Ngugi wa Thiong’o's ‘Wizard of the Crow’
Stella Cho | Oct 30, 2006 | Comments 0
On Thursday, Oct. 27, the UC Irvine Bookstore celebrated the English translation of Ngugi wa Thiong’o's 768-page novel ‘Wizard of the Crow,’ a political satire originally written in Gikuyu, Thiong’o's native language.
Ngugi, head of the International Center for Writing and Translation, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCI and an honorable member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, is a politically active Kenyan writer.
Most of Ngugi’s works concentrate on issues of colonialism, postcolonialism and modernity.
‘[I want to] examine Africa and global forces that are shaping it,’ Ngugi said. ‘The 20th-century dictatorship is special because it is sponsored by Western democracies in struggles of world wars. In essence of function like Western democracies, what is taken out of the bottle cannot be pushed back. A dictatorship is really a tragedy that manifests in a comedy. [In the story] the dictator builds himself up to be like God. [By bringing] out his absurdity
Popularity: unranked [?]
Filed Under: Features
