ABSTRACT
Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya and educated in
Uganda and the University of Leeds. His early novels Weep Not, Child
(1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967)
explored traditional Kenyan society and the impact of colonialism on it,
while with Petals of Blood (1977) he began to show a more explicit
political concern with neo-colonialism. As a teacher in the Department of
English at the University of Nairobi, he called in 1968 for the abolition of
that department as a step towards cultural decolonization, a theme he has
developed in essays collected in Decolonising the Mind (1986) and Mov-
ing the Centre (1993). In 1977 he was detained for a year without trial in
a maximum security prison, where he began to write his next novel in his
native language Gikuyu, Devil on the Cross (published in Gikuyu 1980,
in English 1982). On a visit to Britain in 1982 to promote this novel,
Ngugi went into exile. All copies of his next novel, Matigari (published in
Gikuyu 1987, in English 1989 and translated by Wangui wa Goro, who
was also present during this interview) were seized in Kenya and an
attempt was even made to arrest its fictional hero.
