Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Novelist, Playwright & Theorist

(1938 – Present) · East Africa

Kenyan novelist, playwright, and cultural theorist who abandoned the English language in 1977 to write exclusively in Gĩkũyũ, his mother tongue, and Swahili. His 1986 work Decolonising the Mind is a landmark text on language and colonial power. He was imprisoned in 1977 by the Kenyan government for co-writing a play in Gĩkũyũ.