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So much for my publishing. My corporate social responsibility involved many other things, such as the Maragoli Cultural Festival which I created in 1979, and I chaired for the first 10 years of its existence. President Moi attended it no less than 3 times during my tenure, and made important policy statements. In 1982, he decreed that ALL communities in the country must hold cultural festivals on 26th December, which was the date of ours. Thus, the Maragoli Cultural Festival, now in its 40th year, can claim to be the Mother of all cultural festivals in Kenya. This initiative earned me a Head of State Commendation (HSC), in 1992.
At the Continental Level
At the continental level, I was instrumental in the formation of APNET and helped secure SIDA funding for it. The late Chief Victor Nwankwo was elected first Chairman and I was given the No.2 position of Treasurer. In addition, being the most experienced, I was elected Chairman of IPI (international Publishing Institute), the training wing of APNET. During this period, and in this position, I traversed the whole of Africa, from Egypt to South Africa, Sudan to Guinea, altogether covering 32 countries in 10 years, attending conferences, administering and training on behalf of APNET. I was involved in most of the start-ups of this period, the most remarkable being James Tumusiime’s Fountain
Publishers of Uganda.
Also with SIDA as the main partner, I was able to launch the East African Book Development Association (EABDA) to train and encourage East African Publishers to venture out and grow. Again, I led it through its first 10 years as Founding Chairman, making regular supervisory visits to Kampala and Dar es Salaam. EABDA also sponsored and encouraged the formation of National Book Development Councils, whose forte included the strengthening of indigenous publishing institutions, and promoting African languages and cultures.
Following UNESCO guidelines, I single-handedly registered the National Book Development Council of Kenya (NBDC-K) and constructed a board consisting of heads of book organizations from Publishers, Booksellers, Printers, Librarians, as recommended by UNESCO. I also invited government departments such as the National Commission to UNESCO, The Ministry of Education, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development, (KICD), the Department of Culture, the Department of Adult Education, etc.
Altogether, I put together a Board of about 15 people and with the help of Anita Theorell, Director of Culture and Media and her able assistant Per Knutson, received funding from SIDA and other sources. CODE Canada Under Scott Walter came on board, and other small unilateral donors followed suit. I served as Chairman for the first 10 years and retired only after I judged the project sustainable. Under new leadership, the Council lost the Swedish funding, but CODE still continues with them.
The first 10 years under my leadership were aggressive and full of action within the country and the East Africa region. NBDC-K has done some good work and continues to generate literacy materials for the Abagusii and the Maa people of Kenya and administers the Burt Award for Publishing in Africa. Last year, it launched a Children’s book fair which seems to have found a good niche’. I am proud that, twenty years after inception, the Council continues to be relevant and to complement the efforts of the Kenyan book community. Throughout, due emphasis has been given to indigenous writing and publishing.
My firm, at my insistence, has developed a vibrant local language publishing program. In the new competency-based curriculum just released, they were the only ones to submit complete courses in local languages, all of which were approved for use in Kenya primary schools. They have also released 38 titles in digital format in Icinyanja and Icibemba for the Zambian market and uploaded them on the World Reader platform. It remains to be seen whether or not these books will be bought and used. Experiments in publishing in regional indigenous languages such as Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Cinyanja (Malawi), Icibemba (Zambia), have only been partially successful in spite of the fact that these books have been approved as school texts and appear on official tender documents. Yet our publishing in Kiswahili has been a roaring success story from the beginning with sales in millions of shillings. In fact, I would say 55% of our total publishing turnover is derived from Kiswahili language publishing. That is the paradox.
At the International Level
On the international front, I enrolled KPA as a member of the International Publishers Association (IPA) and served on its Censorship and copyright Committees. Sponsored largely by international donor and development agencies, I traveled to 30 different destinations outside Africa and presented over 50 papers around the world, a majority of which were later published in one form or the other. I was able to gain recognition by being declared the best publisher in Africa at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in 2003, honored with a doctorate degree by Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom, (2006) and declared a winner of the Prince Claus Award (2007) from The Netherlands. I also served on the Board of the African Books Collective from inception in 1986 – 2017 when I voluntarily retired after years of religiously trooping to Oxford University every year for the ABC annual Board meetings and AGM, with Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay as Chairman and CEO, respectively.
The most memorable of my many overseas trips was to Vienna, Austria in 1988. I was invited by the International Booksellers Federation (IBF) to address a plenary session on the topic ‘Book Distribution in Africa’. At the closing ceremony, Micheal Zifcak, the Australian President of the Association, asked that every delegate be given one minute to say something in their mother tongue. Most of the speeches were in English, French and some European languages. I chose to speak, not in Kiswahili, but in Kimaragoli, my mother tongue. After my little ditty, Michael leaned over and whispered to me ‘ What a beautiful language.
It was like music to my ears’. I was over the moon. At the end of the dinner which was at Beethoven’s Den, we were all invited to a wine tasting competition underground. I was very good with wines those days and was able to beat the 100 delegates or so who participated in the competition to win the choice prize; two bottles of vintage wine, one white and one red. On the way back to the hotel, in a state of inebriation, I donated the two bottles to the bus driver who drove us back to the hotel, much to the consternation of my colleagues.
I woke up the following day at noon, with a stinging headache, having missed my train ride to the airport, for which a free ticket had been provided. I jumped into a taxi to the airport but it was too late. I found the Counter closing, but Swissair were sympathetic enough to book me on Austrian Airways two hours later, warning that the connection to Nairobi might be tight.
When we landed in Zurich, I found a car waiting for me on the runway. I was whisked, ambulance style, across Zurich Airport to the waiting plane and was, in fact, one of the first to board. That night I never touched alcohol in spite of all provocation from the flight attendants in business class. It took me three days to recover from this whole experience.
