Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

African Literature … Says Who?

Author(s): Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Charles Cantalupo
Source: Transition, No. 120, You Are Next (2016), pp. 4-21
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research at Harvard University
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 Reverted.
Oil and mixed
media on digital
polyester inkjet
plate. 64.7 ×
51 cm. ©2015
Paul Onditi.
Image courtesy
of the artist and
ARTLabAfrica.

4 DOI 10.2979/transition.120.1.02 • Transition 120

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African Literature . . . Says Who?
the last fifty years with Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o

Charles Cantalupo

Writer Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o sits down with poet, translator and scholar, Charles
Cantalupo to discuss the evolution that’s occurred within Africa’s literary land-
scape in the twenty-three years since their initial conversation in 1993. Ngũgı̃
wa Thiong’o, a longtime advocate for the use of African languages within
African literature, explains his notion of the Europhone tradition, his thoughts
on literary identity theft, and the ways we might conceive of the progress that
has been made by Africans to reckon with the cultural aftermath of imperialism.
This interview took place on April 24, 2015 as a part of the Warscapes Public
Lecture Series at The New School. The full interview can be viewed at www​
.warscapes.com/videos.

Charles Cantalupo: To cite a passage from your book of essays, Some-

thing Torn and New (2009):

I always remember how, upon learning how to read

in English, my classmates and I would carry the En-
glish-language Bible to church. The service was entirely
in Gı̃kũyũ. Everybody else had the Gı̃kũyũ-language Bi-
ble. The preacher read passages from the Gı̃kũyũ-lan-
guage Bible. But we who had been to school would
follow him through our English text. The Gı̃kũyũ voice
had to come to us in English sounds. . . . This was to
become the practice in African writing as well . . . 

What do you mean by the “Gı̃kũyũ voice” that came to you “in English
sounds?” How does this dynamic become a paradigm of “the practice in
African writing as well?” What are the differences between that “voice” in
English sounds and the “voice” in Gı̃kũyũ itself?
Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o: The voice is that which my mother gave me. The
conquering sound is that of the colonial. After the conquest my voice
came to me swaddled in English sounds. Or rather the voice that my

Cantalupo • African Literature . . . Says Who?5

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 mother gave me was buried under the English sounds. It could only be
heard through English.
Let me tell you more about the voice that my mother gave me. First
it was oral. All languages are oral. The literary always mimics the oral. At
night and around the fireside, this voice reached me in the form of sto-
ries. We were told that stories went away in daytime. Where did they go?
We didn’t know. Fortunately, they always came back in the night, after
all the chores of the day. My mother did not know how to read or write.
But she had a dream of education—an education for me. Even though
We were told that stories she didn’t know how to read or write, she
supervised my homework. She always want-
went away in daytime. ed to know how well I had done. If I told
Where did they go? We her I had a 100% in something, she would
ask, “Is it the best? The best you could have
didn’t know. Fortunately,
done?” The question became a constant
they always came back refrain, an aspiration. And thus I learned to
in the night, after all write and read. In Gı̃kũyũ language.
And then the magic. The stories came
the chores of the day. back in daytime. I could now tell stories to
myself regardless of the time of day. It was thanks to my mother. I read
the stories in the Gı̃kũyũ translation of the Bible, the Old Testament.
Today when I hear the song “Amazing Grace” and the line “I once was
blind, but now I see,” I remember that time when I learned how to read
through my mother’s efforts. How did I repay her? Consider my first
novel, Weep Not, Child (1964). It was my own life, but it was not written
in my mother’s voice. I wrote it in another language. This is the contra-
diction I was trying to capture in the passage from Something Torn and
New (2009) that you quoted. Instead of accepting that we had a good
language and that through it we could read along with the people
around us, we acted special—feigned foreign.
This encapsulates the central contradiction in much of the writing
from the continent. I call it Europhone African literature. This is the
literature written by Africans but in European tongues. Some of what I
have written—Weep Not, Child; The River Between (1965); A Grain of Wheat
(1967); Petals of Blood (1977); and even my memoirs and my literary and
critical theory—is part of the Europhone tradition.
In reality there is another literature, another tradition that is deep
and long and found throughout Africa in African languages: in Ge’ez,
Amharic, Hausa, Kiswahili, Luganda, IsiZulu and isiXhosa, Shona,
Yoruba, and in many other African languages. But its voice has been
muffled; its identity stolen. We all are aware of and talk about “identity
theft.” But what about literary identity theft? Europhone African literature
has stolen the identity of African literature; it wears the mask of African

