NGUGI WA THIONG'O, also written Ngũgĩ; formerly James Ngugi [b. 1938]. Kenyan (Kikuyu) teacher, critic, dramatist, and novelist, born in Limuru, and educated in Kenyan schools and at Makerere U., Uganda, and Leeds U., England. His first works were in English, set against a background of social and political upheaval as Kenya moved towards independence from Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ngugi's style has been described as biblical in its purity, and expresses an African Marxist viewpoint. His writings in English include the novels
Weep Not Child (1964),
The River Between (1965),
A Grain of Wheat (1967), and
Petals of Blood (1977), and the plays
The Black Hermit (1968),
This Time Tomorrow,
The Rebels,
The Wound in the Heart (all 1970), and
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976, with Micere Mugo). When he completed
Petals of Blood, he gave up English as the medium for his fiction, but continued to use it to translate his works and for non-fictional purposes. He argued that to provoke and cultivate the social and political reforms needed in Kenya requires novels and plays in the local languages. For this, his medium is Kikuyu (or Gĩkũyũ, as he writes the name). With Ngugi wa Mirii, he produced the play
Ngaahika Ndeenda (1980), translated as
I Will Marry When I Want (1982). It was immediately banned. In
Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981), he describes his one-year detention without trial in 1978. His Kikuyu novels are
Caitaani Mutharabaini (1980), translated as
Devil on a Cross, and
Matigari Ma Njiruungi (1986), translated as
Matigari. In these, Ngugi draws on oral traditions and tribal values to attack neo-colonialism, and their apparently plain language is laden with aphorisms, symbols, and slogans. His works are widely read in Kenya by people far from the modern metropolitan centres. Ngugi discusses the language issue in
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), a work dedicated to ‘all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages’. He adds in the preface: ‘If in these essays I criticise the Afro-European (or Eurafrican) choice of our linguistic praxis, it is not to take away from the talent and the genius of those who have written in
ENGLISH,
FRENCH, or
PORTUGUESE. On the contrary I am lamenting a neocolonial situation which has meant the European bourgeoisie once again stealing our talents and geniuses as they have stolen our economies.’ In the same work, he says: ‘This book … is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way.’