Ngugi wa Thiongo

Ngugi wa Thiong'o or James Ngugi, 1938-, Kenyan writer, acclaimed as East Africa's foremost novelist. He studied at universities in Uganda and England. His first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964) and his second, A Grain of Wheat (1967), are accounts of the Mau Mau rebellion. Ngugi is particularly concerned with preserving native African languages, and in 1977 he wrote (with Ngugi wa Mirii) and directed a play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (tr. I Will Marry When I Want, 1982), in Kikuyu. The production was so popular among Kikuyu farmers and workers that the government, fearing the play would encourage political dissent, banned it. Arrested and detained (1978-79) for his novel Petals of Blood, Ngugi wrote about his prison experience in Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). After his release, he continued to write in Kikuyu and English. In 1982 he went into self-imposed exile in London, later settling in the United States, where he now is a professor at the Univ. of California, Irvine. A triumphant trip home in 2004 was cut short when he and his wife were brutally attacked in Nairobi; they soon returned to the United States.

Ngugi's literary targets have included governmental corruption, socioeconomic exploitation, and religious hypocrisy. Some of his writings, such as the novels Petals of Blood (1977), his last novel in English; Caitaani mutharaba-ini (1980; tr. Devil on the Cross, 1982), his first novel in Kikuyu, written while he was in prison; and Matigari (1986, tr. 1990), are still politically controversial. Ngugi's lengthy novel Murogi wa Kagogo (2004, tr. Wizard of the Crow, 2006) is a surreal, allegorical, and satirical fantasia of corruption, venality, and shape-shifting magic in a fictional postcolonial country resembling his homeland—and other 20th-century African nations. His nonfiction works include Barrel of a Pen (1983), Decolonising the Mind (1986), Moving the Centre (1992), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). He also has written children's books.

Bibliography: See studies by C. B. Robson (1979), G. D. Killam (1980; as ed., 1984), D. Cook and M. Okenimkpe (1983 repr. 1997), C. Sicherman (1990), C. M. Nwankwo (1992), H. Narang (1995), C. Cantalupo, ed. (1995), I. B. Lar and T. I Ogundare (1998), J. Ogude (1999), S. Gikandi (2000), O. Lovesey (2000), P. Nazareth, ed. (2000), and J. G. Ndigirgi (2006).

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.’