Noo Saro Wiwa is a Nigerian- British Travel writer who Condé Nast Traveler Magazine listed as one of the 30 most influential women travelers. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, where she attended King’s College London and then Colombia University in New York. She has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion, and analysis articles for The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, City AM, Chatham House, and The New York Times, among others. Although her genre is non-fiction, the keenness of her vision and her ability to look at ordinary everyday realities with an artistic vision makes her travel memoir, Looking for Tanswonderland: Travels in Nigeria, a great reference point in the discussion of narratives set in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. I discovered this memoir while writing my dissertation on the gendered portrayal of Lagos in contemporary narratives and find it fascinating. I asked if Noo would answer some questions on the text, and she agreed. I’m excited to share some of her responses here:

To what extent is Looking for Transwonderland a non-fictional work? Are there fictional elements in the narrative? If yes, can you give examples?
The book is 100% non-fictional. I take great pride in reporting my experiences faithfully. Real life is more interesting than fiction, especially in places like Nigeria. The only times I tweak names or details is to protect someone’s privacy, particularly for safety reasons.

Did you have to change names to conceal identities?
Yes, see above.

I know you write travel narratives. Have you tried or considered fiction?
I’ve considered it, but I find it much harder than non-fiction. Maybe one day.

The idea of a Transwonderland is fascinating, especially considering the linguistic possibilities in the word. Moreso, an amusement park in Ibadan has a name close to that. What exactly did you mean by transwonderland?
Transwonderland is the name of the dilapidated amusement park in Ibadan. My book title is a metaphor for my search for that touristy side of Nigeria, which I wanted to explore as a way of disassociating from the painful memories of my father’s death at the hands of the military regime. But I found that the touristy side, such as Transwonderland amusement park, was often rundown: neglected natural reserves and safari parks, etc.

The memoir says that, “being Nigerian can be the most embarrassing of burdens.” This statement is about Nigerian travelers’ cacophony at Gatwick Airport. Can you discuss this further? How often do you experience this burden? Is it physical or psychological? Has this something to do with the physical location or the attitude of the people?
Nigerians are constantly embarrassed by the failures of our government. Our diaspora contains some of the most successful immigrant groups in countries like the United States. We have so many smart, talented people, yet as a nation Nigeria is not worth the sum of its parts. Decades of poor governance has led to poverty, a lack of education, an increase in criminality, and a mistrust of authority (the latter demonstrated by that cacophony at Gatwick airport). Unfortunately, that’s the image of Nigeria in the eyes of the world. When you tell people you’re Nigerian you can often see the hidden disdain, or at least lack of admiration, in people’s eyes.

I noticed that the extreme religiosity of Nigerians repeatedly features in your memoir. Do you see this as a kind of agency for Lagos’s powerless people or a manifestation of sanctimony ecstasy?
The extreme religiosity is a result of economic failure caused by perennial corruption and structural adjustment policies in the 1980s. Nigerians began to import the ‘prosperity gospel’ from the United States (white Americans invented it) as a coping mechanism. Every society, be it in Europe, the Americas or Asia, responds to poverty in its own way in order to survive financially and psychologically.

Do you think it’s paradoxical that you refer to yourself as a tourist in your own country?
No, tourists can be domestic or foreign. I would say most people haven’t seen the beauty spots in their own countries, which is a shame.

Would you travel to Lagos again? Why or why not?
I touch base with Lagos at least once every two years as I have friends and family there.

What do you detest most about Lagos?
It’s too noisy. Constant music everywhere you go; you can’t escape it. There are almost no public spaces to enjoy quiet contemplation or meditation.

What do you love most about the city?
Like all major cities, it’s big and full of energy. There’s lots going on, always new developments (architecturally, culturally, etc.). Things are always changing.

Taiye Selasi describes Afroplolitans as Africans of the world. Recently, scholars have been knocking heads on the privileged position that tempers Afropolitan narratives. A travel writer fits that description. Do you view yourself as an Afropolitan?
If the definition of an Afropolitan is an African who owns a passport and does a job that enables them to travel easily to other countries, then yes I’m an Afropolitan. There aren’t many such people. Having a British passport puts me in a very privileged position, and I never taken it for granted. I know the struggles that Nigerian passport holders have. It affects their ability to work, study or simply explore different parts of the world.

Are there potentials in Lagos that are not being harnessed right now?
Yes. Every human being has potential, and if the government is not investing in them (through education) then their potential is not being fulfilled. In Lagos – and Nigeria as a whole – there are millions of potential entrepreneurs, astronauts, teachers, lawyers, journalists. But instead they are living parallel lives as impoverished, struggling citizens.

Do you think that the spatial structures of the city (Lagos) are not neutral? Do you think it would have been easier to navigate the city as a man? How does Lagos treat women?
To be honest, it’s hard to answer this question as I don’t live there. I find Lagos easy to navigate as a short-term visitor with dollars in her pocket and an Uber app on her phone. Living there, however, is another matter.

Have you visited any other place that created the same feelings that you had in Lagos? Did any other city present similar precarious situations?
Lagos is pretty unique. I’ve been to massive cities like Manila and Cairo, but their infrastructure always seems slightly better than Lagos. But maybe that’s only because I haven’t seen their poorest areas.

What do you think about the presence of the supernatural in the African psyche as manifested in our movies and literature?
It’s important that literature and movies reflect our psyche – it’s what makes it authentic. The supernatural can be confusing and inaccessible to non-African audiences when production values are poor, but when such themes are explored by talented artists like Akwaeke Emezi, Wole Soyinka or Nnedi Okarafor it’s great.

Elizabeth Olaoye
Idaho State University

Eye Brother Horn (2023) by Bridget Pitt, is the story of two brothers who, though devoted to each other, are at odds with the world, each in his own way. Daniel and Moses are the sons of an English Reverend at a Christian mission station in Natal[1] in the mid- to late-1800s. While Daniel, the biological son, experiences debilitating sensitivity to the natural world around him because of a painful empathy with the animals he sees hunted, Moses, the adopted son, feels torn between two cultures without a sense of belonging to either. Both boys dream of travelling to England where each hopes to become his own man. But their patriarchal benefactor challenges their bond and their aspirations.

