Throwing off those shackles has brought Ngugi persecution and an enforced exile, but it has also led to the production of a body of fiction, drama, and essays so original, technically assured, politically committed, informative, and influential that many of Ngugi's admirers regard him as the most important African writer.
Ngugi was born on 5 January 1938 as James Ngugi, son of a Kenyan peasant farmer who, having no access to land of his own, was forced to live as anahoi, a squatter or "tenant-at-will" on the land of "one of the very few African landlords in pre-independence Limuru," as Ngugi says in Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981). Ngugi was one of about twenty-eight children in a polygamous household in which his father had four wives: Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. Describing his childhood, Ngugi says in "The Writer in a Changing Society," an essay in Homecoming (1972): "Harvests were often poor. Sweetened tea with milk at any time of day was a luxury. We had one meal a day--late in the evening.
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