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literature. It is a good example of literary identity theft, a phenomenon
that is now global, a maturation of the colonial.

Cantalupo: Identity theft, in literature. Maybe the world is catching up to

you, Ngũgı̃. Way back in an interview from the early 1980s that was revised
and republished in 1996, you state:

I have come to the view that literature written by Afri-

cans in foreign languages like French, English, Spanish,
Danish . . . etc. falls into a category of its own. It is a
misnomer to call it African literature. It can only be
called Afro-European literature in general and more
particularly Afro-Saxon literature when the literature
is written by Africans in the English language, or Af-
ro-French literature that is written by Africans in the
French language. According to the new view, African
literature is that literature written by Africans in African
languages like Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Swahili, Gı̃kũyũ,
etc.—languages that are indigenous to Africa.

This viewpoint prevails in your work ever since. In 1986, you call “the
tradition of African literature in English, French, and Portuguese,” in Eu-
rophone and colonial languages, “a minority
tradition. It has no right usurping the term We all are aware of and
‘African literature.’ In years to come it will be talk about “identity
in footnotes when people talk about African
Literature.” Your comment about “footnotes” theft.” But what
reminds me of the current status of elaborate about literary identity
poems written in Latin during the European theft? Europhone
Renaissance or Early Modern Era. Almost no
one reads them, even in graduate school, that African literature has
is, even among the few who read Latin. Are stolen the identity
you forecasting a time when reading African
authors who only write in English, French, or
of African literature;
other colonial languages will look as obtuse it wears the mask of
as someone only reading authors who write African literature.
in Latin during the European Renaissance?
Then again, I ask myself, what would be known about it without European
vernacular writers like Petrarch, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne,
Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, and more, if only their Latin-composing
contemporaries were read?

Cantalupo • African Literature . . . Says Who?7

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 A Leap in
Time. Oil and
mixed media on
digital polyester
inkjet plate. 64.8
× 51 cm. ©2015
Paul Onditi.
Image courtesy
of the artist and
ARTLabAfrica.

From a different perspective, nevertheless, you have given African liter-

ature in European languages high praise. From a technical standpoint, you
have applauded the intertextuality of Europhone African literature, even
claiming to have used this yourself in A Grain of Wheat. You have also called
for the translation of European African literature into African languages.
You have also written, for example, in your most recent book of essays, In
the Name of the Mother (2013):

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 African literature in European languages is the nearest
thing we have to Pan-African common literary inheri-
tance. . . . They have . . . enabled a dialogue between
Africans of the continent and the diaspora. In short,
they belong to the continent as much as to the nations
of their origin. You have only to see the reverence with
which African writers are held in every part of the con-
tinent to realize the validity of the claim. I can testify to
that. I have been stopped in the streets of Zimbabwe,
Ghana, Nigeria, by people who have never seen me
before to say what my books have meant to them.