The novel begins – in Part One 1862 to 1864 Bhejane – with a clash between hu/man and nature when the baby, Daniel, and his carer, Nomsa, survive a close encounter with a rhinoceros: “Two tons of bone and muscle hurtle towards the women gathering grass for weaving. Their grass bundles fly up as they flee screaming” (Pitt 2022:1). Nomsa, with the baby strapped to her back, trips and falls leaving her and the baby helpless with the rhino looming over them. But having lunged at them three times, the rhino retreats. Daniel is unharmed yet forever affected, with “a look of strangeness in his eye, as if he’d been lost in distant worlds” (1).

This opening scene foregrounds not only the tension between hu/man and nature but between all the disparate forces at play here: at Umzinyathi Mission there is an intersection – sometimes a melding, sometimes a clash – of culture, religion, language. For example, while Daniel’s father, the reverend of the mission station, calls their survival of the rhino encounter a miracle, there are other theories amongst the local inhabitants, “including witchcraft, ancestral intervention, and good luck” (2).

These events at Imzinyathi occur within the greater context of British colonialism. The positioning of this local scene within the broader frame of colonialism is illustrated by Cousin Roland, a character who epitomises colonial ideology with his words and deeds, while illustrating – through his mobility between India, Africa, and Britain – the range of the British Empire at the time.

The author forestalls a dominating coloniser’s narrative, however, by foregrounding language from the outset. isiZulu is seamlessly blended into the narrative, beginning with Reverend Whitaker’s moniker, “umfundisi, the teacher” (2) and the way that the boy, Daniel, is spoken about following the incident with the rhino: he is thereafter known as “inkonyane likabhejane: the Rhino’s child” (2). Throughout the book, though explanatory phrases in English at times follow the use of isiZulu, the reader (if not familiar with isiZulu) is left in most instances to infer the meaning without explanation. Thus, blended language is seamlessly incorporated in the novel, giving the narrative an authentic context, a sense of place, time, and culture; as well as making prominent the inevitable entanglement of language and culture, and the formation of a transcultural and/or liminal space in a colonised place. In this context, though, there is disparity and conflict; the novel examines, with this story of brothers, the oppositions inherent in colonial discourse, which “at the very least, […] creates a deep conflict of consciousness of the colonised” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 2007:37).

The boys are inseparable in their early youth, only becoming aware as they grow that there are differences between them: one is a biological son, the other adopted, one is white and English, one is black and Zulu. This brings into sharp relief in the novel, the division at the time between the white Englishman and the colonial subject, the illogical disparity and inequality, the foundations of which are the “[r]ules of inclusion and exclusion [of colonial discourse that] operate on the assumption of the superiority of the colonizer’s culture, history, language, art, political structures, social conventions, and the assertion of the need for the colonized to be ‘raised up’ through colonial contact” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 2007:37).

Ultimately, these ‘rules’ will force the boys apart, but not because they are binary opposites of each other; rather, because neither Daniel nor Moses can live by these prescribed rules, each with his own reasons for subverting his expected role. Thus, the novel explores the theme of the ‘in-between’ space, which is occupied by ‘hybrid’ characters in a cross-cultural situation, by deviating from expected or cliched characterisation.

This is signaled early in the narrative – in Part Two 1871 The Python and the Gun – when the word ‘birthright’ “erupts between [Daniel and Moses], like the sudden blast of a trumpet, like a call to arms” (50) in a childish squabble about their 13^th birthday presents.

Though Daniel uses the word ‘birthright’ in the argument, subsequently he in fact subverts his role as a colonial Englishman: instead of assuming the guise exemplified by his missionary father or landowner uncle, he clings instead to his ‘birthright’ as a young man born and raised on the continent of Africa. He has an affinity with his natural environment, rejecting patriarchal, colonial culture. He is emotionally sensitive and spiritually curious. Moses is more pragmatic; he is fascinated with science. As the boys grow older, the divide between the adjacent worlds they straddle becomes more apparent: on the one hand there is a traditional African existence with the environment, on the other there is the modern emphasis of change and ‘progress’ that is being imposed by the colonising force.

This divide is brought into sharp focus – in Part Three 1871 to 1876 Evolution – on a visit (with the church) to King Mpande. Here, Moses is immersed in Zulu culture, experiences the heritage he has been denied through his upbringing; he confronts the notion that he can never feel a sense of complete belonging to either the mission station or to the Zulu nation. Instead, he puts his faith in science, eschewing local customs and spiritualities.

Thus, with the goal of pursuing a scientific education in England, Moses withstands great hardship – in Part Four 1877 to 1978 The Silence – while Daniel, contrastingly, is crushed by the injustices of their lives. Through the boys’ respective responses to their mission station upbringing, the novel (reminiscent, perhaps, of Lewis Nkosi’s (1986) Mating Birds, and Farida Karodia’s (1991) A Shattering of Silence) examines the impact of Christian colonial mission stations in southern Africa. Contrasted with their father Rev Whitaker’s zeal is his cousin Sir Roland’s attitude that “the real world is a little different from a mission station” (177). When Roland attempts to break the bond between the two boys, at pains for Daniel to understand that Moses is not his brother, Daniel emphatically clings to his belief that “Moses is [his] brother everywhere,” not only when they are at the mission station (212).

