Ngugi wa Thiong’o, giant of African literature, dies at 87

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who was censored, imprisoned and forced into exile, a perennial contender for the Nobel prize for literature and one of few writers working in an indigenous African language, has died aged 87, write Richard Lea and Sian Cain for The Guardian.

Ngugi explored the troubled legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Considered a giant of the modern African pantheon, he had been a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature for years. After missing out on the prize in 2010 to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Ngugi said he was less disappointed than the photographers who had gathered outside his home: “I was the one who was consoling them!”

Born in 1938, while Kenya was under British colonial rule, Ngugi was one of 28 children, born to a father with four wives. He lived through the Mau Mau uprising as a teenager, during which the authorities imprisoned, abused and tortured tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. While a lecturer in English literature at Nairobi University, he argued that the English department should be renamed, and shift its focus to literature around the world. “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African?” he wrote in a paper. “Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?”
Full report on The Guardian site