The ability to make language—words extend from the page…to become alive… to dance in the mind of a reader…creating vivid pictures that map time and space…weaving multiple experiences into a common tapestry of human history is an ability that only a few writers possess. It would not be a stretch to place such writers in the deep tradition passed down by generations of ancient priest, mystics, thinkers, storytellers, teachers who are often referred to as oracles. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o fits seamlessly in the long line of historical oracles who possess foresight and insight in the continuities that crisscross our human past, present, and future. Every group of people have these oracles, but to hear them…to see them is an art. We have lost the patience and humility to listen to them. These vessels of ancestors, conveyors of deep thought…channelers of truths…that provide guidance for our deep praxis of humanity. Ngũgĩ, as he is known, comes from an oral tradition of storytellers. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who sits alongside the likes of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in the modern African pantheon, he is a recurrent favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ngũgĩ’s life encompasses British colonialism and the anticolonial struggle for Kenyan independence; the tragedy of despotism in a free Africa; and exile…all of which he effortlessly weaves into his work. According to a November 16, 2016 interview in the Financial Times with Ngũgĩ , the author recounts Ngũgĩ’s reflection of winning a Nobel: “A Nobel would be validating but not essential.” Ngugi wa Thiong’o was born in 1938 a village north of Nairobi, one of 28 children. In the 1950s, his older brother, Good Wallace, joined the Mau Mau anticolonial resistance against the British occupation whose prison camps were described by the then-solicitor general as having been “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia”, according to previously secret documents released by the British Foreign Office in 2012. According to Ngũgĩ in the article: The British response to the rebellion was brutal and relentless. It even extended to weaponizing language itself” Further recalling this period, Ngũgĩ goes on in the article to say that it is was “the British who gave movement the name of Mau Mau— as if to say it was a meaningless movement”. Ngũgĩ reasons that “If they had said or called it the, ‘Land and Freedom Army’, as [the fighters] called it themselves, then they would be articulating the aims of the movement, right?” Today, I invite you to listen to a recent reflection by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Dr. Micere Githae-Mugo…on their work…The Trail of Dedan Kimathi. The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, a collaboration between Ngũgĩ and Micere Githae-Mugo, is a response to colonialist writings about the Land and Freedom Army (aka the Mau Mau movement), which traditionally depicted the movement and its leader, Dedan Kimathi, as mentally unbalanced and vicious. They choose to present a counter narrative to this image by highlighting how the movement and its leader was seen by many of the peasants and laborers of Kenya. In this reflection, they explore the politics of memory; the relationship between naming, forms of power, and resistance. Enjoy the program