Kenyan novelist, playwright, memoirist, and critic — the central anglophone East African literary voice of his generation and, through the long argument of Decolonising the Mind (1986), the best-known theorist of the politics of language in African literature. Born Gikuyu during the last decades of British settler colonialism in Kenya, Ngũgĩ lived through the Mau Mau emergency (which imprisoned his mother and killed his stepbrother) and wrote his first novels — Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967) — under his colonial baptismal name, James Ngugi, in English, which he then considered his unproblematic literary medium.
The break came in the late 1970s. Petals of Blood (1977), his major novel of post-independence Kenyan corruption, was followed by his participation in a Gikuyu-language community play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), whose performance at the Kamiriithu community center led to his detention without trial for a year under Jomo Kenyatta's regime. In prison Ngũgĩ wrote his first novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross, 1980), on toilet paper, and emerged with the conviction he has held ever since: that African writers writing in European languages are writing, however unintentionally, as agents of the colonial project that made those languages the languages of African education in the first place.
Decolonising the Mind (1986) is the sustained argument for this position — that the choice of language is not incidental but constitutive of the literature produced, and that genuine African literature must be written in African languages with translation into European ones as a secondary act. The argument has been contested (including by Achebe, who went the other way), but it has reshaped the postcolonial debate. Ngũgĩ has written his subsequent novels in Gikuyu — Matigari (1986), Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo, 2004; English 2006) — and has lived in exile in the United States since 1982 under threat to his life. His memoirs — Dreams in a Time of War (2010), In the House of the Interpreter (2012), Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016) — trace his formation across the last years of settler colonialism and the early postcolonial decades.