You further add, “Take any major African writers, say Ama Ata Aidoo or
. . . Wole Soyinka. If you travel anywhere in Africa, be it Zimbabwe, South
African, Kenya or wherever, people . . . do not say, ‘This is a Ghanaian writ-
er’ or ‘That is a Nigerian writer.’ They rather see them as African writers
wherever they go.” Isn’t this a conundrum? Isn’t such recognition the result
of their works primarily being known in European languages that themselves
are pan-African, in many cases even more than African languages them-
selves? Critics and readers have been defensive, dismissive, and intimidated
by your distinctions between African language literature and Europhone
literature. Why shouldn’t they be?
Ngũgı̃: When I talk about literary identity theft, it’s not to demean the
actual quality of the work produced in European languages. In fact,
the quality of the work that has been produced by members of my
generation who, for example, learned English many years after already
speaking African languages, is amazing. Later generations may be dif-
ferent, too, in that there are some African writers who write in English
because English in reality is their mother tongue, meaning that their
parents brought them up as English-speaking children. This doesn’t
take away from the genius of what is produced.
The question of literary identity theft is not peculiar to Africa. Let’s talk
about the well-known Irish writer, James Joyce. He could speak many
languages—Greek, Latin, Italian, even some Japanese. Living in Italy
for some time, he wrote for Italian newspapers in Italian. He published
in Italian. He was aware of the problem. The English translation of one
of his Italian articles is called “Ireland at the Bar.” It tells the story of an
Irish man who is arrested and accused of murder but who only speaks
Gaelic and no English. The trial is in English, but everything he answers
and tries to explain is translated as “No, your honor.” As a result, he
is found guilty and hanged. Joyce could see the problematic relation
between Gaelic or Irish and English, but he wanted to be seen more as

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a European than Irish. It was as if Ireland was not part of Europe. Joyce
chose to write in English. He is a part of this tradition of Europhone
literature or, in this case, Anglophone. In Finnegan’s Wake (1939), Joyce
tries to smuggle Gaelic words and expressions into the narrative. This
does a lot for English, but it does nothing for Gaelic.
Let’s compare Joyce with a contemporary Irish writer, Nuala Ní
Dhomhnaill. She has degrees in English, speaks and reads Turkish,
French, and German. She is almost a replica of Joyce, but she chooses
to write in Irish. She is always asked the question: why do you write in
Irish? If so much of what is written in English is called Irish literature,
she responds, what do I call the literature actually written in Irish by
the Irish? In one of her most brilliant essays, “Why I Choose to Write
in Irish” (1995), Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill says she will not sit idly by and
let the identity of Irish literature be stolen.
Advances in technology have made stolen identities possible. It is
a serious crime that can affect nations and peoples. Even at personal
survival level! Stealing your identity, someone can access your bank ac-
count. You go to your bank and ask for your money, and you are told,
“You’ve already taken it.” You will say, “No, no, that’s not me.” Literary
identity theft is as serious as what has been called stolen identity.

Cantalupo: James Joyce came up in our first interview in 1993. I talked

about language as his homeland, and you were skeptical. Languages were
as much a matter of social communities, I recall you saying, as personal
acquisition of the languages one uses in a novel or a poem. You insisted on
the connection between the suppression of a language by economic or mil-
itary means and the effect on the individual. You wondered how you could
have a language that did not have community of speakers. I answered that
maybe Joyce worked towards a language of no one’s world, which could be
a kind of lonely solace—and a Modernist monument—like Finnegan’s Wake.
But you weren’t hearing that. Instead you brought up Ireland’s long colonial
history in relation to England and the West in general: a reality—an Irish
reality—that you thought Joyce might not have fully considered. Joyce, of
course, lived in a kind of exile and never returned either to Ireland or the
Irish language. You have had the experience of exile, too.
Ngũgı̃: I’m not a Joycean scholar, but his was a chosen exile—he want-
ed to be European, although I don’t fully understand what that means
since Ireland is an integral part of Europe. But the Europe he identified
with, for example, Italy, was the Europe of the empire: the Europe that
colonized Africa; the Europe that colonized Ireland. Which Europe did
he want to be a part of? I’m not talking about the quality or the genius
of his work but the implications of his linguistic choice. He ran away

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from his Irish self, but one can also argue that his English works contain
a longing for the Irish he chose to runaway from.

