Africa News blog

Thiong’o's memories of a time of war

Ngugi wa Thiong’o had been hesitant to write his memoirs, but wanted to give his children a wake up call about what life was like when you had to walk miles to school - not to mention being a political prisoner.

A giant of African literature, he has never been afraid to challenge the establishment. Yet while he recounts his time in prison with humour today, he has never moved back to Kenya full time since going into exile nearly 30 years ago despite being one of the country’s best-known writers. 

Thiong’o was imprisoned without charge in December 1977 after peasants and workers performed his play “Ngaahika Ndeenda”,  which criticised inequalities in Kenyan society.

Thiong’o went into exile in 1982 and only returned in 2004, when he and his wife were assaulted in what he maintains was a politically motivated attack.

“If I had returned to Kenya during the Moi dictatorship, I probably wouldn’t be breathing today. But after the defeat of the Moi dictatorship …  my exile was over, because I know I can return to Kenya, I can visit Kenya, although I have to say that when my wife and I returned to Kenya for the first time we were brutally attacked by armed gunmen so I realised that the forces that had always been against what I stand for in terms of creating a more humane society, that those forces are still very much alive,” he told Reuters Africa Journal in Los Angeles.

“I was arrested in 1977 … when I was then professor and chairperson of the department of literature at Nairobi university. So, from being a professor and author of three novels, and so on, I found myself in a maximum security prison. On my left, were sections for the mentally deranged, and then the other side was for those who were condemned to die. So writers were somewhere between those two categories,” the 72-year-old told fans at Los Angeles public library, where he was promoting the first volume, “Dreams in a Time of War”.

Under Daniel arap Moi’s rule, dissent was crushed and those who opposed him were harassed and suppressed, many of them killed or subjected to Nairobi’s torture chambers.