Oliver Lovesey
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000. Pp. 164. $33.00

Reviewed by R. S. Krishnan

Oliver Lovesey has provided a compact, insightful, and illuminating look at a writer of remarkable personal history and talent. Lovesey provides a careful assessment of the place of Ngugi wa Thiong'o in African and World literature. Lovesey's work is divided into five chapters: The introductory chapter deals with a brief history of Kenya, Ngugi's life and career, and an overview of his evolution as a postcolonial theorist. The succeeding chapters deal, respectively, with his early and later fictions, Ngugi as playwright and filmmaker, and his nonfiction writings. At the outset, and with clarity and efficiency, Lovesey locates Ngugi's niche as a writer: "Much of Ngugi's work conveys a sense of both the transcendent hope of independence and freedom, uhuru, and also the absolute despair that followed when this hope was compromised.… Although he has not written an acknowledged masterpiece, a staple of college and university syllabi like Achebe's Things Fall Apart, or, like [Wole] Soyinka, won the noble Prize for Literature, Ngugi has inspired a generation of writers and is celebrated for his stand on political and linguistic issues" (1). This thesis underlies the reading of Ngugi. Lovesey ironically notes that even as "Ngugi's work is anchored in a concern for common people, especially the Gikuyu people of Kenya, and for the land, which holds profound spiritual importance.… Ngugi is one of those writers who reenvision their homeland when they go abroad" (2-3), since most of his works have been written outside his homeland.

The summarizing paraphrases of individual works are clear, persuasive, and inviting. If the early fiction broadly deals with the theme of "tradition and modernity" (including Ngugi's first three novels, A River Between, Weep Not Child, and A Grain of Wheat), the later fiction (Petals of Blood) is more allegorical, the result of Ngugi embracing "a distinctively African aesthetics or poetics of fiction" (46). If earlier A Grain of Wheat marked Ngugi's embrace of Fanonian Marxism, his 1980 publication of the first modern novel written in Gikuyu, Caitaani Mutharaba-ini (Devil on the Cross), and of Matigari ma Njiruungi (Matigari) mark another development in Ngugi as he argues for the genealogy of writing in one's own native language, decrying as "Afro-European literature" that written by Africans in a colonial language. As Lovesey argues, in his non-fiction prose, including his prison diary, Ngugi focuses on "the linguistic integrity of African literature" and reinforces the "role of the African writer and the intellectual's responsibility to a popular audience" (104-05).

Lovesey's book has much to offer, and, best of all, it thoughtfully asserts a rightful place for Ngugi as a preeminent writer. As a work that provides a comprehensive introduction to Ngugi, it may be approached with confidence by students and teachers alike.