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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (formerly known as James Ngugi; 1938-2025) |
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Kenyan teacher, novelist, essayist, and playwright, whose work form a link between the pioneers and the younger generation of African writers. After imprisonment in 1978, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o abandoned using English as the primary language in favor of Gikuyu, his native tongue. The transition from colonialism to postcoloniality and the crisis of modernity was a central issue in a great deal ofNgũgĩ's writings. Mungo felt nervous. He was lying on his back and looking at the roof. Sooty locks hung from the fern and grass thatch and all pointed at his heart. A clear drop of water was delicately suspended above him. The drop fattened and grew dirties as it absorbed grains of soot. Then it started drawing towards him. He tried to shut his eyes. They would not close. He tried to move his head: it was firmly chained to the bed-frame. (from A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, revised edition, Oxford: Heinemann, 1986, p. 1; first published in the African Writers Series as AWS 36, in 1968) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, Kiambu District, the fifth child of the third of his father's four wives. At that time Kenya was under British rule, which ended in 1963. Ngũgĩ's family belonged to the Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Gikuyu. His father, Thiong'o wa Nducu, was a peasant farmer, who was forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Ngũgĩ attended the mission-run school at Kamaandura in Limuru, Karinga school in Maanguu, and Alliance High School in Kikuyu. During these years Ngũgĩ became a devout Christian. However, at school he also learned about the Gikuyu values and history and underwent the Gikuyu rite of passage ceremony. Later he rejected Christianity, and changed his original name in 1976 from James Ngugi, which he saw as a sign of colonialism, to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in honor of his Gikuyu heritage. In 1962 Ngũgĩ's play The Black Hermit was
produced in Kampala. To pursue graduate studies he left in 1964 for
England, entering the Leeds University. After receiving a B.A. in
English at Makerere University College in Kampala (Uganda) in 1963,
Ngũgĩ worked briefly as a journalist in Nairobi. He married in 1961. Over the next seventeen years his first wife, Nyambura, gave birth to six children. His second wife, Njeeri wa Ngũgĩ, he met in 1987. She had moved at the age of 17 to the United States, where she studied at New Jersey City State University and later worked at the New Jersey State Division of Youth and Family Services. In 2002 she was appointed director of the UCI Faculty and Staff Counseling Center. The most prominent theme in Ngũgĩ's early work was the conflict
between the individual and the community. As a novelist Ngũgĩ made his
debut with Weep Not, Child (1964), which he started to write
while he was at school in England. It was the first novel in English to
be published by an East African author. Ngũgĩ used the Bildungsroman
form to tell the story of a young man, Njoroge. He loses his
opportunity for further education when he is caught between idealistic
dreams and the violent reality of the colonial exploitation. The River Between
(1965) was set in the late 1920s and 1930s and depicted an unhappy love
affair in a rural community divided between Christian converts and
non-Christians. A Grain of Wheat (1967) marked Ngũgĩ's break with cultural nationalism and his embracing of Fanonist
Marxism. Like André Gide in Si le grain ne meurt (1923), Ngũgĩ refers in the title to the biblical theme of
self-sacrifice, a part of the new birth: "unless a grain of wheat die." The allegorical story of one man's mistaken heroism and a
search for
the betrayer of a Mau Mau leader is set in a village, which has been
destroyed in the war. The author's family was involved in the Mau Mau
uprising against the British rule. His older brother had joined the
movement, his
stepbrother was killed, and his mother was arrested and tortured.
