The great Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who died last week at 87 and left a legacy of centering African languages, was born James Ngugi in 1938, in Kamĩrĩĩthũ, a small village in Kenya, at a time when the structures of British imperial rule were embedded in every facet of life. He grew up knowing how much harm the alienation of ancestral land and erasure of indigenous languages could cause a people. His upbringing in a large, polygamous Gikuyu family, and his early education under the colonial school system, afforded him a deep knowledge of tradition as well as allowed him insight into the aggressive reshaping of the African consciousness that accompanied missionary education. These formative tensions — between colonizer and colonized, orality and literacy, tradition and modernity — would define much of his literary and political vision.
Ngũgĩ’s entry into writing was precocious and politically charged. He was still a student at Makerere University College, in Kampala, Uganda, when he completed his first major work, The Black Hermit, in 1962. The play was staged at the institution’s inaugural drama festival, organized in the lead-up to Uganda’s independence. At a time when East Africa was on the cusp of decolonization, Ngũgĩ, like many of his contemporaries, saw literature as a vehicle for imagining a postcolonial African identity. In The Black Hermit, the themes that would preoccupy him for decades were present: the disorientation of the Western-educated elite, the fracturing of indigenous values, the uneasy moral inheritance of independence.
Ngũgĩ’s literary career, like that of many African writers of his generation, was nurtured by a small but powerful network of institutions and individuals committed to the development of African literature in the years after independence. Chief among these was Chinua Achebe, whose own landmark novel Things Fall Apart (1958) had helped inaugurate modern African literature in English. As founding editor of the influential African Writers Series at Heinemann, Achebe played a crucial role in championing new African voices. It was under his editorship that Weep Not, Child was published in 1964, making Ngũgĩ the first East African author to be included in the series. Achebe’s endorsement brought Ngũgĩ into an emerging canon of postcolonial African letters.
Weep Not, Child follows a young boy, Njoroge, caught in the violent throes of the Mau Mau Uprising, the anticolonial guerrilla war that shaped Kenya’s independence struggle. The novel, while written in English and framed within a conventional European narrative form, was unmistakably African in its perspective and subject matter. With its tender portrayal of familial aspirations crushed by the brutality of colonial repression, Ngũgĩ began to lay the groundwork for what would become his life’s work, a literature that reclaims African memory and refuses imperial silences.
His next novels, The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), showed a writer increasingly willing to confront the complexities of nationalism and the moral compromises of revolution. In The River Between, set during the early days of colonial encroachment, Ngũgĩ examines the cultural chasm created by Christianity and traditional Gikuyu beliefs. A Grain of Wheat, perhaps his most critically acclaimed early novel, takes on the ideological ambiguities of independence itself — how those who fought for liberation can themselves become instruments of oppression. Independence, for Ngũgĩ, was never the endpoint. It was only the beginning of a deeper struggle for the soul of the African.
By the 1970s, Ngũgĩ had taken up a teaching post at the University of Nairobi. There, he became a central figure in a radical intellectual movement that sought to Africanize the university’s curriculum and decolonize its theoretical frameworks. His collaboration with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii produced a politically charged play in Gikuyu titled Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) in 1977, which critiqued post-independence class inequality and neocolonial corruption. The play was performed by non-professional actors, in an open-air theatre, to large local audiences for six continuous weeks.
The response from the Kenyan state was swift and brutal. Ngũgĩ was arrested shortly after the play’s debut and detained without trial for over a year at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. His imprisonment marked a watershed moment in his life and work. Deprived of pen and paper, he wrote Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross, 1980), the first modern novel in Gikuyu, on toilet paper. From that point on, he abandoned English as a literary language and committed himself fully to writing in African languages, arguing that language is not merely a tool of communication but a carrier of culture, a carrier of a worldview, a carrier of power. His seminal theoretical text, Decolonising the Mind (1986), remains one of the most important manifestos on language and cultural imperialism in African literary discourse.
Even in this early phase of his career, it was clear that Ngũgĩ was not content to write as a detached observer. He believed that literature had a political responsibility, that it must confront the structures of power, injustice, and alienation, not merely reflect them. His essays from this period, later collected in Homecoming (1972), reveal a restless intellect grappling with the purpose of African writing in the aftermath of empire.
“He evoked for me,” Ngũgĩ says of his influence, George Lamming, in his Homecoming, “an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world. And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords [sic] deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D. H. Lawrence.”
