Wa Thiong'o Quotes

Written words can also sing.

The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.

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

Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb

Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.

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

Stories, like food, lose their flavor if cooked in a hurry.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

Our people think: I , Wangari, a Kenyan by birth - how can I be a vagrant in my own country as if I were a foreigner.

He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.

Your own actions are a better mirror of your life than the actions of all your enemies put together.

Prescription of the correct cure is dependent on a rigorous analysis of the reality.

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

... for I had reached a point in my life when I came to view words differently. A closer look at language could reveal the secret of life.

This land used to yield. Rains used not to fail. What happened?’ inquired Ruoro. It was Muturi who answered. ‘You forget that in those days the land was not for buying. It was for use. It was also plenty, you need not have beaten one yard over and over again.

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

Life, struggle, even amidst pain and blood and poverty, seemed beautiful.

Surely my mother could do anything to which she set her mind

Unshed tears of an unrequited desire for vengeance are exhausting and require privacy.

I believe that black has been oppressed by white; female by male; peasant by landlord; and worker by lord of capital. It follows from this that the black female worker and peasant is the most oppressed. She is oppressed on account of her color like all black people in the world; she is oppressed on account of her gender like all women in the world; and she is exploited and oppressed on account of her class like all workers and peasants in the world. Three burdens she has to carry.

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism

The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent.

That was one of the most rewarding things about spending nights in the open. Birds were bound to wake you up, and whether they carried good or bad luck, at least they woke you up with music.

What Waringa tried hard to avoid was looking at the pictures of the walls and windows of the church. Many of the pictures showed Jesus in the arms of the virgin Mary or on the cross. But others depicted the devil, with two cow-like horns and a tail like a monkey's, raising one leg in a dance of evil, while his angels, armed with burning pitchforks, turned over human beings on a bonfire. The Virgin Mary, Jesus and God's angels were white, like European, but the devil and his angels were black.

As she stared at them, Waringa noted that their skins were indeed red, like that of pigs or like the skin of a black person who has been scalded with boiling water or who has burned himself with acid creams. Even the hair in their arms and necks stood out stiff and straight like the bristle of an aging hog.

Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.' 'I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.' 'Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!' 'I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …' 'I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?

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.

...it would be good to reconcile all these antagonisms.

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

A task is a burden only when it has not been tackled.

For literature, all the world is a stage.

Luckily for me, I loved books. Books can enlighten but can also benight, but at least one can play one off against another.

The real aim of colonialism was to control the people’s wealth, what they produced, how they produced it,” Ngūgī wa Thiong’o sees the way that control was introduced and managed was to deconstruct the people’s sense of self and replace it with that of the colonizer. This would occur when a people’s perception of themselves and their world was overthrown.

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

It is rather that I believe in the reality of what’s being named more than in the name itself.

Woman is the mother of life, For she is the one who carries the womb of life. Woman is the carrier of creation. We show her gratitude always.

Truth never dies.

It's terrible when the old have to bury the young. But it is more terrible when neither the old nor the young are there to bury each other.

It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.

But when did this anger take root? When snakes first appeared on the national scene? When water in the bowels of the earth turned bitter? Or when he visited America and failed to land an interview with Global Network News on its famous program Meet the Global Mighty? It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air, he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his every moment - eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose - captured on camera.

Hoy a los niños se les enseña a cerrar los ojos y a bloquear los oídos para que nunca vean las necesidades del pueblo ni oigan sus gemidos. El que solía oír, hoy se ha convertido en sordo. El resultado de esos colegios son aquellos de quienes se dice: «¡Lástima de esta generación, porque tienen ojos y no pueden ver, y tienen oídos y no pueden oír!». Porque se les ha enseñado a ver y oír un solo mundo.

How does a writer, a novelist, shock his readers by telling them that these are neo-slaves when they themselves, the neo-slaves, are openly announcing the fact on the rooftops? How do you shock your readers by pointing out that these are mass murderers, looters, robbers, thieves, when they, the perpetrators of these anti-people crimes, aren’t even attempting to hide the fact? When in some cases they are actually and proudly celebrating their massacre of children, and the theft and robbery of the nation? How do you satirise their utterances and claims when their own words beat all fictional exaggerations?

The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head. Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn't they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance.

Munira relished twilight as a prelude to that awesome shadow. He looked forward to the unwilled immersion into people, huts, without consciously choosing the links. To choose involved effort, decision, preference of one possibility, and this could be painful. He had chosen not to choose . . .

They argue that the modern world was created by private capital. The subcontinent of India, for instance, was owned by the British East India Company, Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company, our neighbors by the British East Africa Company, and the Congo Free State by a one man corporation. Corporate capital was aided by missionary societies. What private capital did then it can do again; own and reshape the Third World in the image of the West without the slightest blot, blemish, or blotch. NGOs will do what the missionary charities did in the past. The world will no longer be composed of the outmoded twentieth-century divisions of East, West, and a directionless Third. The world will become one corporate globe divided into the incorporating and incorporated...to become the first voluntary corporate colony, the first in a new global order..with NGOs relieving us of social services, the country becomes your real estate.

