Paperback: 158 pages
Publisher: James Currey, 2013

In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers and Empire

This collection of essays reflect Ngugi’s continuing interests and enthusiasms. His choice of writers is original, making 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.

REVIEWS

This is vintage Ngugi, 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

This collection is various and wide-ranging. Above all it is demonstrably the product of a mind which has remained determinedly open and receptive to the ideas and fortunes of contemporaries, throughout the turbulent years of his own misfortunes and triumphs.
—Keith Sambrook