These tensions mount in Part Five 1878 My Brother Everywhere: between the two brothers, between them and Sir Roland, between the various thematic forces in the novel (for example, religion vs African spirituality; coloniser vs colonised; hu/man vs environment). The brothers’ bond is tested by the choice to either give up or go on: to return to their father’s mission station or to continue under Sir Roland’s patronage and eventually acquire an education in England. Moses is prepared to endure saying, “[i]f this farm has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no place in this colony for me. The AmaZulu think I’m a peculiar black umlungu, and the abelungu think I’m an impudent over-educated native” (232). For Daniel, though, endurance becomes impossible. He is in physical agony while on the hunting safari, in Part Six 1878 The Black Imfolozi, because of his empathy with animals whose fear and pain he feels – physically – when they are hunted and shot. Here Pitt juxtaposes magical realism, African Knowledge Systems (AKS), and African spirituality: Daniel describes his “body-jumping” (72, 134, 263, 307), during which he seems to enter and feel the animal’s pain, as something almost unbearable. He seeks help from a powerful sangoma. He is predisposed to accept the intervention of African spirituality from the ‘mystic’, having witnessed his mother’s healing through traditional medicine when he was a child (she was cured with the leaves and bark of the isibhaha tree). This particular sangoma is a specialist who, he is told, is “a doctor who enables the ancient spirits to speak to you with the whistling voices of the birds” (272). She explains how Daniel could free himself of his ability/affliction through ritual. Ultimately, overwhelmed by pain and injustice, Daniel takes matters into his own hands – in Part Seven 1879 Eye Brother Horn –with devastating consequences.

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In tracking the boys’ trajectory from childhood to early adulthood, while highlighting the effects of colonialism and of Christianity in the region, there is also a mapping of the ecological effects of colonial land use.

Pitt’s environmental concerns are the golden thread in this text. Though not overt, the environment is the dynamic backdrop to this bildungsroman.

Throughout the novel – from the opening scene where women gathering grasses are accosted by an angry rhinoceros, to the final paragraphs in which a dog chases a sandpiper, and the gift of clay animals is given – elements of the natural environment are a touchstone. The “more-than-human” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 2007:71) is considered from multiple perspectives to show the effects of colonial enterprises on the landscape, and the subsequent effects on traditional, indigenous lifestyles.

As they travel across Natal to reach Sir Roland’s sugar estate, for example, they witness how much of the land is under crops of “coffee, cotton, and sugar cane” (194) where “[y]ou can almost hear the march of the sugarcane as it consumes ever widening tracts of grassland and forest to grow more sugar,” (194). They come across small traditional villages – umuzi – with “rising mounds of beehive huts surrounded by small fields of corn and vegetables” that are affected by the “pressing of the English farmers around them” and where there is the worry that, “[s]oon there will be no more place to graze our cattle” (195).

Felling trees to make way for sugarcane on Roland’s estate, Daniel considers how “the stumps and brush will be burned, the land will be ploughed and all traces of that chattering web of former lives will sink beneath the sugarcane” (210). He wonders: “does this stump remember being a tree […] does the earth remember the feel of the elephants’ feet?” (210).

*

Eye Brother Horn is a compelling examination of the effects of colonisation on people and the environment, that is, on the human and the ‘more-than-human’; as well as an exploration of the life-changing impact of Christian missionary interventions in Natal. With its portrayal of brothers whose fates subvert stereotypically expected roles, it questions the in/ability to intervene in human and ‘extra-human’ lives and is a call to more conscious and empathetic interactions.

Bridget Pitt (2022) Eye Brother Horn | Catalyst Press | ISBN 978-1-946395-76-4

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Beverley Jane Cornelius is a lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).

References:

Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, Tiffin, Helen. 2007. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (second edition). New York: Routledge.

Karodia, Farida. 1993. A Shattering of Silence. Johannesburg: Heinemann.

Nkosi, Lewis. Mating Birds. New York: St Martins Press.

Pitt, Bridget. 2022. Eye Brother Horn. El Paso: Catalyst Press.

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[1] Natal is today known as KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), a province of the Republic of South Africa.

For many people, the Libyan novel – and the country it represents – is largely a terra incognita, a place where ancient cartographers masking their ignorance would have written ‘hic sunt leones’ (‘here … there are lions’). This is regrettable; Charis Olszok’s study is a most welcome and relevant addition in the field of literary studies.

A basic understanding of Libyan history, in modern times, is essential to grasp the essence of its novels. The country itself is a modern construct. After the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Italians established two colonies in North Africa that were subsequently united into one state. Italian colonial rule (1911-1943) was replaced by a British military administration (1943-1951), after which one single king, Idris al-Sanusi (1951-1969) sat on the throne of the independent kingdom of Libya. His rule was overthrown by a military coup which brought Libya’s most influential and notorious leader to power: Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi. From 1969 until 2011, when he was deposed and killed, he retained a firm grip on the country. His ideologies, dictatorship and ruthless methods to stay in power, combined with the oil boom and rapid urbanization, reshaped the landscape and brought profound change to the every-day lives of the people of Libya. Although there was a flicker of hope for a more open society after his downfall, rival governments, factions and militias soon filled the void, creating an even more chaotic and unpredictable environment. Young authors who now started to write openly about atrocities and trauma, were bullied online and faced death threats. It is in such difficult circumstances that Libya’s creative writers sought to express their concerns in ways carefully laid bare in Charis Olszok’s ‘The Libyan Novel. Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability.’

This book is not an easy read but I highly recommend it because it is important and enjoyable.

First of all, as said, it fills a real gap. Even among academics specialized in Arabic literature, Libyan novels have remained largely under the radar.

Second, the focus on poetic vulnerability is a fortunate choice because it opens windows for a better understanding of the realities of the Libyan population. This is not a dry overview of authors and their works; through the stories of novelists like Al-Nayhum, al-Kuni, al-Faqih, al-Ghazal, Razan al-Maghrabi and others, the beauty and the horrors of the country come to life. Charis Olszok opens up multiple perspectives and her work illustrates how reading contemporary fiction can help create awareness, empathy and sympathy. Her book offers an intimate if sometimes gloomy portrayal of the precarious lives of the people of Libya, of tribals and city dwellers, Arabs and blacks, and their struggles with poverty, oppression, environmental hazards, neglect and other issues, as unfolded by its novelists. It tells us how a population was ‘othered’ within its own land – as second-class citizens under colonial rule, and labelled as ‘stray dogs’, ‘rats’ or ‘cockroaches’ by its dictator. It shows us la condition humaine et animale in a country full of suffering.