Following continued threats and harassment from the Moi regime, Ngũgĩ was forced into exile in 1982, first in Britain and later in the United States. He continued to write fiction, memoirs, and essays, but his themes shifted toward global structures of domination, diaspora consciousness, and the ongoing struggle for cultural sovereignty.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s body of work includes 12 essay collections and monographs, eight novels and two short story collections, five memoirs and autobiographical books, five plays, and four children’s books. We have collected below all of them, with synopses.
Buy the books by clicking the Amazon affiliate links. Open Country Mag may earn an affiliate commission.
Novels
Weep Not, Child (1964)
Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau, stand on a garbage heap and look into their futures: Njoroge is to attend school, while Kamau will train to be a carpenter. But this is Kenya, and the times are against them: In the forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against the white government, and the two brothers and their family need to decide where their loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau, the choice is simple, but for Njoroge the scholar, the dream of progress through learning is a hard one to give up.
The River Between (1965)
A legendary work of African literature, this moving and eye-opening novel lucidly captures the drama of a people and culture whose world has been overturned. The River Between explores life in the mountains of Kenya during the early days of white settlement. Faced with a choice between an alluring new religion and their own ancestral customs, the Gikuyu people are torn between those who fear the unknown and those who see beyond it.
A Grain of Wheat (1967)
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested..
Petals of Blood (1977)
The puzzling murder of three African directors of a foreign-owned brewery sets the scene for this fervent, hard-hitting novel about disillusionment in independent Kenya. A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time.
Devil on the Cross (1980)
One of the cornerstones of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s fame, Devil on the Cross is a powerful fictional critique of capitalism. It tells the tragic story of Wariinga, a young woman who moves from a rural Kenyan town to the capital, Nairobi, only to be exploited by her boss and later by a corrupt businessman. As she struggles to survive, Wariinga begins to realize that her problems are only symptoms of a larger societal malaise and that much of the misfortune stems from the Western, capitalist influences on her country. An impassioned cry for a Kenya free of dictatorship and for African writers to work in their own local dialects, Devil on the Cross has had a profound influence on Africa and on post-colonial African literature.
Matigari (1986)
Who is Matigari? Is he young or old; a man or fate; dead or living…or even a resurrection of Jesus Christ? These are the questions asked by the people of this unnamed country, when a man who has survived the war for independence emerges from the mountains and starts making strange claims and demands. Matigari is in search of his family to rebuild his home and start a new and peaceful future. But his search becomes a quest for truth and justice as he finds the people still dispossessed and the land he loves ruled by corruption, fear, and misery. Rumors spring up that a man with superhuman qualities has risen to renew the freedom struggle. The novel races toward its climax as Matigari realizes that words alone cannot defeat the enemy. He vows to use the force of arms to achieve his true liberation. Matigari is a satire on the betrayal of human ideals and on the bitter experience of post-independence African society.
Wizard of the Crow (2006)
In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in Wizard of the Crow is, in his own words,nothing less than “to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.”
Commencing in “our times” and set in the “Free Republic of Aburlria,” the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburlrian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, Wizard of the Crow reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity.
Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, Wizard of the Crow is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugl wa Thiong’o’s career thus far.
The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (2020)
In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters — called “The Perfect Nine” — and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice.
Short Story Collections
Secret Lives, and Other Stories (1976, 1992)
The Hidden by Ngugi wa Thiong’o depicts a magical world that has yet to be destroyed by the ‘strange white men’ and their religions. In The Village Priest, the rainmaker continues to use deeply rooted mystical powers, while the priest is unable to perform miracles to end the drought; in The Meeting in the Dark, John finds himself caught in moral constraints, facing a dilemma. The ideals of modern civilization frequently clash with ancient tribal customs, ultimately leading to tragedy.
Minutes of Glory and Other Stories (2019)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree, ” written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence―and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States― Ngũgĩ’s collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British, and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.
Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.
Plays
The Black Hermit (1963)
In this play, Remi, the first of his tribe to go to university, ponders whether or not he should return to his people. Or should he continue to be a black hermit in the town?
This Time Tomorrow: Three Plays (1970)
The play ‘This Time Tomorrow’ by Ngugi wa Thiong’o depicts the struggles of slum dwellers in post-independence Kenya who fought for freedom but remain impoverished and landless. The narrative follows characters Njango and Wanjiro as they navigate their harsh realities, reflecting on lost dreams and the disparity between the rich and the poor. The impending demolition of their homes by the city council symbolizes the ongoing neglect and oppression faced by the lower class despite the promise of independence.
