Kenya: ‘They Wanted to Erase My Language – I Chose to Write in It’ – Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o

Prof. Ngugi wa Thiong’o was precise with his words, and the wordsmith delicately weighed them before he let them roll off his tongue.

“My wife was raped, not sexually violated. There was penetration, and you can’t downplay that in your paper,” he told me with a chilling tone from his Nairobi Hospital bed in 2004.

The night before, the renowned author and his wife had been brutally attacked in their suite as they slept, having broken his political exile after President Kibaki’s National Rainbow…