Our friend and colleague, Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, entered the East African literary scene in 1962 with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Uganda. In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most controversial work, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) sharply criticized the injustices of Kenyan society and unequivocally championed the causes of ordinary citizens. Following his release in 1978, Ngũgĩ decided to write only in his native Gĩkũyũ and today he is known as one of the most outspoken intellectuals working in postcolonial theory and the global postcolonial movement.
Ngũgĩ was recently interviewed by Nanda Dyssou of The Los Angeles Review of Books on the occasion of receiving another major honor: the second annual LARB/UCR Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award. In this interview he discusses his writing career and current role in the writing community, calling himself a “language warrior” who is joining all those others in the world who are fighting for marginalized languages. Ngũgĩ states that “for writing, there is no moment of arrival — or, rather, the moment of arrival is the beginning of a new phase of the journey. It is a continual challenge.”
Reflecting on the future, Ngũgĩ proclaims: “I want to see a world without prisons and detention camps. I want to see a world without homelessness and starvation. I want to see an end to the logic behind modern development, that in order for one to be, others must cease to be. I want to see an end to the assumption that, in order for a thousand millionaires or billionaires to be, there have to be a billion poor. We have to end this madness of thinking that the number of billionaires a country has is the measure of its development. What about the billion poor created by the billionaires?”