Cantalupo: Back to identity theft. When someone steals something,

you want it back. You gave a talk a few days ago called, “Decolonizing the
mind—are we there yet?” When the Against All Odds conference was
held in 2000 in Eritrea, you said that one of its most significant outcomes
was the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures because
it settled once and for all the African language question. When I heard
the title of your talk, I wanted to ask you about the ascendancy of African
languages—“Are we there yet?” Yet we find that more often than not the
struggle of African languages is emphasized. For example, ninety percent
of all the books in African languages have been published since 2000. To
take another example, there was a moment during a conference I attended
last summer at Kenyatta University. A young woman, one of the plenary
speakers, stood up and asked a group of nearly two hundred young African
language scholars, “Have any of you ever been colonized?” They roared in
response, “No!” I had never heard that kind of response. I also found that
there is so much African language literature and scholarship that is going on
that we in the United States and Europe are not aware of. In this respect,
the study of African languages and literatures is not the same in both places
and is almost like a different discipline. Perhaps this is natural and should
be expected. It is less of a struggle there and more plentiful. Your now
longstanding Gı̃kũyũ journal, Mũtiiri, is online, there are all kinds of African
language apps for cell phones, and hip-hop thrives in African languages.
There is a lot now that wasn’t going on in 2000. If more people knew that
African identity in this respect is being taken back, I wonder if there would
be as much alarm that it has been stolen? There is more than one front in
the struggle, and there are different levels of success.
Ngũgı̃: I always like to add that as a writer I have absolutely nothing
against English. I like all languages. They are marvelous. I’m now learn-
ing Español on YouTube. I try to learn French. It is very beautiful. I am
learning several greetings in Chinese and other languages. When I went
to Wales, I wanted someone to teach me some Welch so that I could at
least read the road signs. I value all languages. What I reject—what has
become more and more anathema to me—is a hierarchy of languages:
as if some languages inherently have more than other languages. This is
imperial nonsense. All languages are capable of expressing the highest
beauty. Instead of in a hierarchy, languages should relate to one anoth-
er in a network of give and take. In that sense, there isn’t such a thing as
a big or small language. A network and a hierarchy exhibit a different
kind of relationship. Hierarchy is a question of power. Network is a
question of give and take.

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 Swarm of
Words. Wa-
tercolor, transfer
and pen and ink
on paper. 77 ×
53.5 cm. ©2015
Paul Onditi.
Image courtesy
of the artist and
ARTLabAfrica.

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 The irony is that, in Africa, there has always been a tradition of
writing in African languages. The translation of Thomas Mofolo’s Cha-
ka (1925) originally written in Sotho had an impact on the work of
Léopold Sédar Senghor. Kiswahili language in terms of poetry and
recently in the novel has a highly developed literary history, but its very
identity as an African literature is buried under this other identity of
European literature. Europhonity becomes Africanity, and what about
the Africanity of Kiswahili and Yoruba and isiZulu?
The term Europhone African literature is not necessarily a neg-
ative. It is a correct description of a global phenomenon, a cultural
aftermath of imperialism. There is Asian Europhone literature. Pacific
Europhone literature, too. This Europhone tradition has its own iden-
tity. What is wrong and offensive is when it takes on the identity of the
other, in what I have called literary identity theft. It doggedly refuses to
recognize and accept its literary self as Europhone. It demands that
literature in African languages beg for recognition, beg back its own
name. “Europhonity” is, of course, a reality. In Africa there is Anglo-
phone, Europhone, Francophone, Lusophone, Spanophone. Depart-
ments of literature all over the world can really help by calling writing
by Africans in European languages by its correct name, Europhone
African literature, which is part of worldwide Europhone literature.

