BBL 4306Literature of

MalaysiaWEEK 3

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o Born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu

district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi.

His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu homeguard post.

Received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, The Black Hermit, was produced in Kampala in 1962.

Ngũgĩ published his first novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England.

the first novel in English to be published by a writer from East Africa.[8]

His second novel, The River Between (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians.

The River Between is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus.

Subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist

Changed his name back to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili.

In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his “farewell to English,” Ngugi describes language as a way people have, not only of describing the world, but of understanding themselves.

For him, English in Africa is a “cultural bomb” that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-colonial cultures and history and as a way of installing the dominance of new, more insidious forms of colonialism.

Writing in Gikuyu, then, is Ngugi’s way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of acknowledging and communicating their present

not concerned primarily with universality, though models of struggle can always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity of his individual groups. In a general statement, Ngugi points out that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore the loss of the former results in the loss of the latter

Source: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/ngugi-wa thiongo/#ixzz2v0IS7vsm