The Kenyan novelist, playwright, and theorist who became the most forceful advocate for African literature written in African languages — a writer who won acclaim in English, then renounced English as the primary language of his fiction, choosing Gikuyu, arguing in Decolonising the Mind that to write Africa in the colonizer's language was to complete the colonization of the imagination, a stand that cost him prison and exile.
In a cell in a Kenyan prison in 1978, a writer with no books and no freedom began composing a novel on the only paper he could get: the coarse toilet paper handed out to inmates. He had been jailed without trial, not for anything he wrote in English, but for a play staged in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, performed by the farmers and workers of his home village. The state feared that play because ordinary people understood it. Ngugi wa Thiong'o left prison more certain than ever of a single idea. The language a people are made to forget is the deepest thing a conqueror takes from them.