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Ngugi Wa Thiong’O., John C. Hawley

English

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of the third of his father's four wives; he had twenty-seven siblings. The family lived in Kamiriithu Village, twelve miles northeast of Nairobi, Kenya. His father, Thiong'o wa Nducu, was a peasant farmer dispossessed by the British Imperial Land Act of 1915 and therefore forced to become a squatter on property meted out to one of the few native Africans who had profited from the act. His father's condition was similar to that of most of the Kikuyu with whom Ngũgĩ grew up.