There’s nobody who cannot write a book if they want to, because it’s a question of dreaming, and we human beings are dreamers...

Recasting the Centre | Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Towards a New Imagination | 09 Sept 2021

Could you elaborate more on your journey of becoming a writer?

& How did your childhood in Kenya affect your writing process?

I’ve written all about this in my childhood memoir – Dreams in A Time of War!

The idea of writing is like dreams!

My definition of writing is – conscious dreaming in words.

When we dream at night the mind connects lots of things. We see ourselves in different places.

When we wake up, we say, ‘What happened to my wings of flight?’

Artist is one who does conscious dreaming in paint!

Musician is one who does conscious dreaming in music!

I was in Calcutta some years ago – the guest of my publishers Seagull! They published my book, The Upright Revolution which has now been translated into more than one hundred languages in the world.

I also visited the house of one my heroes – Tagore!

Now let me go back to my childhood. 

Well, I come from a large family. I was very lucky to have four mothers! The result is that, my siblings were very many.

We were like a community. Every evening we will go to one of our mother’s houses, where we were told stories. 

So we grew up in a story-telling household.

And that’s how I became interested in story-telling.

But guess what? They could only tell stories in the evening, when all the work was done.

They said that, stories went away in day time, and they only came in the evening, when all the work of the day had been done.

But I and other children wanted stories even in day time!

So while we were able to go to school, we were able to read, and get a book of stories, it was wonderful to be able to read myself stories in daytime as well, by reading books.

So authoring stories began in my childhood!

In 1959-1960 I left Kenya for Makerere College in neighbouring Uganda.

By 1961 I had finished my first novel, The River Between!

So I began writing when I was a student!

This is my belief that, there’s nobody who is a monopoly over the imagination.

Even children can dream! Adults can dream!

There’s nobody who cannot write a book so to speak, if they want to, because it’s a question of dreaming, and we human beings are dreamers.

We have imagination, that makes us humans.

We imagine our gods, we imagine our future!

So imagination makes the invisible visible!

That’s another joy for me, for writing.

As an undergraduate, I didn’t want to be bound by being a student.

I didn’t want someone to say, ‘You’re a student. You cannot be writing books’.

I believed it was possible!

In my second year, I did my second book!

The mystery is in the imagination…

For the full interview, click on the YouTube Link here!