excuses, excuses

on disappointing revolutionaries

The world is freckled with people who live their lives so potently that they transform ours from afar. Their writing stitches fine embroidery on our souls. Their art coaxes our ways of thinking down scenic pathways. Then they die. And we post about them.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was one such life. Hearing that he’d passed shone a floodlight on my memory of discovering his work. In the petty contrarianism of my late teens—I decided my first foray into African Literature shouldn’t be as predictable as reading Chinua Achebe’s widely renowned Things Fall Apart. Instead, I turned to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s The River Between.

The Paris Review posted one of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s quotes in the wake of his death. “I don't think anybody who has gone through a colonialist system can claim to be free of the effects of the colonial. All we can do is continue to fight against those tendencies. Scars on the mind take a long time to heal.” It resonated and I reposted.

In another corner of the internet Ayo of Feminist Inc published How revolutionary can a wife beater be?

The essay illuminates Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s abuse of his first wife, Minneh Nyambura. Their son, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, spoke out about his father’s domestic violence in March last year. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o never responded.

How revolutionary can a wife beater be? Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s own quote partially answers.

“I don't think anybody who has gone through a colonialist system can claim to be free of the effects of the colonial.”

This paradigm is not exclusive to colonialism. You can easily swap colonial with patriarchal—for the patriarchal system contorts masculinity itself by narrowing the idea of manhood into machismo cookie-cutter moulds that very few men (if any) comfortably fit into. A man may come out of boyhood’s brutal formatting with clean edges but never without bits of him getting cut away. None are free from the effects of the systems we swim in. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s conduct in his marriage reveals a gaping wound that bled acid onto the woman he claimed to love.

I’m leaving the colonial Kenya of terror and uncertainty but also the country of my private dreams and desires. Among the many who have come to see me off is Minneh Nyambura, whose smiling eyes make my heart beat so loudly I think people around me can hear the boom.¹

How revolutionary can a wife beater be? This confronting question made me think of Benjamin Zephaniah. I remember stumbling upon a discussion about his history of domestic violence soon after he passed away.

Once upon a time I was a bad boy, I didn’t go to school when I should have, I was a burglar, a car thief, a middle man, a womaniser and a woman beater.

— Benjamin Zephaniah

Unlike Ngũgĩ, Zephaniah publicly addressed hitting his ex-girlfriend—expressing regret and recounting his attempts at making amends. Maybe we can speculate why Zephaniah reached a place where it felt necessary for him to condemn his own actions publicly in a way Ngũgĩ did not. Zephaniah was 20 years younger, his experience of life in Britain had all manner of differences to Ngũgĩ’s upbringing in Kenya. They still enacted the same shade of violence on the women closest to them.

Ayo argues in her essay that the misogyny of male revolutionaries “makes their liberation incomplete.” I believe the opposite is true. The misogyny of revolutionaries, whose principled ethics in one arena and confounding lack of them in another, exhibits a messy interiority that we’re all capable of. Where the goal of liberation is morally uncomplicated, people are not. And we have a tendency of flattening the revolutionary into a two-dimensional monument, worthy of reverence only if they are perpetually correct. It does us and them a disservice. Us; because it sees them as unattainable outliers of moral clarity that we can’t achieve. Them; because they aren’t. Expecting incorruptible exhibitions of their principles will always be disrupted by their failures. To recognise the collision of those failures is to see them whole.

Because sometimes, their “failures” aren’t as egregious as abuse. After Nikki Giovanni passed, discourse quickly erupted about her having a white partner. The criticism of Black revolutionaries partnering with white people has evolved into a tedious ‘gotcha’ moment—sanctimonious paranoia more concerned with exposing the hypocrisy of principled Blacktivists who’ve paraglided into the dreaded downdraft of the snow-bunny snowstorm than critically considering if or how their romantic affiliation is indicative of an internalised bias that would call their work into question.

Which is maybe the crux of the issue. We attempt to understand influential figures through moral arithmetic. We weigh their bad deeds against the good to make them legible. When they die, we measure their scales like The Fates of Ancient Greece.

In Ola Ojewumi’s thread, she mentions how John Amos’ character was killed off in Good Times for criticising the racist stereotypes of the show’s scripts but “the whole time, John Amos was married to and had all of his kids by a white woman.” The framing here is that John Amos’ marriage to a white woman negates his right to resist racist stereotypes—as if he would’ve only been qualified to call out anti-Blackness when he was married to Lillian Lehman, a Black woman, years later.

We position the bad to cancel out the good in a way that misses the point of why its necessary to do so. What if it isn’t subtractive? What if the good is just the good and the bad is just the bad? What if we didn’t pit them against one another so mathematically?

It may appear like I’m advocating for your bog-standard separation of art from artist. Again—I am saying the opposite. I’ve met my fair share of people who use the excellence of Kanye’s discography to excuse his slow decay towards attention-seeking naziism. I’ve also been roped into an hours-long group-call after one of my friends said “Kanye isn’t even influential” and found myself in the bizarre position of expressing that just because Ye is wiling out, doesn’t retroactively erase the fact that—between fashion and music—he has influenced popular culture in countless ways.

