Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Quotes

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

Then the white men had come, preaching a strange religion, strange ways, which all men followed. The tribe's code of behaviour was broken.

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.

Written words can also sing.

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 in to 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 another to guess the same riddle day after day: 'Oh, for a piece of one of those!'

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.

But, somehow, in time, I began to connect a few threads, and things became clearer as if I was emerging from a mist. I learned that our land was not quite our land; that our compound was part of a property owned by an African landlord, Lord Reverend Stanley Kahahu, or Bwana Stanley, as we called him; that we were now the ahoi, tenants at will. How did we come to be ahoi on our own land? Had we lost our traditional land to Europeans? The mist had not cleared entirely.

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.

If in these essays I criticise the Afro-European (or Euroafrican) choice of our linguistic praxis, it is not to take away from the talent and the genius of those who have written in English, French or Portuguese. On the contrary I am lamenting a neo-colonial situation which has meant the European bourgeoisie once again stealing our talents and geniuses as they have stolen our economies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages and all its patriotic writers.”

Gikonyo greedily sucked sour pleasure from this reflection which he saw as a terrible revelation. To live and die alone is the ultimate truth.

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.

Koina talked of seeing the ghosts of the colonial past still haunting Independent Kenya. And it was true that those now marching in the streets of Nairobi were not the soldiers of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army but of the King’s African Rifles, the very colonial forces who had been doing on the battlefield what Jackson was doing in churches.

The man who had suffered so much had further revealed his greatness in modesty. By refusing to lead, Mugo had become a legendary hero.

Stay well, Son. Go well and in peace, Mother.

African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries.