Tireless pursuits of Kenya’s two great authors

Prof Ngugi Wa Thiong’o addresses journalists at a breakfast meeting in Nairobi Wednesday. RIGHT: Prof Micere Mugo gives a public lecture at Riara University Wednesday.

NAIROBI: In July 2004, when Africa’s greatest living writer returned to Kenya after 22 years in exile, his local publisher, without any sense of irony, organised his tour around the theme of ‘reviving the spirit.’

After all, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ever the public intellectual, would be touring different cities across East Africa giving lectures, restoring the place of imagination in our social and cultural development, as had happened through the heady decades of the 1960s and the 1970s.