Ngugi wa Thiong'o

1938—

Writer

Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o is considered one of East Africa's most eminent literary figures. Since the early 1960s, Ngugi has produced a number of novels, plays, and critical essays—both in English and in Kenya's indigenous Gikuyu language—with a strongly political tone, for his emergence as a writer has also coincided with Kenya's struggle to free itself from the legacy of colonialism. At times, Ngugi has vociferously criticized the post-colonial leadership in his country, and after a period in the late 1970s when he was harassed and even jailed, Ngugi left the country for an exile that would last more than 20 years.

Ngugi holds a distinguished professorship at University of California at Irvine, and continues to produce an impressive body of work dealing with Kenyan history, politics, and culture. "Writing has always been my way of reconnecting myself to the landscape of my birth and upbringing," Ngugi wrote in his Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom. "Not surprisingly the natural landscape dominates the East African literary imagination. This awareness of the land as the central actor in our lives distinguishes East African literature from others in the continent and it certainly looms large in my own writing." More than his ability to relate depict his "awareness of the land" in his writing, Ngugi has led the charge to offer the intricacies of his thought and culture that only his mother tongue can capture. Ngugi argued that African culture was supplanted by colonialism when other languages were forced upon Africans and had not been revived when African countries won independence because the language of the former colonial powers remained in use. Ngugi's insistence on using the Gikuyu language was what he called the "aesthetics of resistance," according to Washington Post writer Lynne Duke. His "attempt to rise up, to rise again and keep rising."

Chronicled Kenya's Independence

The writer was born James wa Thiong'o Ngugi on January 5, 1938, in Limuru, Kenya. He graduated from Makerere University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1963, and went on to earn a second one from the University of Leeds. By this point, his first play, The Black Hermit, had already been produced in Nairobi, Kenya's capital. It was part of a resurgence in African culture taking place at the time, for Kenya's status as a British possession ended in December of 1963 when independence was formally granted after more than a decade of unrest. Ngugi's first novel,Weep Not, Child, fictionalizes a crucial period in the Kenyan struggle, the Mau Mau emergency (1952-56). In this rebellion, Kenyans took arms against the English colonial government, which had relegated them to work as laborers or subsistence farmers. The novel won its young author the 1965 Dakar Festival of Negro Arts prize.

During the mid-1960s, Ngugi taught school and wrote in his spare time. Subsequent novels include The River Between, published in 1965, and A Grain of Wheat, which appeared two years later. The latter work deals with the aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising, and the changes that took place in Kenya and among Kenyans themselves as the country moved toward independence day. In 1967, Ngugi became a lecturer in English literature at the University of Nairobi, but soon involved himself in a burgeoning African nationalist movement there, and successfully campaigned to force the institution to change its "English Department" into the "Department of African Languages and Literature." Around this time he abandoned his Christian name, James, in favor of "Ngugi."

Ngugi eventually became senior lecturer and chair of the literature department at the University of Nairobi, a position that placed him in the vanguard of the country's intellectual elite, but his prestige did not protect him from official harassment when he grew increasingly critical of Kenyan politics. In 1976 he co-wrote a play with university colleague Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, that won a competition. Kimathi had led the Mau Mau uprising, and was executed for it by British colonial authorities in 1957. But an attempt to schedule the play at Kenya's National Theatre to coincide with a UNESCO general conference in Nairobi was thwarted by the venue's European management, who had scheduled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for that month. As Ngugi recalled several years later, "the conflict over the performance space was also a struggle over which cultural symbols and activities would represent the new Kenya," according to an excerpt of his 1996 Oxford University lecture found in TDR.

Risked Danger with Play, Novels

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was eventually granted a four-night schedule, and each performance sold out. "But the dramatic highlight still belonged to the opening night," Ngugi recalled in his Oxford University lecture. "As the actors performed their last song and dance through the middle aisle of the auditorium, they were joined by the audience. They all went outside the theatre building, still dancing. What had been confined to the stage had spilled out into the open air, and there was no longer any distinction between actors and audience." Afterward, Ngugi and another playwright whose work had also premiered that month were invited to appear before Kenya's Criminal Investigation Department at its Nairobi Headquarters. They were posed the question: "Why were we interfering with European performances at the National Theatre?," as he recalled in his Oxford University lecture.

