Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, "Wrestling with the Devil"

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his memoir, "Wrestling with the Devil", at Politics and Prose at The Wharf on 3/9/18.

Ngũgĩ, one of Africa’s leading writers whose internationally renowned novels include Weep Not, Child and Wizard of the Crow, spent the year from December 1977 to December 1978 in Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. Not charged with any specific crime, he was held with eighteen others in a block reserved for political prisoners. In this detailed memoir of his incarceration, first published as Detained in London in the 1980s and now revised, Ngũgĩ speaks out against the repressive Kenyatta regime, noting the irony that Kenyatta himself had once been a political prisoner; chronicles the lonely, painful days of confinement; and pays tribute to the liberating power of the imagination in an account of how he eluded the twenty-four-hour surveillance to write what became Devil on the Cross, using the only paper available, scraps of toilet paper.

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Produced by Tom Warren