Solomon's suitors for myrrh and frankincense; Zeu's children in a royal hunt for the seat of the sun-god of the Nile; scouts and emissaries from Genghis Khan; Arab geographers and also hunters for slaves and ivory; soul and gold merchants from Gaul and from Bismark's Germany; land-pirates and human game-hunters from Victorian and Edwardian England: they had all passed here bound for a kingdom of plenty, driven sometimes by holy zeal, sometimes by genuine thirst for knowledge and the quest for the spot where the first man's umbilical cord was buried, but more often by mercenary commercial greed and love of the wanton destruction of those with a slightly different complexion from theirs.

This country, our country, is pregnant. What it will give birth to, only God knows... Imagine! the children of us workers are fated to stay out in the sun, thirsty, hungry, naked, gazing at fruit ripening on trees which they can' t pick even to quieten a demanding belly! Fated to see food steaming in the pantry, but unable to dip a calabash into the pot to scoop out even a tiny portion Fated to lie awake all night telling each another stories about tears and sorrow, asking one and other to guess the same riddle day after day: "oh, for a piece of one of those" 'Ripe bananas!' Wangari replied, as if Muturi had asked her a real riddle. 'Oh for some of that ' Muturi said. 'Fresh, cool water in a cave that belongs to another,' Wangari replied again.

For the first 3 weeks of that month, I was also under internal segregation. This simply meant that no other political prisoner was allowed near me. During meals, I was made to sit apart from the others, often with a guard between us. During my ration of sunshine, I had to sit in my corner, often with a watchful guard to ensure that there was no talking or other contact between me & any of the others. Because we were all on the same block it wasn't easy for the warders to enforce total segregation. The other political prisoners would break through the cordon by shouting across to me or by finding any & every excuse for going past where I was sitting & hurriedly throwing in one or two words of solidarity...This was always touching coming from people who were in no better conditions.

Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle … The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.

ليست اللغة مجرد مجموعة مصفوفة من الأصوات. بل اللغة هي الناس الذين يتكلمونها. ولم تكن قضية كتابتي كما هي في ظاهرها فحسب: أي أنني أثريت الإنجليزية على حساب الغيكويو. لقد كان الأمر في حقيقته أني سلبت من الناس الذين صنعوا الغيكويو وعبقريتها قدرتهم على قراءة واستدعاء تاريخهم إلا عبر لسان المستعمر الأجنبي. لم أكن أفكر بهذا في بداية الطريق فقد كنت مبتهجاً حين أرى نفسي ناشراً بالإنجليزية، والصحافة الإنجليزية تستعرض أعمالي في إفريقيا وخارجها. لكن السؤال الذي بدأ يؤرقني هو: أنا أكتب لمن؟!

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.

… and there was much blood, many motherless, many maimed legs, many broken homes and all because a few hungry souls sick with greed wanted everything for themselves. They took the virtues that arise from that as true virtues of the human heart. They practised charity, pity; they even made laws and rules of good conduct for those they had made motherless, for those they had driven into the streets. Tell me … would we need pity, charity, generosity, kindness if there were no poor and miserable to pity and be kind to?

Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life, the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern factories where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human.

For a detained patriot, breaking through the doubled walls of gray silence, attempting even a symbolic link with the outside world, is an act of resistance And resistance--even at the level of merely asserting one's rights, of maintaining one's ideological beliefs in the face of a programmed onslaught--is in fact the only way political prisoners can maintain their sanity and humanity. Resistance is the only means of trying to prevent a breakdown. The difficulty lies in the fact that in this effort one must rely first and foremost on one's own resources (writing defiance on toilet paper for instance), and nobody can teach one how to do it.

El blanco habló de otro país más allá del mar donde una mujer poderosa se sentaba en el trono, mientras los hombres y las mujeres bailaban a la sombra de su autoridad y benevolencia. Ella estaba dispuesta a extender su sombra para cubrir a los agikuyu. Se rieron de este hombre excéntrico, cuya piel estaba tan escaldada que el negro de fuera se había pelado. El agua caliente le debía de haber afectado a la cabeza [...] Más tarde, o eso decían, Waiyaki había sido enterrado vivo en Kibwezi con la cabeza apuntando al centro de la tierra, un aviso viviente para quienes, en años venideros, osaran desafiar la autoridad de la mujer cristiana cuya sombra protectora dominaba ahora tierra y mar. Entonces nadie se dio cuenta: pero mirando hacia atrás pudimos ver que la sangre de Waiyaki contenía una semilla, un grano, que dio origen a un movimiento cuya mayor fortaleza, desde ese día, nacía del vínculo con la tierra.

Then, only then, would the kingdom of man and woman really begin, joying and loving in creative labour.

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

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

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...