Conclusion
Research carried out internationally by linguists has scientifically proved that learners weaned in mother tongue in the early* years of their education have a better grasp of concepts in other subjects (and languages) later in life.
Mother tongues also confer cultural pride, belonging and awareness to the user. However, in the case of Africa, these languages were stigmatized, declared socially inferior, and foreign languages such as English, French, and Spanish marketed as languages of immense opportunities and development.
The time has come for African languages to take their rightful place in society. Digital publishing, for example, can provide a leap, and this can be achieved through partnerships with international agencies such as World Reader mentioned above. Let me attempt, by way of concluding, to make some observations as to the obstacles facing local languages publishing and use. These languages are generally perceived to be good for verbal communication, and no commercial value. Some don’t even have written or harmonized orthographies, with the same word appearing differently even within the same text, hence difficult to read even by the most literate. The Holy Bible is a case in point and is still, in most cases, available in orthographies formulated by the original missionaries.
Indigenous languages are not considered important for learning and educational purposes. Often times the period set aside for teaching or learning local languages is used to teach other subjects such as Math or English. These languages are not taken seriously even though politicians exploit them effectively during election campaigns. Publishers don’t take them seriously either, arguing that they are a hard sell. They will normally produce them to lower standards, poor paper, poor design, and smudgy inking, no color, and few illustrations. Print runs are usually small, complicating the pricing process. Their marketing poses new challenges as language groups may be concentrated in one area or scattered all over and difficult to specifically target.
Print quantities are generally nonviable and even when some titles appear on government tenders, they don’t get ordered, or are ordered in very small quantities. Finally, indigenous books suffer from the same problems encountered in mainstream publishing: poor book reading and book-buying habits, poverty that makes it hard for people to afford to buy books, a poor reading environment with few bookshops and libraries, lack of electricity in schools and homes, making it impossible to read at night, etc.
Attempts to deal with these problems have been, by and large, unsuccessful but one can say, African countries, with assistance from donors and development partners, are beginning to take the book seriously if one can go by the various international book schemes in operation today. The Kenya government is called upon to strictly enforce policies relating to the teaching and learning of mother tongues in the early years of primary education and to sensitize the public on the cultural and social benefits of this approach as it instills pride and confidence in the learner. Kenyan publishers are advised to be more enterprising and to invest some of the profits they are currently making from these schemes into the neglected areas of general and indigenous languages publishing.
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Musician Stevie Wonder (centre) poses with the Ngugis (left) and Congressman John Lewis. On the right in Mukoma wa Ngugi.
Early this week, the American city of New Haven, Connecticut, was downcast before a drizzle melted, as a crowd of 1,000 roared at the indoor arena to appreciate the eight elderly men and women about to be crowned.
That moment, now frozen in an official graduation picture that has been widely circulated, features two black men on [expander_maker id=”1″ more=”Read more” less=”Read less”]either side of the front row, each clutching their graduation hat in their lap, posing for the cameras in solemn dignity.
The man on the left is John Lewis, the American Congressman and legendary civil rights activist who worked with Martin Luther King Jnr; the man on the right is Prof Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the celebrated Kenyan writer and cultural theorist.
This was at Yale University when the two joined a pantheon of six others to receive honorary doctorates in this year’s commencement. Other famous Americans in the line-up that Kenyans might be familiar with include megastar Stevie Wonder and former US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Wonder danced and sang along as the university band gave a rendition of his hit, I Wish, while Yale University president Peter Salovey used Wonder’s own lyrics in the citation: his degree was “signed, sealed, delivered, it’s yours.”
Ngugi’s citation read: “Author, playwright, activist, and scholar, you have shown us the power of words to change the world. You have written in English and in your Kenyan language, Gikuyu; you have worked in prison cells and in exile, and you have survived assassination attempts — all to bring attention to the plight of ordinary people in Kenya and around the world.
“Brave wordsmith, for breaking down barriers, for showing us the potential of literature to incite change and promote justice, for helping us decolonise our minds and open them to new ideas, we are privileged to award you this degree of Doctor of Letters.”
This is Ngugi’s 12th honorary doctorate — having received others from universities in the US, Europe and Africa. KCA University made history last year when it became the first Kenyan institution to accord the author with a similar honour.
“It was a particularly great honour because it came from home,” Ngugi said of the recognition from KCA.
The award from Yale, one of the top universities in the world, is somewhat bittersweet; it reminds of the scant praise that Ngugi receives from home, even though his pioneering work has been entrenched in Kenya and replicated elsewhere in the world.
Dubbed the Nairobi revolution, the campaign in the late 1960s to situate the study of African literature and its diaspora at the core of what was then the Department of English at the University of Nairobi is now a well-grounded literary theory in post-colonial studies.
Ngugi’s subsequent declaration in the early 1980s that he would stop writing in English to embrace his first language, Gikuyu, has prompted indigenisation efforts from as far places as Hawaii and New Zealand and South Africa, where writers and cultural proponents are evaluating the legacies of oppression and segregation in knowledge production.
“Decolonisation is a message that’s resonating with many people across Africa,” Ngugi said in a recent conversation, revealing that some 2,500 people showed up for a lecture in Johannesburg South Africa in March.
South African universities have been grappling with the legacy of Apartheid, with some organising protests against what they see as symbols of their oppressive past.
During last month’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Ngugi was asked by the American critic, Rebecca Carroll, whether he had managed to “decolonise” himself, invoking the title of his treatise: Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.
“I’m still trying,” Ngugi admitted, no doubt weighed down by the recognition that he has not published often in Gikuyu, despite his earlier “farewell to English.”
