ABOUT
"In writing one should hear all the whisperings, all the shouting, all the crying, all the loving and all the hating of the many voices in the past, and those voices will never speak to a writer in a foreign language."
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, born 5 January 1938 in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, was baptised as James Ngugi. His family was caught up with the Mau Mau War (also known as the Mau Mau Uprising/Revolt/Rebellion and Kenya Emergency) which lasted for eight years since 1952. His half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army while his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu homeguard post. However, he received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda in 1963 in which he also produced a play, The Black Hermit in 1962.
Ngũgĩ published his first novel, Weep Not, Child in 1964 while attending the University of Leeds in England. It was the first novel in English to be produced by an East African writer. His second novel, The River Between (1965), highlighted the Mau Mau Revolt and narrated an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians. It is currently being used in Kenya's national secondary school syllabus. On the other hand, his other novel, A Grain of Wheat (1967), marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He later renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name back to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and wrote in his native Gikuyu and Swahili.
Ngũgĩ helped set up the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre in 1976 which partly organized African Theatre in the area. He embarked on a new form of theatre in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he believed to be "the general bourgeois education system" by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to "demystify" the theatrical process, and to avoid the "process of alienation [that] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers" which, according to him, encourages passivity in "ordinary people".
Although Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. The unabridged political message of his 1977 play provoked the Kenyan Vice-President of that time, Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison for over a year, Ngũgĩ wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross) on prison-issued toilet paper.
Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison on December 1978 and fled Kenya because he was not reinstated to his job as professor at Nairobi University and his family was harassed. Due to his writing about the injustices of the then dictatorial government, Ngũgĩ and his family were forced to live in exile. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since taught at New York University with a dual professorship in Comparative Literature and Performance Studies where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair, and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. His son is the author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ.
They only safely returned after Arap Moi was voted out of office 22 years later.
On 8 August 2004, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya from a month-long tour of East Africa. Three days later, robbers broke into his high-security apartment and assaulted Ngũgĩ, sexually assaulted his wife and stole various items of value. Since then, Ngũgĩ has returned to America, and in the summer of 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel after nearly twenty years, Wizard of the Crow, which was translated from Gikuyu to English by the author. Two years later on 10 November, Ngũgĩ was harassed and ordered to leave the Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, San Francisco by an employee. The incident led to a public outcry and angered the African-American community and the Africans living in America which prompted an apology by the hotel.
Ngũgĩ's work included novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is also the founder and editor of Gikuyu journal Mũtĩiri. Some of his later works included Detained, his prison diary of 1981, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native mother tongues rather than European languages in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and Matigari (1987), one his most famous works, a satire based on Gikuyu folktale.
His most recent books are Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 2009 with the argument turning into the crucial role of African languages in "the resurrection of African memory," and two autobiographical works: Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012).
Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has won the 1973 Lotus Prize for Literature, nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, and awarded the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (finalist Autobiography) for In the House of the Interpreter.
For more information on Ngũgĩ, please click here.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)
- Weep, Not Child, 1964, Heinemann 1987, Macmillan 2005
- The River Between, Heinemann 1965, Heinemann 1989,
- A Grain of Wheat, 1967 (1992)
- Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play, with Ngugi wa Mirii, Heinemann Educational Books (1980)
- Petals of Blood (1977) Penguin 2002
- Wizard of the Crow, 2006, Secker
"Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mould it and those committed to breaking it up; those who aim to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow [...] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes.
~Prof. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
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