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Daily Maverick
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — 5 things you should know about one of Africa's greatest writers
The late Kenyan author committed to giving voice to the decolonial moment and vowed, in the late 1970s, to write only in his home language. One of Africa's most celebrated authors, Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, has died at 87. Having published his first novel – Weep Not, Child – in 1964, Ngũgĩ pursued a rich and acclaimed career as a writer, teacher and decolonial thinker. His last creative effort was Kenda Muiyuru (The Perfect Nine), a Gikuyu epic that was longlisted for the 2021 International Man Booker Prize. Kenyan academic and writer Peter Kimani sets out five things you should know about this legendary African writer. He understood the politics of his time Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is regarded as one of Africa's greatest writers of all time. He grew up in what became known as Kenya's White Highlands at the height of British colonialism. Unsurprisingly, his writing examines the legacy of colonialism and the intricate relationships between locals seeking economic and cultural emancipation and the local elites serving as agents of neo-colonisers. The great expectations for the new country, as captured in his seminal play, The Black Hermit, anticipated the disillusionment that followed. His fiction, from the foundational trilogy of Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, amplify those expectations, before the optimism is replaced by disillusionment in Petals of Blood. He shaped a new African story African fiction is fairly young. Ngũgĩ stands in the continent's pantheon of writers who started writing when Africa's decolonisation gained momentum. In a certain sense, the writers were involved in constructing new narratives that would define their people. But Ngũgĩ's recognition goes beyond his pioneering role at home: his writing resonates with many across the continent. One could also recognise his consistency at churning out high-quality stories about Africa's contemporary society. This he always did in a way that illustrates his complete commitment to equality and social justice. He has done much more, through scholarship. His treatise, Decolonising the Mind, now a foundational text in postcolonial studies, illustrates his versatility. His ability to spin the yarns while commenting on the politics that goes into literary production of marginal literature is a very rare combination indeed. Finally, one could talk about Ngũgĩ's cultural and political activism. This precipitated his year-long detention without trial in 1977. He attributed his detention to his rejection of English and embracing his Gikuyu language as his vehicle of expression. Critics are divided on his greatest works It's hard to pick a favourite from Ngũgĩ's more than two dozen texts. But there is concurrence among critics that A Grain of Wheat, which was voted among Africa's best 100 novels at the turn of the last century, stands out for its stylistic experimentation and complexity of characters. Others consider the novel as the last signpost before Ngũgĩ's work became overly political. For other critics, it's Wizard of the Crow – which came out in 2004, after nearly two decades of waiting – that encapsulates his creative finesse. It utilises many literary tropes, including magical realism, and addresses the politics of African development and the shenanigans by the political elite to maintain the status quo. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages around the world. He stopped writing in English in 1977 Without a doubt, Africa would be poorer without the efforts of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and other pioneering writers to tell the African story. He was an important figure in postcolonial studies. His constant questioning of the privileging of the English language and culture in Kenya's national discourse saw him lead a movement that led to the scrapping of the Department of English at the University of Nairobi – replaced by a Department of Literature that placed African literature and its diasporas at the centre of scholarship. He never stopped writing Ngũgĩ remained active in writing, even in old age. Among his later offerings was the third instalment of his memoir, Birth of a Dreamweaver, that looks back on his years at Makerere University in Uganda. This is the period when he published his novels Weep Not, Child and The River Between, while still an undergraduate. Also at this time he wrote the play The Black Hermit, which was performed as part of Uganda's independence celebrations in 1962. In later years he was busy restoring his early works into Gikuyu, from English. Ngũgĩ appeared on the list of favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for a number of years. Since the workings of the Nobel award committee remain secret – the committee's deliberations are kept secret for 50 years – it will be decades before we know why he was overlooked when so many felt he deserved the prize. DM Peter Kimani is professor of practice at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in Karachi, Pakistan.