Third, it highlights ‘narrative fragility’ in a world dominated by censorship and brutal repression. The author unfolds how in al-Qadhafi’s Libya, any reference to contemporary issues was a no-go zone for creative writers. In the name of revolution, libraries and bookstores were emptied and books were burned. Authors were stigmatised as ‘enemies of the revolution’ and maltreated. The political conditions affected their lives and had an impact on their creations. They could simply not describe the present in realistic terms. In response, they turned to the past, and used fantasies, symbols and allusions to express their concerns. Expect a book with dramatic story lines, fables, metamorphoses, transformations, hybrids, the suffering of all creatures, man and animal …. The relevance of this book exceeds the regional level. It is a book about the challenges of authors who are fettered by the chains of a totalitarian regime, silenced and oppressed, an example of a literature driven to the margin (as the author eloquently expresses it). It tells us the story of writers, who, faced with ‘difficulty of story’, find a refuge in ‘allegorical darkness.’ This book shows us the effects of oppression, pollution, deprivation and other calamities of modern times.

Fourth, the book reads as a celebration of overlapping cultural heritages. In Libyan literature, sources of inspiration range from prehistoric rock art to Tripoli’s Girl and Gazelle statue, from Genesis to folk stories full of jinns, donkeys and wolves, from the tales of Classical Antiquity to the Qur’an, from Arabic classics to World literature. This is also true for the orientation of this study. These heritages do not appear as separate entities, but form a stream in which cultures interconnect and intersect. Libya’s novels thus seem to be embedded in a continuum of texts. The citations at the beginning of the chapters draw upon different cultural layers and include sources ranging from the Qur’ān (There is no nation that crawls on the face of the earth, no bird on the wing, but they are nations like you (…) to Ovid’s metamorphoses (Libya became a desert, the heat drying up her moisture. Then the nymphs with dishevelled hair wept bitterly for their lakes and fountains); from Kafka (There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquillity, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition: for I possess a house) to Santner (It is almost as if one were to ask whether Benjamin’s angel of history was capable of a good laugh amid all that wreckage piling up before his eyes). These lines invite the reader to ponder on what follows, to practice slow reading, to sit back and relish.

Fifth, there is the image of Libya itself. The cultural and intellectual awareness of the novelists forms a sharp contrast with the lawlessness and chaos which have befallen the country ‘like a black plague’, which shapes the way the country is perceived abroad. It is an antidote against stereotypes.

Sixth, this book is an excellent piece of scholarship. It approaches Libyan literature with modern methods and insights from the field of literary studies, Arabic and Islamic studies, ecocriticism, animal studies and other fields of interest. One will find references to Barthes and other specialized reading, original Arabic terms in transliteration, and many cross-references. The bibliography is solid. Primary sources have been used abundantly, in Arabic and other languages. Libyan literature is not confined to the Arabic language but authors expressing themselves in other tongues are included as well.

Finally, Charis Olszok is not only a scholar with a PhD in Arabic literature and a person with a vision, she is also a gifted translator whose mastery of the language shines through the pages of this book. The choice of words and imagery is bold at times. The beautiful, dense and pregnant style lends it literary quality. Titles and subtitles have been crafted with care and tickle our curiosity (Introduction: A country of others; Part I: Survival, 1. Animal Fable in Novels of Survival; 2. The Primordial Turn; Part II Signs and Cityscapes: 3. A God’s Wide Land: War, Melancholy and the Camel; 4. Absent Stories in the Urban Novel; Part III: Children of the land: 5. Too-Long-a-Tale; 6. ‘Une histoire de mouche’: the Libyan Novel in Other Voices; Afterword: Breaking fevers and strange metamorphoses).

A few highlights may illustrate what has been said above and give the reader a first impression. The book opens with ‘Umar al-Kiddi’s (1959-) story ‘The wonderful short life of the dog Ramadan’. In it, a Libyan rescue dog stands in the spotlight. A Dutch lady pays a fortune to make him leave the country as an illegal migrant crossing to Lampedusa. His story goes viral and he becomes the hero of animal rights’ activists and the object of a commercial circus; when he dies, he is honoured, in the Netherlands, with a state funeral. It is the invisibility of all but the fate of this dog – the blindness for the suffering of humans – that lends the story its power. Inadvertedly, my thoughts drifted here when I read about the airlift of a group of cats and dogs from a shelter in Afghanistan, during the last days of the chaotic exodus of foreign troops, in August 2021, when so many vulnerable Afghan allies and collaborators were left behind.

Beautiful too is to see the literary fantasies surrounding the iconic statue of the (nude) Girl and the Gazelle, which dates back to the times of Italian occupation and used to sit in a fountain on the Gazelle Roundabout in Tripoli. The selected texts show how a beloved monument grows into a literary motif, that, like, e.g., camels, horses and wildlife depicted in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, undergoes transformations in ever changing stories. Having read the book one fully understands the shock that was felt, when in 2014 the nude statue was veiled, hit by a mortar shell which left a hole in the girl’s stomach, and finally went up into thin air (was she destroyed? hidden somewhere, to salvage her?). That same year Muhammad al-Na‘as (1991-) wrote a short story which was awarded the Khalifa al-Fakhri prize in 2015. Its title, Majnun Ghazala (‘the madman of Ghazala/ the gazelle’), is reminiscent of Majnun Leila, an old story about a man who loses his mind over his infatuation with a woman named Leila (this story too has manifold interpretations, some of which with mystic dimensions). In Majnun Ghazala the naked woman caressing the gazelle becomes the focal point of a police man’s obsession. Having come from a village, he resents the city dwellers and is disturbed by the condemning and lusting gazes she attracts. In the cracks of the bronze he sees her desire to escape; in the eyes of the gazelle he reads a cry for help. His dream is to save them. The author observes: They all passed her by: Italians; Italianised Libyans; Arabised Libyans; Africanised Libyans and Libyanised Libyans. Four-wheel drives sped by, and men with clubs, Kalashnikovs and heavy artillery. People wrote for her and against her, and jokes and anecdotes were spun around her. A Shaykh in a mosque called for her to be covered with a niqab. Another called for her to be destroyed. An intellectual wrote a poem about her, and another wrote a story. And so the Arabs continued to quarrel over their women (p. 230).

