Chimamanda let Hillary off. But my father showed how to stand up to power

In June 2015 my father, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and my writer siblings were on a book tour in Kenya at the invitation of East African Educational Publishers. One of our stops was a meeting with President Uhuru Kenyatta and the opposition leader Raila Odinga (for balance, I assumed). So we went. After going through security we were walked into this room that was arranged, as to be expected, for power to sit at the head of the table.

Uhuru walked in and we all stood up. He greeted each one of us and casually sat at the head of the room, one leg draped over his chair’s arm rest. My father was sitting closest to him and the rest of us scattered around according to age or seniority. After all, protocols had been observed, as they say in Nigeria.

My father spoke to Uhuru for about 15 minutes with him listening intently, politely interrupting now and then with a pointed question. My father spoke about the issues that have animated him for most of his life: language and decolonisation, the need for homegrown innovation and to be in control of our economy, and ultimately our destiny. Uhuru also spoke for a few minutes, eventually inviting my father – and by extension the rest of us –to come back to help in nation-building. After a few photographs with the president holding each one of our books, we were on our way.

I was especially proud of my father for not conceding his politics to power – that is, he had remained himself. But then I saw the headline the following day in the Daily Nation, Kenya’s largest newspaper: “It is time to come back home, Uhuru tells Ngugi”. All the other newspaper and TV stories had a variation of that theme. It was as if the president had summoned Ngugi to the state house to tell, not ask, him to come back. My father’s remarks to him were truncated and buried at the bottom of the news articles. So the story became about Uhuru telling my father to come back – that things have changed – and not about the fundamental issues the writer had raised with the head of state.

I was thinking about that meeting as I read Fatima Bhutto’s critical article, “When Chimamanda met Hillary: a tale of how liberals cosy up to power” about their conversation during the PEN literature festival last April. Bhutto makes the argument that, by unquestioningly embracing Clinton’s narrative, Adichie had failed to do the one thing that literary writers should always do: question power. Bhutto wrote that Adichie had not asked Clinton “to account for her ruinous human rights record: her vociferous support for all the wars the United States has fought since 2001” which have resulted in “the death of more than a third of a million people in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

To answer why, one has to try to imagine what they both were getting, because individually they can pack any auditorium. Clinton gets a softer image: indeed it was her changing the order of her Twitter description at Adichie’s recommendation – to list her political credentials and not wife first – that made the news. Clinton gets literary credentials, through the PEN stage and Adichie’s writing reputation, that she otherwise would not have had.

And what does Adichie get? Certainly she climbs the celebrity cultural ladder, sits closer to power, gets increased book sales and more than likely commands a larger speaking fee. But Adichie also has something to lose. For one, writers and intellectuals – her true writing community – become wary of her. As a writer I cannot imagine a writing life outside the writing community.

In that meeting, Hillary, with her media-savvy political machinery, gains without conceding anything. Just as Uhuru, with the help of governmental machinery, controlled what came out of that meeting with my father.

It is not much of an excuse to say that Adichie has never said she was radical black feminist: that she is seen as speaking for black people and women in general, and Africans, in place of other black voices should be enough. The underlying message in the image of Adichie leaning in to listen to Hillary tells the story of an African niece and her white auntie (as she referred to Clinton). I truly do believe in conversations across political divides – but not like this.

There is yet another question: why did PEN not invite, say, Angela Davis, Arundhati Roy or Amy Goodman? Surely a good moderator (perhaps even Adichie herself) would have allowed for a lively and ultimately more useful discussion? The problem is not really with Adichie – she was invited, she went and she adored, as the organisers knew she would. It is the mainstream literary institutions, of which PEN is now a part, that have set the stage for seemingly benign conversations that in the end undermine the very democracy that organisations such as PEN itself try to promote.

With all that said, there is a part of me that is also in sympathy with Adichie – it feels darn good to “cosy up” with power. I mean look at Cornel West – the prophetic intellectual conscience of America – and his early adulation of Barack Obama.

I have written several highly critical pieces about Uhuru, both before the meeting and after. He and his deputy president were indicted by the international criminal court in 2011, but he whipped up ethnic nationalism, so much so that the indictment in part got him elected in 2013. His family owns more than 500,000 acres in a country where people kill each other over land. But there was something very seductive about being so close to power, especially power so casually wielded. I assume my father did not mind sitting next to the president – but he spoke the hard truths to power. Adichie did not.

Bhutto holds out the hope for Adichie to become a “witness” of power and “its ravages” and not its “moderator”. West did finally wake up from power-induced stupor. I too hope Adichie can wake up and speak truth to power and not be a broker of rewritten history – one who helps the powerful hide their crimes between the pages of their cleaned-up memoirs.

• Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an associate professor of English at Cornell University, and author of The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership