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“... The​ Perfect Nine takes as its source material the creation myth of the Agĩkũyũ peoples of Kenya. At the top of Kirima Kĩrĩ Nyaga – known in English as Mount Kenya – Gĩkũyũ, the first man, meets Ngai, God, who instructs him to make his home under the fig trees to the south of the mountain. When he gets there, Gĩkũyũ finds a woman waiting for him, and names her Mũmbi (Creator ...”

“... In 1962​ the young Ngugi waThiong’o had a piece of good fortune. He had left Kenya for Uganda, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate at Makerere, in Kampala. As he explains in Birth of a Dream Weaver, the third of his memoirs, the university was hosting a conference on ‘African writers of English expression’, and he was invited to join a panel on the strength of a handful of short stories published by a local press in Kenya ...”

“... writers such as J.M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul, or of the grand old man of Kenyan letters, Ngugi waThiong’o, but what he refers to as their ‘stingy prose’ is also an index of what he is writing against. Their pained grappling with questions of conscience is not his natural mode. Though far from ...”

“... classics. The timeframe of Memory of Departure, for instance, echoes A Grain of Wheat (1967) by Ngugi waThiong’o, an impressive novel set in the days preceding Kenyan independence, and looking back to the Mau Mau rebellion (Gurnah wrote a lucid introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition). Admiring Silence ...”

“... he took advantage of a trip to Nairobi to make contact with the wife of the imprisoned writer, Ngugi waThiong’o: Femi’s trepidation at such assignments was genuine. Equally genuine however was his relish of them! He revelled in the business of flattening letters and cash into false compartments of his ...”

“... and hired thugs to suppress the unrest in Nairobi’s slums. The argument of figures such as Ngugi waThiong’o that Kibaki deserved a second term on the basis of opening up a democratic space for the Kenyan people now looks like a very poor joke. Kibaki, a man who has built his political career on his image as a ...”

“... had been introduced to the rest of the world as Team Africa: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, Mongo Beti, Es’kia Mphahlele – the list went on. Wainaina himself was modest about his ascent: he saw himself as one of many young writers creating a pan-African literary idiom for the 21st century.‘How to Write about ...”

“... and letters. Contributors included James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi waThiong’o, as well as a cohort of South African writers who were wrestling with apartheid, among them Nadine Gordimer, Ezekiel Mphelele, Dennis Brutus and Lewis Nkosi.From the start, Transition had commissioned ...”

“... her ten years in exile’. Here, Bulawayo joins the long list of African novelists – Sembène, Ngugi waThiong’o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and others – who argue that the project of nation-building or reconciliation requires a reimagining of the past. Destiny finishes her book, but the ...”

“... African intellectuals today, while the work of an older generation of writers – Wole Soyinka, Ngugi waThiong’o, Chinua Achebe and the novelist and film director, Sembène Ousmane – is never without some strong descriptive trace of the dispossession Davidson has in mind. And though there are problems with this ...”