In 1977, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was arrested without trial by the Kenyan government and imprisoned in a maximum-security jail. His crime: staging a politically radical play in Gikuyu, the language of the people rather than the colonial elite.

 He refused to abandon his language. He refused to be quiet.

Wrestling with the Devil recounts that imprisonment and his decision to stop writing in English. During his year in prison, he wrote a novel (The Devil on the Cross) in Gikuyu on toilet paper.

This memoir recounts the absurdity of authoritarian bureaucracy, the psychic negotiations of confinement, the small acts of resistance that accumulate into dignity. It is a memoir about censorship, colonial residue, state violence, and the stubbornness of literature.

A book about what it costs to insist on speaking in your own tongue. 

Paperback, very good condition.