The writer Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was censored, imprisoned and forced to exile by the dictator Daniel ARAP Moi, a lasting competitor for the Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the few writers working in an indigenous African language, died at the age of 87.
“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the death of our father, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, this Wednesday morning,” wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. “He lived a full life, fought a good fight.”
He died in Atlanta and his daughter said that more details would be announced soon.
“I am me because of him in many ways, like his child, his scholar and his writer”, his son Mukoma a wa ngũgĩ wrote On X. “I like him – I don’t know what tomorrow will bring without him here. I think that’s all I have to say for the moment.”
Ngũgĩ explored the disturbed heritage of colonialism through essays, plays and novels of which WeP Not, Child (1964), Devil On the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Consider A modern African pantheon giantHe had been a favorite for the Nobel Prize in literature for years. After missing the prize in 2010 to the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, ngũgĩ said he was less disappointed May the photographers who had gathered in front of his home: “It was I who consoled them!”
Born in 1938, while Kenya was under British colonial domination, Ngũgĩ was one of the 28 children, born of a father with four women. He experienced the uprising of Mau in adolescence, during which the authorities imprisoned, abused and tortured dozens, even hundreds of thousands of people. During the conflict, the father of Ngũgĩ – one of the Gikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya – was forced to leave his land, and two of his brothers were killed.
This struggle formed the backdrop of the novel which made its name: Weep Not, Child. Published in 1964, only a year after Kenya has acquired independence, he tells the story of Njoroge’s education, the first in his family to go to school, and how his life is thrown into the events around him.
A series of novels, including news and plays, he followed, because Ngũgĩ became a lecturer in English literature at the University of Nairobi. There, he argued that the English department should be renamed and focuses on literature in the world. “If there is a” study of the historical continuity of a single culture “, why can’t it be African?” He wrote in an article. “Why can’t African literature be at the center so that we can see other cultures related to it?”
In 1977, he published his fourth novel, Petals of Blood, and a play, the essay by Dedan Kimathi, which treated the disturbed heritage of Mau Uprising, but it was his co-authorization of a piece written in Gikuyu, I will marry when I want, which led to his arrest and his imprisonment in the maximum security prison of Mamiti.
“In prison, I started thinking in a more systematic way on language”, ” He said to the Guardian in 2006. “Why was I not detained before, when I wrote in English?” He decided from that moment to write to Gikuyu that “the only language I could use was mine”.
Released in 1978, Exile followed in 1982, when the author learned a plot to kill him on his return from a trip to Great Britain to promote his novel Caitani Mutharabaini, translated by devil on the cross. He then moved from the United Kingdom to the United States, where he worked as a teacher of English and comparative literature at the University of California in Irvine, and led his international writing and translation center.
Ngũgĩ continued to write in Gikuyu, despite his troubled connection with his homeland; An arrest warrant was issued for the fictitious main character in his 1986 Matigari novel, which was also prohibited in Kenya. Back in Nairobi with his wife Njeeri for the first time in 2004, two years after the death of Daniel Arap Me, Ngũgĩ was greeted by crowds at the airport. But during the trip, The men brandishing rifles have burst into their apartmentRape njeeri and beat ngũgĩ when he tried to intervene. “I don’t think we were supposed to go out alive”, He said to the goalkeeper Two years later.
His novel Wizard of the Crow, Translated by the author in English in 2006returned to the subject of the African Kleptocracy, taking place in the imaginary dictatorship of the free republic of Aburirie. He said that the “most beautiful sentence of the whole novel” was “a translation of Gikuyu by the author”.
He continued to Translate his own works by GikuyuAnd was nominated for the Booker International Prize in 2021 for his epic novel in the perfect nine. He was the first nomine for award in an Aboriginal African language and the first author to be nominated for their own translation.
NGũGĩ had received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1995 and had undergone triple heart surgery in 2019.
Ngũgĩ had nine children, including four authors: tee ngũgĩ, mũkoma wa ngũgĩ, nducu wa ngũgĩ and Wanjiku wa ngũgĩ.
“Resistance is the best way to stay alive”, He said to the goalkeeper in 2018. “It can even take the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you are right, you stick to your beliefs and you help survive.”
