Summary

In Chapter 3, Ngũgĩ states that he will focus on his experience of writing his first novel in Gikuyu, Caataani Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross) in order to address broader issues surrounding the origins and development of the African novel. Ngũgĩ recalls the last lecture he gave before his arrest on December 31, 1977. In his lecture, he announced his plan for them to do an analysis of Chinua Achebe’s novels according to their representations of the messenger class. In addition, he asked his students to read The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, and V.I. Lenin’s Imperialism, or the Highest Stage of Capital. Five days later, Ngũgĩ was in prison cell 16, which he writes would become “what Virginia Woolf had called A Room of One’s Own” (64)—provided free to him by...