The Winter of Discontent

Mûrogi wa Kagogo (The Wizard of the Crow)
By Ngugi wa Thiong’o
324 pages, Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2004
(in Kikuyu)

August is the cruelest month in Kenya. In the highlands, around Nairobi, August is cold; the closest eastern Africa comes to winter. According to popular legend, August is a month of death and catastrophe. Presidents die in August. Terrorists bomb foreign embassies in August. Paradoxically, though, August is also the month of renewal. With schools on recess in Europe and North America, Kenyan émigrés flock home in the thousands for vacations and family reunions. It was not surprising, then, that when Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s most distinguished novelists, decided to return home to Kenya after 22 years in exile, he chose the month of August.

For Ngugi, the world’s most vocal opponent of Kenya’s recently deposed authoritarian leader, Daniel arap Moi, the voyage home was meant to be a triumphant one. In 1982, Ngugi vowed never to return to Kenya so long as Moi was in power. On a personal level, the homecoming was to be Ngugi’s first opportunity to meet his wife’s family. Indeed, the highlight of the visit was intended to be a ngurario, a traditional Kikuyu marriage ceremony. And Ngugi had another reason to celebrate: His return coincided with the publication of Mûrogi wa Kagogo (The Wizard of the Crow), his first novel in 20 years.

Five years in the making, the book is an epic story of postcolonial dictatorship. The brutal vagaries of such regimes are one of the most persistent themes in modern African literature. Ngugi revised the novel constantly over the years, taking into account the changing power struggles in Kenya, the book’s unnamed, if hardly disguised, setting.

But stories of triumphant return rarely play out as planned. For Ngugi, August would indeed be the cruelest month. On Aug. 11, 2004, the author was viciously attacked in his Nairobi hotel room by armed men, and his wife was raped. Was this an act of political revenge? Was there a connection between Ngugi’s new novel and the attack? No one knows the answers yet. The attack remains shrouded in confusion and speculation. Whatever the motive of his attackers, the assault on the author and his wife will have unintended literary consequences: All readings of Mûrogi wa Kagogo will now be framed, in part, by accounts of that terrible night.

Ngugi has said that the line between fact and fiction in postcolonial Africa is too often blurred. In his newest work, the two collide in the creation of a vicious political satire. Readers familiar with Kenya’s recent history, especially the Moi years, will easily recognize the novel’s characters and events. There is the president of the fictional republic of Abaruria, who presents himself to his people as Mwathani, or "lord and creator of humankind," despite his unspeakable corruption and moral depravity. At the beginning of the novel, the president banishes his wife, confining her to a remote village for suggesting that he stop preying on schoolgirls. The (former) first lady is imprisoned in a room where time stops. By the end of the novel, she has been transformed into a ghost. Then there are the leading government ministers, men who will go to extremes to express their adoration of the president. Some have their eyes and ears surgically enlarged so they can serve the president to the best of their abilities.

For Ngugi, facts masked in fiction can also be a source of humor. The most hilarious moments in his novel emerge when a young man named Kamiti (also the name of a Kenyan prison) returns from his university studies in India. Unable to find a job, he adopts a double identity. During the day, he is an articulate student of Indian philosophy and religion; at night, he dresses himself in sackcloth and begs for food. Soon, word spreads that Kamiti has magical powers. He is thought to be Mûrogi wa Kagogo, a legendary Kikuyu folk figure with the ability to heal and kill through witchcraft. A fiction is cultivated around the man — he is simultaneously a healer of maladies and an agent of death. Kamiti ultimately meets Nyawira, a member of the radical underground. The two work to turn traditional practices such as witchcraft and "hypnotising magic" into a political movement of resistance against the dictatorship.

The story climaxes when several thousand women "moon" the president, a gesture that is, in Kikuyu tradition, considered the ultimate humiliation. "[T]he women," Ngugi writes, "turned our face to the crowd and our backs to the dais, bent down, raised our skirts in one motion and turned our buttocks to face the president as if we were about to defecate in the stadium."

Like many African novelists, Ngugi shapes his story in part by the modernizing claims of the ruling regime, which is involved in negotiations with the "Global Bank" to finance the construction of Africa’s tallest building. In his earlier works, most notably Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross, Ngugi similarly dwelt on Africa’s rough passage into modernity, specifically through stories of secularization and the liberation of Africans from the irrationality of nature and underdevelopment. The desire for modernity again appears in Mûrogi wa Kagogo, but modern rationality and traditional irrationality are no longer set against each other. Instead, notions of witchcraft and magic are deployed both in the name of liberation and in the service of attaining power.

Mûrogi wa Kagogo is likely the author’s revenge on the regime that exiled him, destroyed his family, and repressed his writings. But after so many years in exile, how has the writer been changed by time and space? For one, the overt influence of other writers is now clearly visible. In its best scatological moments, Mûrogi wa Kagogo echoes the great Latin American novels of dictatorship by Miguel Ángel Asturias, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez. Also, for the first time, Ngugi seems open to the cultures and literatures of the so-called Global South, and especially to India, Kenya’s closest ally outside Africa. Because Ngugi’s other novels were produced during the Cold War, a time when political questions were often framed by the East-West conflict, India and the Third World tended to be of marginal importance to his narratives of global identity. In exile, after the Cold War, Ngugi discovered the "new" Third World in two of the great cities of the world, London and New York, in which the novel was conceived and written.

At the same time, Mûrogi wa Kagogo is a novel of rehearsed and familiar themes from the Ngugi canon, namely, a political elite driven by greed, corruption, and a fear of democracy. To be fair, it was written under a cloud of what once appeared to be unending dictatorship. It stands now as a vivid portrait of postcolonialism and the banality of evil. In Kenya’s new age of democracy, it will be read as a postmortem on a painful period in the country’s history.