Ngugi's 1977 novel, Petals of Blood, landed him in particular disfavor, for its portrayal of a postcolonial Kenya riven by corruption and disillusionment cast much of the blame on the political leaders who had emerged since independence. The novel recounts the stories of four characters, all jailed for murder; one is a teacher and union activist named Karega; Munira was once headmaster of a school; Abdulla is a half-Indian shopkeeper who participated in the war for independence; and Wanja, once a prostitute, works instead as a barmaid. At the time of the novel's publication, Ngugi's play, Ngaahika Ndena (translated as "I Will Marry When IWant"), co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, was banned as incendiary. Ngugi soon became the victim of an official harassment campaign: his home was searched, his library of books confiscated, and he was jailed without trial for a year. He also lost his post at the University of Nairobi.

In the midst of this troubling time, Ngugi announced that he would write only in Gikuyu or Swahili from this point forward. His first work in Gikuyu was published abroad as Caitaani utharaba-ini in 1980, with a translation by the author appearing three years later as Devil on the Cross. Ngugi viewed the decision to switch languages as critical to his ultimate objective as a writer—using literature to incite change. "When you use a language, you are also choosing an audience," he said in an interview with Research in African Literatures. "When I used English, I was choosing English-speaking audience…. Now I can use a story, a myth, and not always explain because I can assume that the [Gikuyu] readers are familiar with this…. I can play with word sounds and images, I can rely more and more on songs, proverbs, riddles, anecdotes…. I maintain multiple centers, in a sense, simplify structures."

Continued Writing in Exile

In the early 1980s, Ngugi moved to England. He continued to write both fiction and nonfiction there, including three works that have become staples for students of African literary criticism: Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), and Writing against Neocolonialism (1986). His second novel in Gikuyu, Matigarima Njiruungi, attracted a great deal of controversy back in Kenya, which by then had become a one-party dictatorship. "Matigarima Njiruungi" means "the patriots who survived the bullets," and the plot revolves around a man, Matigari, who has been living in an East African forest for some time, but decides to return to his home to reunite his sundered family. On the way, Matigari is arrested and jailed in the oppressive political atmosphere, but escapes to continue his crusade for peace. He then lands in a mental hospital, but once again eludes his captors. Matigari decides that an armed uprising of the people is the only route to justice in his country. The publication of Matigarima Njiruungi caused such a furor in Kenya that authorities briefly believed that Matigari was a real person and launched a search for him.

Ngugi and his wife, Jerry, founded a literary journal in the Gikuyu language, and though he had once delivered conference papers and wrote an important critical essay for Yale Journal of Criticism in it, he began using English again in the late 1980s in his academic career. In the early 1990s, he accepted a professorship at New York University's Africana Studies Program, and in 1996 he was invited to deliver the prestigious Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. The four essays were published the following year as Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State of Africa.

From the publication of his children's Njamba Nene books in the late 1980s, Ngugi turned to nonfiction for more than a decade to examine East African culture and politics in his scholarly work. He also became the subject of several scholarly works by others. He continued to work in academia as distinguished professor and director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine.

Though living far from his home, he continued to work toward leading Kenya into a new era. "What we see is after independence—even after post-cold war situation—is, quite frankly, the continued deprivation of people," he told the Research in African Literatures. "[I]n fact, the gulf between the poorer nations and richer nations of the West is widening and within each of those nations, particularly Africa, the gulf between the poor and rich is becoming really enormous. When I travel from New York to other parts of the world I see that the whole world is connected—but in the image of the beggar…. You see the beggar and the homeless persons in every capital city in the world."

Returned from Exile

With the political party of President Daniel arap Moi finally out of power in 2002, Ngugi began exploring the possibility of traveling to Kenya. In 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya for the first time since 1982. His return was to promote his first piece of novel since Matigari. His novel, the first installment of a six-volume story, Murogi wa Kagogo (translated as Wizard of the Crow), is set in the fictitious country of Aburiria. In it, Ngugi offers complex musings about dictatorship, humanity, cultural legacy, and Western influence on Africa in a story. Though in his review of the book in the New Yorker John Updike wrote that Ngugi offered "more indignation than analysis in his portrait of postcolonial Africa," Jumana Farouky of Time.com praised the tome for being "laugh-out-loud funny."

At a Glance …

Born James Thiong'o Ngugi on January 5, 1938, in Limuru, Kenya; married; children: five. Education: Makerere University, BA, 1963; University of Leeds, BA, 1964.