TimesLIVE
06-06-2025
- Politics
- TimesLIVE
Ngugi was simply ordinary — a man of the people
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist and thinker, who died on May 28, has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa's cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at Nairobi University and much later as a scholar of Ngugi and African literature. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngugi was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then, was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe — the man who published his award winning novel, Weep Not, Child under Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish worldwide series on 'Leading Writers in Context', again it is Achebe and Ngugi who featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on Ngugi in Context. His works have been widely translated in several languages across the globe: Japanese, German, Chinese and in many parts of Asia. I hope we will soon see his works getting translated into African languages across the continent. During his last days, he had embarked on translating his novels written in English into Gikuyu. It needs no emphasis that Ngugi remains one of the most influential African writers over the past few decades of Africa's independence, not only for his creative works but also for his wide-ranging contributions on Africa's cultural thought and political life. Indeed, the role of the writer in shaping the cultural and political life of his people is an enduring theme in all his works. He was concerned with the role of culture as a source of historical memory and as a weapon against all forms of oppressive regimes. But he was also interested in narrative, specifically imaginative literature, as an agent of history and self-definition, an instrument for taming and naming one's environment. He was concerned with literature's role in the restoration of African communities dislocated by colonialism and the repressive postcolonial states that followed. As early as 1972, Ngugi was already drawing attention to how the tyranny of the past exerts itself on his works. He wrote: 'The novelist is haunted by a sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with 'the thing that has been,' a struggle as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, his people's history' (Homecoming, 39). For Ngugi then, the novel was an instrument that wills history into being and therefore, as a writer, he always located himself at the intersection of history and literary imagination. Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe Ngugi always insisted that colonial subjects were detached from their mainstream history and therefore their identity was shaped by forces alien to their local universe. For him, the search for Africa's identity therefore lay in a reconstructive project to reassert a radical form of Africa's historiography conceived from below. At the heart of his restorative project was also his call for a return to the source, which would also involve the privileging of African languages in the production and consumption of local cultures. For him, it was only African languages that had the capacity to recover those African cultures repressed by colonialism and to equally carry the weight of a national history and memory. Genuine national literature, Ngugi argued, can only flower in local indigenous languages because literature as a cultural institution works through images and language embodied in the collective experience of a people. Ngugi always positioned himself as a writer in politics. He was hounded at home by one Kenyan political regime after the other and eventually driven into exile in the eighties by the repressive Moi regime in Kenya in the 80s. Little wonder then, that themes of dislocation, abandonment and exile dominates his works, written against the backdrop of authoritarian structures of control and imprisonment. Ngugi's early works are heavily weighted towards fiction, and the later lean towards non-fiction. In the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the publication of four novels, two plays and a collection of short stories, Ngugi produced only one volume of essays, Homecoming. But after his last major work of fiction in English, Petals of Blood (1977), Ngugi wrote a total of five collections of essays as opposed to only three novels, Devil on the Cross (1981), Matigari (1986), and his latest novel, The Wizard of the Crow (Murogi wa Kagogo (2005), written first Gikuyu before translation. But it was the establishment of a community theatre in his home village of Kamiriithu, and the staging of the play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), that really raised the ire of the Kenyan authorities, leading to the banning of the play, his arrest and detention without trial. It also marked a major turning point in Ngugi's life when in prison, he used the language of his incarceration to write his first Gikuyu novel: Caitaani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross), on rolls of toilet paper. Subsequently, it is only Ngugi's collection of essays that he would continue to write in English, obviously aimed at the academy, with whom he continued to wrestle with over a range of cultural and political issues. The joy of reading Ngugi's essays is that they serve as a theoretical elaboration of themes and topics akin to his narrative. If Writers in Politics (1981), and Barrel of a Pen (1983) essays seek to question the colonial traditions of English and Englishness inherited at independence, Decolonising the Mind (1986), and Moving the Centre (1993) push the debate to its limits by insisting that the roots to Africa's freedom lay in the articulation of a new idiom of nationalism that would liberate the African identities from the prison house of European languages and cultures. The project should not only involve the privileging of African languages in the making of African cultures, but also the struggle for the realignment of global forces such that societies, which have been confined to the