This is just a small sample of what to expect. Readers be warned: the Girl and the Gazelle may have disappeared from the roundabout, but she can still crush your heart while lamenting the fate of her people. The book may sketch a gloomy picture at times, but it shows, above all, the resilience of creativity and the relevance of literary works for the cohesion of a modern society.

Prof. dr. Caroline Janssen (Ghent University)

This review was published in: Africa Book Link, Fall 2021

So this is not history, it is a revelation; A revelation of love A revelation of hope A revelation of perseverance A revelation of bravery A revelation of knowledge

Kwa ũguo rũũrũ ti hithitũrĩ ni kĩguũrĩrio Kĩguũrĩrio kĩa wendo Kĩguũrĩrio kĩa mĩwhoko Kĩguũrĩrio kĩa ũmĩrĩru Kĩguũrĩrio kĩa ũkamba Kĩguũrĩrio kĩa ũmenio

After decades of producing fiction, plays, memoirs, and essays, earning thirteen honorary doctorates and a UCI Medal, distinguished professor of English and comparative literature and literary and social activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o returns to the printed page to bring us the epic of his own people, and he does so for his first time in a fully-fledged poetic prose verse publication.

The title The Perfect Nine refers to nine daughters, who in fact were ten in number—hence, the “perfect nine.” It retells an origin myth: that of the founding parents of the Gĩkũyũ people’s ten clans, their mother Mũmbi and father Gĩkũyũ; the ten clans are named for their ten daughters, each of whom was matriarch of a clan.

Introduction: “The landscape was beautiful”

The book takes the reader to Kenya, and is set around Kere-Nyaga, the Gĩkũyũ name for Mount Kenya, which means “that which possesses brightness, or mountain of brightness” (Kenyatta 1953 (1938), 234).  Kere-Nyaga is the second-highest mountain in Africa (after Kilimanjaro, Tanzania), and is regarded as one of the mountains of the moon, a mythical mountain, where people are enabled to “perform their magic and traditional ceremonies in undisturbed serenity, facing Mount Kenya” (Kenyatta 1953 (1938), xxi). Deferring to the original name of Mount Kenya allows us to understand the mountain’s connection with the Supreme Being, called Ngai or Mulungu, whom the Gĩkũyũ address in prayers and sacrifices as Mwene-Nyaga, which means “possessor of brightness” (“Owner of Ostrich Whiteness”, ibid., 19). As later explained by the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, “The mountain of brightness is believed by the Gĩkũyũ to be Ngai’s official resting-place, and in their prayers they turn towards Kere-Nyaga and, with their hands raised towards it, they offer their sacrifices, taking the mountain to be the holy earthly dwelling-place of Ngai.”[1] Kenyororokero na kehuroko kia Mwene-Nyaga—literally, “descending and resting- or dwelling-place of God” (Kenyatta, 1953 (1938) 234).

It is on the mountaintop of  Kere-Nyaga that God put the first man (Gĩkũyũ) and woman (Mũmbi), and “from where they surveyed the lands around” (wa Thiong’o 2020, ix). Of these lands, Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi arrived safely at a place called Mũkũrũwe-inĩ, remarkable for its landscape, which became their home and for which they chanted their gratitude to the Supreme Giver through a hymn interpolated into the epic—the first out of several that the epic features. The hymn is recited as follows:

Owner of Ostrich Whiteness, we praise you For this brightness around us, This soil, these rivers and numerous hills, And these animals of different kinds.(Prologue, 11)

Mwene Nyaga nĩ twakũgatha Nĩ ũthaka ũyũ wakenga ta kĩ, Tĩĩri ũyũ njũũĩ na irĩma nyingĩ O na nyamũ mithemba mĩingĩ (Matemo, 8)

This beautiful hymn is a hymn to God, to life, and to nature, which is appreciated in all its beauty and complexity. After Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi’s hymn, the narrator offers his own hymn of gratitude, imploring the Supreme Giver to bestow peace on his heart so that he may recount the tale of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi and their Perfect Nine: “exactly the way the wind whispered it to my soul / when once / I stood on a hill watching swallows flying in the air” (Prologue, 11).

Synopsis

Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi’s nine daughters have no brothers, and their father and mother have taught them to do everything by themselves: how to make weapons, defend themselves, build houses; they are well rounded (“theirs was the union of mind, heart and hands”), and beyond that, they are beautiful. Their powerful self-reliance and wholesome beauty, which are known all over the world, make the perfect nine daughters “seem to be the original feminists” (wa Thiong’o 2020, x).

Not introducing the daughters by name would be an egregious oversight in any critical analysis of Ngũgĩ’s epic. Names, as the author himself asserts, are the first points of identity—followed by one’s mother tongue, which is a carrier of cultural memory. Their names are Wanjirũ (the oldest), matriarch of the Anjirũ clan who “it is said once put a curse on a hyena”; Wambũi, matriarch of the Mbũi clan, “who once rode a zebra to war and led an army to victory”; Wanjikũ, matriarch of the Agacikũ clan, who loves work, cares for her own personal freedom, and knows all about healing herbs; Wangũi, matriarch of the Thiegeni clan, who has been singing since she was in her mother’s womb, and whose voice all the birds to gather to hear; Waithĩra, matriarch of the Thĩra clan, who is very diligent, attentive, and fair; Njeri, matriarch of the Cera clan, who “reasons in search of justice”; Mwĩthaga, matriarch of the Ethaga clan, which swears by her other name, Nymabura, “a name given for her rainmaking powers”; Wairimũ, matriarch of the Thigia clan, who adds decorations to the pots she makes and patterns to the things she invents; Wangarĩ, matriarch of the Ngarĩ clan, who has the courage and quickness of a leopard, with similarly bright eyes; and Warigia, matriarch of the Mũyũ clan, the tenth of the daughters, whose name means “the last”, with crippled legs and extremely good with arrows; who gave birth, unmarried, at her parents’ home.