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) (co-written with Micere Githae Mugo)
Kenyan-born novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo, have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character, Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment.
Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”
I Will Marry When I Want (1977) (co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii)
Set in post-independence Kenya, the play is a searing look at the legacies of colonialism and the difficulties Kenyans faced at the time. It was developed with Kikuyu actors at the Kamiriithu Cultural Centre at Limuru. was performed at Kamiriithu for six continuous weeks. It proved so powerful, especially in its use of song, that it was banned and was probably one of the factors leading to Ngugi’s detention without trial. The original Gikuyu edition went to three printings in the first three months of publication.
Memoirs & Autobiographical Works
Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981)
The international outcry over the detention of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o without trial by the Kenyan authorities even reached him in prison. In this book he describes the purposeful degradation and humiliation of prison life.
Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (2010)
In Dreams in a Time of War, Ngũgĩ deftly etches a bygone era, bearing witness to the social and political vicissitudes of life under colonialism and war. Speaking to the human right to dream even in the worst of times, this rich memoir of an African childhood abounds in delicate and powerful subtleties and complexities that are movingly told.
In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012)
In the House of the Interpreter richly and poignantly evokes the author’s life and times at boarding school—the first secondary educational institution in British-ruled Kenya—in the 1950s, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Mau Mau Uprising for independence and Kenyan sovereignty. While Ng˜ug˜ý has been enjoying scouting trips, chess tournaments, and reading about the fictional RAF pilot adventurer Biggles at the prestigious Alliance High School near Nairobi, things have been changing rapidly at home. Poised as he is between two worlds, Ng˜ug˜ý returns home for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed and the entire village moved up the road, closer to a guard checkpoint. Later, his brother Good Wallace, a member of the insurgency, is captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. As for Ng˜ug˜ý himself, he falls victim to the forces of colonialism in the person of a police officer encountered on a bus journey, and he is thrown into jail for six days. In his second year at Alliance High School, the boarding school that was his haven in a heartless world is shattered by investigations, charges of disloyalty, and the politics of civil unrest.
Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Memoir of a Writer’s Awakening (2016)
Birth of a Dream Weaver charts the very beginnings of a writer’s creative output. In this wonderful memoir, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o recounts the four years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda―threshold years during which he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist just as colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born―under the shadow of the rivalries, intrigues, and assassinations of the Cold War.
Haunted by the memories of the carnage and mass incarceration carried out by the British colonial-settler state in his native Kenya but inspired by the titanic struggle against it, Ngũgĩ, then known as James Ngugi, begins to weave stories from the fibers of memory, history, and a shockingly vibrant and turbulent present.
What unfolds in this moving and thought-provoking memoir is simultaneously the birth of one of the most important living writers―lauded for his “epic imagination” (Los Angeles Times)―the death of one of the most violent episodes in global history, and the emergence of new histories and nations with uncertain futures.
Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir (2018)
Wrestling with the Devil, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir, begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population.
In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross.
Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ’s account of the drama and the challenges of writing the novel under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.
Essay Collections & Monographs
Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (1972)
In these essays, Ngugi wa Thiong’o eloquently interweaves a range of issues including religious oppression, consumerism, and independence with the powerful intellect and passion that has come to characterise his writing. These pieces are essential for readers wishing to uncover a critical perspective on African society and culture.
Homecoming is a groundbreaking collection intended to provoke and encourage thoughtful debate on how best to ‘restore the creative glory of Africa and of all Africans’ in the wake of postcolonialism.
Writers in Politics: Essays (1981)
This book reflects many of the concerns found in Decolonising the Mind and Moving the Centre. Ngugi has put together a new collection under an old title, rewriting most of the pieces that appeared in the original 1981 edition, and adding completely new essays, such as ‘Freedom of Expression’, written for the campaign to try to save Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Niger Delta activists and writers from execution in Nigeria.
Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-Colonial Kenya (1983)
This book is a collection of essays by the prominent Kenyan novelist and playwright, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. These collected essays vigorously respond to the atmosphere of repression and domination in Kenya. Ngugi argues that the defense of national culture and national identity is central in the overall struggle against regimes of repression and imperialist domination.
