Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) has gone down in history as one of the greatest literary Pan-Africanists in modern times. Beyond that, he is one of Africa’s most consequential authors in Latin America.Footnote ¹ Nearly all of his works are translated into Spanish, making them accessible to a Hispanic Latin American market that shares much with Africa but is largely disconnected from the latter by linguistic barriers (among other factors). Ngũgĩ is thus a rare exception given the relatively low traffic of creative texts between Africa and Latin America. Most of the translations of African literature are done by Spanish scholars-translators in a context where the enthusiasm for and reception of African literature leave much to be desired. Marta-Sofia Rodriguez Lopez, who has translated major works by Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Spanish asserts that in Spain “People are unaware, or not very conscious, of the existence of a vast and rich African culture. Africa is associated with misery, poverty and illiteracy. It seems to me that, to a large extent, we can therefore speak of simple ignorance” (Reference López and Sofía2014, 243). However, apart from the growing interest for African literature in Spain, these translations are beginning to find critical readership among Latino scholars in the USA but most importantly among engaged readers in Latin America. In the latter case, African literature is not only gaining increasing interest among the literati, its readership is growing most especially among Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples who can relate with the major deconstructive and decolonial potentials of that literature. In this contribution, I examine zones of intersection between Ngũgĩ’s works and Latin American historical context as reasons why the Kenyan author’s works will continue to arouse the interest of Latin American readers on a wide gamut of issues.

Ngũgĩ’s works resonate across spaces where unequal power relations have led to systemic dispossession and where formerly colonized peoples are engaged in a quest to articulate their worldviews in their language, both strictly and symbolically speaking. That is exactly where Latin America and Africa become bedfellows in Ngũgĩ’s imagination due to their dramatic and largely tragic entries into Western modernity. In the history of cultural encounters, “America” stands as a space where metaphor tragically embraced reality, shaping contemporary social relations nearly five centuries after the fatal encounters between Europe and its others. The history of the extermination of indigenous peoples and the forced deportation of Blacks to the American continent to be used as disposable bodies (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2003) in the slave plantations and the colonial mines provide a primeval backdrop to fundamental causes that have defined Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s literary career.

As “modernity’s first born” (Ashcroft Reference Ashcroft1998), the Latin American context represents the pristine case of settler colonies (as opposed to colonies of exploitation) quite relatable to Ngũgĩ’s Kenya, which he depicted in his earlier creative works such as Weep Not Child (Reference wa Thiong’o1964), The River Between (Reference wa Thiong’o1965), I Will Marry When I Want (Reference wa Thiong’o1977) and Petals of Blood (Reference wa Thiong’o1978). There are striking similarities in colonial looting and the implantation of capitalist labor relations that justify Crawford Young’s (Reference Young1994) claim that the Western European colonial forces in Africa took a leaf from the experiences of Iberian powers especially in Latin America. Ngũgĩ’s postcolonial literary texts grapple with the original scene/sin of colonial implantation, with its attendant consequences of economic and spiritual alienation of Africans (and the indigenous peoples of Latin America) and its self-reproduction in postindependence Africa, this time with the national bourgeoisie as agents of neocolonial spoilation.

Ngũgĩ’s interest in transatlantic history in relation to the Middle Passage experiences and Black heritage in the Americas is vividly expressed in his book Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (Reference Ngũgĩ2009), wherein he reflects on the need to reconnect and reimagine a new relationship with the African-American diaspora. He posits that Africa cannot experience genuine progress without adequately mourning the tragic separation from its ancestors who were deported to the Americas under dehumanizing conditions and those who were forced to drown at sea. Reading through Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel Osiris Rising: A Novel of Africa Past, Present and Future (Reference Armah1995), he emphasizes the necessity for Africa to re-member itself and regain its strength from the fragments of history. Mourning, as conceived by Ngũgĩ in this text, is not an emotional and static harking on the past, but rather a reflective process that works through the tragedy of the past in order to foreground an energized future that harnesses the spiritual and cultural forces of African societies: “Mourning, then, is a sombre celebration of a rite of passage in the journey of the trinity, but it is also a memory, a re-membering of the ancestors, an honouring of the heritage they have left to the living. It is a closure and an opening to a new relationship of being” (Ngũgĩ Reference Ngũgĩ2009, 45). Imagining Africa beyond the strict contours of its map, America becomes part of the African renaissance by virtue of its historical congeniality and as the home of millions of Afro-descendant peoples. Ngũgĩ thus reads profound Pan-Africanist works like Osiris Rising (Armah Reference Armah1995) as forms and processes of mourning that take account of the profound dimension of Africa’s dis-membering but equally builds on the fathomless recesses of African resilience as the sap of the African renaissance. The need for trans-atlantic re-connection is quite urgent in the case of Latin America whose afro-descendant population and their experiences do not gain the same visibility and attention (especially in the African continent) as North American Afro-diasporas.