When the equally beautiful girls all come of marrying age, their father Gĩkũyũ goes back to the mountaintop to ask God to provide suitable husbands. It is then that, on waking one morning, the family finds ninety-nine men who have travelled to their home in Mũkũrũwe-inĩ from all corners of the world: “it was the beauty of the fame of these nine that brought them there” (ibid., 51)—the silhouette of an existing  beauty that, day after day and night after night, would never abandon their mind.

The ninety-nine decide to fight among themselves, and the last nine suitors remaining will wed the daughters. Swords are drawn and rivals challenged among the ninety-nine, each of whom begins claiming that his own home region is superior to the others (57). The ninety-nine men’s plan is not well received by the family of Mũmbi and Gĩkũyũ, who do not want any blood to be spilled over their daughters because, as Gĩkũyũ adds, “war destroys lives whereas peace restores” them, and while “the warrior and the warrior bring home trophies of tears (Mũrũi na mũrũi mainũkagia kĩrĩro, 38) / the peacemaker and the peacemaker bring home trophies of laughter” (Wathayũ na thayũ mainũkagia mĩtheko. 38);  Mũmbi and Gĩkũyũ summon the ninety-nine—and others—to “embrace in friendship / to embrace the human within us / The human like the divine, has many names, but its / real name is Human” (61). Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi invite the men to build their own dwellings: “As soon as the sun appears in the morning, you begin. By the time the sun goes to sleep, you will have to put up ten huts. Nine men into each hut. And each of the huts will be named after one of the Perfect Nine” (69).

Soon a dispute has arisen among the daughters, who all find themselves with one particular man as their first choice. Mũmbi reproaches them recalling that “When the heart finds its target, the head will decide. Never fight over a man” (78). Consequently, several tests are given to each group of ten chaperoned by one of the nine daughters, like making clothes, climbing trees, starting a fire by drilling into hard stones or sticks, and throwing spears. The last day is a test of archery skills, during which Gĩkũyũ wants the men to show his daughters how good they are at shooting arrows straight into the eye of a tree. All the groups succeed equally, but once the shooting distance is increased, it is hardly possible to see the eye. Astoundingly, Warigia is the only one who manages to shoot one arrow after another, and each arrow hits the eye of the tree: “The men looked at each other, wondering how she could do this on crippled legs.”

Afterwards, Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi want the groups to embark on a journey to the mountain of the moon, to walk the path they had walked and drink the water they had drunk. The daughters and their respective groups are given a mission: to find Mwengeca, the king of human-eating ogres, who is said to have hair that grows in the very middle of his tongue. Gĩkũyũ tells them the following words: “I want you to wrestle him to the ground, capture his tongue, and pull out the hair. / The hair that cures all will restore full power to Warigia’s legs” (90).

The journey to the mountain of the moon sees the ninety-nine leaving home as “an immature lot,” and after a period spanning an untold number of weeks or seasons, those who have made their way back home are “a mature lot,” only nineteen in number (171). The ninety-nine have to face a plethora of challenges along the path to the mountain of the moon, from the minor irritation of mosquitos, red ants, and tsetse flies, to crocodiles and other humans, who pose the greatest danger of all with their machetes, spears, clubs, and arrows. Climbing the mountain and withstanding the cold is yet another challenge, but as the line reads, “There is no power stronger than the power of hope” (109).

The convoy’s first great achievement is when, determined to scale the mountain, they finally manage to arrive at the mountaintop, scoop up some of the white moon, and put it into their gourds, their fingers freezing as if bitten by the whiteness itself. While climbing down, they are described filling their gourds with holy water at the lakes, wonderfully mixing it with moon, and exclaiming “Victory, victory!”

There are six episodes dedicated solely to hostile encounters and fights with ogres of all species. The experiences they gain from those encounters and losses teach them a lesson, as they say on arriving home:

“And now we know that ogres don’t dwell in tales alone / And that, though different in types and colours, all are human-eaters. / Their challenges taught us that without continuous vigilance, we shall fall.” (172)

The first encounter is with a bodiless ogre with a magical tongue, who faces off against Wanjirũ and her own strong, arrogant, and defiant tongue (117). When his long, wide tongue wraps itself around the tree, Wanjirũ shouts “Now!” and arrows pin his tongue to the tree. The daughters pierce his eyes and pluck his magical hair, but do not hurt his body as they cannot see it. Itis Kĩhara who jumps on his magical tongue and pulls out the hair, prompting Mwengeca to “let out a blood-curdling scream” (118). “For Warigia!” Kĩhara shouts. The reader will discover only later (172–74) that pulling out the hair has restored the use of the beautiful legs of the last-born Warigia, who stayed home from the journey;

The encounter with the bodiless “Cure-All Ogre” Mwengeca is not the only duel that the groups face. In chapter 11, the reader witnesses another arduous duel, which on the one hand inspires sorrow for those who died—three men die when the ogre splits their heads against a tree—and on the other, admiration for one of the perfect nine, Wangarĩ, who, “trembling with rage and proud defiance” as the ogre of endless darkness is advancing toward her, causes the darkness to retreat ignominiously with her words, “I dare you to come near me, and I will clear you with the light of a leopard’s eyes” (126) while lighting a fire.

Chapter 12 opens with another mysterious encounter: a creature with three legs and three arms who breathes smoke and fire from his mouths and nose, incinerating all the plants around him. Mwĩthaga is asked as the price for letting them go, but instead, she suggests that her sisters climb a fig tree, a mythical tree in Gĩkũyũ culture, and, also assuming a position where the flames cannot reach her, Mwĩthaga starts mocking the creature by singing a rain song; she then chants further incantations to induce rain, and it starts raining. The epic describes the beautiful scene of “leaves amplifying the sound of rain.” Interestingly, the sound of the rain in the original Gĩkũyũ is rendered as cococococo, with the entire verse reading as follows: macoya thĩ magambage cococococo (87). This powerfully evocative sound combined with the rain itself makes the Ogre of Fire and Fury run away. Sadly, this duel also costs the group some losses: while the nine manage to run at a fair pace, some of the men are not able to run as swiftly, and die when the flames reach them. Their mourning reaches its apex in the line, “Our pain was deepened by our knowing that we could not stop to help them” (133).

