Craig White's
Literature Courses

authors

 Ngugi wa Thiong'o
 (b. James Ngugi, 1938)

(adapted from http://kirjasto.sci.fi/ngugiw.htm)

Kenyan teacher, novelist, essayist, and playwright. After imprisonment in 1978, Ngugi abandoned using English as the primary language of his work in favor of Gikuyu, his native tongue. The transition from colonialism to postcoloniality and the crisis of modernity has been a central issue in much of Ngugi's writings.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, Kiambu District, as the fifth child of the third of his father's four wives. At that time Kenya was under British rule, which ended in 1963. Ngugi'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. Ngugi attended the mission-run school at Kamaandura in Limuru, Karinga school in Maanguu, and Alliance High School in Kikuyu. During these years Ngugi became a devout Christian.

However, at school he also learned about the Gikuyu values and history and underwent the Gikuyu rite of passage ceremony. While at Alliance, he participated in a debate in which he contended that Western educations were harmful to African students. The headmaster subsequently counseled Ngugi against becoming a political agitator. Ngugi next attended Makerere University in Uganda and later the University of Leeds in England, where he was exposed to West-Indian born social theorist Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, a highly controversial treatise in which the author maintains that political independence for oppressed peoples must be won—often violently—before genuine social and economic change may be achieved. Ngugi became influenced by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, developing an ardent opposition to colonialism, Christianity, and other non-African influences in Kenya. During this period, he also began to write plays and novels criticizing Kenyan society and politics.Later he rejected Christianity, and changed his original name in 1976 from James Ngugi, which he saw as a sign of colonialism, to Ngugi wa Thiong'o in honor of his Gikuyu heritage.

After receiving a B.A. in English at Makerere University College in Kampala (Uganda) in 1963, Ngugi worked briefly as a journalist in Nairobi. He married in 1961. Over the next seventeen years his wife, Nyambura, gave birth to six children. Ngugi's play The Black Hermit was produced in Kampala in 1962. In 1964 he left for England to pursue graduate studies at Leeds University.

Ngugi's early work centered on the conflict between the individual and the community. As a novelist Ngugi 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.

A Grain Of Wheat (1967) marked Ngugi's break with cultural nationalism and his embracing of Fanonist Marxism. Ngugi 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. Ngugi's older brother had joined the movement, his stepbrother was killed, and his mother was arrested and tortured. Ngugi's village suffered in a campaign.

In the 1960s Ngugi 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). Ngugi had resigned from his post at Nairobi University as a protest against government interference in the university, but he joined the faculty in 1973, becoming an associate professor and chairman of the department of literature, which was formed in response to his and his colleagues' criticism of English. In the 1950s the British government had made instruction in English mandatory. Ngugi had asked in an article, written with Taban lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-Anyumba, "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', 1968) Acknowledging the influence of European literatures on African writing, Ngugi and his coauthors emphasized the importance of the oral tradition, Swahili literature, and the Caribbean novel and poetry.

In 1976 Ngugi chaired the cultural committee of the Kamiriithu Community Edcational and Cultural Centre, a collective that ran a public theatre. The government denied its permission for performances in 1982. At the end of December 1977 Daniel arap Moi, then vice-president, ordered Ngugi detained in Mamiti Maximum Security Prison. Ngugi was imprisoned under Public Security Act for a year without trial for his involvement with a communal theatre in his home village. Behind his arrest was the uncensored political message of his popular play Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977, I Will Marry When I Want), written with Ngugi wa Mirii. Moreover, Ngugi's novel Petals Of Blood (1978) drew attention with its keen sense of contemporary political events. It reflected change in Ngugi's work from portraying the colonial era to focusing on exploit and corruption in present-day Kenya.

After being released, Ngugi was not reinstated in his university post, and his family were subjected to frequent harassment. In 1980 Ngugi 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.