Ngũgĩ's village suffered in a campaign. In the prefatory note of the
book Ngũgĩ
said that all the characters are fictitious, but "the situation and the
problems are real – sometimes to painfully real for the peasants who
fought the British yet who now see all that they fought for being put
on one side." Also the short story 'The Martyr' took place during the rebellion. "And again his whole soul rose in anger – anger against all those with a white skin, those foreign elements that had displaced the true sons of the land from their God-given place. Had God not promised Gekoyo all this land, he and his children, forever and ever? Now the land had been taken away." (from 'The Martyr,' in Secret Lives and Other Stories, New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1975, pp. 42-43) In the 1960s Ngũgĩ was a reporter for the Nairobi Daily Nation and editor of Zuka from 1965 to 1970. He worked as a lecturer at several universities -
at the University College in Nairobi (1967-69), at the Makerere
University in Kampala (1969-70), and at the Northwestern University in
Evanston in the United States (1970-71). Ngũgĩ resigned from his post
at Nairobi University as a protest against government interference in
the university, though he joined the faculty again in 1973,
becoming an associate professor and chairman of the department of
literature. Ngũgĩ's resignation was response to his and his
colleagues' criticism of English -
the
British government had made in the 1950s instruction in English
mandatory. Ngũgĩ had asked in 1968 in a paper, written with Henry
Owuor-Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong: "If there is need for a 'study of
the historic
continuity of a single culture', why can't this be African? Why can't
African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures
in relationship to it?" (from 'On the Abolition of the English Department,' Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, London: Heinemann, 1972, p. 146) Acknowledging
the influence of European literatures on African writing, Ngũgĩ and his
coauthors emphasized the importance of the oral tradition, Swahili
literature, and the Caribbean novel and poetry. "The poetry of Negritude indeed cannot be understood without studying its Caribbean roots. We must also study Afro-American literature." (Ibid., p. 149) The short story 'Minutes of Glory' examined the backside of economic progress - the life of women who were teared off from their villages and doomed to work as prostitutes in cities. The protagonist, Beatrice, is an exploited barmaid. "Her life was here in the bar among this crowd of lost strangers. Fallen from grace, fallen from grace. She was part of a generation which would never again be one with the soil, the crops, the wind and the moon. Not for them that whispering in dark hedges, not for her that dance and love-making under the glare of the moon, with the hills of TumuTumu rising to touch the sky." (from 'Minutes of Glory,' in Secret Lives and Other Stories, p. 86) Beatrice steals from a fellow victim, a lorry driver, and has her few minutes of freedom and admiration, before she is arrested. In 1976 Ngũgĩ chaired the cultural committee of the Kamiriithu
Community Edcational and Cultural Centre, a collective that a ran a
public theater. His play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, was staged at the community theater in October 1977. At the end of December 1977, Daniel arap Moi, then vice-president, ordered Ngũgĩ detained in Mamiti Maximum Security Prison. He was charged of having engaged in unspecified "activities and utterances . . . dangerous for the good Government of Kenya and its institutions." Until December 1978, he was imprisoned under Public Security Act, without trial. Behind Ngũgĩ's arrest was the uncensored political message of Ngaahika Ndeenda. Moreover, his novel Petals of Blood (1978)
took a harsh look at life in Kenya after independence. This work
reflected change in Ngũgĩ's fiction from portraying the colonial era to
focusing on exploit and corruption in present-day Kenya. The story
dealt with an investigation of the murder of three representatives of
the new society, who have profited from neocolonialism. After being released, Ngũgĩ was not reinstated in his university post, and his family were subjected to frequent harassment. In 1980 Ngũgĩ published the first modern novel written in Gikuyu, Caitaani Muthara-ini (Devil on the Cross). He argued that literature written by Africans in a colonial language is not African literature, but "Afro-European literature." Writers must use their native languages to give the African literature its own genealogy and grammar. Detained (1981), Ngũgĩ's prison diary, was written in
English on sheets of prison-issue toilet paper.
The manuscript had been confiscated but it was returned on Ngũgĩ's
release. "12 December 1978: I am in cell 16 in a detention block
enclosing eighteen other political prisoners. Here I have no name. I am
just a number in a file: K6,77. A tiny iron frame against one wall
serves as a bed and a tiny board against another wall serves as a desk.
