Reverberations: How Ngugi Lives On

Call for Submissions: Reverberations Library Exhibit

We invite UCI students (undergrad, MA or PhD) to submit work for a Library Exhibit that engages with key themes in the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who was Professor of Comparative Literature and English as well as the founding Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UCI.

Students should submit their work here by December 10. A committee will select a sample for display through the UCI Library’s Student Display Program to be staged in Winter Quarter 2026.

The work can be in a variety of formats: print materials including short-form essays, poems, or short plays, visual art (video, painting, photography etc.), sculptures, digital materials (e.g. reframed humanitarian appeals), etc. These may be class-based assignments or undertaken independently.

Themes can include:

decolonizing the mind
writing and translating in Indigenous languages
reversing the lens on humanitarianism (“who give to whom”)
African Renaissance

Students are also encouraged to attend a 2-day event celebrating Ngugi on November 13 and 14. Speakers will include scholars of Ngugi’s work, family members, and a number of colleagues who worked alongside Ngugi. There will also be readings of Ngugi’s “The Upright Revolution”, and a screening of a documentary made in 2014, when Ngugi’s play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi was staged at UCI. Africa’s music and dances closes the event.

"Dawn of Darkness" by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi read his poem "Dawn of Darkness" to the graduating Comp Lit seniors in 2020.

Quotes from Ngugi

“Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is.” (Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas)
“Translation is the language of languages. It opens the gates of national and linguistic prisons.” (Globalectics)
“Education policies should be devised on the basis that all languages are treasuries of history, beauty and possibility. They have something to give to one another if their relationship is that of the give-and-take of a network. Even if one of the languages emerges as the language of communication across many languages, it should not be so on the basis of its assumed inherent nationality or globality, but on the basis of need and necessity. And even then, it should not grow on the graveyard of other languages.” (Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas)
“At the International Center for Writing and Translation (ICWT), we borrowed for an inspirational motto a line from Aimé Césaire’s book Discourse and Colonialism, where he says that culture contact is the oxygen of civilization.’ By enabling cultural contact and exchange, translation as conversation becomes a civilizing agency in the globe.” (The Language of Languages)
"The cruel genius of colonialism was to turn normality into abnormality and then make the colonized accept the abnormality as the real norm [. ..]. The moment we lost our languages was also the moment we lost our bodies, our gold, diamonds, copper, coffee, tea. The moment we accepted (or made to accept) that we could not do things with our languages was the moment we accepted that we could not make things with our vast resources.” (The Language of Languages)
When you make a child not learn literature which has images which reflect his own world, you are destroying that child, because you are making that child look at the world through images that often distort that world, or that make that world absent. In other words, his world does not exist. He will identify with the world that seems to exist, and it is a world that is often in conflict with the actual, real images he himself had formed about his own world and the world around him. It is a process of alienation. You make children uncomfortable with what is around them. About themselves." (“Ngugi: In His Own Words”)
“Art anticipates a new world. Revolutionary forces in society are always anticipating that world. But once a state, even a revolutionary state, comes to power, the very nature of the state is to hold back." (“Ngugi wa Thiongo: Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams: An Interview.”)

Reverberations: How Ngugi Lives On

Call for Submissions: Reverberations Library Exhibit

Call for Submissions

Quotes from Ngugi

Contact Comparative Literature

Subscribe to our newsletter