Career:

East African schools, teacher, 1964-70; University of Nairobi, Kenya, lecturer in English literature, 1967-69, later became senior lecturer and chair of literature department; Makerere University, creative writing fellow, 1969-70; Northwestern University, visiting lecturer, 1970-71; exiled from Kenya, 1982-2004; New York University, New York City, professor of African and Caribbean literatures, theater, film, and cultural theory, early 1990s; University of California at Irvine, distinguished professor, 2000s-.

Awards:

Dakar Festival of Negro Arts, award, 1965; East African Literature Bureau, 1965; Paul Robeson Award for Artistic Excellence, Political Conscience and Integrity, 1992; Gwendolyn Brooks Center Contributors Award for Significant Contribution to the Black Literary Arts, 1994; Fonlon-Nichols Prize, 1996; New York African Studies Association Distinguished Africanist Award, 1996; Nonino Prize, 2001; Council for the Development of Social Sciences Research in Africa (CODESRIA), honorary life membership, 2003; University of Leeds and University of Transkei, honorary doctorates.

Addresses:

Office—University of California, Irvine, Comparative Literature, 401 Humanities Instructional Building, Irvine, CA 92697-2650.

Ngugi's book tour was entitled "Reviving the Spirit," and Ngugi told Robyn Dixon of the Los Angeles Times. "All I wanted was to breathe the air of Kenya again, to walk in the streets, to go to the marketplaces -just to be here. Coming home revived me in spirit, which is very important." Yet a pall was cast over his trip when Ngugi and his wife were brutally attacked in their hotel room within weeks of their arrival. Four men were arrested and security guards surrounded Ngugi to ensure his and his wife's safety. Instead of immediately cancelling the tour and leaving the country, Ngugi and his wife openly grieved with the Kenyan public about the attack and the rape of Ngugi's wife. Despite the sour taste left by the attack on he and his wife, Ngugi remained optimistic about his visit to Kenya. Dixon related Ngugi's comment: "'We have to keep rising up, rising up, rising up." Cheered that Kenyans no longer lived under Moi's oppressive government, Ngugi also saw that his refusal to write in English had also made an impact in his homeland. As he observed to the Guardian: "I feel very happy about my stand. I met a lot of hostility. But now in Kenya many books are being written in Gikuyu, and theatre in African languages is quite common. The younger generation will have a choice."

Selected writings

Books (as James T. Ngugi)

The Black Hermit (play; first produced in Nairobi in 1962), Makerere University Press, 1963, Humanities, 1968.

Weep Not, Child (novel), introduction and notes by Ime Ikeddeh, Heinemann, 1964, P. Collier, 1969.

The River Between (novel), Humanities, 1965.

A Grain of Wheat (novel), Heinemann, 1967, 2nd edition, Humanities, 1968.

This Time Tomorrow (play; includes The Reels and The Wound in the Heart; produced and broadcast in 1966, also broadcast on BBC Africa Service in 1967), East African Literature Bureau, 1970.

Books (as Ngugi wa Thiong'o)

Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, Heinemann, 1972, Lawrence Hill 1973.

Secret Lives, and Other Stories, Heinemann Educational, 1974, Lawrence Hill, 1975.

Petals of Blood (novel), Heinemann Educational, 1977.

(With Micere Githae Mugo) The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Heinemann Educational, 1977, Swahili translation by the authors published as Mzalendo kimathi, c. 1978.

Mtawa Mweusi, Heinemann, 1978.

Caitaani mutharaba-ini, Heinemann Educational, 1980, translation by the author published as Devil on the Cross, Zimbabwe Publishing, 1983.

Writers in Politics: Essays, Heinemann, 1981, revised and enlarged as Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society, James Currey (Oxford), 1997.

Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, Heinemann, 1981.

Njamba Nene na mbaathi i mathagu (juvenile), Heinemann Educational, 1982.

(Co-author and translator with Ngugi wa Mirii) I Will Marry When I Want (play), Heinemann, 1982.

Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, New Beacon, 1983.

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Heinemann, 1986.

Writing against Neocolonialism, Vita, 1986.

Matigari ma Njiruungi, Heinemann, 1986, translation by Wangui published as Matigari, Heinemann, 1989.

Njambas Nene no Chiubu King'ang'i, Heinemann, 1986.

Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (juvenile), translation by Waugui wa Goro, Africa World, 1989.

