Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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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.

writer

Personal Information

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-.

Life's Work

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."

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 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."

Awards

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

Works

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.
• 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.

Further Reading

Books

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

• American Visions, April/May 1994, p. 11.
• Research in African Literatures, spring 1999, p. 162; summer 2000, p. 194.
• TDR, fall 1997, p. 11.

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

— Carol Brennan