to know about the man's character. What 00:30:32.630 --> 00:30:35.650 did he do? He went outside to all the disappointed 00:30:35.650 --> 00:30:37.990 photographers and journalists on his lawn, and 00:30:37.990 --> 00:30:39.750 he started comforting them. He comforted the 00:30:39.750 --> 00:30:42.490 paparazzi. He was joking with them. He said things 00:30:42.490 --> 00:30:44.789 like, I'm more worried about you guys standing 00:30:44.789 --> 00:30:47.769 out here in the heat all day. He completely refused 00:30:47.769 --> 00:30:50.369 to be bitter or angry. He said his real prize 00:30:50.369 --> 00:30:54.049 was his readers. He passed away on May 28, 2025. 00:30:54.430 --> 00:30:57.269 He was 87 years old. He'd had health struggles 00:30:57.269 --> 00:30:59.529 for a while. He was a prostate cancer survivor. 00:30:59.769 --> 00:31:01.990 He'd had kidney failure. He had a triple bypass 00:31:01.990 --> 00:31:05.480 surgery in 2019. His body was failing him in 00:31:05.480 --> 00:31:08.039 his later years, but his mind, his intellect 00:31:08.039 --> 00:31:10.400 was sharp as a tack right until the very end. 00:31:10.559 --> 00:31:12.559 And when he died, the tributes, as we said, they 00:31:12.559 --> 00:31:14.440 just poured in from everywhere. Wolf Soyinka, 00:31:14.640 --> 00:31:17.160 Barack Obama, the president of Kenya. But what 00:31:17.160 --> 00:31:19.079 struck me reading through them was that people 00:31:19.079 --> 00:31:21.000 weren't just praising his storytelling. They 00:31:21.000 --> 00:31:23.759 were praising his fight. His fight against mental 00:31:23.759 --> 00:31:26.680 colonization. Exactly. He fundamentally changed 00:31:26.680 --> 00:31:29.579 the way a generation of African and post -colonial 00:31:29.579 --> 00:31:31.539 writers thought about their own tongues, their 00:31:31.539 --> 00:31:33.720 own cultures. And we should also mention... He 00:31:33.720 --> 00:31:36.140 literally passed the torch on. His children, 00:31:36.299 --> 00:31:40.200 T, Makoma, and Duke, Wanjiki, four of them are 00:31:40.200 --> 00:31:42.559 published authors. It's a literary dynasty. It 00:31:42.559 --> 00:31:44.700 is. He didn't just write books. He bred storytellers. 00:31:44.740 --> 00:31:47.400 The gene continues. So as we wrap up this deep 00:31:47.400 --> 00:31:50.099 dive, I want to try and synthesize this incredible 00:31:50.099 --> 00:31:53.940 life. We have a boy who watches his village get 00:31:53.940 --> 00:31:56.400 burned to the ground by the empire. He masters 00:31:56.400 --> 00:31:58.880 the empire's language. He becomes its literary 00:31:58.880 --> 00:32:01.579 darling. And then he rejects it all to write 00:32:01.579 --> 00:32:04.319 on toilet paper in a cage. He was beaten. He 00:32:04.319 --> 00:32:06.619 was exiled. He was ignored by the Nobel Committee. 00:32:06.799 --> 00:32:09.980 But he never, ever stopped writing. I think the 00:32:09.980 --> 00:32:11.819 through line, the one word that connects it all 00:32:11.819 --> 00:32:14.779 is dignity. He believed you cannot be a fully 00:32:14.779 --> 00:32:18.079 human, fully free person if you are viewing yourself 00:32:18.079 --> 00:32:20.319 through someone else's eyes, whether that's the... 00:32:20.359 --> 00:32:21.900 colonizer's eyes or the dictator's eyes or the 00:32:21.900 --> 00:32:24.500 racist's eyes. You have to reclaim your own vision, 00:32:24.519 --> 00:32:26.740 your own language, your own way of seeing the 00:32:26.740 --> 00:32:29.099 world. There's one final thought I want to leave 00:32:29.099 --> 00:32:30.940 our listeners with. It's a provocation that he 00:32:30.940 --> 00:32:33.519 made in an interview in 2023. People often talk 00:32:33.519 --> 00:32:35.599 about things like Kenyan English or Nigerian 00:32:35.599 --> 00:32:37.619 English or Indian English, you know, these valid 00:32:37.619 --> 00:32:41.220 local dialects. Oh, he hated that idea. He called 00:32:41.220 --> 00:32:44.339 it a normalized abnormality. He flat out said 00:32:44.339 --> 00:32:47.960 Kenyan English is nonsense. He repeated his old 00:32:47.960 --> 00:32:51.160 line. The colonized trying to claim the colonizer's 00:32:51.160 --> 00:32:54.160 language is a sign of the success of enslavement. 00:32:54.220 --> 00:32:56.339 That is a harsh thing to say. It's an uncomfortable 00:32:56.339 --> 00:32:58.960 thought. It's meant to be uncomfortable. He's 00:32:58.960 --> 00:33:01.519 asking us a very pointed question. Why are you 00:33:01.519 --> 00:33:04.519 so comfortable with the language of power? Why 00:33:04.519 --> 00:33:07.140 do you still believe that standard English is 00:33:07.140 --> 00:33:09.859 the ultimate measure of intelligence or sophistication? 00:33:10.299 --> 00:33:12.039 It's a question that doesn't have an easy answer, 00:33:12.180 --> 00:33:13.960 but I think that's what he did his whole life. 00:33:14.140 --> 00:33:16.779 He forced us all to ask the hard questions. And 00:33:16.779 --> 00:33:18.859 he showed us through his own life that you can 00:33:18.859 --> 00:33:21.099 lock a man in a cell, you can give him nothing 00:33:21.099 --> 00:33:23.319 but toilet paper to wipe himself with, and he 00:33:23.319 --> 00:33:25.079 can still write a story that will be translated 00:33:25.079 --> 00:33:27.460 into a hundred languages and will outlive the 00:33:27.460 --> 00:33:29.819 dictator who put him there. You cannot imprison 00:33:29.819 --> 00:33:38.319 an idea. Thank you for listening to The Deep 00:33:38.319 --> 00:33:39.740 Dive. We'll see you next time.