Mukoma wa Ngugi, Mrs. Shaw (A Novel)

Summary

In 2004, the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o returned to Kenya, his homeland, after twenty-two years of political exile. The much publicized exile's return of Kenya's preeminent writer and intellectual was in part to highlight the new impetus of change happening with the election of a new government in Kenya, led by Mwai Kibaki. The election had swept away the old order of the KANU party of Arap Moi, who in 1977, had jailed Ngugi for staging a play that was critical of the government. Ngugi moved to exile in 1982 following a great threat to his life, and from exile, had remained one of the fiercest critics of the old guard that emerged from the end of colonialism in Africa. Ngugi's return to what was presumably a ‘new Kenya’ was heralded as very symbolic in amplifying the change taking place. Ngugi's arrival underpinned the new promise of a beneficial social order that would mark those new beginnings. The novelist thus returned from exile in a much publicized way, and was roaringly received. Part of Ngugi's itinerary on this journey of return included a cycle of lectures and readings from his satirical epic written originally in Gikuyu, now published as Wizard of the Crow; a satire of power that looks and skewers Kenya's political buffoonery in cracking, scatological prose. However, one night during this return, on 14 August, at his apartment at the Norfolk Towers, the novelist and his wife, Njeri, were attacked, and the consequence of that attack led to a broad scandal, theories of conspiracy, and certainly trauma, of the kind that needs expiation. It raised the question, ‘what is the meaning of return?’ for the exile separated from the homeland; forced to flee from a haunting history. Ngugi wa Thiong'o has yet to write that novel of expiation, but his son Mukoma wa Ngugi seems to have appropriated the fundamental questions raised by his father's return to Kenya and the violence that marked that return to craft a very intimate story that shares a deep correspondence with the facts of that lived experience.