‘Growing up surrounded by books was the pull to the written word’

It is a rare feat to have members of same family engage in professional writing. As a matter of fact, the Ngugis have scored a first for Africa.

So far, Ngugi wa Thiong’o says, in different combinations, he and his children have appeared for readings in Jamaica, Florida and Atlanta in the US and London. In Jamaica, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Wanjiku wa Ngugi and their father read to a crowd of some 3,000.

Ngugi’s lectures and readings in Nairobi this week have sold out, as happened at Kenyatta University on Wednesday and Thursday at Alliance High School.

For comparison, it is only the American family of Stephen King that competes with the Ngugis. In King’s immediate family, only one member is not a professional writer.

The rest, including King’s wife, his two sons and his daughter-in-law have all published books. Hailed as the “first family of letters,” they consider writing aas “family business.”

“As children, Naomi King, Joe Hill, and Owen King passed the time by reading books out loud to their father and each other, discussing literature, critiquing each other’s work, and playing storytelling games,” says a report on the family in the online journal, newser.com.

“Joe, at the ripe old age of 11, started writing two hours every single day (weekends and holidays included), just like his dad. Even daughter-in-law Kelly Braffet, who married Owen, grew up an obsessive Stephen King fan.”

Ngugi’s children credit their growing up surrounded by books as the initial pull towards the written word, and all have evolved at different stages, and published in different locations of the world. Tee Ngugi and Nducu wa Ngugi have been published by East African Educational Publishers, the local publisher of their father, while Mukoma has been published in Harare, South Africa and Nairobi.

Nairobi Heat has since been translated into German and a Hollywood producer is working on a film based on the novel.

Besides writing fiction, Nducu is a teacher based in New York, while their sister Wanjiku, recently relocated from Finland to the US, where she is scheduled to embark on graduate studies in creative writing at the University of Houston. Tee is a communications coordinator with a Nairobi-based non-governmental organisation in Nairobi.

While approving of their language choice, the patriarch says his children, and so many Africans writing in English, are part of the metaphysical empire that continues to grow by leaps and bounds, even as African languages wither on the periphery of world languages.

But Ngugi also seems to have modified his 1977 pronouncement that he had bid English goodbye, pledging from then, “it would be Gikuyu all the way.”

Instead, he says that’s a task he will conduct for his fiction only, and that he would continue to produce his academic writing, as well as non-fiction, in the wider circulating English language.