Njamba Nene's Pistol (juvenile), translation by Waugui, Africa World, 1989.

Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Heinemann, 1992.

Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State of Africa, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Murogi wa Kagogo, 2004; translated as Wizard of the Crow, Pantheon, 2006.

Sources

Books

Cantalupo, Charles, The World of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Africa World Press, 1995.

Gikandi, Simon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Heinemann, 1992.

Robson, Clifford B., Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, St. Martin's Press, 1980.

Sicherman, Carol, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The Making of a Rebel: A Sourcebook in Kenyan Literature and Resistance, H. Zell, 1990.

Periodicals

American Visions, April/May 1994, p. 11.

Guardian (London), January 28, 2006.

Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2004, p. A3.

New Yorker, July 31, 2006.

Research in African Literatures, spring 1999, p. 162; summer 2000, p. 194.

TDR, fall 1997, p. 11.

On-line

"Africa's Wizard of Words," Time.com,http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901060911-1531284,00.html (May 30, 2007).

"An Interview with Ngugi Thiong'o, May 2004" by Michael Alexander Pozo, St. Johns University, www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/poldiscourse/pozo3.html (May 30, 2007).

"Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English: An Overview," National University of Singapore,www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/index.html (May 30, 2007).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born 1938) was Kenya's most famous writer. Best-known as a novelist, he also wrote plays, literary criticism, and essays on cultural and political topics.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o (formerly James Ngugi and known generally as Ngugi) was born in Limuru, Kenya, on January 5, 1938. Educated initially at a mission school and then at a Gikuyu independent school during the Mau Mau insurgency, he went on to attend Alliance High School in 1955-1959 and Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1959-1964. After earning a B.A. in English he worked as a journalist for Nairobi's Daily Nation for half a year before leaving to continue his studies in literature at the University of Leeds in England.

He returned to Kenya in 1967 and taught in the English department at Nairobi University College until January 1969, when he resigned in protest during a students' strike. He lectured in African literature at Northwestern University in Illinois from 1970 through 1971, then resumed teaching at Nairobi University College, where he soon was appointed acting head of the English Department. In December 1977 he was arrested by the Kenyan government and detained for a year; no formal charges were ever filed against him, but it is assumed that his involvement in an adult literacy campaign aimed at raising the political consciousness of peasants and workers in his hometown of Limuru led to his imprisonment. When he was released he was unable to regain his position at the university. In 1982 he went to England at the invitation of his publisher (Heinemann Educational Books) to launch a novel he had written while in detention. During his absence there was an attempted coup in Kenya, after which a number of his friends and associates fled the country. Ngugi wa Thiong'o chose to live in exile in London.

Ngugi came to the United States, teaching at Yale University and Amherst College before becoming the Erich Maria Remarque professor of comparative literature and a professor of performance studies at New York University, New York City, New York.

Ngugi's literary works were concerned with major social, cultural, and political problems in Kenya, past and present. His first two novels, Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), set in the colonial period of his childhood, focussed on the traumatic effects of the Mau Mau uprising on Gikuyu family life and on the impact of the independent schools movement on rural Gikuyu society. His third novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), combined memories of the Mau Mau era with a depiction of Kenya on the eve of independence—a time of great bitterness, Ngugi claimed, "for the peasants who fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put on one side." In Petals of Blood (1977), his longest and most complex novel, he described in even greater detail the exploitation of Kenya's masses by its own established elite.

Ngugi always sympathized with the oppressed and underprivileged people in his nation. Before independence this included most Kenyans, for the country was being ruled by foreigners; but after independence he showed that the poor, rural, working-class people continued to suffer—this time at the hands of their more fortunately placed fellow countrymen who controlled all the levers of political and economic power. So Ngugi's primary target of criticism shifted from the colonial government to the neo-colonial government.

This was most evident in the works he wrote after Petals of Blood. For the adult literacy campaign in Limuru he coauthored in Gikuyu a musical, Ngaahika Ndeenda (1980), later translated and published as I Will Marry When I Want, (1982), which exposed the hardships of the landless poor and the greed and arrogance of wealthy landowners. In a subsequent Gikuyu novel, Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (1980), translated and published as Devil on the Cross (1982), he turned to allegory and transparent symbolism to indict the evils of capitalism in contemporary Kenya. Another of his Gikuyu musical dramas that stirred controversy in Kenya in 1981, Maitu Njugira (Mother, Sing for Me), was immediately published. Ngugi said that it was his imprisonment that persuaded him to persist in writing novels and plays in Gikuyu so that he could convey his message directly to the exploited masses among his people.

