Contemporary Literary Criticism | Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - Richard Gibson (review date 16 June 1989)

Richard Gibson (review date 16 June 1989)

SOURCE: Gibson, Richard. “The House the Freedom Fighters Built.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4498 (16 June 1989): 670.

[In the following excerpt, Gibson lauds Matigari as a fine example of effective political propaganda.]

Since Weep Not, Child (1964), which was the first East African novel in English, most of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's writing has been in that language, but Matigari, his new novel, was written originally in Gikuyu, Ngugi's native African tongue. It is a superb work of agitprop, brief, sharp and clearly intended to shorten the days in power of the “KKK”, the Ruling Party of a “country with no name”.

Ngugi is a Kenyan, one of Africa's most distinguished men of letters, who has in effect been banned because of his leftist political beliefs from teaching in his homeland or even from living there as a free man. His play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I...

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