These fill up the minute cell." (Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, Nairobi, Oxford: Heinemann, 1981, p. 3) At the time of the launching of the book, Ngũgĩ learned of a plot to murder him. Barred from jobs in colleges and
at the university, Ngũgĩ left Kenya in 1982 to live in self-imposed exile
in London. He continued to write prolifically. In Decolonising the Mind The Politics of Language in African Literature
(1986) he said that African writers should express themselves
in indigenous languages in order to reach the African masses. For the
younger generation of readers he wrote three stories of the adventures
of Njamba Nene, whose name could be translated as "Big Hero"
and whose life is deeply connected with the history of
anti-colonial resistance. In the first story Njamba Nene rescues a busload of children (Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus), he then transports a concealed pistol to a Mau Mau leader, General Ruheni (Njamba Nene's Pistol), and at the end of the trilogy he a venges his mother's torture and murder (Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief). Matigari (1987), a satirical moral fable, is one of Ngũgĩ's most important works. Its narrative is built on a famous Gikuyu folktale. Martigari, a freedom fighter, emerges from the forest in the political dawn of post-independence Kenya. Searching for his family and a new future, he finds little has changed and vows to use force of arms to achieve his true liberation. According to a rumor, Matigari was taken seriously by Kenyan authorities as a revolutionary agitator plotting to overthrow the government, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. In the 1990s, Ngũgĩ published mostly non-fiction. Before becoming professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University (1992 –2002), where he also held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair, Ngũgĩ taught at the University of Bayreuth, Yale University and Amherst College. A respected speaker and internationally acclaimed author and activist, he lectured at Auckland University, Oxford University, Cambridge, Harvad, and other universities. In 2002, Ngũgĩ was appointed distinguished professor of comparative literature and English at the University of California, Irvine. While
touring in Kenya in 2004 with his wife, Ngũgĩ was attacted by four
thieves, armed with guns, a machete and a large wire cutter,
who broke into their Norfolk Towers apartment. During the assault Ngũgĩ
was beaten up
and tortured with cigarettes and his wife was raped. The assailants took
money, Ngagugi's laptop computer and wedding ring and Njeeri's earings.
"I don't think we were meant to come out alive. We think there's a
bigger circle of forces –
not just those who attacked us. I don't know if we'll ever reach the
truth. But I'm sure that if it had happened under the Moi regime, we
wouldn't be alive." ('Ngugi wa Thiong'o: 'I don't think we were meant to come out alive'' by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, 29 Jan 2006)
Three of the four men charged with the offence were sentenced
to death in 2006. Ngũgĩ's nephew was acquitted for lack of
evidence. Among Ngũgĩ's later novels is Murogi wa Kagogo (2004-07), originally published in a series of instalmenst. The first volume, translated as Wizard of the Crow, takes place in the
corrupted fictional Republic of Aburiria, where the Ruler's bodily functions are a national news – from eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose to yawning. In the House of the Interpreter (2012) was the second volume of his memoirs, began with Dreams in a Time of War (2010). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o died on May 28, 2025, at a hospital in Buford, Georgia, United States. For further reading: Ngugi wa Thiong'o by Clifford B. Robson (1979); An Introduction to the Writings of Ngugi by G.D. Killam (1980); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: An Exploration of His Writings by David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe (1983); Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat by Muchigu Kiiru (1985); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: The Making of a Rebel by Carol Sicherman (1990); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: L'homme et l'ouvre by Jacqueline Bardolph (1990) Ngugi Wa Thiong O: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, 1957-1987 by Carol Sicherman (1991); The Words of Ngugi by C. Nwandwo (1992); The World of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, edited by Charles Cantalupo (1993); The Novels of Achebe and Ngugi by K. Indrasena Reddy (1994); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Text and Context, edited by Charles Cantalupo (1995); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: The Ideology of Form by Simon Gikandi (1998); Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi, and Tutuola by Sydney Onyeberechi (1999); Ngugi wa Thiong'o by Patrick Williams (1999); Ngugi wa Thiong'o by Oliver Lovesey (2000); Ngugi wa Thiong’o Speaks: Interviews with the Kenyan Writer, eds. Reinhard Sander & Bernth Lindfors (2006); Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading by Brendon Nicholls (2010); The Postcolonial Intellectual: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in Context by Oliver Lovesey (2015); Ngũgĩ: Reflections on His Life of Writing, edited by Simon Gikandi & Ndirangu Wachanga (2018); Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Resistance by Amitayu Chakraborty (2024) Selected works:
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