By Abdi Ali
Published June 15, 2021
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenya’s best known writer, is on June 17, 2021 at 7:00 PM set to wind up the Great Texts/Big Questions Online Lecture Series that highlight the role of African artists in tackling losses occasioned by the Coronavirus pandemic.
Wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, shall respond to ‘Loss upon loss’, the theme of the series that is held virtually. His lecture is titled ‘Language and Liberation of the African inventive imagination’.
The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) of the University of Cape Town, the organisers of the event that has taken place every Thursday from May 12, 2021, say the focus of the lecture series has been the role and response of artists in the time of Covid-19.
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ICA says Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “One of the most prolific and influential thinkers of our time, … burst onto the literary scene with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala in 1962. In a highly productive literary period, Ngũgĩ wrote additionally eight short stories, two one-act plays, two novels, and a regular column for the Sunday Nation under the title, ‘As I See It’. The novel, Weep Not Child, was published to critical acclaim in 1964 followed by a second novel, The River Between (1965). His third, A Grain of Wheat (1967), was a turning point in the formal and ideological direction of his works. His first volume of literary essays, Homecoming, appeared in print in 1969. These were to be followed, in later years, by other volumes including Writers in Politics (1981 and 1997); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Center (1994); and Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams (1998).”
“Sharply critical of the inequalities and injustices of Kenyan society, Ngũgĩ was arrested and imprisoned without charge at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison at the end of 1977. His memoir, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1982), is an account of those experiences.”
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“After Amnesty International named Ngũgĩ a Prisoner of Conscience, an international campaign secured his release in December 1978. However, the Moi Dictatorship barred him from jobs at colleges and universities in Kenya. In exile, Ngũgĩ worked with the London based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya (1982-1998). In 1992 he became Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University, and from there moved to his present position at the University of California. Ngũgĩ has continued to write prolifically. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature, as well as ten Honorary Doctorates.”
The event that shall be held via zoom and facilitated by academic Polo Moji, shall be followed by a Q&A with online viewers.
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But just who is academic Polo Moji?
Moji joined the Department of English Literary Studies at UCT in 2018, after lecturing French and Francophone Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (2015-2018). Moji is one of the few researchers in South Africa working with both English and French/Francophone literary forms. She has co-edited the special journal issues “Ghostly Border-Crossings: Europe in Afrodiasporic Narratives” in Tydskrif vir letterkunde: A Journal for African Literature (2019), “The Cinematic City: Desire, Form and the African Urban” in The Journal of African Cinemas (2019) and the forthcoming special issue in Cinematic Imaginaries of the African City, Social Dynamics (2021). Her current book project is Gender and the Geopolitics of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives: Black Flâneuses and she is co-organiser of the forthcoming African Feminisms Conference (November 2021).
