Ngugi wa Thiong’o picks medal for his electric 65-year education race

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, right, with a University of California, Irvine, official.

By Peter Kimani

The red carpet was rolled recently for Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o – not for the Nobel Prize for Literature that eluded Africa yet again – but to confer him with the highest honour from the University of California, Irvine, where he has taught and directed programmes for more than a decade.

The UCI Medal is awarded annually by the institution to staff for exemplary performance in academic work and research, and demonstrate leadership and character excellence, according to the varsity chancellor Michael Drake, who presided over the ceremony.

Among four achievers

Ngugi was among four achievers were honoured this year. He dedicated his award to his mother, the late Wanjiku wa Thiong’o, the central force that steered him through school, although she could neither read nor write.

That transformational moment in 1948, when the young Ngugi learns with elation he would be going to school, is immortalised in the opening chapter of Weep Not, Child. Ghanaian President John Mahama, whose video tribute was transmitted for the audience in California, remarked how the opening scene in Ngugi’s seminal novel stayed with him all his life.

“As a student reading that first scene of the book (Weep Not, Child) was extremely impactful. It made me understand the importance of getting an education.

 It was through reading that book that I was introduced to Ngugi and took him as a mentor,” President Mahama explained.

Nadine Gordimer, the South African Nobel Literature laureate for 1991 also sent a tribute, recalling her thrill when she first met Ngugi. “Quite often, it’s a disappointment to meet the writer if the best of the writer has gone into the work. But here was a personality that came to me from the work and here it was embodied in the man.

“That’s his spirit I think, his indomitable spirit, that has helped him serve as a role model for others both in Kenya and around the world,” Gordimer said in her tribute. She added the award was “surely the least that the world owes to somebody like him (Ngugi) who has indeed done so much, sacrificed so much to bring about change in Africa and by extension the world.”

Words of a mother

On his part, Ngugi invoked the words of his mother: “She made me promise that no matter what hardships fell my way I would not give up on the dream… I feel like I am being crowned for sustaining a sixty-five year race that begun on the day my mother made the offer of school.  My dream of education was really hers before it became mine and I am always glad that she let me share it.”

Ngugi’s wife, Njeeri, chuckled that her husband’s barefoot forays in search of education in rural Kenya had culminated in a $1,000 per table luncheon in a swanky hotel in California.

Since his 1982 exile, which was prompted by a year-long detention without trial in December 1977, Ngugi was domiciled in England before moving to America where he has taught at Yale and New York University, among others, before moving to his present base at Irvine in 2002. 

He is a distinguished professor of Comparative Literature and English and the founding director of the institution’s International Centre for Writing and Translation.Ngugi says Irvine is the single location where he has produced the largest haul of work – six over the past ten years.

These include, Wizard of the Crow, winner of a 2006 California Book Awards gold medal for fiction; his childhood memoir, Dreams in a Time of War and its sequel, In the House of the Interpreter, which was shortlisted for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award.

Good tidings

More good tidings have by way of honorary doctorates – eight so far, six of them coming during his stay in Irvine – and honorary membership to the prestigious American Academy of Arts And Letters.

The latter is an exclusive club of 250 members picked from diverse creative fields, from architecture to music and writing, and serve for life. The Academy is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

Describing Ngugi as “one of the pre-eminent writers worldwide today,” UC Irvine chancellor Drake hailed him as an “emblematic figure who shows and models for us how we can stand up to tyranny, adversity, oppression and not lose our human values.”

Mahama hailed Ngugi’s courage and commitment to the truth, adding these have “not only shaped the literature and history of Africa, but also challenged generations of authors, activists and, yes, politicians to give this our motherland nothing less than our very best.”