Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Background

The writer was born James wa Thiong'o Ngugi on January 5, 1938, in Kamiriithu, Kenya.

Education

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.

Career

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. Ngugi'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, Ngugi 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, Ngugi 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. "

Ngugi 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 Ngugi 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, " Ngugi 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, Ngugi 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.

Ngugi'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, Ngugi's play, Ngaahika Ndena (translated as "I Will Marry When IWant"), co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, was banned as incendiary. Ngugi 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, Ngugi 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.

In the early 1980s, Ngugi 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).

Ngugi 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.

From the publication of his children's Njamba Nene books in the late 1980s, Ngugi turned to nonfiction for more than a decade to examine East African culture and politics in his scholarly work. He also became the subject of several scholarly works by others. He continued to work in academia as distinguished professor and director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine.

With the political party of President Daniel arap Moi finally out of power in 2002, Ngugi began exploring the possibility of traveling to Kenya. In 2004, Ngugi returned to Kenya for the first time since 1982. His return was to promote his first piece of novel since Matigari. His novel, the first installment of a six-volume story, Murogi wa Kagogo (translated as Wizard of the Crow), is set in the fictitious country of Aburiria. In it, Ngugi offers complex musings about dictatorship, humanity, cultural legacy, and Western influence on Africa in a story. Though in his review of the book in the New Yorker John Updike wrote that Ngugi offered "more indignation than analysis in his portrait of postcolonial Africa, " Jumana Farouky of Time. com praised the tome for being "laugh-out-loud funny. "

Achievements

• Ngugi presented his ideas on literature, culture, and politics in numerous essays and lectures, which were collected in Homecoming (1972), Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of a Pen (1983), Moving the Centre (1993), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). Ngũgĩ has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Works

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  • Devil on the Cross (Penguin African Writers Series)

    (The great Kenyan writer and Nobel Prize nominee’s novel t...)

  • Weep Not, Child (Penguin African Writers Series)

    (The Nobel Prize–nominated Kenyan writer’s powerful first ...)

  • Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

    (Ngugi describes this book as 'a summary of some of the is...)

  • A Grain of Wheat (Penguin African Writers Series)

    ( Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cus...)

  • The River Between (African Writers Series)

    (Christian missionaries attempt to outlaw the female circu...)

  • Wizard of the Crow

    ( A landmark of postcolonial African literature, Wizard o...)

  • Petals of Blood

    ( The puzzling murder of three African directors of a for...)

  • Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir

    ( Born in 1938 in rural Kenya, Ng?g? wa Thiong’o came of ...)

  • Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer's Awakening

    ( One of Oprah.com's "17 Must-Read Books for the New Year...)

Connections

Wife:

Njeeri