Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born James Ngugi on 5 January 1938 in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kenya's central highlands, into a large Gikuyu family of peasant farmers. His boyhood fell inside the Emergency, the colonial war against the Mau Mau rising, and his family was caught in it. He went to Alliance High School and then to Makerere University College in Kampala, where his play The Black Hermit was staged in 1962. Weep Not, Child (1964) was among the first major novels in English by an East African, and The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967), the latter finished while he studied at Leeds, made his name as the novelist of Kenya's long road to independence. Petals of Blood followed in 1977. That year he co-wrote Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), a play in Gikuyu performed by villagers at the Kamiriithu community centre, and the government answered by detaining him without trial at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison until December 1978. In his cell he wrote the novel Devil on the Cross on toilet paper. Barred from his university post, he left Kenya and spent more than two decades abroad, teaching at Yale, New York University and finally the University of California, Irvine. In Decolonising the Mind (1986) he announced his farewell to English as a vehicle for his writing, and Matigari (1986) and the vast satire Wizard of the Crow (2004 in Gikuyu, 2006 in English) followed. He also wrote memoirs of his childhood, his schooling and his imprisonment. Long mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he died on 28 May 2025, aged 87.

At the end of 1977 Ngũgĩ was seized and taken to Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, held without charge after a Gikuyu play performed by villagers had angered the government. With nothing to write on in his cell, he began a novel in Gikuyu on toilet paper issued by the prison. That book became Devil on the Cross.