At home in the central highlands, Gikuyu was not just a language; it was our essence. It held our proverbs, our music, our prayers, our ancestral logic. English, by contrast, was suspect.

In later years he was busy restoring his early works into Gikuyu, from the English language, which he bid farewell to in 1977, opting rather to write in his indigenous tongue.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST: Ngugi wa Thiong'o went to jail for writing a play in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. During his year in prison, he wrote his first novel on toilet paper. Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Kenya's ...