Posts featuring Micere Githae Mugo

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Nairobi, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on the literary scene, including literary festivals and debates about educational reforms. From a readathon in Kenya to the Struga Poetry Evenings in North Macedonia, read on to find out more!

Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia

The greatest literary event in North Macedonia, the Struga Poetry Evenings (SPE), began yesterday with the customary reading of T’ga za jug (Longing for the South), an iconic poem by the first modern Macedonian poet, Konstantin Miladinov. The first event of this year’s festival was the planting of a tree in Poetry Park to honor this year’s laureate and recipient of the Golden Wreath, Vlada Urošević. Previous recipients of this award include W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, and Ted Hughes, as SPE broadened its scope from national to international literature in 1966. READ MORE…

His Defiance: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Struggle for an Independent African Literature

These words cannot just exist in a vacuum; they provoke reactions that demand political change.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born 5 January, 1938 in Limuru, Kenya and is a perennial favourite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngũgĩ is at the forefront of a war of resistance regarding the use of language that has spanned many decades. He advocates that African writers write in their mother tongues, because he understands how integral language is to a culture and its identity. Since African literature is mostly written in languages of the minority, the language of the colonizers, Ngũgĩ asserts that this choice stifles the imagination of Africans and their propensity to be creative.

Nearly fifty years ago, Ngũgĩ wrote his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), the first written in English by an Eastern African. Ngaahika Ndeenda (1977), translated as I Will Marry When I Want, was co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii. It is a play that depicts the injustices and excesses of post-colonial Kenya. It was acted by “non-intellectuals” in an open-air theater at the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Center, Limuru. Ngũgĩ’s Gikuyu play sought to bring the theatre closer to the masses and encourage the audience to interact with the play. The play appealed to a wide audience and, because of the resultant reaction by people, the Kenyan government threw Ngũgĩ in prison for a year.

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