Helené Coetzee wrote on Facebook:
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed away yesterday, and another great tree has fallen in Africa. He was a Kenyan author and academic, who was described as East Africa’s leading novelist and the continent’s biggest contender for the Nobel Prize for literature. (Every year bookies would bet on his chances being good this year, then the next, then the next. Now it will never be.)
I have a personal anecdote that I carry with me in my day-to-day as a professional bookworm. He was a guest at the 2012 Cape Town Book Fair, and I, a freshly graduated English major, was a volunteer. My only payment was that they booked me into this creepy B&B in Tamboerskloof. On the Saturday, the main organiser was not on site and unfortunately the handover of what should happen for his lunch break did not reach the staff. I happened to be free at that time and got instructed to keep him company while he eats. So, we sat in a random staff room at the CTICC and ate really bad food, the blandest curry on earth, which I had overheated in the microwave, with plastic forks and styrofoam cups of water while we made small talk for an hour. Eventually someone came in, saw him sitting with the random volunteer and whisked him off. It’s a memory that often feels false and made-up, but it’s a memory I carry with me.
What I most vividly recall about the conversation is his kind eyes and warm laughter. I’m guessing that I had verbal diarrhoea, and he was very clearly tired of talking, so I just filled the silence. I have a flashback of telling him about the angry goose on the farm that used to chase us whenever we’d be on the quad bike. Why would that have been relevant? But he just laughed and asked if the goose had a name. This giant, this icon, cared about the name of the goose.
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Picture of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 3.0 via WikiMedia
Picture of the goose: S. Nagel | Pixabay