This book was imagined as a retrospective examination of the lives of four major African writers − Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele − all born in 1919, now recognised as key figures in the founding of African literature and its criticism. Since the essays collected in this volume came out of a series of conferences celebrating what would have been their hundredth birthdays in 2019, the four writers are referred to as centenarians. But with its millennial connotations, the word centenarian also carries some significant symbolic weight in the history of modern Africa: the centenarians were born in the same year the new world order was born, or stillborn, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; they witnessed the tragedies triggered by this European arrangement, including the rise of white nationalism in South Africa; and, yes, they all lived long enough to witness the fall of apartheid and the final decolonisation of Africa.

But the book is much more than a celebration of a generation of pioneering writers and intellectuals and their struggle to define what it meant to be African in the long twentieth century; it is also a bold and expansive exploration of some of the questions that have troubled African literary history since the early 1960s. How and why did this literature emerge? What was the nature of the literary public that it both imagined and willed into being? What was the role of African languages in the making of this literary culture? Which writers were included in the emergent canon of letters and which voices were lost or repressed?

Bringing together a cross-section of literary and cultural scholars, many of them based in African institutions of knowledge production, this book is a powerful statement about what African literature looks like when read from below, outside the normative pressures of European and American institutions. In looking back at these centenarians and their important foundational work from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we are able to see how the subordination of African literary history and criticism to the larger flow of theoretical work − most of it functioning under the rubric of poststructuralism − was both a blessing and a curse.

The routes of Caribbean interactions with Africa during the 1950s and 1960s were several and varied: not only did Africa appear in the literature as forms and interrogations of an ideological homeland, but African and Caribbean writers met on European soil, exchanged ideas in conversations with each other, and became part of literary projects fostered through European universities and publishers. During this period, many writers and scholars from across the Caribbean region moved to the newly independent African countries, and engaged with the cultures in their writing and professional and personal lives. Conversely, many African writers turned to the Caribbean for models of how to engage with the cultures of colonialism and their afterlife. This chapter examines the pilgrimage of identity and diaspora enacted through the African–Caribbean connection, the new literary movements that it generated, as well as the shared project of political and cultural decolonization.

On the surface, Weep Not, Child, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's first published novel, would seem to have come slightly late in history of African literature. It was completed at Northcote Hall, Makerere University College in 1962, ten years after the publication of Amos Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and it was published in 1964, six years after the publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Within this historical timeline, Ngũgĩ's novel appears to be a work suspended between two distinct moments of literary history. On the one hand, the work appears to belong not to the first generation of African writers, but to a second “postcolonial” generation. Unlike his predecessors, Ngũgĩ can claim to have drawn his works on models of African writing, a library that was available to him as he set out to write his novel. As he told Dennis Duerden in a 1964 interview, he had read Achebe and Ekwensi who, together with a group of Caribbean writers, set his imagination flying. Moreover, by the time Ngũgĩ started writing, the idea of Africa literature had firmly been established. The historical conference of African writers held at Makerere University in 1962, which Ngũgĩ attended, was evidence of the coming into being of African writing. At this conference, Ngũgĩ, an apprentice novelist, would rub shoulders with the makers of the new canon of letters. Given the existence of this canon, it could be said that Ngũgĩ didn't suffer the anxiety of dealing with a radical starting point or what Edward Said would call an “intransitive beginning” (Beginnings 73). Weep Not, Child was born into an ever-expanding family of African scribes and critics.

On the other hand, however, Weep Not, Child carries within its language and structure a deep anxiety about the possibility or impossibility of writing. Ngũgĩ has written about this anxiety in considerable detail in Dreams in a Time of War where he looks back on in his own childhood desire to become a writer without the authorization of the institutions of colonial power. In retrospect, we can read Njoroge's struggle to be educated and his striving to acquire a proper sense of himself as part of the crisis of writing.

This started as a work of commemoration and celebration. The two of us had been working on Ngũgĩ's works for many years from different directions— Simon Gikandi as a literary critic and historian; Ndirangu Wachanga as a journalist and documentarist. In the course of our lives and work, we had had many encounters with Ngũgĩ and knew him well in different contexts. On January 5, 2018, the author, one of the most eminent writers to have come out of Africa in the modern period, would be celebrating his 80th birthday. We thought it would be a good occasion to reflect on Ngũgĩ's life in writing, and to think through his work from the perspective of those who had known him either personally or through reading and commenting on his texts. Our goal was to put together a collection of short essays, poems, and stories that reflect on the life of the writer, his world, and his works. We were particularly interested in imaginative pieces that would reveal the different, and sometimes complex, layers that had gone into the making of the writer; and we wanted to go beyond his well-established institutional image and to probe how what might initially have appeared to be minor episodes in his life provided vistas into his coming into being as a writer, as an intellectual of decolonization, and a major figure in conversations about human rights and justice in the long twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. We were also interested in Ngũgĩ's role outside the academy in the world of education, the mass media, community theater, and activism, places where we had encountered him many times. The works collected here are reflections of this desire to celebrate the writer in his prime.

The story of Ngũgĩ's life and its intersection between his experiences and education is well known. His interviews over the years, and his memoirs in late career, have given us a complex image of the writer in his various iterations; but what we see in this collection is both an extension and complication of this well-established narrative. Ngũgĩ means different things to different people, but one of the themes running through the collection is how he is both rooted in a very specific Gĩkũyũ and Kenyan realm from which he has spread his wings to the world.

Becoming a Writer

If one was looking for that moment that encapsulates Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's entry into the edifice of African letters—and hence the institution of modern authorship—it is probably that day in May, 1964, when his first novel, Weep Not, Child is published by Heinemann Educational Books in London. We have at least two images of this moment: the first one is Ngũgĩ's now famous interview with John de Villiers for the mass circulation Daily Nation newspaper in Nairobi. The young author was introduced to his new public as follows:

Here, there is the often-forgotten combination of the moment of arrival of the artist, of his uncertain entry into the culture of letters, and, with it, some hesitation, perhaps doubts about his own capacity to carry the burden thrust on him by history as the first East African novelist. In the interview itself, we can see Ngũgĩ making the first tenuous step into the public sphere that will come to define the rest of his life, drawing adulation from generations of readers, but also the enmity of an insecure postcolonial state.