Palmost fifteen years. This is the time it took to have the chance to read in French the translation of the memoirs of the Kenyan intellectual living in the United States Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Recognized internationally – especially for its essay Decolonizing the Mindpublished in 1986 in the English-speaking field and published in France in 2011 -, this literary giant born in 1938, former professor at the universities of Yale, New York and California in Irvine, passes modes and postures with the same care of transmission – languages in particular.
“These memoirs were indelible in my mind… It was above all for my last two children, born in the United States, that I wrote them. They had to be able to know, to be able to read my childhood. At the height of his 84 years, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o…