SOURCE: Gikandi, Simon. “Traveling Theory: Ngugi's Return to English.” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 2 (summer 2000): 194-209.

In the following essay, Gikandi examines Ngugi's role as an African public intellectual and discusses the reasons behind his decision to return to writing in English as opposed to his native Gikuyu language.

Writing has always been my way of reconnecting myself to the landscape of my birth and upbringing.

Not surprisingly the natural landscape dominates the East African literary imagination. This awareness of the land as the central actor in our lives distinguishes East African literature from others in the continent and it certainly looms large in my own writing from The River Between to Matigari.

—Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi made two powerful statements that were going to dominate the nature of his critical and cultural work in the...