However, he continued to write his political and cultural essays in English in order to reach a broad international audience. These miscellaneous pieces have been collected in four volumes: Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (1971), Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), and Moving the Centers: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (1993). He also produced an autobiographical work based on his year behind bars: Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). He also wrote two children's books Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus and Njamba Nene's Pistol, both in 1995.

For his literary accomplishment, Ngugi has received many awards. He received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York African Studies Association (1996), the Fonlon-Nichols prize (1996), the Zora Neale Hurston-Paul Robeson Award (1993), the Lotus prize for Afro-Asian literature (1973), UNESCO first prize (1963), and the East Africa Novel Prize (1962).

In all of his writings Ngugi attacked injustice and oppression and championed the cause of the poor and dispossessed in Kenya. He "set out to develop a national literature for Kenya in the immediate wake of that nation's liberation from British rule," wrote Theodore Pelton in the Humanist (March-April 1993). He was East Africa's most prolific and most politically engaged author.

Further Reading

There have been three books devoted to Ngugi's works: C. B. Robson, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1979); G. D. Killam, An Introduction to the Writings of Ngugi (1980); and David Cook and Michael Okenimpke, Ngugi wa Thiong'o: An Exploration of His Writings (1982); a collection of essays entitled Critical Perspectives on Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1985), G. D. Killam, ed. □

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.’

Thiong'o, Ngugi Wa, formerly known as James T. Ngugi (1938– ), Kenyan novelist. Weep Not, Child (1964), a novel of childhood that draws largely from his own upbringing and mission-school education, ends by rejecting the romantic individualism of its protagonist. Other novels include The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), which blends the realism and compassion of his undergraduate short stories with the messianic political search of his first two novels. When Ngugi took to writing in his own language, Gikuyu, his government arrested him in 1977, and he wrote his first Gikuyu novel largely in prison; it was translated as Devil on the Cross (1982), after being published in Nairobi in 1980 in its original version. Detained: A Prison Writer's Diary (1981) was, however, written in English. Several extracts from works banned in Kenya have appeared in Index on Censorship.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1938–

Writer

Hailed as New Literary Voice

Nationalized the National Theatre

A Year behind Bars

Government Hunted for Protagonist

Selected writings

Sources

Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o is considered one of East Africa’s most eminent literary figures. Since the early 1960s, wa Thiong’o has produced a number of novels, plays, and critical essays—both in English and in Kenya’s indigenous Gikuyu language—with a strongly political tone, for his emergence as a writer has also coincided with Kenya’s struggle to free itself from the legacy of colonialism. At times, wa Thiong’o has vociferously criticized the post-colonial leadership in his country, and after a period in the late 1970s when he was harassed and even jailed, wa Thiong’o left the country permanently.

wa Thiong’o holds a professorship at New York University, and continues to produce an impressive body of work dealing with Kenyan history, politics, and culture. “Writing has always been my way of reconnecting myself to the landscape of my birth and upbringing,” wa Thiong’o wrote in his Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom. “Not surprisingly the natural landscape dominates the East African literary imagination. This awareness of the land as the central actor in our lives distinguishes East African literature from others in the continent and it certainly looms large in my own writing,” he continued.

Hailed as New Literary Voice

The writer was born James wa Thiong’o Ngugi on January 5, 1938, in Limuru, Kenya. He graduated from Makerere University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1963, and went on to earn a second one from the University of Leeds. By this point, his first play, The Black Hermit, had already been produced in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. It was part of a resurgence in African culture taking place at the time, for Kenya’s status as a British possession ended in December of 1963 when independence was formally granted after more than a decade of unrest, wa Thiong’o’s first novel, Weep Not, Child, fictionalizes a crucial period in the Kenyan struggle, the Mau Mau emergency (1952-56). In this rebellion, Kenyans took arms against the English colonial government, which had relegated them to work as laborers or subsistence farmers. The novel won its young author the 1965 Dakar Festival of Negro Arts prize.