Cantalupo: You mention hierarchies. For all the advances, progress,

health, and robustness of African language study and literature, it is still
against some staggering odds. Google “African literature,” and the “Go-
odreads” list of popular African literature books lists your latest novel,
Wizard of the Crow (2006), at #81. There are no other African language
books or translations in the first one hundred and fifty. More specifically,
Googling “African literature books,” I find in the first fifty that there are
only two that were first published in African languages: Nawal El Saadawi’s
Women at Point Zero (1975) and, perhaps surprisingly, Okot p’Bitek’s Song
of Lawino (1966). The project to list “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th
Century” is little better. Amazon’s list of “African bestsellers”—the first
100: you don’t even want to go there. I work in translating African language
poetry, and websites that might be supposed to have a sampling of such
work are disappointing. The UK Poetry Translation Centre has work in
only three African languages, and the Poetry Society has next to nothing.
The United States’ Poetry Foundation also has nothing. Even the School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London website only has
.2% African languages. Wasafiri and Callaloo, British and American journals
that are supposed to have a strong connection to African cultures, have
next to nothing, too. I could go on, but discretion here might be the better
part of valor. Under the Soviet regime of Stalin in the 1930s, 1500 writers
were executed: 750 of them were Ukrainian. They are called an “executed

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 Renaissance.” You have spoken of the history of African language writers,
the odds against them, and we devoted the conference in Asmara to them.
Surely there has been an executed Renaissance in African literature.
Ngũgı̃: The key and cause for hope is that despite hundreds of years of
imperial and neo-colonial repression, African languages have refused
to die. At the conference we had in Eritrea, where we produced the
Asmara Declaration in African Languages
These days the resources and Literatures: even for me, an advocate
that go to prizes to of literature in African languages—I was to-
tally amazed by the number of writers in Af-
promote African rican languages. I didn’t know where they
literature are given on all came from. You did all the groundwork,
the condition that [the so you knew! They came from Ghana, Ivory
Coast, North Africa, South Africa, East Af-
work] is not written in rica. We were all there, in Eritrea—writers
an African language. who primarily wrote in African languages.
I could make that claim, too. I was editing
the journal Mũtiiri in Gı̃kũyũ and was now writing all my novels in
Gı̃kũyũ. It was a beautiful thing to see. But to get the resources, even
within Africa, or to get the gathering going again, there is a problem.
These days the resources that go to African literary prizes to promote
African literature are given on the condition that it is not written in an
African language: a prize to encourage African writers but they cannot
write in their African languages if they want to submit their work. Gov-
ernments in Africa and financial institutions like the World Bank have
policies that are aligned to ensure that European languages remain the
dominant languages of education, intellectual production, and literary
production.

Cantalupo: This makes me wonder how we got the World Bank to give us
funding for the conference. We weren’t very threatening, perhaps. Yet we
made sure the conference hall had the equipment to translate the plenary
sessions into six African languages. We produced your play, I Will Marry
When I Want (1977) translated into Tigrinya. We couldn’t find a Gı̃kũyũ
speaker to translate the original into Tigrinya, but we used the English
translation. It gave us a ride from Gı̃kũyũ to Tigrinya like a taxi.
Ngũgı̃: It’s not that I am against what is available in English or French
in any shape or form. I’m a great believer in translations. I have trans-
lated Molière into Gı̃kũyũ. Since I started emphasizing African lan-
guage literature as an organizing principle in teaching literature from
Africa, I have come to appreciate Shakespeare much more than I used
to because I can now see and properly appreciate what he was able to
accomplish, and I can link his work to Africa much more meaningfully,

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comparatively, rather slavishly so. I have been able to appreciate more
the rise of European languages because English, French, German,
and Spanish went through what African languages are going through.
There was a time when people who used English to translate or write
about the Bible or medical terms were being told, even by other English
intellectuals, “You can’t do that.” English was thought of as rude and
crude. You can find the same resistance in French: Descartes found it
necessary to explain why he was writing some of his philosophic dis-
course in French rather than Latin. In 1536 William Tyndale was exe-
cuted for translating the Bible into English. Dante is very interesting for
me. When he started writing in his Tuscan language instead of Latin,
some of his fellow writers advised him that he wouldn’t get anywhere;
he would lose literary immortality. He should write in Latin. What did
Dante do? He wrote a reply in Latin in which he compares his Tuscan
vernacular to a female sheep (ewe) whose udder is full of milk. “You can
write in Latin, but I want to milk this richness,” he said. But he wrote
it in perfect Latin to show, “I can write in Latin if I want to, but I’m
choosing to write in Tuscan.” I love that. I love translations. They are a
very good way to make languages communicate with each other so that
their richness is in mutual conversation. And as cited above, there was
a time when it was a crime to translate the Bible into English.

