SOURCE: Williams, Patrick. “‘Like Wounded Birds’?: Ngugi and the Intellectuals.” Yearbook in English Studies 27 (1997): 201-18.

In the following essay, Williams examines how Ngugi portrays the role of the intellectual in postcolonial Africa, comparing the representations of intellectuals in Ngugi's fiction with the works of Edward W. Said.

For many, Ngugi is perhaps the paradigmatic postcolonial intellectual: politically committed, oppositional, outspoken, activist, exiled. At the same time, though this fact is widely acknowledged, it is, arguably, surprisingly little studied, and the same may be said for his continued engagement with the figure of the intellectual in his fiction and essays. A similar and unexpected gap is observable in the area of postcolonial studies. Although the period of decolonization saw many debates about the nature and function of intellectuals in relation to anti-colonial struggles and newly-independent states, the current moment of postcolonial theory, in its ‘high’ or post-structuralist-inflected mode, has...