Early years and education Ngũgĩ was born on 5 January 1938 in
Kiambu district,
Kenya Colony of the
British Empire. He is of
Kikuyu descent, and was baptised
James Ngugi. His father, Thiong'o wa Ndūcũ, had four wives and 28 children; Ngũgĩ was born to his third wife, Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ. His family were farmers whose land had been repossessed under the British Imperial Land Act of 1915. He would later write about the scene of desolation he found on returning home after his first term there: "...the British had razed the entire village to the ground. Kenya was under State of Emergency, the colonial state’s way of trying to isolate the forces of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, waging war against the settler state. My village destroyed, Alliance High School, for the next four years became the new base, from which I looked back at Limuru, the region of my birth. By losing my home, I became more aware of it, the home that I had lost." and his play
The Black Hermit premiered as part of the event at The National Theatre. At the conference, Ngũgĩ asked
Chinua Achebe to read the manuscripts of
The River Between and
Weep Not, Child, which were subsequently published in the
Heinemann African Writers Series, launched in London that year, with Achebe as its first advisory editor. Ngũgĩ received his B.A. degree in
English from Makerere University College in 1963. Later that year, having won a scholarship to the
University of Leeds to study for an MA, Ngũgĩ travelled to England, where he was when his second novel,
The River Between, came out in 1965. He left Leeds in 1967 without completing his thesis on
Caribbean literature, for which his studies had focused on Barbadian writer
George Lamming, about whom Ngũgĩ said in his 1972 collection of essays
Homecoming: "He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world. And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords
[sic] deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of
Fielding,
Defoe,
Smollett,
Jane Austen,
George Eliot,
Dickens,
D. H. Lawrence." He subsequently renounced writing in English, and the name James Ngugi as
colonialist; and began to write in his native Gikuyu. In 1967, Ngũgĩ also began teaching at the
University of Nairobi as a professor of English literature. He continued to teach at the university for ten years while serving as a Fellow in Creative Writing at
Makerere University. During this time, he also guest-lectured at
Northwestern University in the department of English and African Studies for a year. In the late 1960s, these efforts resulted in the university dropping English Literature as a course of study, and replacing it with one that positioned African Literature, oral, and written, at the centre. He was sent to
Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, and kept there without a trial for nearly a year. During his time in prison, Ngũgĩ decided to cease writing his plays and other works in English and began writing all his creative works in his native tongue, Gikuyu.
The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was performed at
FESTAC 77 in
Lagos, Nigeria. The play portrays the
Mau Mau revolutionary
Kimathi and his right-hand person – a female fighter. While Kimathi is in jail, the woman attempts to free him and trains the next generation to continue the struggle. Many Kenyan women did participate in the Mau Mau movement. After Ngũgĩ's release in December 1978,
Exile While in exile, Ngũgĩ worked with the London-based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya (1982–98). Describing himself as a "literary migrant", he also stated: "I had to be away from my mother tongue to discover my mother tongue."
21st century in 2007 On 8 August 2004, Ngũgĩ returned to Kenya as part of a month-long tour of East Africa. On 11 August, robbers broke into his high-security apartment: they assaulted Ngũgĩ, sexually assaulted his wife and stole various items of value. When Ngũgĩ returned to the U.S. at the end of his month-long trip, five men were arrested on suspicion of the crime, including one of his nephews. On 10 November 2006, while in
San Francisco at Hotel Vitale at the
Embarcadero, Ngũgĩ was harassed and ordered to leave the hotel by an employee. The event led to a public outcry and angered both African-Americans and members of the African diaspora living in America, which led to an apology by the hotel. Ngũgĩ's later books include
Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2012), and
Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, a collection of essays published in 2009 making the argument for the crucial role of African languages in "the resurrection of African memory", about which
Publishers Weekly said: "Ngugi's language is fresh; the questions he raises are profound, the argument he makes is clear: 'To starve or kill a language is to starve and kill a people's memory bank. This was followed by two well-received autobiographical works:
Dreams in a Time of War: a Childhood Memoir (2010) and
In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir (2012), which was described as "brilliant and essential" by the
Los Angeles Times, among other positive reviews. in 2019 There was perennial speculation about Ngũgĩ being a likely candidate to win the
Nobel Prize in Literature, and he had been considered a firm favourite in 2010. However, that year it was awarded to Peruvian writer
Mario Vargas Llosa, and afterwards Ngũgĩ was reported as saying that he was less disappointed than the photographers who had gathered outside his home: "I was the one who was consoling them!" Ngũgĩ's 2016 short story
The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright became "the single most translated short story in the history of African writing", now with versions in more than 100 languages. starting a project that aimed to translate each story into 2,000 African languages. Ngũgĩ's book
The Perfect Nine, originally written and published in Gikuyu as
Kenda Muiyuru: Rugano Rwa Gikuyu na Mumbi (2019), was translated into English by Ngũgĩ for its 2020 publication, and is a reimagining in epic poetry of his people's
origin story. It was described by the
Los Angeles Times as "a quest novel-in-verse that explores folklore, myth and allegory through a decidedly feminist and pan-African lens." The review in
World Literature Today said: "Ngũgĩ crafts a beautiful retelling of the Gĩkũyũ myth that emphasizes the noble pursuit of beauty, the necessity of personal courage, the importance of filial piety, and a sense of the Giver Supremea being who represents divinity, and unity, across world religions. All these things coalesce into dynamic verse to make
The Perfect Nine a story of miracles and perseverance; a chronicle of modernity and myth; a meditation on beginnings and endings; and a palimpsest of ancient and contemporary memory, as Ngũgĩ overlays the Perfect Nine's feminine power onto the origin myth of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya in a moving rendition of the epic form."
Fiona Sampson writing in
The Guardian concluded that
The Perfect Nine is "a beautiful work of integration that not only refuses distinctions between 'high art' and traditional storytelling, but supplies that all-too rare human necessity: the sense that life has meaning." In March 2021,
The Perfect Nine became the first work written in an indigenous African language to be longlisted for the
International Booker Prize, with Ngũgĩ becoming the first nominee as both the author and translator of the book. When asked in 2023 whether
Kenyan English or
Nigerian English were now local languages, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o responded: "It's like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement. English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That's an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser's language is a sign of the success of enslavement." In 2025, he commented "In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues... They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don’t know their mother tongue. That’s why I call it mental colonization." He also commented that he had no issue speaking English, but that "I don’t want it to be my primary language... if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment." == Personal life ==