Cantalupo: Knowledge of literature depends on translation. No one can

know literature without translation. For all You can find the same
who read Dante, comparatively few read him
in Italian. For all who read and know the Bi- resistance in French:
ble—in its myriad of translations—its readers Descartes found it
in actual biblical languages, like Hebrew, or
necessary to explain
later translations, long-standing translations
like the Septuagint Koine Greek or the Vul- writing his philosophic
gate in Latin, are miniscule. I’m very inter- discourse in French
ested in talking about why there aren’t more
African language translations. Until there are, rather than Latin.
the question of what is African literature must remain wide open. Your
analysis thirty years ago in Decolonising the Mind (1986) of African languages’
lack of standing or status in comparison with other languages in the world
primarily as a result of their political, social, and economic repression is now
a critical given and rarely, if ever, contested. Still, as a non-native speaker, I
have to plead for more translations of African language literature. Gı̃kũyũ,
Swahili, Tigrinya—they are not my languages. And until their poems, plays,
and novels are translated, I won’t know them. I need them, they have to
be translated, and they have to be translated beautifully. Otherwise, I can’t
know them the way I know and love translations from so many of the
world’s great literatures in languages that I also don’t and won’t know. This

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Back to Back
IV. Oil and
mixed media on
digital polyester
inkjet plate.
122 × 112 cm.
©2015 Paul
Onditi. Image
courtesy of
the artist and
ARTLabAfrica.

day has to come, but when? There is plenty of focus on the problems of Afri-
ca, but the translation of African language literature is a huge problem, too.
We know all too well the litany of other problems: globalization, dictators,
democracy, fundamentalism, economies, immigration, Ebola, war, rights,
reparations—the list can become endless. It seems endlessly repeated, too.
And no one can or should deny such problems. But if there was one Afri-
can language literary translation for the hundreds of times when we hear
about these other problems and respond, “Yes, that’s true. Yes, that’s true.
Yes, that’s true,” the problem of the dire lack of African language literary
translations would be much closer to being solved. The unending recital of
Africa’s political and social problems can even begin to seem like excuses
or alibis for not going ahead and translating the African literary texts. We
have so many contexts for African language literature but all too few texts.
What is going to change this? African language translation must succeed