Other ogres of the forest step on the feet of the nine daughters and their male troop during their journey, like the Ogre of Endless Tears, the Ogre of Floods, the Ogre That Shat Without Stopping, the Bloodthirsty Ogre and the Squint-Eyed Ogre—also known as the Ogre of the Big Bag, because it never fills up. The convoy also witnesses the transformation of one ogre into a vulture (wamahuru) and another into a large hyena (wamahiti), who begins following them.

One very symbolic chapter is chapter 16, titled “Ogres in White Masks,” which echoes Franz Fanon’s masterpiece Black Skin, White Masks. The convoy spots two attractive humans, a man and a woman, who resemble twins, with complexions the colour of chalk, chalk-white clothes, and long, straight, and soft-looking hair falling on their backs. Madness claims each of them as they begin to desire the duo’s chalk-hued beauty. Wanjikũ and Kĩhara are the only ones who stand firm, resist temptation, and prevent the others from becoming the slaves of “the ogres in chalky masks” (marimũ ma irembeko cia mũnyũ, 100). Wanjikũ’s words to her sisters contemplate and philosophize black beauty:

“Don’t despise the beads you are wearing for the ones worn by another. / Don’t give up the four in your hand for the eight in the hands of another. / Since when does chalk beauty beat black beauty? (Wamũnyũ aakĩririe Kairũ ũthaka rĩ?, 98) / How can we abandon the men with whom we have suffered / For somebody we don’t even know? / Chalk?  (Nĩ ũndũ wa mũnyũ mwerũ?, 99) / Have we forgotten the admonition from Mother Mũmbi? / Let our eyes return to those whose character has been proven by deeds.” (164–65)

The epic comes to an end with the blessings that Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi confer on each couple who bring the gourd and place it at their feet: “May this water wash away all impurities in the path of your life together” (177). Gĩkũyũ welcomes all the men, who are no longer strangers in the house. Every nine days, a marriage ceremony takes place: the first is that of Wanjirũ and Njirũ, while the last, the marriage of Warigia and Kĩhara, never takes place, eclipsed by a tragedy that takes Warigia’s husband-to-be.

Storytelling, language, and writing style

We encountered so many wonders that
Even now, as I recount these stories,
I feel I am talking about dreams, or
Nightmares that make one sweat on waking. (157)

The Perfect Nine’s original language of composition is Gĩkũyũ, a Bantu language spoken in the area between Nyeri and Nairobi, Kenya. The Gĩkũyũ edition also includes digital pictures by Julius Maina. It is not the first work the writer has composed in his mother tongue[2]; he has been writing in Gikuyu since the 1970s. In fact, the turning point for Ngũgĩ came as he recounts it in several works (Decolonising the Mind and Birth of A Dream Weaver, “On Writing in Gĩkũyũ”) after he attended the Conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University in 1962 where renown writers like Shaaban Robert –  writing in Swahili –  or Daniel O. Fagunwa – writing in Yoruba –  were not attending the conference of “African Writers” just because their works were not in English. Yet The Perfect Nine is Ngũgĩ’s first epic, whose original Gĩkũyũ title is Kenda Mũiyũru: Rũgano rwa Gĩkũyũ na Mũmbi (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2018).

The fact that we call this work an “epic” both helps and hinders us in comprehending the book’s genre, its verbal style and conventions. Approaching The Perfect Nine as an epic, the reader will certainly discern a few characteristics of the genre, such as its being poetic, narrative, heroic, and legendary (see Johnson 1980). On the other hand, the term used in the Gĩkũyũ title, namely rũgano,  sheds light on its other stylistic characteristics. Rũgano is the closest genre to fiction, Ngũgĩ explains, but it could also suggest a historical narrative. “Kũgana rũgano—‘to tell a story’—can mean either of those, but specifically means retelling of well-known stories such as fables. The art is in the telling, not the fact of the story. As the writer says in his acknowledgments, the story of the origins of his own people’s culture is a narrative that has been told and retold, like many other mythical tales (the story of Adam and Eve, the Genesis creation myth, Greek cosmogonical accounts, the Mande creation myth). As he once said, “This is our own story. I am retelling it in my own way.”

Ngũgĩ has gracefully recast this myth in poetic prose verse for the first time, by creating something completely new. On one hand, he continues his tendency with allegorical writing – already started in Matigari in which characters stand for all the veterans –  but on the other hand, he goes more decidedly away from realism and tries to create an all-time narrative, a myth of origin. The author reframes it in humanist terms – beauty, unity, humanism and peace – and typically epic virtues, like courage and stamina. At the basis of his retelling, he has used the quest for beauty “as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family, and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture” (Notes on The Perfect Nine, x).

The motif of quest and beauty, aside from being praised in the epic’s prelude, where the author tells about the fame of the nine’s beauty which spread  and travelled widely to Ethiopia and Egypt by means of nine ostriches who, with nine trumpets, announce the nine’s birth (see chapter 4, “The Wind and the Ostrich”), becomes palpable also at the very end of The Perfect Nine, where Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi powerfully proclaim, “Don’t look for me in wicked deeds, […] in theft and robbery, […] in senseless violence, […] in meaningless wars; Look for me in the water, […] in the wind, […] in love, […] in unity […] among the helping, […] among the oppressed, […] among the seekers of justice, […] among those building the nation in the name of the human.” (226–27).

