Ngugi and I : a personal tribute

Abstract

The great Ngugi wa Thiong'o has passed https://lnkd.in/gecNjFKx https://lnkd.in/gt5U3VaX As a student in my native Sierra Leone, at a time when the literature curriculum was decidedly Anglocentric, crowded with the British canon, with only a smattering of African texts and writers, Ngugi is one of the figures who made me fall in love with African literature. I avidly read his early novels in secondary school in Freetown and it was from Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967) that I first learned about Kenya (rural life and culture, traditional and western education, colonization, the Mau-Mau and anti-colonial struggle).