“THE RIVER BETWEEN:” A DISCOURSE ON NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION OF AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel, The River Between,[i] is not just a ‘fictional’ work of literature as mostly described, it is also Ngugi’s reflexive and unique historical account of the encounter between the Gikuyu community and the missionaries during the pre-independence period in Kenya. This is because, fiction can be more than human history, in that, opines Abiola Irele, “a historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, and the expounder of human experience”[ii] Subsequently, the novel is also an account of Ngugi’s reflexivity on his lived experiences, presented in the artistic expression of a specific style, form, and genre, that to some extent is closely related to an autoethnography. These lived experiences were sourced from his encounters and observations in life and knowledge learned through orality.[iii] For instance, his interaction and observation of nature as a rock and mountain club member while in Kampala, helped him in the exploration of the different landscapes and rock formations. In retrospect, he points out that, “the experience was very much in tune with my awe and love of nature, which inspired many of my stories.”[iv]  They made him a “weaver,”[v] and coupled with his academic information, helped to develop his literary imagination.[vi] Most of the scenarios in the novel were events he witnessed as a participant and non-participant observer, learned through oral tradition, and through the questions he sought in conversations with others in the community. Ngugi presents these “field accounts” as an insider born in the Gikuyu culture and an outsider, influenced by his colonial education and relocation from his cultural space to pursue his studies. A case in point was how Ngugi presented his insider ‘field accounts’ while at East Africa Agriculture and Forestry Research Organization (EAAFRO), by opining that, "years later, the location and the people I encountered would appear in a fictitious place as characters in my novel A Grain of Wheat, and one reviewer in Canada who had lived in Kenya expected a libel suit against me. He claimed that anybody who had lived in the country then would recognize the natural persons behind the mask of fiction."[vii] In addition, his first publication in Penpoint, the short fictional story “The Fig Tree” were embodied experiences because “the story and the domestic violence were from [his] experience at home.”[viii] As an outsider, while trying to make a case to his former Alliance Principal Carey Francis about his article, Ngugi maintained that, “one doesn’t have to experience a historical act in person to write about it.”[ix]

In as many scholarly works on Ngugi’s literary and historical scholarship have been done, scholars need to explore more ethnographic imagination in the novels. For instance, if one reads the novel, just as a fictional work of literature, one is likely to miss Ngugi’s unique historical reflexivity of this encounters with missionaries in the pre-independence Kenya. As a result, reading the novel as an ethnographic story provides an intellectual and analytical framework to illuminate the experience and emergent issues of the Gikuyu community’s encounter with the colonial Christian enterprise.

[i] Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, The River Between (London: Heinemann, 1965).

[ii] Irele, Abiola, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 98.

[iii] During the reception of his first novel, Weep Not, Child, Ngugi was excited to show it to his mother and immediate brothers and sisters, which they reverently received. However, they could not read it (this became one of his inspirations to forever write in his indigenous language). Notably, he was more interested in his half-sister Wabia, underscoring, “She was my half-sister. She was disadvantaged in every possible way but had remained optimistic about life, dwelling in the world of songs and stories, becoming the community’s collective memory. I grew up with her stories. She was the only one who could conjure them up in the daytime. She could not see the daylight; she felt it in her trembling hands. She had molded my world in ways that only I could understand. She had made me want to become a dream weaver.” Ngugi, Birth of A Dream Weaver, 219.

[iv] His interaction and observation of nature as a rock and mountain club member while in Kampala, “The club had helped me explore the different landscapes and rock formations around Kampala and beyond. The experience was very much in tune with my awe and love of nature, which inspired many of my stories.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Birth of A Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (New York: The New Press, 2016), 208.

[v] A term he uses to define himself as a writer through his time in Makerere, commenting that “even then, I found it difficult to use the word writer to refer to myself. In my mind, all this was a kind of preparation for the writer-to-be. So, on many forms and documents, I would put student for occupation. It was as if I had not yet written the novel I wanted to write. But the desire to weave dreams remained aflame, an integral part of my life...it was in Makerere where I discovered my calling as a weaver of dreams.” Ibid., 241.

[vi] As part of his education, while at Alliance, he got introduced to various subjects to which he “found life in books of literary imagination more fascinating than that in history books and scientific laboratories.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o, In the House of The Interpreter: A Memoir (New York: Anchor Books, 2015), 31.

[vii] Ngugi, Birth of A Dream Weaver, 119-126.

[viii] Ibid., 94-95.

[ix] Ibid., 187.