During the mid-1960s, wa Thiong’o taught school and wrote in his spare time. Subsequent novels include The River Between, published in 1965, and A Grain of Wheat, which appeared two years later. The latter work deals with the aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising, and the changes that took place in Kenya and among Kenyans themselves as the country moved toward independence day. In 1967, wa Thiong’o became a lecturer in English literature at the University of Nairobi, but soon involved himself in a burgeoning African nationalist movement there, and successfully campaigned to force the institution to change its “English Department” into the “Department of African Languages and Literature.” Around this time he abandoned his Christian name, James, in favor of “Ngugi.”

Nationalized the National Theatre

wa Thiong’o eventually became senior lecturer and chair of the literature department at the University of

At a Glance…

Born James Thiong’o Ngugi on January 5, 1938, in Limuru, Kenya; married; children: five. Education: Makerere University, B.A., 1963; University of Leeds, B.A., 1964.

Career: Teacher in East African schools, 1964-70; University of Nairobi, Kenya, lecturer in English literature, 1967-69, later became senior lecturer and chair of literature department; Makerere University, creative writing fellow, 1969-70; Northwestern University, visiting lecturer, 1970-71; New York University, New York City, professor of African and Caribbean literatures, theater, film, and cultural theory, early 1990s-.

Awards: Recipient of awards from the 1965 Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and the East African Literature Bureau, both for Weep Not, Child.

Addresses: Office —Africana Studies Program, New York University, 269 Mercer St., Suite 601, New York, NY 10003-6687. Agent— c/o William Heinemann Ltd., 15 Queen St., London W1X 8BE, England.

Nairobi, a position that placed him in the vanguard of the country’s intellectual elite, but his prestige did not protect him from official harassment when he grew increasingly critical of Kenyan politics. In 1976 he co-wrote a play with university colleague Micere Githae Mugo, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, that won a competition. Kimathi had led the Mau Mau uprising, and was executed for it by British colonial authorities in 1957. But an attempt to schedule the play at Kenya’s National Theatre to coincide with a UNESCO general conference in Nairobi was thwarted by the venue’s European management, who had scheduled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for that month. As wa Thiong’o recalled several years later, “the conflict over the performance space was also a struggle over which cultural symbols and activities would represent the new Kenya,” according to an excerpt of his 1996 Oxford University lecture found in TDR.

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was eventually granted a four-night schedule, and each performance sold out. “But the dramatic highlight still belonged to the opening night,” wa Thiong’o recalled in his Oxford University lecture. “As the actors performed their last song and dance through the middle aisle of the auditorium, they were joined by the audience. They all went outside the theatre building, still dancing. What had been confined to the stage had spilled out into the open air, and there was no longer any distinction between actors and audience.” Afterward, wa Thiong’o and another playwright whose work had also premiered that month were invited to appear before Kenya’s Criminal Investigation Department at its Nairobi Headquarters. They were posed the question: “Why were we interfering with European performances at the National Theatre?,” as he recalled in his Oxford University lecture.

A Year behind Bars

wa Thiong’o’s 1977 novel, Petals of Blood, landed him in particular disfavor, for its portrayal of a postcolonial Kenya riven by corruption and disillusionment cast much of the blame on the political leaders who had emerged since independence. The novel recounts the stories of four characters, all jailed for murder; one is a teacher and union activist named Karega; Munira was once headmaster of a school; Abdulla is a half-Indian shopkeeper who participated in the war for independence; and Wanja, once a prostitute, works instead as a barmaid. At the time of the novel’s publication, wa Thiong’o’s play, Ngaahika Ndena (translated as “I Will Marry When I Want”), co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, was banned as incendiary, wa Thiong’o soon became the victim of an official harassment campaign: his home was searched, his library of books confiscated, and he was jailed without trial for a year. He also lost his post at the University of Nairobi.

In the midst of this troubling time, wa Thiong’o announced that he would write only in Gikuyu or Swahili from this point forward. His first work in Gikuyu was published abroad as Caitaani utharaba-ini in 1980, with a translation by the author appearing three years later as Devil on the Cross, wa Thiong’o viewed the decision to switch languages as critical to his ultimate objective as a writer—using literature to incite change. “When you use a language, you are also choosing an audience,” he said in an interview with Research in African Literatures. “When I used English, I was choosing English-speaking audience…. Now I can use a story, a myth, and not always explain because I can assume that the [Gikuyu] readers are familiar with this…. I can play with word sounds and images, I can rely more and more on songs, proverbs, riddles, anecdotes…. I maintain multiple centers, in a sense, simplify structures.”