margins will gradually move to the centre, to become not just consumers but producers of global culture. It is the denial of the cultural space by the postcolonial state tyranny and global imperialism that Ngugi elaborates on in Penpoints, Gunpoint, and Dreams. Here the culture of violence and silence that has come to define the postcolonial state; the state's desire to saturate the public space with its propaganda, is counterpoised against a radically redemptive art that seeks to erect a new regime of truth by reclaiming and colonising those spaces through the barrel of the pen. In his most eloquent collection of essays, symbolically entitled Moving the Centre, Ngugi draws attention to the effect of the colonial archive in arrogating what constitutes the real historical subject to the imperial centre. When Ngugi calls for moving of the centre, he is in essence trying to suggest that in terms of history and discursive knowledges, the West has always positioned itself as the true self — the centre — while the empire remains the Other and on the periphery. Indeed, one of the legacies of the colonial encounter is a notion of history as 'the few privileged monuments' of achievement, which serves either to arrogate 'history' wholesale to the imperial centre or to erase it from the colonial archive and produce, especially in the Empire or the so-called New World Cultures, a condition of 'history-lessness', of 'no visible history'. Both notions are part of the imperial myth of history because history is defined by what is central, not what is peripheral and those not central to an assumed teleology or belief system, are without history. It seems to me that even a superficial reading of Ngugi's narrative and his critical essays over the years, point to a conscious project of transforming our inherited notions of history, especially the position of the colonial subjects as inscribed within imperial discursive practices. If the imperial narrative attempted to fix history and to read the empires history as the history of the other, by making reference to its set of signs located in its cultural landscape, Ngugi's position is that the history of Africa need not be contingent upon the imperial allegorising. Allegory here is used to mean a way of representing, of speaking for the 'other', especially in the enterprise of imperialism. Whatever the ideological drifts and shifts in his body of work, Ngugi's fundamental belief is in the restorative agency embedded in all human cultures — the return of the other to the self. This is what he celebrates in his theory of globalectics — a theory that seek seeks to destabilise the privileging Western ways of knowing and instead celebrates those many streams of knowledge, regardless of their origins, as humanities collective experience. The creation of a humanistic wholeness and healing, has been at the core of his poetics over the years. The return to memoirs over the last decade or so was perhaps his last attempt to lay bare his soul and spirit; his life history as fragments of many forces — a rich tapestry into a life crafted around complex and layered forces of family and larger biographical universe. As a person, Ngugi was profoundly warm and down-to-earth, and always carried himself around with a deep sense of humility and ease, not to mention his infectious laughter and humour. He was simply ordinary — a man of the people. May his legacy live on and his soul rest in peace until we meet again in the land our ancestors. James Ogude, Professor of African Literatures and Cultures. Professor and Senior Research Fellow, and author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Daily Maverick
03-06-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Elegy for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o – Weep not Africa, the devil is on the cross
the passing of the sage needs an elegy weaving his works into memory woven not from sorrow but from the titles he left us each a thread in the long cloth of liberation Weep Not, Child though Njoroge's dreams were drowned in betrayal still he hoped still he studied still he believed that books could set a colonised people free as the Petals of Blood drift down the River Between Kamina's cries echo through the valley where Waiyaki once stood torn between tradition and the hunger for change Devil on the Cross watches from a billboard in Ilmorog where Wariinga, mother, secretary, warrior walks tall past the businessmen who sold her country for a coin and a foreign tongue through the smoke of the Kenyan stage we hear The Trial of Dedan Kimathi his voice unbroken his spine unbowed his name restored to the tongues of children (did I say Kenya? No, belonged to the world) he spent his life trying to Decolonise the Mind not just from foreign flags flying through the occupied territories and the Dias but from self-doubt from the coloniser who lived behind our eyes whispering shame in our own languages he taught us the necessity of Moving the Centre from empire to earth from London to Limuru from ivory towers to village theatres I Will Marry When I Want, said Gicaamba and Wariinga not when the landlord says not when the priest demands but when freedom rings clear as a blacksmith's hammer and for saying so he was Detained left with nothing but a Writer ' s Prison Diary pages scribbled in secret where even silence was written in resistance yet even in exile he nurtured Dreams in a Time of War walking barefoot through his boyhood while bombs fell and books were rare as rain in the House of the Interpreter he listened to the scriptures of the empire read aloud by boys in uniform and asked what if we spoke of our own prophets instead the Birth of a Dream Weaver was not painless it came with betrayal with exile with his passport stolen and his tongue declared dangerous yet he kept Wrestling with the Devil not to destroy but to expose his weapon not violence but parable his armour not hate but laughter the sting in his pen penetrating and shattering tyrants, and masters the humility in his heart warming every freedom fighter in Africa