The mounting offensiveness of Kanye West’s actions informs the totality of him. He has always been outspoken. When he said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”, he was David pointing the glock at Goliath, speaking out on behalf of the victims of Hurricane Katrina who were being federally neglected. When he interrupted Taylor Swift to declare “Beyoncé had the greatest music video of all time”, he was speaking out against the systemic bias of awards shows on behalf of a Black female peer.

As the years went by, his disposition for disruption clashed with the position of power he rose to. By the time of his Yeezus album rollout, his declaration that “classism is the new racism” was the catalyst for me to recalibrate my thinking in the way I’m articulating to you now. Here was a man I admired greatly, who’d shifted culture more times than I could count and was on the verge of doing it again… Saying one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. His inherent outspokenness had stopped being deployed in defence of others and his self-absorption had grown so clear that it echoed back through time.

Yes, he might have been advocating for the Black people of New Orleans when he challenged George Bush but he also benefited from the cultural capital of calling out a Republican president on live TV. Yes, he might have been defending Beyoncé being snubbed at the MTV Awards but he was also looking out for himself as a Black artist saying, if you won’t give Beyoncé an award for a masterpiece then you aren’t going to give me one… Let me nip this in the bud.

The conviction in his voice when he claimed, there’s this new thing called classism was because he was experiencing classism—not in the sense of a proletarian being exploited by the rich but as a rich man being denied access by other, richer men. In that moment, I felt a shift. He (or perhaps his work) didn’t mean less to me. It was just my investment lessened.

As is the nature of all growth, whatever the direction, he’d changed but he’d also remained the same.

There is something to be said about how parasociality manifests towards influential figures; how we grapple with the proximity we aren’t privy to. When speaking about Kanye for GQ, Pusha T recently said, “He's a genius. His intuition is even more genius-level, right? But that’s why me and him don’t get along, because he sees through my fakeness with him. He knows I don’t think he’s a man.” The privilege of interpersonality is the clarity of rejection. Pusha T knows Kanye West and has no interest in associating with him—not because Ye’s not talented but because: “he knows what I really, really think of him. He’s showed me the weakest sides of him, and he knows how I think of weak people.”

We aren’t afforded that access, we’re simply spectators—always afar.

Yet, these figures transform us all the same.

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To return to misogynistic revolutionaries, it is natural for us to judge them by the ways they’ve harmed the women in their lives. I tend to use such revelations as a way to identify the inconsistencies I’ve sensed in their work. I calibrate a new context and lessen my investment.

It serves as a reminder that we’re not telling the full story when we overlook the ways in which African literature, like most other literature, was forged in the heart of patriarchal power.²

I believe the penance of the misogynistic revolutionary can only be negotiated by those in orbit of their harm—the women and the children and, perhaps more ambiently, those who’ve experienced domestic harm who follow the misogynistic revolutionary’s work. How these men seek accountability in their own lives is something we may never be privy to. We have no idea of the ways Ngũgĩ might have sought to make amends with Nyambura. Even in the case of Zephaniah, who publicly opened up about his wrongs we might ask, is this enough? Is this true accountability? The committal of an act as unspeakable as domestic violence is made all the worse because it is rendered unspeakable. We are allergic to and ill-equipped for active reparative work because we’ve been conditioned to rely so solidly on punishment and exile that we don’t know how to speak about the harm, address it, prevent it, deal with it, stop it, change from it, heal from it, move on from it.

If rectification means stripping the title away from misogynistic revolutionaries, I understand. But I want for us to interrogate our very consumption and expectations of the figures who influence our lives from afar. Especially the revolutionary.

We treat them like messianic incarnates whose moral clarity is so unblemishable that it makes them incapable of wrongdoing then death becomes an amphitheatre for fond remembrance and aired grievances alike.

Scrutiny of the influential dead is both unfair and necessary. Unfair in cliché as they are unable to defend themselves, yes, but also because their eternal silence dooms us to an uncanny kind of ignorance. We don’t know their truths, their deepest regrets, the artefacts of their shame, the lucid wrongs they’d right if they had time. Necessary because their regret, shame or potential to change all pale in comparison to the harm they caused. It is necessary that we understand it all if we are to build on the revolutionary tradition ourselves. It would be foolish not to learn from the failures of those who achieved relative success.

When looking to the people who’ve transformed our lives from afar—the problematic and the unproblematic alike—I encourage us to observe their legacies, their work, their life without venerating them in a way that is so precious and fragile that it would shatter under the weight of a damning revelation. We are all complicated, hypocritical and woefully deficient in some way. So was every revolutionary you’ve ever been inspired by. Ask yourself—what truths lie on the other side of that complication?

1. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (2016) — The Birth of a Dream Weaver

2. Ainehi Edoro (2024) — The Story of a Novelist’s Wife: The Mukoma, Ngugi, Nyambura Controversy and Lessons for African Literature