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Paris Review - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, The Art of Fiction No. 253

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AS A STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, ENGLAND, CA. 1966. COURTESY OF THE LILLY LIBRARY AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You’ll find in Ngũgĩ’s oeuvre—his fiction, his criticism, his theory—an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is because Ngũgĩ is a Marxist thinker. In our conversation in early 2021, we discussed his fascination with the idea of contraries: “I talk about struggle a lot, dialectical struggle, dialectics of Marx, dialectics of Hegel,” he said. Born James Ngũgĩ in 1938 in a village in Limuru, Kenya, he attended Alliance High School, a missionary boarding school in the nearby town of Kikuyu, and in 1959 received a scholarship to Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

Interviewed by Namwali Serpell Issue 240, Summer 2022 As a student at the University of Leeds, England, ca. 1966. Courtesy of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a revolutionary. Take nearly any pressing political topic: the horrors of incarceration, the erasure of indigeneity, the oppression of the poor, the rights of the working class, the corrosive effects of neoliberalism. You'll find in Ngũgĩ's oeuvre-his fiction, his criticism, his theory-an incisive, often prescient treatment of the issue, one that always attends to the conflicts that underlie it. This is becau

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