and beyond Barrel of a Pen in hand wa Thiong ' o resisted repression in neo-colonial Kenya noting that the Mau Mau is Coming Back out of myth walked Matigari wrapped in rags and questions seeking truth in a land where justice had gone into hiding on a windy playground Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus took off lifting young minds beyond fences and flags while Njamba Nene's Pistol reminded us that courage can be held even in small hands his Homecoming was never a return but a revelation a replanting a radical remembering that the village has always been enough on every page he spoke with the Language of Languages from Gikuyu to Kiswahili to the silence between drums reminding us that no language is small when it carries a people's soul he dreamed of The Perfect Nine daughters of Mũmbi mothers of a nation their journey carved in myth and marrow walking barefoot into legend from Something Torn and New he stitched a flag that no coloniser could fold his ink forming stars his stories forming skies weep not Africa the devil is on the cross screaming in white houses the walls of the empire shaking from voices Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o son of Kenya father of African letters fellow traveller of Fanon comrade of Sankara brother in resistance to Biko rooted in Makerere's red soil where he stood among a chorus of East African minds Micere Githae Mugo, fierce and unbending Okot p'Bitek, singing Lawino into eternity Ali Mazrui, mapping Africa's global soul John Ruganda, building stages of truth Pio Zirimu, naming orature as power Grace Ogot, weaving ancestral memory into prose Taban lo Liyong, sharp as iron in a blacksmith's fire Shaaban Robert, a Kiswahili visionary the South and North African contingents the Dias, Walter Rodney and so many others teachers and poets farmers and firebrands the women and men of the people who did more than write back to empire they wrote forward with and among their people they imagined futures in the ashes of conquest they held language not as a tool but as a weapon as shelter as seed Ngũgĩ understood this he knew that the word could build a nation he knew the power of stories told in the mother tongue and like all true cultural workers he toiled not for applause but for transformation now he rests but Njoroge still dreams Wariinga still walks Matigari still searches Dedan still speaks Mazrui lives and children still rise on buses made of books he is not gone his story is not over a monument built on language, knowledge, culture, history this elegy is still becoming. DM
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, dissident Kenyan novelist who drafted a book on prison lavatory paper
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who has died aged 87, was a Kenyan novelist whose work could manage to be both poignant and darkly funny as he challenged authority in many forms – political, economic, cultural and, most significantly, colonial. In 1964, the appearance of Weep Not, Child in the UK made him the first East African writer to have a novel appear in English. This came about with the help of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart. They had met at the African Writers Conference that took place in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, when Achebe was advisory editor for Heinemann's African Writers series. Although the two novelists could often be muddled by the ignorant, and Ngũgĩ paid generous homage to Achebe when he died, their different approaches to writing would come to represent one of the biggest debates faced by African authors. The question was: which language should a post-colonial writer use? Should it be the language of the former imperial power – an approach one could characterise as 'The Empire Writes Back'? Or should it be the writer's original tongue? At the 1962 conference, Chinua Achebe and his fellow Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, argued for English. However, Ngũgĩ was beginning to think differently, and by 1977, a dramatic sequence of events confirmed his belief. That year he collaborated on a play in his native Kikuyu, whose English title is I Will Marry When I Want, and staged it in Kamiriithu, the community where he had grown up. The play concerned a rich, venal couple called, not too subtly, Ahab and Jezebel, who intimidate a local family, blackmailing them into changing their lifestyles while condemning their daughter for adopting fashionable, westernised dress. It was an immediate hit, and played to full houses for six weeks, before Ngũgĩ was arrested without trial. His house was raided, and his books – some of them Marxist – were confiscated. He was imprisoned for a year, among other political dissidents; they were allowed an hour of sunlight a day. He used government lavatory paper to draft his next novel, The Devil on the Cross, this time in Kikuyu. The response to his play had convinced him that if he wanted to upset the authorities, and to take his audience with him, then his mother tongue was the surest way. He crystallised this thinking in his most significant academic book, Decolonising the Mind (1986), in which he argued that the choice of language is every bit as important as what you say with it. By now, he was more openly critical of Achebe's approach, and relations between the two became less cordial as a result. Even so, Ngũgĩ's own writing went for an ingenious and highly effective compromise: he would write his books first in Kikuyu, and later produce his own English translations. