Ngugi wa Thiong'o in conversation with Gita Hariharan

Every thought, every memory, every emotion, has a landowner! Things that happen are meant to belong, to you, or to me. Like a privilege acquired at birth, a litany made up of, “this is mine, yours, ours.”

Nations and powers that be, appropriate entire histories, lives, other nations, people, writing and rewriting of things that later become our truths – yours and mine – living under the keel of collective ownership can be crippling.

How does one free the event of one’s life from the clutches of possessive, dictatorial memory, and turn it into a literature of resistance…

Presenting the legendary Ngugi wa Thiongo, in conversation with Gita Hariharan, 23 February 2018, New Delhi.

The Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, was seated to capacity, brimming with a throng, which literary events rarely boast of. Well, literary minds from far and wide started trickling in from three pm on, for the event which was to begin at 7 pm.

“Let me tell you a secret,” Thiongo began.

“You know something?”

“I met Spivak first in the year 1996 at UCI.”

“No, Thiongo. You got it wrong!!! We met first in the year Nineteen Sixty Six!”

“Oh yeah! I remember!”

“And back then, Gayatri was an Assistant Professor at Iowa”

“Right!”

Soon, Gita Hariharan gently interrupts, and starts, on the interactions!

“This is my second visit to India. My first visit was in 1996, when I came to New Delhi to be part of the Nationalities Conference to talk about the national question among and within nations.”

Excerpts from his colloquy –

Education, to Thingo, is “where we are!”

It is simply, “where we are”.

So it’s not the subject alone, that matters in education, but also a place! The wonderful space or place, where education takes place.

So, “Knowledge begins in the body”. The body is not just as an entity belonging to a subject. It is also an entity that defines a place. And the task of education is to begin at the beginning, where we are, our body and our place.

“Education is to learn about ourselves.” But unfortunately, what colonial education does instead, is, to carry this beginning “elsewhere”, somewhere else, and displace the beginning. It turns us into receptors of a knowledge that comes from outside about other people. As if knowledge begins elsewhere, from where the coloniser comes from. No wonder, we receive, relearn, discuss and justify the knowledge we receive from elsewhere to explain ourselves as much as the world.

Making the colonised suffer from a sense of inferiority forms the psychological basis of colonialism. It paves the way for the enthusiasm towards English/European education and knowledge.

Thiong’o adds to say, how in his student days, he felt as if Shakespeare was the only playwright in the world.

Well, to Shakespeare, the iambic pentameter was an obsession. Whether he remembered to have his food or not, he never forgot the iambic pentameter!

To be contd…

PS: YouTube videos on Thiongo in conversation with Gita Hariharan are HERE for y’all!