Kenya’s world renowned author and storyteller Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has died at the age of 87, APA learnt on Wednesday.
The literary giant had a history of prostate cancer and kidney disease and was given three months to survive in 1995.
In 2019, a triple heart bypass surgery was performed on him as his health began to fail.
Although he was bypassed several times as a firm favourite to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ngũgĩ who changed his name from James had in the space of 60 years cemented his reputation as a writer of immense appeal with books such as Petals of Blood, Weep Not Child, and The River Between which took the literary world by storm.
He was among the first post-independence writers in Africa who helped shape African literature of the 20 century especially his native Kenya, witnessing its leap from a colonial entity to a functioning democracy.
Kenya’s most famous author had written several treatises explaining why African writers should be using their indigenous languages as the medium of their works over borrowed ones and even criticised Nigerian great Chinua Achebe for clinging onto to English in his storytelling career, a criticism which led to the two falling out.
He was born James Thiong’o Ngũgĩ in 1938, to an agricultural family in the town of Limuru and attended the Alliance boarding school established by British missionaries.
He was directly affected by the Mau Mau rebellion against the British and their collaborators after his village was raided and razed to the ground by colonial forces in pursuit of rebel fighters.
Members of his family joined thousands of other Kenyans in detention centres where many of them were tortured and lived in squalid conditions.
His own brother Gitogo, hard of hearing died from a shot by British military officers whose command went apparently unheeded.
Ngũgĩ attended Makerere University in Uganda where he interacted with Achebe who sent his Weep Not, Child manuscript to his publishers in the UK. The book published in 1964 attracted critical acclaim and cemented its place as the first major novel by an East African written in the English language.
More literary success followed with the publication of A Grain of Wheat and The River Between, two books which raised his reputation as one of Africa’s best writers of the contemporary era.
He changed his name from James to Ngugi in 1977 signifying his break with a ”colonial cultural baggage” and resorted to his native Kikuyu instead of English as the medium for his later works.
This include plays such as Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want).
Thanks to his parodies of the leaders of post-colonial Kenya, he ran into trouble with the government, the most notable being his incarceration for a year and the closure of his theatre in the late 1970s.
His first novel in Kikuyu, Devil on the Cross was written in prison using toilet papers as papers were not available to him during his detention.
Later in his life Ngũgĩ taught at universities in the United States and stayed abroad for over two decades before returning to Kenya where he was warmly received by his fans.
However, he was the target of an attack at his home soon afterwards, an incident which he claimed was politically motivated. He would eventually return to the United States to teach in Yale, New York and California Irvine.
He was divorced twice and had nine children, four of whom took after him as published authors in their own right.
WN/as/APA