In the Name of the Mother

Ngøgð wa Thiong’o

• Publisher: East African Educational Publishers
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9789914310030
• Subtopic: African Literature
• Index: Literature

'This is vintage Ngüg?, plain-spoken, intensely committed, and passionate about the values of freedom and struggle in which he still profoundly believes.' – Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford. Renowned worldwide, as novelist and dramatist, Ngüg? wa Thiongo's contributions to the body of critical writing on African literature, politics and society have been highly significant. His best known critical work is Decolonising the Mind, which since publication in 1986 has profoundly influenced other writers, critics, scholars and students. These latest essays reflect Ngügi's continuing interests enthusiasms. His choice of writers is original. He makes us look again at their novels to address his lifelong concerns with the ways to independence, the meanings of colonialism and the takeover by neo-colonialism, and the functions of literature in political as well as literary terms. They will appeal not only to his international band of supporters. They will also introduce his views to young people discovering African and Caribbean literature.

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half-title
• Previously published by James Currey
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Preface
• Birth of a Literature | Heinemann, African Writers Series & I
• In the Name of the Mother | Lamming & the cultural significance of ‘mother country’ in the decolonisation process
• Freeing the Imagination | Lamming’s aesthetics of decolonisation
• Nation in the Underground | Alex la Guma’s In the Fog of the Seasons’ End
• Dialectics of Hope | Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood
• Voices & Icons | The neocolonial in emergent African cinema
• Birth of a Nation | Narrating the National Questionin Pepetela’s Mayombe
• Orature, Class Struggle & Nationalism | Vieiera’s Luuanda & The Real Life of Domingos Xavier
• Writing a National Agender | Patriarchy as domestic colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
• Index
• Back cover