Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
The legendary Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a fierce advocate for African self-determination, died aged 87, leaving behind a legacy of pioneering modern African literature.
The author’s experiences during the late stages of British colonial rule in Kenya had a profound influence on his early work, with his family among the hundreds and thousands devastated by the crackdown on Mau Mau independence fighters. That partly inspired his first book Weep Not, Child, published in 1964 after he shared a manuscript with Nigerian author Chinua Achebe at a writers’ conference at Makerere University in Uganda.
In the 1980s Ngũgĩ became a strong champion for writing in local African languages. “If you know all the languages of the world but don’t know your mother tongue, that is enslavement,” he argued in a 2015 interview.
