In 2010, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o authorized me to document his life and work in form of a documentary film. Looking at his life and his intellectual biography provides a window into an understanding of the major debates on African languages and literatures, the role of writers and intellectuals in political, social, and cultural transformation, on colonialism and decolonization, on the pain and melancholy of exile, diasporic privileges and displacements, and on the memory of the colonized. It is instructive that Ngũgĩ turned 80 when his country, Kenya, was celebrating 55 years of political independence. The coincidence is insightful because Ngũgĩ's biography and intellectual career are emblematic of Kenya's complex process of becoming a nation, its political and cultural challenges, as well as its intellectual history. His biography provides revealing insights about the deployment of memory, and the role of memory in the evolution of the African nation states, allowing us to evaluate the relationship between the state and the African memory project. If the process of becoming of most African nation states continues to been defined by an unofficial program of forgetting, Ngũgĩ's biography invites the public to resist the urge to forget—rather to re-member.

This documentary project is motivated by a belief that the preservation of memories and experiences through visual and audio technology has a number of advantages over written materials: it enables representation and subsequent preservation of raw voices. While the objective is to produce a feature film documentary on Ngũgĩ, all the footage captured during the production process will be thematically archived in an open access repository. For more than half a century, he has been an eloquent voice championing human rights and a leader in global cultural criticism and political activism. Because of his longevity, Ngũgĩ's life and writings connect readers to an East African history that they only read in history books. In the following discussion, I organize my reflection on Ngũgĩ's life and his works around four distinct stages.

Phase I—Growing Up (1938–1959)

Born on January 5, 1938, Ngũgĩ grew up during the most violent period in Kenya's history, and came of age at the end of British occupation in East Africa.

This started as a work of commemoration and celebration. The two of us had been working on Ngũgĩ's works for many years from different directions— Simon Gikandi as a literary critic and historian; Ndirangu Wachanga as a journalist and documentarist. In the course of our lives and work, we had had many encounters with Ngũgĩ and knew him well in different contexts. On January 5, 2018, the author, one of the most eminent writers to have come out of Africa in the modern period, would be celebrating his 80th birthday. We thought it would be a good occasion to reflect on Ngũgĩ's life in writing, and to think through his work from the perspective of those who had known him either personally or through reading and commenting on his texts. Our goal was to put together a collection of short essays, poems, and stories that reflect on the life of the writer, his world, and his works. We were particularly interested in imaginative pieces that would reveal the different, and sometimes complex, layers that had gone into the making of the writer; and we wanted to go beyond his well-established institutional image and to probe how what might initially have appeared to be minor episodes in his life provided vistas into his coming into being as a writer, as an intellectual of decolonization, and a major figure in conversations about human rights and justice in the long twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. We were also interested in Ngũgĩ's role outside the academy in the world of education, the mass media, community theater, and activism, places where we had encountered him many times. The works collected here are reflections of this desire to celebrate the writer in his prime.

The story of Ngũgĩ's life and its intersection between his experiences and education is well known. His interviews over the years, and his memoirs in late career, have given us a complex image of the writer in his various iterations; but what we see in this collection is both an extension and complication of this well-established narrative. Ngũgĩ means different things to different people, but one of the themes running through the collection is how he is both rooted in a very specific Gĩkũyũ and Kenyan realm from which he has spread his wings to the world.