Colonial uprooting and systematic looting position the land question as central to the historical trajectories of settler colonies like Ngũgĩ’s Kenya and the entire Latin American continent. Land defines the ontological anchoring of the subject and their relationship with their ancestors, beyond its economic value. Land features, such as mountains, rivers, plains, the countryside and so on, become the primal metaphoric settings of texts that contest the colonial will on dispossessed territories. Think of the Peruvian José Maria Arguedas’s Los rios profundos (Deep Rivers, Reference María Arguedas1958) and Ngũgĩ’s The River Between (Reference wa Thiong’o1965)—two novels that explore the spiritual alienation of indigenous and African peoples from their cosmovisions following imperial conquests and dispossessions. Literature in this context becomes a medium for reconnecting with ancestral spirits and memories as well as forcing the bridging of the gap between the state and the nation, made up of disenfranchised majority. The countryside and rural spaces become propitious sites for the emergence of a new society that is in synergy with the past of the people and their dream of an inclusive future.

In their quest for economic survival, the countryside folks migrate to the cities but are faced with discrimination and rejection in their attempt to eke out a living. In this scenario, the colonial subject becomes a stranger in his own land. This has been the major ferment for social conflicts as represented in works such as Peruvian Julián Pérez Huarancca’s Criba (Sift, Reference Pérez Huarancca2013) and Colombian Arnoldo Palacios’s Las estrellas son negras (The Stars Are Black, Reference Palacios1958). This is the vintage setting of class demarcations of the typical colonial city that has been described so vividly by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (Reference Fanon and Farrington1963) and Mongo Beti in Ville Cruelle (Cruel City, Reference Beti1954) that also find echoes in Ngũgĩ’s texts such as The Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (Reference wa Thiong’o2006). From Nairobi and Yaoundé to Bogota and Lima, the colonial cartography of the prototypical African and Latin American city has been re-produced in most postcolonial states where the “wretched of the earth” or the “nobodies” (Galeano Reference Galeano2011) occupy barely habitable zones where they are exposed to slow deaths. It is from this class that Ngũgĩ consistently weaves his revolutionary characters (such as Karega, Matigari, Nyawira/KamitiFootnote ²) whose ideological positions echo the author’s combativeness as a committed writer on the side of the dispossessed masses.

Conceived as ways of reappropriating discursive agency, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings, even his fictional texts, could be read as forms of self-writing, a genre that he perfected in his essays as well as his autobiographical memoirs trilogy—Dreams in a Time of War (Reference wa Thiong’o2010), In the House of the Interpreter (Reference wa Thiong’o2012), and The Birth of a Dream Weaver (Reference wa Thiong’o2016). Ngũgĩ’s works consistently subvert the prerogative of the hegemonic and privileged groups to speak in the name of othered groups, foregrounding the necessity of self-representation, re-centering the spaces of the subaltern and rerooting the epistemic positionality of the African/indigenous subject in non-European traditions and genealogies. In Globalectics, he states that “The unresolved internal colonialism also remains in countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and throughout Latin America where the original colonized indigenous peoples never went through an independence stage. Have they gone through a postcolonial period? The postcoloniality of the indigenous cannot be identical with that of the settling communities” (2010, 45). In this way, his autobiographical works resonate so stridently with Afro-descendant and indigenous proponents of self-writing in marginalized communities in Latin America, a continent that has suffered the supremacist mentality of Iberian creoles who have sidelined non-European voices in their nation-building projects. Self-writing dislodges the subject from its position as the exotic other, reestablishing their authority and centrality as a defining force and not just an appendage or a footnote of collective history. The poetic oeuvre of an author such as Jorge Artel, Drums in the Night (Reference Artel1940) can be positioned in the trend of collective self-writing whereby marginalized Afro-Colombian subjects articulate their right to inclusion in national historiography and the ethical pertinence of their visions as survivors of the Middle Passage and continuous exploitation of Blacks in postindependence Colombia.