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in Kamiriithu, in the Limuru region, on January 5 1938, and baptised James Ngugi. His father, Thiong'o wa Ndũcũ, had four wives at the time: Ngũgĩ was the fifth child of the third one, Wanjikũ. She left the farm with her children when a livestock disease led Ndũcũ to become increasingly drunken and violent. In 1947, Wanjikũ single-handedly raised enough money to send Ngũgĩ to school. In 1955 he attended Alliance High School, about 12 miles from Limuru. In a memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, he describes how he and his brother would walk to school separately, because he would be in British-style school uniform and his brother in tribal dress; and for the author, two rites of passage – his Christian baptism, with the name of James, and his circumcision by a river – happened around the same time. The struggle for Kenyan independence left a profound mark on Ngũgĩ, and on his work. One half-brother joined the Mau Mau uprising with the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Another, who was deaf and dumb, was shot because he hadn't heard a soldier command him to stop running. By the time Ngũgĩ left school, it was safer for him to continue his studies at Makerere University College, in Kampala. Here he found a more progressive intellectual environment than in Kenya, and a university with more Africans in positions of authority. Ngũgĩ produced his first writing at Makerere. He wrote a short story because he had bragged that he could, and then had to deliver it. He drafted The River Between, which would be his first completed novel (but the second to appear in print) because the East African Literature Bureau was offering a prize of £50. The first published novel, Weep Not, Child, presents the often harrowing events of the 1950s from a young perspective, and is based closely on the author's own experience of family life, with violence both outside and inside the home. In 1964 he left for Leeds University, where he embarked on an MA on Caribbean writing. He never finished it, but he did write A Grain of Wheat, set during the days leading up to Kenyan independence in December 1963. For all the influence of social and political Marxism, the book looks sceptically at the more heroic versions of the struggle that had quickly emerged in Kenya. He returned to Kenya in 1967, and changed his name permanently to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. He joined the Department of English Literature, and campaigned successfully for its abolition. An African Literature department appeared in its place, with a curriculum that included oral as well as written literature. Ngũgĩ's arrest in 1977, and his decision to write first in Kikuyu, can be seen as the logical conclusion of this activism. Detention brought Ngũgĩ fame, and Amnesty International urged the Kenyan authorities to release him. President Jomo Kenyatta died on August 22 1978, and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, freed Ngũgĩ in December. But Moi's administration was to become Ngũgĩ's biggest target. Nairobi University did not reinstate the novelist, and he left as an exile, first for London, where he would become writer-in-residence for Islington Borough Council, and later for the United States. There he taught Comparative Literature at Yale, New York University, and later, on the west coast, at Irvine University. Although he visited South Africa during this time, he had to wait until Moi's forced retirement before returning to his homeland, having been warned about the risks to his life from the 1980s onwards. When he did return to Kenya, on August 8 2002, his reception was triumphant, and then horrific. Crowds of admirers welcomed him at Nairobi airport; but three days later, four burglars broke into his apartment. They burned him with cigarettes, and then held him in one room while they raped his wife in another. He felt the attack had to be political, and also that if it had happened under Moi's presidency, they could both have been killed. He returned to his settled life at Irvine, California, where he wrote more memoir than fiction, but won wide acclaim for Wizard of the Crow (2006), an epic in six books in which a tramp takes on magic powers. He uses these to help mock his identifiably Kenyan rulers, before they co-opt him to fulfil their dreams of ultimate power, which prove to be their undoing. Ngũgĩ's plots and characters are rich in Biblical reference: for example, the tyrant who is the butt of the invective in Wizard of the Crow decides to build a Babel-like tower so tall that he can climb it for his conversations with God. Often, though, these vie with traditional Kikuyu stories. His last fiction, a verse novel called The Perfect Nine (Kikuyu 2019; English 2020) celebrates the mythical daughters of his tribe's founders. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is survived by his wife Njeeri, and by nine children from previous relationships. Some of these are novelists who write in English. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, born January 5 1938, died May 28 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Wire
29-05-2025
- General
- The Wire
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Culture Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End Nandini C. Sen 36 minutes ago Ngugi chose to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu and argued that his stories need to reach his own people and stir their nationalist consciousness. Ngũgĩ-wa-Thiong'o (1938-2025). Photo: Wikimedia Commons Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now 'The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.' ― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o The world of literature and activism lost one of its best with the demise of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Ngugi was that rare writer who stood for everything he preached – respect for women, love for the mother tongue, standing up against the colonial mindset, standing up for one's rights and revising the historical wrongs of the British Colonial regime. This came at a great price – incarceration and banishment from his home country Kenya and a lifelong war with the powers that be. I was introduced to Ngugi's Decolonising the Mind (1986) in my Master's class at JNU and it gave me a whole new way to look at the world as I knew it. I realised that the 'freedom' that I had taken for granted was not something one could take lightly. It was something one had to fight for constantly. One also learnt how the nature of colonialism had