Ngugi Quotes

Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow [...] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes

with me,it is 'better never than late

If poverty was to be sold three cents today, i can't buy it.

If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe ... then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.’25

Being is one thing; becoming aware of it is a point of arrival by an awakened consciousness and this involves a journey.

Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.

El agua que bebo, la comida que como, la ropa que uso, la cama donde duermo; todo está determinado por la política, sea ésta buena o mala. La

In the theatre that I was used to in school and colleges and in amateur circles, the actors rehearsed more or less in secrecy and then sprung their finished perfection. on an unsuspecting audience who were of course surprised into envious admiration: oh, what perfection, what talent, what inspired gifts - I certainly could never do such a thing! Such a theatre is part of the general bourgeois education system which practices education as a process of weakening people, of making them feel they cannot do this or that - oh, it must take such brains! - In other words education as a means of mystifying knowledge and hence reality. Education, far from giving people -the confidence in their ability and capacities to overcome obstacles or to become masters of the laws governing external nature as human beings, tends to make them feel their inadequacies, their weaknesses and their incapacities in the face of reality; and their inability to do anything about the conditions governing their lives. They become more and more alienated from themselves and from their natural and social environment. Education as a process of alienation produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers. The Olympian gods of the Greek mythology or the dashing knights of the middle ages are reborn in the -twentieth century as superstar politicians, scientists, sportsmen, actors, the handsome doers or heroes, with the ordinary people watching passively, gratefully, admiringly.

Blackness is not all that makes a man, Kamau said bitterly. There are some people, be they black or white, who don't want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed. That is what's wrong with all these carpenters and men who have a certain knowledge. It is the same with rich people. A rich man does not want others to get rich because he wants to be the only man with wealth.

The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently—even jarringly—experienced in a deliberately understated, self-consciously unidiomatic and austere language. In Ngugi the white man recedes in importance—he is compressed into a single missionary figure emblematically called Livingstone—although his influence is felt in the divisions that separate the villages, the riverbanks, and the people from one another. In the internal conflict ravaging Waiyaki’s life, Ngugi powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain. A new pattern, suppressed in Heart of Darkness, appears, out of which Ngugi generates a new mythos, whose tenuous course and final obscurity suggest a return to an African Africa. And in Tayb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Conrad’s river is now the Nile, whose waters rejuvenate its peoples, and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed, first through the use of Arabic; second in that Salih’s novel concerns the northward voyage of a Sudanese to Europe; and third, because the narrator speaks from a Sudanese village.

—El mundo no tiene corazón. —Entonces hay que cambiar el mundo. Darle

Hay una gran belleza en el hombre vestido de percal y calzado con sandalias, sin más armas que un bastón para andar y su credo de la no violencia, que se enfrenta al poderoso imperio británico, ¿no

Hay algunos que aman su historia y el color de su piel, y hay otros que odian su historia y el color de su piel...

Por abundantes que fueran los peces en el mar, se necesitaba una red o un sedal y un anzuelo, como mínimo.

Tus propias acciones son un espejo mejor de tu vida que todas las acciones juntas de tus enemigos.

Democracy is a really complex phenomenon. It involves the right of a people to criticise freely without being detained in prison. It involves a people being aware of all their rights. It involves the rights of a people to know how the wealth is produced in the country, who controls that wealth, and for whose benefit that wealth is being utilised. Democracy involves therefore people being aware of the forces shaping their lives. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, quoted in ‘Ngugi wa Thiong'o Still Bitter Over his Detention’, Weekly Review, 5 January 1979