In the face of master-slave ontologies (Maldonado-Torres Reference Maldonado-Torres2008) that led to slave trade and colonialism, Ngũgĩ’s works constitute a humanizing impulse and elaborates a project that dismantles the hierarchies imposed by the coloniality of power. These hierarchies have had the insidious effect of dissociating the language of Africans and indigenous peoples from their rightful place at the table of human civilizations. In the Latin American context, Ngũgĩ’s concept of globalectics, based on the primordiality of epistemic equity and dialogue finds favorable reception. It aligns with Enrique Dussel and Alessandro Fornazzari’s (Reference Dussel and Fornazzari2002) concept of transmodernity, a notion that critiques the subservience of Global South cultures and languages to Euro-American imperial cultures. Decolonising the Mind (Reference Ngũgĩ wa1986), by far Ngũgĩ’s most popular work in Latin America, argues for a fundamental reappropriation of Global South epistemologies that have been denigrated in colonial discourses. The radical impulse in this work marks a preamble and a precondition to Globalectics (Reference Ngũgĩ2010), in which Ngũgĩ reflects on the importance of lateral dialogue among human cultures through the power of translation, which he refers to as the language that languages speak to each other. Translation is crucial for the conception of world literature in which cultures interact in the global market of ideas, enriching human experiences with contributions from both globalized and minoritized cultures.

In the interface between literature and politics, Ngũgĩ’s artistic representations of postcolonial perversion of power is significantly inspired by Latin American precursors. Ngũgĩ was an avid reader of authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s texts.Footnote ³ Imprints of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Reference Márquez and Gabriel1971) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (Reference Márquez and Gabriel2007) are perceptible in Ngũgĩ’s dictator novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Reference wa Thiong’o2006). This transatlantic intertextuality in both authors’ novels is enhanced by the similar history of power confiscation and neocolonial tutelage over supposedly endless rule by the dictators. The dictator’s tendency to monopolise discourse, the baroque expansion of the quixotic ruler’s body, the theatrical display of state power, the symbolic debauchery of the potentate, the perversion of political transitions; the dictator’s usurpation of religious symbols, his obsession with the spectacle of power and the solitude behind the façade of power are some of the points of intersections between the dictator novels of these two authors. Wizard of the Crow can thus be inscribed conveniently as an African version of a series of classic dictator novels that flourished in the Latin American boom, such as The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), the Feast of the Goat (Reference Llosa and Mario2000) and I, the Supreme (Reference Bastos and Augusto1974) by Augusto Roa Bastos. These texts, just like Ngũgĩ’s, tap from contextual experiences of dictatorship (in Ngũgĩ’s case, the Moi dictatorship), while at the same time positing dictatorship as a universal phenomenon that can befall any society where the balance of power fails to check the excesses of individual leaders or the governing class.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, like many African authors, did not have a significantly direct personal relationship with Latin America, partially due to linguistic differences. However, he was deeply aware of the congeniality between Africa and Latin America and the strikingly identical historical developments between these two spaces that equally reflect the literary practices and trends that have sought to capture the dramatic histories. Given the contemporary pushback from right-wing sectors and their active promotion of historical amnesia, the works of an author like Ngũgĩ will continue to generate and to instigate the radical reimagination of the future for many years to come. In the same light, the growing consciousness of Afro-latino and indigenous peoples in evoking alternative paths to modernity that re-center Global South cultures would find potency and exemplary resilience in Ngũgĩ’s life and works in their immense diversity. More so, the continuous improvement of cultural, political, and economic integration between Africa and Latin America (spaces that have hitherto related with each other mainly through European-North American mediation) will enhance the recognition of deep historical bonds between them and instigate future-making collaborative projects.