Get the latest gossip
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
Thiong’o was admired worldwide, including by authors John Updike and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama.
His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.”By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with “A Grain of Wheat.” Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Starting with “Devil On the Cross,” written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past.Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Starting with “Devil On the Cross,” written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past.
Or read this on WLKY
