Kenya’s most famous writer and literature export Ngugi Wa Thiongo is currently living alone, sick, lonely and undergoing a bitter divorce with his wife Njeeri.
Ngugi, 85 is currently ailing from kidney failure is living alone and under the care of medical personnel at his house in California, US. He has to undergo kidney dialysis three times a week and he recently had surgery.
The author has already moved out of the house she shared with Njeeri at University Hills in Irvine, Carlifornia and is now living alone and unable to take care of himself.
Ngugi has has nine children – six from his first wife Nyambura and three with Njeeri.
Njeeri is the director Human Resource Faculty and Staff Conflict Resolution Services at the University of California, Irvine, where Ngugi is a Distinguished Professor, the Comparative Literature School of Humanities.
In 2004, Njeeri who had just returned to Kenya with her husband for the first time after 22 years in exile was raped after robbers broke into their apartment in Nairobi. Asked if he regretted returning from the US, Ngugi said: “I am a Kenyan, this is my country for better or for worse.”
“It’s for me and everybody else to make it a Kenya that it can be.”
Ngugi’s politically charged writing led to his arrest in 1977 and he spent a year in detention without trial. In 1982 he went into self-imposed exile in London, and then took up residence in the United States where he taught comparative literature.
After his novel, Petals of Blood, which was written in 1977, he gave up writing in English to write in Kikuyu.
Since then he has remained in the US and has only come to Kenya once.
