Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

"First published in the Heinemann African Writers Series as Secret Lives and Other Stories, 1975. This edition published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2019."

And Other Stories

Minutes of Glory

Um das principais vozes da literatura africana contemporânea e frequentemente cotado para receber o Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o revisita sua infância em Sonhos em tempo de guerra, primeiro volume de suas memórias. O escritor nasceu em 1938, em uma região rural do Quênia, durante a ocupação britânica. Seu pai era polígamo e a família, formada por quatro esposas e 24 filhos, era uma comunidade que experimentava as diversas mudanças provocadas pelo colonialismo. Thiong'o mistura brincadeiras infantis e reflexões sobre o cenário político, como o hábito de contar histórias nas cabanas das mulheres de seu pai, a curiosidade de ouvir a experiência de um irmão que participou da Segunda Guerra Mundial, as brincadeiras com os filhos de donos de terra, e como essas relações mudam quando Thiong'o e seus irmãos passam a trabalhar nos campos. Com sutileza, o escritor compõe um cenário em transformação. Os cultivos tradicionais são substituídos pela produção escolhida pelos colonizadores, homens brancos aparecem nas plantações e crianças mestiças começam a nascer, mudando a composição das famílias. Sonhos em tempo de guerra também explora a descoberta da paixão de Thiong'o pelas histórias, pelas palavras e o momento em que ele se dá conta de sua sede de aprender. Frequentar a escola pode ser algo sacrificante, que exige longas caminhadas e impõe a sensação constante de fome, mas que lhe oferece a oportunidade de aprender a ler, o que lhe permite conhecer muitas mais histórias. Com um texto leve e envolvente, Thiong’o recorda momentos de descoberta infantil, como a primeira vez em que esteve em uma cidade e seu desejo de viajar de trem pela primeira vez. Suas observações se misturam com as lembranças de ataques da rebelião Mau Mau, que desafiou o domínio inglês defendendo a independência do Quênia. O escritor tem uma visão complexa do impacto do colonialismo nos países africanos que se reflete em sua ficção. As memórias de Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o são essenciais para compreender a formação do escritor e a postura crítica presente em sua ficção.

Sonhos em tempo de guerra

Krvave latice

تصفية استعمار العقل

الكتَّاب في السياسة

Aradaki Nehir

El diablo en la cruz

Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Micere Githae Mugo

James Ngugi

Ngugi and Micere Mugo have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the trial of one of the celebrated leaders of the Mau Mau revolution.

The Trial of Dedan Kimathi

This story is fiction based in part on the life of Robert A. Boyd while he served in the United States Air Force in the mid 1960's. The story centers around the US Military during a time of civil unrest in America and the uncertanty of survival if a man joined the US Military from 1965 thru 1968 at a time American citizens fought not only the US Government, and each other, for race equality, peace, and freedom from oppression, but the unpopular, to its citizens and especially its military personnel, Vietnam War. Its writings detail the names and locations of actual top-secret US military bases that were used, located both inside and outside Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, and many highly detailed scout sniper missions that includes actual mission locations and targets. This is a story about the so called, 'best against the best', sniper against sniper, about one top-secret scout-sniper team sent out against emense odds on a deadly continent. The book includes detailed sexual content; its combat depictions include very graphic violence, torture, terrorism, period prejudicial language, slurs, and acts, plus race and theater of war specific slang language. These inclusions are necessary to the story for the period of which it was written, and are not meant to debase, slander, or affront anyone or any race. They are simply recreations of period historical fact.

A Grain of Wheat

A dazzling, genre-defying novel in verse from the author Delia Owens says “tackles the absurdities, injustices, and corruption of a continent” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novels and memoirs have received glowing praise from the likes of President Barack Obama, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and NPR; he has been a finalist for the Man International Booker Prize and is annually tipped to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and his books have sold tens of thousands of copies around the world. In his first attempt at the epic form, Ngũgĩ tells the story of the founding of the Gĩkũyũ people of Kenya, from a strongly feminist perspective. A verse narrative, blending folklore, mythology, adventure, and allegory, The Perfect Nine chronicles the efforts the Gĩkũyũ founders make to find partners for their ten beautiful daughters—called “The Perfect Nine” —and the challenges they set for the 99 suitors who seek their hands in marriage. The epic has all the elements of adventure, with suspense, danger, humor, and sacrifice. Ngũgĩ’s epic is a quest for the beautiful as an ideal of living, as the motive force behind migrations of African peoples. He notes, “The epic came to me one night as a revelation of ideals of quest, courage, perseverance, unity, family; and the sense of the divine, in human struggles with nature and nurture.”

The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi

The Perfect Nine

A masterful writer working in many genres, Ngugi wa Thiong'o 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), produced in Nairobi, sharply criticized the injustices of Kenyan society and unequivocally championed the causes of ordinary citizens. Following his release, Ngugi decided to write only in his native Gikuyu, communicating with Kenyans in one of the many languages of their daily lives, and today he is known as one of the most outspoken intellectuals working in postcolonial theory and the global postcolonial movement. In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to "decolonize the mind." Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or "orature," and writing, or "literature"; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and Aimé Césaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

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