This thesis was tested on the ground by Kenyan cultural workers and activists who, in collaboration with peasants and workers, attempted to develop and express their culture. In the late 1970’s they performed such plays as Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) and went on to form the Kamiriithu Educatio and Cultural Center. The Kenyan government responded brutally to these developments of cultural assertion, and by March 1982 the Center was razed to the ground, and all drama and theatre activities in the area of Kamiriithu were banned. Ngugi reflects on the experience of Kamiriithu, but broadens its lessons to the overall experience of the present situation in Kenya. These essays speaks to the issues of cultural domination and resistance as well as focusing on the political currents impacting on the overall social and political condition in Africa and the world. Ngugi here challenges African intellectuals and Kenyans in particular to rise and speak out against oppression and domination so that the “iron hand of the oppressors may not be strengthened by the silence of those who have refused to speak out.”
Barrel of A Pen is very much in the tradition of Ngugi’s earlier collection of essays: Homecoming and Writers in Politics.
Writing Against Neo-Colonialism (1986)
In this essay, Ngugi outlines the development of African literature since the 2nd World War against the background of world revolutions and of the continuing anti-imperialist struggles in Africa today. It clearly connects the major intellectual movements in Africa to the political currents in Africa and the world. The essay ranges widely from revolutions in China and Vietnam to those in Cuba and Nicaragua; from struggles in South Korea and Philippines to those in El Salvador and Chile. In Africa, it ranges from Nasser’s nationalization of Suez Canal, the armed struggles in Kenya and Algeria in the 50’s to the struggles of the liberation movements in South Africa today. “In a special way,” writes Ngügi looking forward to the 80’s and 90’s, “the liberation of South Africa is a key to the liberation of the entire continent from neocolonialism.” The essay is informed through and through with a spirit of internationalism and Pan Africanism of the workers and peasants. It calls upon writers and intellectuals to be an integral part of the revolutionary struggle of the masses for democracy and socialism.
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)
A collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity, that advocates for linguistic decolonization.
‘The language of literature’, Ngũgĩ writes, ‘cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention, and a problem calling for a resolution.’ First published in 1986, Decolonising the Mind is one of Ngũgĩ’s best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the ‘language debate’ in postcolonial studies.
Ngũgĩ wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu. He describes the book as ‘a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature…’. Split into four essays – ‘The Language of African Literature’, ‘The Language of African Theatre’, ‘The Language of African Fiction’, and ‘The Quest for Relevance’ – the book offers an anti-imperialist perspective on the destiny of Africa and the role of languages in combatting and perpetrating imperialism and neo-colonialism in African nations.
Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993)
Ngugi advocates a cultural shift to redress the last 400 years of domination by a handful of western nations. In this collection Ngugi is concerned with moving the centre in two senses – between nations and within nations – in order to contribute to the freeing of world cultures from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and gender Between nations the need is to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. Within nations the move should be away from all minority class establishments to the real creative centre among working people in conditions of racial, religious and gender equality.
Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (1998)
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where they are often seen as the enemy of the postcolonial state. This study, in turn, raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, particularly in their struggle for the control of performance space in territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, calls for the alliance of art and people power, freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern states. Art, he argues, needs to be active, engaged, insistent on being what it has always been, the embodiment of dreams for a truly human world.
Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (2009)
Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been a force in African literature for decades: Since the 1970s, when he gave up the English language to commit himself to writing in African languages, his foremost concern has been the critical importance of language to culture. In Something Torn and New, Ngugi explores Africa’s historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhonism: the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones. The result was the dismemberment of African memory.
Seeking to remember language in order to revitalize it, Ngugi’s quest is for wholeness. Wide-ranging, erudite, and hopeful, Something Torn and New is a cri de coeur to save Africa’s cultural future.
Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012)
In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong’o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to “decolonize the mind.” Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature’s ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or “orature,” and writing, or “literature”; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and Aimé Césaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.
Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe (2016)
For more than sixty years, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been writing fearlessly the questions, challenges, histories, and futures of Africans, particularly those of his homeland, Kenya. In his work, which has included plays, novels, and essays, Ngugi narrates the injustice of colonial violence and the dictatorial betrayal of decolonization, the fight for freedom and subsequent incarceration, and the aspiration toward economic equality in the face of gross inequality. With both hope and disappointment, he questions the role of language in both the organization of power structures and the pursuit of autonomy and self-expression. Ngugi’s fiction has reached wide acclaim, but his nonfictional work, while equally brilliant, is difficult to find. Secure the Base changes this by bringing together for the first time essays spanning nearly three decades. Originating as disparate lectures and texts, this complete volume will remind readers anew of Ngugi’s power and importance. Written in a personal and accessible style, the book covers a range of issues, including the role of the intellectual, the place of Asia in Africa, labor and political struggles in an era of rampant capitalism, and the legacies of slavery and prospects for peace. At a time when Africa looms large in our discussions of globalization, Secure the Base is mandatory reading.
