Q: Which literature has made a lasting impression on you?
MIGUNA: In my formative years, when I was still groping for ideological clarity and philosophical balance and rootedness (before I met Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara and others), I read and re-read the following books: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath;Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers; John Ruganda’s The Floods; Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks; Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X; George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984; Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals;William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood; Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom; John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me; Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice; George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye; Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s I Will Marry When I Want, Matigari; Barrel of a Pen and Decolonizing the Mind; Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; D.M. Zwelonke’s Robben Island; Assata Shakur’s Assata: An Autobiography; Cheche Kenya’s InDependent Kenya; James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Nobody Knows My Name andNotes of a Native Son; Rupert Lewis’ Marcus Garvey; and Malcolm X’s By Any Means Necessary.
When I joined the University of Nairobi in September 1986, I found Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, especially a chapter called, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,†and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as compulsory reading to all first year students in humanities and social sciences. It did not matter what your majors were.I believe that was very instrumental in creating socio-political consciousness and rootedness in young students. Regrettably and tragically, they no longer do that at our local universities.
Closer to home, I have always been fascinated by Mwalimu D.O Misiani’s music, poetry and socio-political commentaries.
If there is one person who helped me become socially and politically conscious, it must have been Mwalimu D.O Misiani’s music, most of which werevery incisive andpractical commentaries on social ills, the struggle against injustice and the uncanny ability to speak Truth to power.
During the repressive Kanu regime, Mwalimu D.O. Misiani was like a one man army against totalitarianism. He had metaphors and parables for all our oppressors.
Along the way, I also discovered the marvelous Ayi Kwei Armah, M.G. Vassanji, Ben Okri and Rohinton Mistry.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine:Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court and Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World To First.
Adapted from an interview by the man with same name twice!