Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Tribute Evening
Posted in Announcements
November 18, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET
Location: Copley Formal Lounge
Join the Lannan Center for a special event honoring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, featuring writers Mukoma wa Ngugi, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and Helon Habila. Moderated by Lannan Visiting Lecturer Tope Folarin. This event is cosponsored by the African Studies Program.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made by November 11th to lannan@georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests made after November 11th.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) was an award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist from Kenya whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. Born in 1938, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986).