Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru[9] in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi. His family was caught up in the Mau Mau Uprising; his half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu home guard post.[10]

He went to the Alliance High School, and went on to study at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. As a student he attended the African Writers Conference held at Makerere in June 1962,[11][12][13][14] and his play The Black Hermit premiered as part of the event at The National Theatre.[15][16] At the conference Ngũgĩ asked Chinua Achebe to read the manuscripts of his novels The River Between and Weep Not, Child, which would subsequently be published in Heinemann's African Writers Series, launched in London that year, with Achebe as its first advisory editor.[17] Ngũgĩ received his B.A. in English from Makerere University College in 1963.

His debut novel, Weep Not, Child, was published in May 1964, becoming the first novel in English to be published by a writer from East Africa.[18][17]

Later that year, having won a scholarship to the University of Leeds to study for an MA, Ngũgĩ travelled to England, where he was when his second novel, The River Between, came out in 1965.[17] The River Between, which has as its background the Mau Mau Uprising, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians, was previously on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus.[19][20][21] He left Leeds without completing his thesis on Caribbean literature,[22] for which his studies had focused on George Lamming, about whom Ngũgĩ said in his 1972 collection of essays Homecoming: "He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world. And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords [sic] deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence."[17]

Ngũgĩ's 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat marked his embrace of Fanonist Marxism. He subsequently renounced Christianity, writing in English, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist; he changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu.[23] In 1967, Thiong'o also began teaching at the University of Nairobi as a professor of English literature. He continued to teach at the university for ten years while serving as a Fellow in Creative Writing at Makerere. During this time, he also guest lectured at Northwestern University in the department of English and African Studies for a year.[24]

While a professor at the University of Nairobi, Thiong'o was the catalyst of the discussion to abolish the English department. He argued that after the end of colonialism, it was imperative that a university in Africa teach African literature, including oral literature, and that such should be done with the realization of the richness of African languages.[25]

In 1976 he helped set up The Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre which, among other things, organised African Theatre in the area. The uncensored political message of his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, provoked the then Kenyan Vice-President Daniel arap Moi to order his arrest. While detained in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, Ngũgĩ wrote the first modern novel in Gikuyu, Devil on the Cross (Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ), on prison-issued toilet paper.

After his release in December 1978,[26] 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 dictatorial government at the time, Ngugi and his family were forced to live in exile. Only after Arap Moi retired after serving his second and last term in 2002, 22 years later, was it safe for them to return.[27]

During his time in prison, Thiong'o made the decision to cease writing his plays and other works in English and began writing all his creative works in his native tongue, Gikuyu.[24]

His time in prison also inspired the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi(1976). He wrote this in collaboration with Micere Githae Mugo.[28]

While in exile, Ngugi worked with the London-based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya (1982–98).[26][4] Matigari ma Njiruungi (translated by Wangui wa Goro into English as Matigari) was published at this time. In 1984, he was Visiting Professor at Bayreuth University, and the following year was Writer-in-Residence for the Borough of Islington in London.[26] He also studied film at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden (1986).[26]

His later works include Detained, his prison diary (1981), Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), an essay arguing for African writers' expression in their native languages rather than European languages, in order to renounce lingering colonial ties and to build an authentic African literature, and Matigari (translated by Wangui wa Goro), (1987), one of his most famous works, a satire based on a Gikuyu folk tale.

Ngũgĩ was Visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University between 1989 and 1992.[26] In 1992, he was guest at the Congress of South African Writers and spent time in Zwide Township with Mzi Mahola, the year he became a professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature as well as having been the first director of the International Center for Writing and Translation[29] at the University of California, Irvine.

Ngũgĩ reading at the Library of Congress in 2019

On 8 August 2004, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On 11 August, robbers broke into his high-security apartment: they assaulted Ngũgĩ, sexually assaulted his wife and stole various items of value.[30] When Ngũgĩ returned to America at the end of his month trip, five men were arrested on suspicion of the crime, including Thiong'o's own nephew.[27] In the summer 2006 the American publishing firm Random House published his first new novel in nearly two decades, Wizard of the Crow, translated to English from Gikuyu by the author.

On 10 November 2006, while in San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the Embarcadero, Ngũgĩ was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered both African-Americans and members of the African diaspora living in America,[31][32] prompting an apology by the hotel.[33]

His most recent books are Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012), and Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 2009 making the argument for the crucial role of African languages in "the resurrection of African memory", about which Publishers Weekly said: "Ngugi’s language is fresh; the questions he raises are profound, the argument he makes is clear: 'To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people’s memory bank.'"[34] This was followed by two well received autobiographical works: Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010)[35][36][37][38][39] and In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012), which was described as "brilliant and essential" by the Los Angeles Times,[40] among other positive reviews.[41][42][43]

• University of Leeds, Honorary doctorate of Letters (LittD), 2004
• University of Auckland, Honorary doctorate of Letters (LittD), 2005
• University of Dar es Salaam, Honorary doctorate in Literature, 2013[54]
• University of Bayreuth, Honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. h.c.), 2014[47]
• Yale University, Honorary doctorate (D.Litt. h.c.), 2017[55]
• University of Edinburgh, Honorary doctorate (D.Litt.), 2019[56]

• Weep Not, Child, (1964) ISBN 1-4050-7331-4
• The River Between, (1965) ISBN 0-435-90548-1
• A Grain of Wheat, (1967, 1992), ISBN 0-14-118699-2
• Petals of Blood (1977) ISBN 0-14-118702-6
• Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross, 1980)
• Matigari ma Njiruungi, 1986 (Matigari, translated into English by Wangui wa Goro, 1989) ISBN 0-435-90546-5
• Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, 2004) ISBN 9966-25-162-6
• The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (2020)

• A Meeting in the Dark (1974)
• Secret Lives, and Other Stories, (1976, 1992) ISBN 0-435-90975-4
• Minutes of Glory and Other Stories (2019)

• The Black Hermit (1963)
• This Time Tomorrow (three plays, including the title play, "The Rebels", "The Wound in the Heart" and "This Time Tomorrow") (c. 1970)
• The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) ISBN 0-435-90191-5, African Publishing Group, ISBN 0-949932-45-0 (with Micere Githae Mugo and Njaka)
• Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want) (1977, 1982) (with Ngugi wa Mirii)

• Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics (1972) ISBN 0-435-18580-2
• Writers in Politics: Essays (1981) ISBN 978-0-85255-541-5 (UK), ISBN 978-0-435-08985-6 (U.S.)
• Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) ISBN 978-0-85255-501-9 (UK), ISBN 978-0-435-08016-7 (U.S.)
• Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom (1993) ISBN 978-0-435-08079-2 (U.S.) ISBN 978-0-85255-530-9 (UK)
• Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance of Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1996), Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-818390-9
• Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe (2016) ISBN 9780857423139

• Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981)
• Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) ISBN 978-1-84655-377-6
• In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012) ISBN 978-0-30790-769-1
• Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer's Awakening (2016) ISBN 978-1-62097-240-3

• Education for a National Culture (1981)
• Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983)
• Mother, Sing For Me (1986)
• Writing against Neo-Colonialism (1986)
• Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009) ISBN 978-0-465-00946-6[57]
• Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012) ISBN 978-0231159517 Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing on JSTOR

• Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (translated by Wangui wa Goro)" Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Mathagu, 1986)
• Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief (translated by Wangui wa Goro) (Njamba Nene na Chibu King'ang'i, 1988)
• Njamba Nene's Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene, 1990) ISBN 0-86543-081-0
• The Upright Revolution, Or Why Humans Walk Upright, Seagull Press, 2019 ISBN 9780857426475