The Name He Chose

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o published his first novels, including Weep Not, Child (1964), under the baptismal name James Ngugi that he had been given in a mission school. In the 1970s he rejected that name as a marker of colonial and Christian imposition, adopting Ngugi wa Thiong'o, his given Gikuyu name, and the change accompanied a broader turn in his thinking, laid out fully in the essay collection Decolonising the Mind (1986), toward writing fiction and drama first in Gikuyu rather than English, treating language itself as a site where colonialism's effects had to be undone.