It’s the birthday of author Ngugi wa Thiong’o (books by this author), born James Ngugi in Limuru, Kenya (1938). The 1960s were productive years for Ngugi. He produced his first play, The Black Hermit, in 1962 while still in college; in 1964, he published the first East African novel written in English. That book is Weep Not, Child, and it’s based on his family’s troubles during the Mau Mau Uprising. He published The River Between (1965) a year later, and A Grain of Wheat in 1967. Around this time, he changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiong’o to reflect his Kikuyu heritage, and he stopped writing in English.
He was sent to a maximum-security prison in 1977 for the overtly political play I Will Marry When I Want, and while he was there, he wrote Devil on the Cross (1980), the first novel in the Gikuyu language. He was denied paper, so he wrote the novel on prison toilet paper. In 1982, he was packing to return home from a book launch in London when he found out the Moi dictatorship in Kenya was plotting to kill him. He suddenly found himself an exile. “At first I would only use the word shipwrecked, not exile, to refer to my situation; shipwrecks end with rescue, right?” he later wrote. “I did not unpack the suitcase. Seven years later the suitcase was still packed.” He eventually settled in the United States and has taught at Yale and the University of California – Irvine. Four of his children are published authors.
In 2010, he published a memoir called Dreams in the Time of War about his childhood in a Kikuyu compound outside of Nairobi, and Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening (2016). It’s about his university days in Uganda, where he found his writerly and political voice.
The Writer’s Almanac for Tuesday, January 5, 2021
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 