Kenya’s most famous writer and literature export Ngugi Wa Thiongo used to physically abuse his first wife Nyambura, his son Mukoma has disclosed.
“My father physically abused my late mother – he would beat her up,” Mukoma has said in a Facebook post.
“Some of my earliest memories are me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge. But with that said it is the silencing of who she was that gets me,” he said.
Ngugi held a traditional marriage Nyambura in 1987. The two went on to have six children: Thiong’o, Kimunya, Nduchu, Mukoma, Wanjiku and Njoki.
Apart from Kimunya, an economics graduate from the University of Nairobi, the rest attended US universities. All his children are working, in the US and different African countries.
Ngugi’s first marriage however collapsed due to detentions and exiles orchestrated by both Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Moi. Nyambura died in 1995 and Thiong’o couldn’t attend funeral as he was in exile in the United States.
He then married Njeri who already had a daughter from a previous relationship with an African-America partner.
The couple went on to have two children before separating last year.
Ngugi, 86, 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.
Njeri 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.