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like the translations of other languages, ancient or modern. They must be
translated and they must be read, and inevitably they will be called great.
What is holding us back?
Ngũgı̃: African countries have to change their own policies about Afri-
can languages first. There must be an enabling linguistic environment.
Apart from Tanzania, there are very few countries, maybe one or two
others, where investments are put into African languages. Let me share
a personal experience. It was overwhelming for me.
In 2014, I was offered an honorary doctorate, my ninth honorary
doctorate, by the University of Dar es Salaam, right next door to Kenya.
I thought, “In what language am I going to accept that doctorate?” This
was a big challenge for me. My friends in Tanzania said that since I was
there, I had to give public lecture. I asked myself, “Am I going to give a
lecture in English, to a Kiswahili speaking nation? No.” I didn’t tell them
because I wasn’t sure I could do what I intended. To be frank, I wrote
a speech in English on language and metaphysical empires, but I had
Abdilatif Abdalla, a native speaker of Kiswahili and one of the leading
Swahili poets in the world, translate it. Five minutes before I was about
to be introduced to around a thousand peo- I have never once
ple who turned out for my talk, I told my
hosts that I was going to speak in Kiswahili. been in a situation
I sensed their surprise. They had assumed where an entire
I was going to speak in English. Professor
academic discourse was
Penina Mhando was going to introduce me,
and for my sake she was going to speak in conducted—without
English. When she got to the platform she any apologies—in an
said, “Ngũgı̃ is going to speak in Kiswahili.
I cannot introduce him in English.” Then African language.
she did an amazing thing. She read the entire introduction, which she
had written in English, in an instant translation in Kiswahili without
any hesitation. Beautiful. Then, the best part for me, I gave my paper in
Kiswahili. I can read Kiswahili, by the way, and I can answer in Kiswahili,
but I cannot write a sustained academic paper in Kiswahili. After my de-
livery, there was another hour of question and answer, and I told myself,
no matter what, come rain or whatever, I must respond to every ques-
tion and comment in Kiswahili—which I did. People were engrossed. It
became the talk of radio and television. And later, when my time came
to receive the degree, I gave my acceptance speech in Kiswahili. The
entire degree-awarding ceremony was conducted in Kiswahili. All the
names and titles of degrees—literature, engineering, chemistry, physics,
medicine etc.—were all in Kiswahili. I am now seventy-seven years old.
In all these years I have never once been in a situation where an entire
academic discourse from beginning to end was conducted—without any

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apologies—in an African language. I felt teary afterwards . . . because it
confirmed what I believed: it can be done. When later I went to get my
tenth doctorate, in Germany, I accepted it in Kiswahili.

Cantalupo: In Globalectics (2012), you quote Goethe: “National literature

is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand,
and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.” Two hundred years ago
Goethe didn’t know he was describing Kiswahili. How can we make more
language experiences like what you describe at the University of Dar es
Salaam happen? It happened, but there is still incredulity about it happening.
As you say, it was the first time in your life. How do we change that?
Ngũgı̃: It has to happen in theory and also in practice if the relation-
ship between languages and cultures is not a hierarchy but a network.
The structure of hierarchy can transform the politics of translation
to enforce the hierarchy. Networking with translation is the answer.
Translation has played a great role in human civilization, and in my own
intellectual life. My knowledge of Russian literature, and early Greek
theater, is through English translation. I read the Bible translated into
Gı̃kũyũ. Translation formed me as a reader and as a writer. Translation
within a network creates a basis of conversation among literatures
and cultures of the world. When I talk of “globalectic imagination,” I
am expanding on the Blakean statement: to see the world in a grain
of sand; to see eternity in an hour. The reading and organization of
the teaching of literature can be done globalectically. Globalectics en-
courages conversation among languages, literatures, and cultures. At
Nairobi University in 1961, when we started to reorganize literature,
we were not abandoning English and English literature but only try-
ing to organize literature differently: starting with African literature,
Europhone for that matter, at the center. We brought in Caribbean lit-
erature, African American literature, Asian literature, Latin American
literature, and then we brought in European literature. If we were in
Europe, European literature would be the center, and this would orga-
nize African literature, Asian literature, and Latin American literature
in relation to it. If we were in America, we would have to put American
literature—Euro, Afro, Asian, Native American etc.—at the center. But
within American literature, I would place African-American and Native
American at the center.
Why would I put African American literature at the center of the
study of American literature and culture? Because the only really new
in American literature is African American literature, right? I want to
repeat. What is really at the heart of modern American literature and
culture is African American literature. I can prove it, if you give me two
minutes. Can I prove it?

