BBL 4306 Literature of Malaysia WEEK 3

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

 Born in Kamiriithu, near Limuru in Kiambu district, Kenya, of Kikuyu descent, and baptised James Ngugi.  His family was caught up in the Mau Mau War; his half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, and his mother was tortured at Kamiriithu homeguard post.  Received a B.A. in English from Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, in 1963; during his education, a play of his, The Black Hermit, was produced in Kampala in 1962.

 Ngũgĩ published his first novel, Weep Not, Child, in 1964, which he wrote while attending the University of Leeds in England.  the first novel in English to be published by a writer from East Africa.[8]  His second novel, The River Between (1965), has as its background the Mau Mau rebellion, and described an unhappy romance between Christians and non-Christians.

 The River Between is currently on Kenya's national secondary school syllabus.  Subsequently renounced English, Christianity, and the name James Ngugi as colonialist  Changed his name back to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and began to write in his native Gikuyu and Swahili.

 In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his “farewell to English,” Ngugi describes language as a way people have, not only of describing the world, but of understanding themselves.  For him, English in Africa is a “cultural bomb” that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-colonial cultures and history and as a way of installing the dominance of new, more insidious forms of colonialism.  Writing in Gikuyu, then, is Ngugi’s way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of acknowledging and communicating their present  not concerned primarily with universality, though models of struggle can always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity of his individual groups. In a general statement, Ngugi points out that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore the loss of the former results in the loss of the latter Source: Source: thiongo/#ixzz2v0IS7vsm