This was the start of his proud exhibition of his mother tongue, even addressing a global UN conference in Gikuyu last year.
BY 1966, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o had written his second novel and was working on his third – all in English – but an incident in a New York meeting where he was to be recognised changed the course of his life.
An Italian panellist on stage made a comment to the effect that Italian was unlike “those Bantu languages with only one or two words in their vocabulary”.
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