18 DOI 10.2979/transition.120.1.02 • Transition 120

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Cantalupo: Yes! Even three minutes.
Ngũgı̃: America belongs to Native Americans. All the others commu-
nities are newcomers to the continent. European people went there
by choice. African people did not go there by choice. For European
peoples who went there as colonists and slave owners, their linguistic
connection with Europe was never cut off. In fact, the connection to Eu-
ropean cultures continued—sometimes in resistance to it, sometimes
emulating it, but always within its framework. Native Americans always
had their languages. Many bad things were What is really at
done to Native Americans, but they still
had their languages. Its only African peo- the heart of modern
ple who had their systematic connection American literature
with Africa denied. The languages of Afri-
and culture is African
ca were banned on slave labor plantations.
Many who were caught speaking their lan- American literature.
guages were hanged. Even the drum, the I can prove it, if you
talking drum, was banned. So the African
had to create new languages out of the im- give me two minutes.
posed language of the master and the memories of the rhythms of the
banned African languages. New languages merged. Call them what
you want: Ebonics, Creole. They are new languages, born out of the
new environment that produced the spirituals, jazz, and today hip-
hop. Deprived by law and the gun of their connection to Africa, they
created new cultures and idioms out of their new environment. This is
something new not because Africans were geniuses or better than other
people, but the very nature of their situation forced them to invent new
languages and cultural expressions of being. Compare their situation
with that of the European in America! Europeans in America could still
connect with cultures and literatures of the continent of their origins.
In fact, we know that for many American writers, going to Europe was
mandatory. T. S. Eliot even migrated to England. So, what is American,
in terms of being built out of the American soil, is African American
literature.

Cantalupo: I like that you have turned the discussion to an America that,
as you write in Globalectics, “offers a significant example of the postcolo-
nial as the site of globality. There is no community, language, or religion
anywhere in the globe that has no presence in the United States. . . . U.S.
literature as much its music and performance is not just European. It is also
African, Asian, and Pacific.” From its origins until today, the United States
has been a nation of immigrants, “transnational” avant la lettre. America’s
indigenous and its slave populations, of course, burst such a formulation.
Nevertheless, all of these constituencies have produced writers who have

Cantalupo • African Literature . . . Says Who?19

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 Alien Blot.
Oil and mixed
media on digital
polyester inkjet
plate. 120.7 ×
112 cm. ©2015
Paul Onditi.
Image courtesy
of the artist and
ARTLabAfrica.

become, albeit through a variety of struggles, a distinct part of American

literature. Over the last decade, many young writers with first generation
family links to Africa, yet who live, write, and work—mostly teach—in the
United States, where most of them were raised and educated, even born,
have received high literary critical acclaim. They write in English, and they
enrich American culture. Yet a lot of writers from Asia, India, and China,
for example, who have similar first generational links, are now a part of
the canon of contemporary American literature: Jhumpa Lahiri and Ha
Jin, to take two famous instances. Should young African writers also be
thought of more as American than African? When is he or she African and/
or American?
Ngũgı̃: Let’s be clear. If I speak English and not Gı̃kũyũ or Malayalam
with my friend, Meena Alexander, who speaks Malayalam, there is no

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point in pretending that we are speaking anything other than English.
It’s the same with literature. If she and I write in English, we are a part
of English language literatures. We can say we are from Kenya or India
but, in terms of the language that defines us, we are part of English
language literatures. If we want to be part of African literatures, we write
in African languages. If my friend learns and starts writing her novels
in Kiswahili, she becomes a part of Kiswahili writing culture, and if I
write in Malayalam, then I am part of Indian literature. Yesterday at City
College I spoke with a woman, and her Kiswahili, including her gestures
and intonation, was so good that I thought she must have been a Swahili
who came to America to live. I learned that she was American, but when
she spoke Kiswahili, she was more part of a Kiswahili culture and a
Kiswahili language tradition than I am, although she was born in Amer-
ica and I in Kenya. When James Joyce writes in English, he is not writing
Irish literature but contributes to the whole universe of English litera-
ture. John Millington Synge invented his own Irish. He didn’t write in
Gaelic. He wrote how he thought Irish spoke English. In the end he
was part of English literature. Whatever we say, when we African writers
write in English, we are part of English literature. There is an encyclo-
pedia of British literature that puts Chinua Achebe at the head of a list
of English writers.

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