On Meeting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / PEOPLE DEPT.

San Francisco, 7 October 2012. The audience perched on the edges of their seats, voices rising in collective, animated chatter. Then suddenly, joyful street music spilled through the second-floor windows of the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), as though the city itself knew. Literary titan, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was in the house! Months of planning with MoAD and Litquake—the Bay Area’s largest literary festival—had led to this moment, and now, as I prepared to moderate, I felt a familiar tremor of excitement. The Nobel Prize for Literature would be announced within days. Could it, would it, finally be Ngũgĩ’s year?

NGŨGĨ IN PUBLIC

For a world of connections and interconnections in a non-hierarchical way.

—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, book inscription in Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing

My very first glimpse of Ngũgĩ came in May 1999 at Cambridge University: just flashes of his shirt, a short man nearly swallowed by an admiring crowd. I was visiting Cambridge as part of my doctoral research at Berkeley to conduct an interview with a young Ghanaian academic, Ato Quayson. But my scholarly agenda quickly dissolved upon learning Ngũgĩ would be delivering Clare College’s annual Ashby lecture. He was the first African literary ‘rock star’ I would encounter, and I could hardly wait.