Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, born in 1938, Kenyan novelist and playwright, many of whose works concern issues of Kenyan independence. Born James Thiong'o Ngugi in Kamiriithu, he changed his name in the late 1960s. He received a B.A. degree in 1963 from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and another B.A. degree in 1964 from the University of Leeds in England.

Ngugi's first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), was published while he was at school in England. Having returned to Kenya after finishing his studies, Ngugi's second novel The River Between (1965), had as its background the Mau Mau rebellion (1952-1956), in which a group of the Kikuyu people began a campaign of violence against the British, who controlled Kenya at the time. This subject reemerged in A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel in which Mau Mau bloodshed is set against celebrations of Kenyan independence. The impact of Ngugi's next novel, Petals of Blood (1977), a story discussing the poor quality of life in East Africa, particularly for Kenya's lower classes, even after independence from the United Kingdom in 1963, led to his detention in 1978 under Kenya's Public Security Act. He recounted his prison experience in Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). The play Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977; I Will Marry When I Want, 1982) held that those who had fought the hardest for independence had gained the least, a theme Ngugi returned to in the novel Matigari (1989).

Ngugi was chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi from 1972 to 1977. He left Kenya in 1982 and taught at various universities in the United States before he became professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University in 1992. Ngugi's works of criticism include Moving the Centre (1993).