Government Hunted for Protagonist

In the early 1980s, wa Thiong’o moved to England. He continued to write both fiction and nonfiction there, including three works that have become staples for students of African literary criticism: Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), and Writing against Neocolonialism (1986). His second novel in Gikuyu, Matigarima Njiruungi, attracted a great deal of controversy back in Kenya, which by then had become a one-party dictatorship. “Matigarima Njiruungi” means “the patriots who survived the bullets,” and the plot revolves around a man, Matigari, who has been living in an East African forest for some time, but decides to return to his home to reunite his sundered family. On the way, Matigari is arrested and jailed in the oppressive political atmosphere, but escapes to continue his crusade for peace. He then lands in a mental hospital, but once again eludes his captors. Matigari decides that an armed uprising of the people is the only route to justice in his country. The publication of Matigarima Njiruungi caused such a furor in Kenya that authorities briefly believed that Matigari was a real person and launched a search for him.

wa Thiong’o and his wife, Jerry, founded a literary journal in the Gikuyu language, and though he had once delivered conference papers and wrote an important critical essay for Yale Journal of Criticism in it, he began using English again in the late 1980s in his academic career. In the early 1990s, he accepted a professorship at New York University’s Africana Studies Program, and in 1996 he was invited to deliver the prestigious Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University. The four essays were published the following year as Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State of Africa.

Though he has not published any works of fiction since his children’s Njamba Nene books in the late 1980s, wa Thiong’o continued to examine East African culture and politics in his scholarly work, and he has become the subject of several scholarly works by others. Though living far from his home, he continued to work toward leading Kenya into a new era. “What we see is after independence—even after post-cold war situation—is, quite frankly, the continued deprivation of people,” he told the Research in African Literatures. “[I]n fact, the gulf between the poorer nations and richer nations of the West is widening and within each of those nations, particularly Africa, the gulf between the poor and rich is becoming really enormous. When I travel from New York to other parts of the world I see that the whole world is connected—but in the image of the beggar…. You see the beggar and the homeless persons in every capital city in the world.”

Selected writings

(As James T. Ngugi)

The Black Hermit (play; first produced in Nairobi in 1962), Makerere University Press, 1963, Humanities, 1968.

Weep Not, Child (novel), introduction and notes by Ime Ikeddeh, Heinemann, 1964, P. Collier, 1969.

The River Between (novel), Humanities, 1965.

A Grain of Wheat (novel), Heinemann, 1967, 2nd edition, Humanities, 1968.

This Time Tomorrow (play; includes The Reels and The Wound in the Heart; produced and broadcast in 1966, also broadcast on BBC Africa Service in 1967), East African Literature Bureau, 1970.

(As Ngugi wa Thiong’o)

Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, Heinemann, 1972, Lawrence Hill 1973.

Secret Lives, and Other Stories, Heinemann Educational, 1974, Lawrence Hill, 1975.

Petals of Blood (novel), Heinemann Educational, 1977.

(With Micere Githae Mugo) The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Heinemann Educational, 1977, Swahili translation by the authors published as Mzalendo kimathi, c. 1978.

Caitaani mutharaba-ini, Heinemann Educational, 1980, translation by the author published as Devil on the Cross, Zimbabwe Publishing, 1983.

Writers in Politics: Essays, Heinemann, 1981, revised and enlarged as Writers in Politics: A Re-Engagement with Issues of Literature and Society, James Currey (Oxford), 1997.

Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, Heinemann, 1981.

Njamba Nene na mbaathi i mathagu (juvenile), Heinemann Educational, 1982.

(Co-author and translator with Ngugi wa Mirii) I Will Marry When I Want (play), Heinemann, 1982.

Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, New Beacon, 1983.

Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Heinemann, 1986.

Writing against Neocolonialism, Vita, 1986.

Matigari ma Njiruungi, Heinemann, 1986, translation by Wangui published as Matigari, Heinemann, 1989.

Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (juvenile), translation by Waugui wa Goro, Africa World, 1989.

Njamba Nene’s Pistol (juvenile), translation by Waugui, Africa World, 1989.

Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Heinemann, 1992.

Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State of Africa, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sources

Books

Ngugi Wa Thion’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Heinemann, 1992.

Periodicals

American Visions, April/May 1994, p. 11.

Research in African Literatures, spring 1999, p. 162; summer 2000, p. 194.

TDR, fall 1997, p. 11.

Other

Additional material was obtained online from The Biography Resource Center Online, Gale.

—Carol Brennan