Your Morning Ngũgĩ

For Thursday, June 5th 2025

Week 117 of our regular morning feature here at Friedman of the Plains Worldwide in which we highlight the great words and works of great men and women, as well as those who are insufferable, delusional, and even fictional.

This Week Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

“They argue that the modern world was created by private capital. The subcontinent of India, for instance, was owned by the British East India Company, Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company, our neighbors by the British East Africa Company, and the Congo Free State by a one man corporation. Corporate capital was aided by missionary societies. What private capital did then it can do again; own and reshape the Third World in the image of the West without the slightest blot, blemish, or blotch. NGOs will do what the missionary charities did in the past. The world will no longer be composed of the outmoded twentieth-century divisions of East, West, and a directionless Third. The world will become one corporate globe divided into the incorporating and incorporated...to become the first voluntary corporate colony, the first in a new global order..with NGOs relieving us of social services, the country becomes your real estate.” — Wizard of the Crow

Bonus

“Often, when I’m alone in a hut thatched with grass and bracken and it is raining or the wind is blowing, or when I’m on my own at night and the moon is shining down on the land, I can hear the many voices gone, the many voices now living, the many voices to come, all signing to me in whispers. At times like those I feel I am just about to catch the tune, the rhythm and the theme of the music I have always longed to write. But it drifts away, carried on the waves of the wind.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o