Ngũgĩ Weep Not, Child

About Weep Not, Child

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first novel published in English by an East African writer and remains one of the most important fictional accounts of the Mau Mau uprising — the Kenyan anti-colonial revolt of the 1950s. Following Njoroge, a young Kikuyu boy whose family is torn apart by the Emergency, the novel traces the destruction of his faith in education and in God by the reality of colonial power. Ngũgĩ wrote it at Makerere University drawing on his own Limuru childhood. It belongs to the tradition that Achebe's Things Fall Apart had inaugurated — the African novel of colonialism and resistance — applied to the East African experience. Ngũgĩ's subsequent novels A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) deepen and extend the same project.