This quest and call to find the beauty and the beautiful ones, aside being praised from the beginning, when for instance at the opening of chapter three, the author recites: “Those who had eaten more salt in this world tried to broker peace: Lay down your swords, young men. The beautiful one will always be born. Reasoning with the heart is better than rioting with the sword. Win hearts with good deeds, not with golden swords.” (23), both stands in contrast to, and is reminiscent of, the lack of beauty and reasoning with the heart that the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah aimed to draw attention to in his The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969), by which, rather than being surrounded with love, beauty, and justice, people were just overwhelmed by post-independence disillusionment at the devastating failures of political and social life.

In both authors, one can find a clear interest and profound interpretation of the phrase “The Beautiful One”. To Egyptologists, this epithet is a praise name for one of the most central figures in Ancient Egyptian culture, namely Osiris, who—as Ayi Kwei Armah notes in a preface to a new edition of The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born published by Per Ankh—represents “a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration.”[3]

Building on this quest for the beautiful one is Ngũgĩ’s own oratory and storytelling, which, as he says, draws from the wellspring of his own artistic imagination, and is an integral part of his creative expression. As attested elsewhere, the oral context of Gĩkũyũ literature and “its relevance to the building of our nation cannot be questioned”; “many people recognise that the development and the future of a nation depend on the ability of that nation to create a people firmly rooted in the best of its traditions. Such as people are proud of themselves as individuals and as a nation” (Mutahi & Kabira 1987, 1).

The stories of ogres (Ng’ano Cia Marimũ in Gĩkũyũ)—widespread among the Pokomo and Gĩkũyũ of Kenya and the Iraqw of Tanzania—as well as animal characters, like “brutes of prey” such as lions, leopards, and hyenas—are all familiar characters in oral literature, livening up storytelling evenings around the fireside without electricity during Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s own childhood at the house of his father’s eldest wife  in Kenya. The stories he listened to formed the cultural lens through which he could see and interpret man’s own struggles and victories in the real world.

As he narrates in his memoirs (see Dreams in a Time of War or Decolonising the Mind), during those evenings, “We children would re-tell stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields picking the pyrethrum flowers, tea-leaves or coffee beans of our European and African landlords. […] Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words. So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content” (Thiong’o 1986, 11).

Ngũgĩ’s alchemy of his own mother tongue, the music and magical power of his language, the “”sense of engagement”[4] that he finds when writing in Gĩkũyũ, can be exemplified in the epic, when the author has to translate the sound of the rain, expressed in Gĩkũyũ through the “nonsensical but musically arranged words” cococococo, untranslatable ideophone in the English rendition.

The writer’s care and sensitivity toward words and their melody are also discernible in other parts of the epic, with such verses as “the forests and the mountains echoed with the melodies and the words and the rhythms” (9).

The epic narrative is paused not only by several songs—to the Supreme Giver, the sun, the rain—but also by several wise sayings, like “One can never complain about that which one has freely chosen” (71), “Hurry hurry hardly gets things right” (116), or the powerful “Don’t burn your bridges” (209).

In their quest for beauty, the nine often serve as first-person narrators who, even when far from their parents on their daily adventures in the forest of the ogres, address Mũmbi and Gĩkũyũ in unison with the plural “you”: “from an early age you taught us to walk and run” (133); “As you always taught us, to every closure, there’s a disclosure” (139); “He was an ogre just like those under Mwengeca’s rule, or those you always told us about in our evenings of storytelling” (145).

One might wonder if and where there lies some political intent in his ardour to retell the myth of his own people, and we may dare to read between the lines a silent intent to decolonize the myth of the tribes and, by extension, the idea of beauty. The Perfect Nine reads also as a parable of humanism and tolerance, where through a political and social allegory, the writer is passing on the message to us. On the other hand, we can also consider political this great project to defy the novel and reconfiguring new narrative modes beyond it by exploring a poetic prose as its form, mythical characters as protagonists and a mythical landscape.

A desideratum for forthcoming editions of The Perfect Nine and other African-language books would be the publication of more bilingual editions (in Gĩkũyũ and Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, Kiswahili, or Hindi)[5], in order to allow the republic of letters and translation to come ever closer to each other. May the epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi cross these bridges and travel beyond its homeland.

References

Ayi Kwei Armah. 1973 (1969). The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann.

———. 1976. Wema Hawajazaliwa. Translation by Abdilatif Abdalla. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.

Biersteker, Ann. 2000. “Gikuyu Literature: Development from Early Christian Writings to Ngũgĩ’s Later               Novels” in Abiola, F. Irene & Gikandi, Simon (eds.) The Cambridge History of African and       Caribbean Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 306–328.

Cantalupo, Charles. 1982. The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press

Thiongo, N. wa. 1985. “On Writing in Gikuyu.” Research in African Literatures 16.4: 151–56.

———. 1986. Decolonising the Mind. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

———. 2006. Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening. London: Harvill Secker.

———. 2010. Dreams in a Time of War. A Childhood Memoir. New York: Anchor Books.

Fanon, Franz. 1975.  Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Edition du Seuil.

Johnson, John W. 1980. “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Epic in Africa,” Research in African Literatures 11.3: 308–326.

Kabira, Wanjikũ Mũkabi & Mutahi, E. Karega. 1993. Gĩkũyũ Oral Literature. Nairobi: East African        Educational Publishers.

[1] Jomo Kenyatta’s work Facing Mount Kenya (1938) has been a source of inspiration for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writing. (See Biersteker, A. 2004.)

[2] To name but a few: the play co-authored by Ngũgĩ wa Miriĩ, Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako rĩa Ngerekano (‘I will marry when I want’) (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1980) , the novel written while he was in prison Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ. (‘Devil on the Cross’) (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1980), Matigari ma Njirũũngi (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986), and the heftiest novel in Gikuyu ever: Mũrogi wa Kagogo.

[3] The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, quoted in New African, August–September 2009.

[4] See the author’s own words and interview with Charles Cantalupo (The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1982).

[5] The translation from Gikuyu in Swahili will be prepared by Ndirangu Wachanga and edited by eminent Swahili poet Abdilatif Abdalla. It will be published by East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi.