Towards an Authentic African Literary Tradition

Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Rewriting of 'The Pilgrim’s Progress' in 'Devil on the Cross'

Abstract

When he made the decision to write his fictional works in Gĩkũyũ rather than in English in the late 1970s, Ngũgĩ’s wa Thiong’o, Kenya’s pioneering writer, was also one of the most prominent figures in African literature expressed in European languages. This article demonstrates that while Ngũgĩ has styled his linguistic shift as an attempt to find an aesthetic that would liberate African languages and literature from Europhonic notions of culture, it did not mean that he would henceforth cut links with the English tradition as a source of aesthetic inspiration. Taking the example of his first novel originally composed in Gĩkũyũ, Devil on the Cross, the article shows that while his choice of language did indeed gives him access to the aesthetic referents embedded in Gĩkũyũ language and oral tradition, Ngũgĩ’s Gĩkũyũ writings have a rich intextextuality with English canonical texts and with the works of D.O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola who pioneered a literary tradition that attempted to imagine African post-colonial identity from the perspective of a pre-colonial gnosis based on the rich oral traditions on the continent.This article argues that although the aesthetic model pioneered by Fagunwa and Tutuola was supplanted by the “modernist aesthetic” as Africa emerged from colonialism,it has recently found converts among African writers, among them Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The article reads Devilon the Cross as the exemplifier of an authentic African literary tradition based on orature and African gnosis; a tradition that foregrounds African worldviews.