Ngugi's prison diary Detained, written in English, appeared in 1981. He left Kenya in 1982 to live in self-imposed exile in London. In his book Decolonizing The Mind: The Politics Of Language In African Literature (1986) Ngugi wrote that African writers should express themselves in indigenous languages in order to reach the African masses. Among Ngugi's most important works is Matigari (1987), in which the author builds his narrative on a famous Gikuyu folktale. In the satirical moral fable Matigari, 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.

Ngugi became in 1992 professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University. He has taught at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Auckland, New Zealand; and Yale, Smith, and at Amherst. In the 1990s, Ngugi published mostly non-fiction. Among his later novels is Wizard of the Crow, set in the corrupted fictional Republic of Aburiria.

For further reading: Ngugi wa Thiong'o by Clifford B. Robson (1979); An Introduction to the Writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o 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, ed. by Charles Cantalupo (1993); The Novels of Achebe and Ngugi by K. Indrasena Reddy (1994); Ngugi was Thiong'o: Text and Context, ed. 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)

Selected works:

  • The Black Hermit, 1963 (play)
  • Weep Not, Child, 1964
  • The River Between, 1965
  • A Grain of Wheat, 1967 - Nisun jyvä (trans. by Seppo Loponen)
  • This Time Tomorrow (three plays, including the title play, "The Reels," and "The Wound in the Heart"), c. 1970
  • Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture, and Politics, 1972
  • Secret Lives, and Other Stories, 1976
  • The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, 1976 (with Micere Githae Mugo)
  • Ngaahika ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), 1977 (play; with Ngugi wa Mirii)
  • Petals of Blood, 1977
  • Caitaani mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross), 1980 - Paholainen ristillä (trans. by Mika Tiirinen)
  • Writers in Politics: Essays, 1981
  • Education for a National Culture, 1981
  • Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary, 1981
  • Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya, 1983
  • Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986
  • Mother, Sing For Me, 1986
  • Writing against Neo-Colonialism, 1986
  • Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Malhagu), 1986 (children's book)
  • Matigari ma Njiruungi, 1987 - Matigari, (translated into English by Wangui wa Goro)
  • Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chif (Njamba Nene na Chibu King'ang'i), 1988 (children's book)
  • Njamba Nene's Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene), 1990 (children's book)
  • Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, 1993
  • Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: The Performance on Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa, 1998
  • Wizard of the Crow: A novel, 2006 - Variksen velho (trans. by Seppo Loponen)

(adapted from http://www.enotes.com/ngugi-wa-thiongo-criticism/thiongo-ngugi-wa)

Critical Reception

Critics have consistently acknowledged Ngugi as an important voice in African letters. He has been called the voice of the Kenyan people by certain commentators, while others have lauded his novels as among the most underrated and highest quality to come from Africa. Ngugi's fiction has been noted for its overtly political agenda, its attempts to give a literary voice to the poor of Kenya, and its consistent critique of colonialization and oppressive regimes. Critics have also praised Ngugi's role as an influential postcolonial African writer, particularly in his portrayal of corrupt post-liberation African governments.

Helen Hayward has commented that his early novels—including The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, and Petals of Blood—act as “important documents in the history of postcolonial writing, distinguished by the urgency of their political engagement and the subtlety of their historical grasp.” His essays and critical works have been acclaimed as powerful and insightful explorations of relevant political, social, and literary issues in Africa. Moreover, reviewers have asserted that his nonfiction work has provided a much-needed African perspective on world affairs.

Scholars have also examined Ngugi's emphasis on language, viewing his switch from using English to African languages as an outgrowth of his political ideology. However, some have criticized Ngugi's return to using English in his later nonfiction works and his residency in the United States, arguing that both are symbolic of his growing disassociation with African revolutionary politics. Simon Gikandi has stated, though he appreciates Ngugi's growing global focus in such works as Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams, that “Ngugi's best fictional work was nourished by his dynamic relationship to local sources, his relationship with the East African landscape … What is going to nourish Ngugi's imagination in exile?”