I'm Ngugi wa Thiong’o
NGUGI WA THIONG’O (b. 1938) is a Kenyan novelist, playwright, short story writer, and essayist. He is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have nothing against Louise Glück, the 2020 recipient, but will the Swedish Academy ever get its act together?
His prizewinning WEEP NOT, CHILD (1964) was the first major novel in English to be published by an East African author. It is the story of a Kikuyu family drawn into the struggle for Kenyan independence during the state of emergency and the Mau Mau rebellion. A GRAIN OF WHEAT (1967), generally held to be artistically more mature, focuses on the many social, moral, and racial issues of the struggle for independence and its aftermath, and marked Ngugi’s embrace of Fanonist Marxism. A third novel, THE RIVER BETWEEN (1965) tells of lovers kept apart by the conflict between Christianity and traditional ways and beliefs and suggests that efforts to reunite a culturally divided community by means of Western education are doomed to failure.
