Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that 85-YEAR-OLD Literature Legend, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is Battlling Sickness, Divorce, and Loneliness in the US. (Read More Here).
The author has already moved out of the house she shared with Njeeri at University Hills in Irvine, Carlifornia and is now living alone and unable to take care of himself.
Ngugi has has nine children – six from his first wife Nyambura and three with Njeeri.
Njeeri is the director Human Resource Faculty and Staff Conflict Resolution Services at the University of California, Irvine, where Ngugi is a Distinguished Professor, the Comparative Literature School of Humanities.
Ngũgĩ is a giant of African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me he looms especially large. Alongside writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was part of a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and 60s, during the last years of colonialism on the continent. If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite.
In 2004, Njeeri who had just returned to Kenya with her husband for the first time after 22 years in exile was raped after robbers broke into their apartment in Nairobi. Asked if he regretted returning from the US, Ngugi said: “I am a Kenyan, this is my country for better or for worse.”
“It’s for me and everybody else to make it a Kenya that it can be.”
Ngugi’s politically charged writing led to his arrest in 1977 and he spent a year in detention without trial. In 1982 he went into self-imposed exile in London, and then took up residence in the United States where he taught comparative literature.
