If novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not a national hero, then who is?

Kenya's foremost man of letters, Ngugi wa Thiong'o. [Beverlyne Musili, Standard]

January 5, 2023, marked the 85th birthday of arguably Kenya's foremost man of letters, Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Born James Ngugi in 1938, in Kamiriithu, Kiambu County, he is Kenya and East Africa's most venerable author, with a rich literary oeuvre that spans novels, plays, short stories, essays and children's books.

In a decades-long career that first began during his time as a college student at Makerere University, Uganda (where he went for his undergraduate studies), in the early 1960s, Prof Ngugi is artistically famed for his literary...