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2 books match the query 'wa Thiong’o, Ngugi'

cover of Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe

Secure the Base

Making Africa Visible in the Globe

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Seagull Books, 2016

The first comprehensive collection of Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's nonfiction, spanning lectures and texts on colonialism, labor and political struggles, and the legacies of slavery. 
 
For more than sixty years, Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o has been fearlessly writing about the questions, challenges, histories, and futures of Africans, particularly those of his homeland, Kenya. In his work, which has included plays, novels, and essays, Ngũgĩ narrates the injustice of colonial violence and the dictatorial betrayal of decolonization, the fight for freedom and subsequent incarceration, and the aspiration toward economic equality in the face of gross inequality. With both hope and disappointment, he questions the role of language in both the organization of power structures and the pursuit of autonomy and self-expression.

Ngũgĩ's fiction has been met with wide acclaim, but his nonfiction work, while equally brilliant, is more difficult to find. Secure the Base changes this by bringing together for the first time essays spanning nearly three decades. Originating as disparate lectures and texts, this complete volume will remind readers anew of Ngũgĩ's power and importance. Written in a personal and accessible style, the book covers a range of issues, including the role of the intellectual, the place of Asia in Africa, labor and political struggles in an era of rampant capitalism, and the legacies of slavery and prospects for peace. At a time when Africa looms large in our discussions of globalization, Secure the Base is mandatory reading.
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cover of The Language of Languages

The Language of Languages

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Seagull Books, 2023

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.

Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the forefront of world literature for decades. He has also been, in his own words, “a language warrior,” fighting for indigenous African languages to find their rightful place in the literary world. Having begun his writing career in English, Ngũgĩ shifted to writing in his native language Gikũyũ in 1977, a stance both creatively and politically significant. For decades now, Ngũgĩ has been translating his Gikũyũ works into English himself, and he has used many platforms to champion the practice and cause of literary translations, which he calls “the language of languages.”
 
This volume brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades. Here we find Ngũgĩ discussing translation as a conversation between cultures, proposing that dialogue among African languages is the way to unify African peoples, reflecting on the complexities of auto-translation or translating one’s own work, exploring the essential task translation performed in the history of the propagation of thought, and pleading for the hierarchy of languages to be torn down. He also shares his many experiences of writing across languages, including his story The Upright Revolution, which has been translated into more than a hundred languages around the globe and is the most widely translated text written by an African author. 

At a time when dialogues between cultures and peoples are more essential than ever, The Language of Languages makes an outspoken case for the value of literature without borders.
 

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