The dynamic inter-linkage of art forms in orature is thus seen as reflecting a Weltanschauung that assumes the normality of the connection between nature, nurture, supernatural, and supernurtural. I

Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Prayer after all is a form of begging and it was the cornerstone of all religions. Ask and it shall be given. Everyday followers of the different faiths, whether named after Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha, get on their knees and beg god for this or that. They pray that their Lord and Master will hear their cry. Yes, prayers are blessed. Begging is blessed. Among the followers of Buddha, the holiest are known by their vows of poverty, and they are sustained in the path of holiness by begging. Didn't Buddha himself renounce the trappings of wealth for a life and begging and purity?

Words are the food, body, mirror, and sound of thought. Do you now see the danger of words that want to come out but are unable to do so?

There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism now would be an error. There was a time when the cold war dicated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has the chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands.

A year as an inmate in Kamĩtĩ has taught me what should have been obvious: that the prison system is a repressive weapon in the hands of a ruling minority to ensure maximum security for its class dictatorship over the rest of the population, and it is not a monopoly exclusive to England and South Africa.

I am drowning: what use would be looking back to the shore from which I fell?

What's a state of emergency?' a man asked. 'Oh, don't ask a foolish question. Haven't you heard about Malaya?' 'What about it?' 'There was a state of emergency.

Then he raised his voice and went on: 'Verily I say unto you. This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled...' It was as if darkness too had fallen into the building and there was no one to light the way.

Ngotho had never known where the other son had gone to. Now he understood. He wanted to tell of his own son: he longed to say, 'You took him away from me'. But he kept quiet. Only he thought Mr Howlands should not complain. It had been his war.

No. He'll remain here. But - but - you sometimes get a feeling you're going away from someone forever...

أؤمن أن لكل لغة عبقريتها. ولا يهمّ هنا كم عدد أولئك الذين يتكلمون هذه اللغة أو تلك فعماد عبقرية اللغة ليس على الأرقام.

Everything owns a sound, loud or soft. When sound hits a thing, it comes back an echo. Mumbi said -Everything sends back a sound, however soft. If you listen to an echo with care, you can tell where it is coming from. The ear is the eye of the soul. It sorts out the sound and the echo and tells us what makes the sound and where it is coming from

Often, when I’m alone in a hut thatched with grass and bracken and it is raining or the wind is blowing, or when I’m on my own at night and the moon is shining down on the land, I can hear the many voices gone, the many voices now living, the many voices to come, all signing to me in whispers. At times like those I feel I am just about to catch the tune, the rhythm and the theme of the music I have always longed to write. But it drifts away, carried on the waves of the wind.

No man or woman can choose their biological nationality. The conflicts between peoples cannot be explained in terms of that which is fixed (the invariables). Otherwise the problems between any two peoples would always be the same at all times and places; and further, there would never be any solution to social conflicts except through a change in that which is permanently fixed, for example through genetic or biological transformation of the actors.

It seems it is the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in the metropolises of the western world

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

To build calls for hard work, From the one who looks to tomorrow. To destroy is easy work, For one who wants to return to yesterday, Like a grown person wishing to remain a child.

Human-to-human cruelty is worse than that of beast to human. Worse still is the cruelty among neighbors when it drives them To raise machetes, spears, arrows, and clubs against one another.

Disability of the body does not mean disability of the heart and mind.

But our time has come. Tomorrow we are going on a journey. We are going back to the mountain from which we came. In case we don't return, I leave you with these words: "Don't look for me in wicked deeds. Don't look for me in theft and robbery. Don't look for me in idleness. Don't look for me in senseless violence. Don't look for me in hatred. Don't look for me in meaningless wars. Don't look for me in bloodletting strife, For my name must not be in the mouths Of those plotting wicked deeds." Mũmbi said: "Look for me in the water. Look for me in the wind. Look for me in the soil. Look for me in the fire— Even in the sun, Even in the stars. Look for me in the rain. Look for me among the tillers. Look for me in the harvests. "Look for me in love. Look for me in unity. Look for me among the helping. Look for me among the oppressed. Look for me among the seekers of justice, Those who give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty. Look for me among those helping the ailing. Look for me among them without clothes and shelter. Look for me among those building the nation in the name of the human." Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi said in unison: "If you do that, We are together with you Now and all the days, life without end.

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

The church, with its eternal call for submissive trust and blind obedience,

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

This is what this book on the politics of language in African literature has really been about: national, democratic and human liberation. The call for rediscovery and the resumption of our language is a call for a regenerative reconnection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being. That struggle beings wherever we are; in whatever we do: then we become part of those millions whom Martin Carter once saw sleeping not to dream but dreaming to change the world.

There is a saying that when a bird in flight gets tired, it will land on any tree

The present is born of the power plays of the past.

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.

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 whose aim is to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow, asking ourselves abut the future of our children, and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes, encouraging us to care only for our stomachs today, without thinking about the tomorrow of our country.