Kenyan novelist, essayist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who died last month aged 87, was one of Africa’s most important first-generation postcolonial writers.
Ngugi grew up in a polygamous rural family of four wives and 28 children. He attended the elite missionary Alliance High School, before inculcating a strong sense of Pan-Africanism at Uganda’s Makerere University, where he completed his English degree in 1963. He went on to graduate from Leeds University in England, where Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka had also studied.
Ngugi returned to teach at University College Nairobi, becoming chair of its literature department in 1972. Four years earlier he had led colleagues in the department to Africanise the curriculum. They argued that just adding literature in English from other parts of the world was insufficient to transform the syllabus, and that since Africa was not an extension of the West the continent needed to be placed at the centre of reconceptualising a new curriculum. This led to a major transformation of literature curricula throughout East Africa.
A 26-year old Ngugi published Weep Not Child in 1964, the first novel by an East African in the postcolonial era. He had handed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series), the book manuscript at a 1962 writers conference at Makerere. The novel dealt with the tale of a Kenyan family amid the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s against the brutal Pax Britannica. It echoed his own family’s experiences: his mother was detained and two brothers killed.
A Grain of Wheat (1967) addressed similar issues. The River Between (1965) examined the clash between Christianity and African traditional ways. Ngugi wrote the plays The Black Hermit (1968) and the brilliant The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976, with Micere Mugo) about the legendary leader of the Mau Mau uprising, who was hanged by the British in 1957.
The Fanonist Marxist soon turned his guns from Africa’s colonisers to what he regarded as its post-independence “comprador class” of collaborators with Western capitalism. He published his collected essays Homecoming (1972), before the 1977 novel Petals of Blood, a scathing critique of the exploitation of peasants and workers by governing elites and foreign corporations.
To conscientise the masses Ngugi set up a theatre group to perform his 1977 play Ngaahika Ndeenda (co-written with Ngugi wa Mirii), “I Will Marry When I Want”, to grassroots communities. This landed him in jail for a year under the autocratic regime of Jomo Kenyatta. He used his time in detention to scribble notes on toilet paper for his novel Devil on the Cross (1980), dealing with the exploitation of the poor. A prison diary, Detained, appeared a year later.
Ngugi went into exile in 1982, first to England before spending most of his career at America’s University of California, Irvine. He continued to publish biting essays on decolonisation: Writers in Politics (1981), Barrel of A Pen (1983), the popular Decolonising the Mind (1986), Moving the Centre (1993), and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998). The novels Matigari (1986) and Wizard of the Crow (2006) continued his attacks on African kleptocracy.
He often translated his Gikuyu novels into English himself. Ngugi also published a trilogy of memoirs: Dreams in A Time of War (2010); The House of the Interpreter (2012); and Birth of A Dream (2016). The epic novel-in-verse, The Perfect Nine (2020), was his last major work.
Nigerian writer Ben Okri described Ngugi as “an almost militant proponent for African languages”. He married twice, divorced twice and had nine children, four of whom became writers.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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