The Language of Languages (2023)
With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.
Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the forefront of world literature for decades. He has also been, in his own words, “a language warrior,” fighting for indigenous African languages to find their rightful place in the literary world. Having begun his writing career in English, Ngũgĩ shifted to writing in his native language Gikũyũ in 1977, a stance both creatively and politically significant. For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.”
This volume brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades. Here we find Ngũgĩ discussing translation as a conversation between cultures; proposing that dialogue among African languages is the way to unify African peoples; reflecting on the complexities of auto-translation or translating one’s own work; exploring the essential task translation performed in the history of the propagation of thought; and pleading for the hierarchy of languages to be torn down. He also shares his many experiences of writing across languages, including his story The Upright Revolution, which has been translated into more than a hundred languages around the globe and is the most widely translated text written by an African author. At a time when dialogues between cultures and peoples are more essential than ever, The Language of Languages makes an outspoken case for the value of literature without borders.
Children’s Books
The Adventures of Njamba Nene Series, Translated by Wangui wa Goro (1986-1990)
The first, Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus (1986), follows school children on a bus trip to a museum in Nairobi. They are taken by surprise when the school bus starts flying and later drops them inside an unknown forest. Njamba Nene, who is brought up is a poor family, is courageous enough to lead the other children, many of them who are from rich families, through challenging endeavors until they reach their homes.
Some stories in the series are in English:
- Njamba Nene and the Cruel Chief (translated by Wangui wa Goro) (Njamba Nene na Chibu King’ang’i, 1988)
- Njamba Nene’s Pistol (Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene, 1990)
The rest are in Gīī-gīkūyū:
- Njamba Nene na Mbathi Ī Mathagū
- Bathitoora Ya Njamba Nene
- Njamba Nene na Cibū Kīng’ang’i
- Njamba Nene wa Kagogo
The Upright Revolution, or Why Humans Walk Upright (Illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee) (2019)
Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o offers in The Upright Revolution. Blending myth and folklore with an acute insight into the human psyche and politics, Wa Thiong’o conjures up a fantastic fable about how and why humans began to walk upright. It is a story that will appeal to children and adults alike, containing a clear and important message: “Life is connected.”
Originally written in Gikuyu, this short story has been translated into sixty-three languages—forty-seven of them African—making it the most translated story in the history of African literature. This new collector’s edition of The Upright Revolution is richly illustrated in full color with Sunandini Banerjee’s marvellous digital collages, which open up new vistas of imagination and add unique dimensions to the story. ♦
Buy the books by clicking the Amazon affiliate links. Open Country Mag may earn an affiliate commission.
If you enjoyed what you just read, consider making a PayPal donation to enable us to publish more like it.
More Guides to Bodies of Work
— 52 Books in 64 Years: Your Guide to Wole Soyinka’s Body of Work
— Your Guide to Nobel Prize Winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 10 Novels
— Your Guide to Damon Galgut’s 9 Works of Fiction
More In-depth Stories from Open Country Mag
— JK Anowe, a Confessional Poet, Confronts Himself
— The Prodigious Arrival of Arinze Ifeakandu
— Aiwanose Odafen‘s Duology of Womanhood
— Momtaza Mehri’s Fluid Diasporas
— The Overlapping Realisms of Eloghosa Osunde
— DK Nnuro Finds His Answers
— How Romeo Oriogun Wrested Poetry from Pain
— Suyi Davies Okungbowa Knows What It Takes
— Why Tobi Eyinade Built Rovingheights, Nigeria’s Biggest Bookstore
— Remy Ngamije on Doek! and the New Age of Namibian Literature
— In Writing Cameroonian American Experiences, Nana Nkweti Crosses Genres
— The Cheeky Natives Is Letlhogonolo Mogkoroane and Alma-Nalisha Cele‘s Archive of Intentionality
— Cheswayo Mphanza on Intertextual Poetry and Zambia’s Moment
— The Seminal Breakout of Gbenga Adesina
— Keletso Mopai Owns Her Story and Her Voice
— At Africa in Dialogue, Gaamangwe Joy Mogami Lures Out Storytelling Truths