changed – it was no longer a story of the White dominance over the Blacks/Browns but an insidious takeover by the corporates who enslaved our minds and held us hostage. This colonisation had a worse stranglehold because it was difficult to identify the coloniser since they now looked like us. Ngugi shot into fame with his debut novel Weep Not, Child (1964), the first novel to be published from East Africa. Ngugi's oeuvre can be compared only to that of Chinua Achebe's who was responsible for reading the manuscripts of The River Between and Weep Not, Child which were published by Heinemann with Achebe as its advisory editor. It was with Achebe that Ngugi's famous 'language debate' gained prominence and became a staple for every student of postcolonial studies. While Achebe chooses to write in English in spite of it being the language of the colonisers, Ngugi argues against it and chooses to write in his mother tongue Gikuyu. Ngugi argues that his stories need to reach his own people and stir their nationalist consciousness. To this effect he and Micere Mugo wrote the famous play on the Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (1976) taught in Delhi University, until very recently, recreates the indomitable courage of the Mau Mau revolutionary and his right-hand person – a woman warrior. While Kimathi remains in jail, it is 'the woman' – representing Kenyan mothers – who tries to free him and in turn train the next generation for the struggle. The role of Kenyan women in the Mau Mau movement (Kenyan freedom struggle) is a historical reality. Ngugi's female characters are strong, bold and determined – towering over the men in sheer brilliance. In his world view, the mothers of the nation rule supreme, challenging the existing stereotypes of dependent women. These women do not exist merely to take care of their home and hearth; they work towards nation-building. He creates them in the mould of Mother Africa, thus adhering towards the Negritude Movement. In A Grain of Wheat (1967), Ngugi writes about Wambui, who 'believed in the power of women to influence events, especially where men had failed to act, or seemed indecisive… Let therefore such men, she jeered, come forward, wear the women's skirts and aprons and give up their trousers to the women.' Wambui helps the Mau Mau warriors, and it is her conviction that her land can only be free once it is rid of the colonisers. Unlike many men who are seen to be supporting the British policies, Wambui is clear-headed about what is best for her people. About the dual nature of colonialism, Ngugi wrote, 'He carried the Bible; the soldier carried the gun; the administrator and the settler carried the coin. Christianity, Commerce, Civilization: the Bible, the Coin, the Gun: Holy Trinity.' Ngugi spent his entire life exposing this unholy trinity through his powerful writing. Ngugi, christened James Ngugi at birth, was one of the 28 children born to the four wives of his father in precolonial Kenya. Growing up, Ngugi witnessed the forced takeover of lands by the British imperialists; he was witness to multiple arrests and tortures his people were subjected to, and he also witnessed the harassment his own father had to face. It was then that he slowly realised that the colonial forces were there to destroy and not to build. His evolving worldview led him to give up his Christian name, and he started to go by the name of Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. He argued that the English departments in Kenyan Universities should start to focus on the study of indigenous languages of Kenya. Challenging the 'centrality' of London and the 'othering' faced by colonised countries, Ngugi argued in favour of centring Africa and studying other cultures in relation to it. Ngugi was a strong advocate on Fanonist Marxism. 'Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.' writes Ngugi in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature where he argues in favour of the indigenous languages because he sees language not merely as a means of communication but as a carrier and repository of culture. To this end, he gave up writing in English and wrote in his mother tongue Gikiyu. His co-authoring of a play in Gikiyu, I Will Marry When I Want (1977), which dealt with the controversial themes of poverty, gender, class and religion in the post-colonial context, led to his incarceration. While in his cell, where he was housed with other political prisoners, he wrote The Devil on The Cross (1980) on prison-issued toilet paper. It was here that he thought more closely about the language question and decided to continue writing only in Gikiyu. Ngugi was the first in his family to be educated, though he spent the better part of his life in exile, where he served as visiting professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University and later a professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University where he held the Erich Maria Remarque Chair. He served as distinguished professor of English and comparative literature and was the first director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi will continue to be missed. I was fortunate to be able to meet him in person at the African Literary Association Conference in Accra, Ghana, in 2008. A mild-mannered and unassuming person, he waxed lyrical about the unity of African cultures. Ngugi was deeply interested in India and in his novel The Wizard of the Crow, he mentions The Gita, the Upanishads and the women writers of India. A prolific writer and an activist till the very end, Ngugi was also a perpetual contender for the Nobel. Commenting on the current governments and drawing parallels, Ngugi wrote, 'Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb.' His words reflect what we see playing out in our modern societies, which allow for totalitarian regimes at the cost of the divisiveness of their people. Nandini C. Sen is a professor of English at Delhi University who specialises in Anglophone African Literature. 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