Diary of a Shopkeeper, 15th June

The great Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has died aged 87. Born while Kenya was still a British colony, his life was inescapably mired in political struggle, initially against his country’s colonisers, and later against the corrupt and brutal regimes that followed independence in 1963.

His chosen method of resistance was, initially, fiction. As part of the great flowering of African writing in English that followed the publication of Chinua Achebe’s 1958 masterpiece, Things Fall Apart, Ngũgĩ made a mark with novels like Weep Not Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat. The last of these was written while Ngũgĩ was a postgraduate student at Leeds University. To be exact, he started writing it following a tour around Scotland, as he sat in a train heading southwards. I’ll forgive him for saying that he caught the train in Aberdeen, ‘the northernmost part of Scotland.’ If I had to name the northernmost part of Kenya I might be off the mark too.

He’d always been interested in the theatre, and in the 1970s started focusing on creating plays. It was one of these that changed his life as well as his writing. I Will Marry When I Want (co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ) is a story of village life, centred on a family’s prized one-and-a-half-acre plot of land, and various people – mostly powerful and rich – who try to steal it from them. With a different setting it could be a story by George Mackay Brown.

It wasn’t just the subject that upset the Kenyan authorities, but the fact that it was staged far away from any officially-sanctioned theatre building that they could easily monitor and control. Rather, it was performed out in the country by an amateur cast of field-workers and their families – the very people the play was about – in an open air theatre the actors built themselves. Even more provoking for the government was that the play was not written in English, the language of the former colonists, and still the official language of law, education and – up to this point – the theatre. Rather, it used Ngũgĩ’s native language, Gikuyu, spoken by over eight million Kenyans, but not officially sanctioned.

After six weeks of huge audiences, the police swooped in and ordered the show to close (Imagine that at the Community Drama Festival!) Shortly after, they demolished the theatre. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, meanwhile, was arrested, thrown in jail without trial, and kept in the harshest imaginable conditions for a year. His experiences are recounted in a harrowing book called Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.

While in prison, he also wrote a novel, using the only paper he could find – toilet paper – which was confiscated, returned, and eventually published as Devil on the Cross. But he hadn’t written it under that English title, or in English at all: it was originally called Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ and written in the mother tongue that had got him thrown in jail in the first place. For the rest of his long and productive life, Ngũgĩ committed himself to writing entirely in Gikuyu, and then translating himself into English. This, he felt, was the truest way he could express himself, while remaining loyal to his family, his community and his heritage.

He was no isolationist, far from it: he was passionate about translation. One of his final books was a collection of essays, The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation. His children’s book, The Upright Revolution, has been translated more than 100 times. He believed that folk should write in their mother tongue, whatever it was, however few speakers it had, and only then think about a wider audience in English – or anything else.

The leading writers of 20th century Orkney took a different tack, for better or for worse. Edwin Muir, influenced by TS Eliot, perhaps, chose English. George Mackay Brown followed in his mentor’s footsteps almost entirely, despite setting almost everything he wrote here. He was a great writer, and a dedicated Orcadian – in everything but his language.

Thank goodness for lesser known figures like CM Costie and Robert Rendall who wrote in their mother tongue. And plaudits to the St Magnus International Festival for featuring Rendall’s work in a foy next week, written by Issy Grieve and Greer Norquoy, and performed by the excellent Orkney Voices group, and others. The festival is also showcasing a very different version of Orkney language in Harry Josephine Giles’ stage adaptation of their prize-winning verse novel, Deep Wheel Orcadia. As much as plurality of languages, diversity within a language rather than forced uniformity is a strength. so it’s good the festival is highlighting these very different writers.

In the second half of his career, as well as fiction and drama, Ngũgĩ wrote a stream of essays and polemics on language, literature and politics – often arguing that those were not three subjects but one. They make stimulating reading, particularly for anyone grew up speaking a minority language, whether Gikuyu, Gaelic, Scots - or Orcadian. I wonder what Edwin Muir or Chrissie Costie would have made of the electrifying essays gathered in collections like In the Name of the Mother and Decolonising the Mind? We’ll never know. It’s up to the next generation of Orkney writers to make something of them.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th June 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.