Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a literary titan. In a career that spanned decades and genres—from fiction to criticism, memoir to plays—his writing engaged with issues of political courage, resistance and the condition of colonial and neocolonial Africa.
Ngũgĩ emerged from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and ’60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa. In the late 1970s he famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ. His writing has been praised from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and others.
To celebrate Ngũgĩ’s legacy and his range as a writer, we’re sharing excerpts from his five books published by The New Press.
* * * * * * * * * *
“In his crowded career and eventful life, Ngũgĩ has enacted, for all to see, the paradigmatic trials and quandaries of a contemporary African writer, caught in sometimes implacable political, social, racial, and linguistic currents.” —John Updike, The New Yorker
“One of the greatest writers of our time.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Ngũgĩ has dedicated his life to describing, satirising and destabilising the corridors of power.” —The Guardian
The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi
In his first novel written in verse, Ngũgĩ retells the origin myth of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya from a strongly feminist perspective. An epic in every sense of the word, the book blends folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory to chronicle the efforts the founders Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine”—and the challenges posed to the 99 suitors who seek their hands. This dazzling, genre-defying novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The Guardian called The Perfect Nine, “a beautiful work of integration that not only refuses distinctions between ‘high art’ and traditional storytelling, but supplies that all-too-rare human necessity: the sense that life has meaning.”
Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o may be best known for his fiction but he was also a major postcolonial theorist. In Decolonizing Language, he gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work—illuminating the intrinsic importance of keeping intact and honoring these native languages throughout time.
Birth of a Dream Weaver: A Writer’s Awakening
In this acclaimed memoir, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, then known as James Ngugi, recounts the four crucial years he spent at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and his birth as a writer. It was at Makerere where he found his voice as a journalist, short story writer, playwright, and novelist, a period where colonial empires were crumbling and new nations were being born. In a review of Birth of a Dream Weaver the Washington Post said, “no serious reader will want to miss this riveting story.”
Minutes of Glory: And Other Stories
Although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, Ngũgĩ honed his craft as a short story writer. The stories in this collection cover the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence, they feature women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. In a starred review, Booklist said, “this masterful, long-overdue, yet timely collection introduces Ngugi’s fiction to American readers.”
Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir
Ngũgĩ was arrested and imprisoned in 1977 for the political message of the play Ngaahika Ndeenda: Ithaako ria ngerekano (I Will Marry When I Want), which he co-wrote with Ngugi wa Mirii. This powerful memoir begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation, the renowned author decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross. Ngũgĩ captures all of the drama and challenges of writing under twenty-four-hour surveillance and the pain of being torn from his family.
