This was a book that I resisted writing for both personal and intellectual reasons. Although separated by a generation, Ngugi and I share a common colonial and postcolonial background, one whose most defining characteristics are the “state of emergency” declared by the British government in Kenya in 1952, the euphoria of independence in the 1960s, the emergence of the student democratic movement at the University of Nairobi in the 1970s, and the consolidation of the undemocratic postcolonial state in the 1980s. Given this background, I felt, for a long time, that I did not have enough distance from Ngugi's works to be able to develop the kind of systematic critique of his works that I wanted. At the same time, however, I felt that more than any other African writer Ngugi needed the kind of sustained critique that would take his readers beyond the simple politics of identity that have come to dominate so much postcolonial theory and criticism.

At a time when postcolonial theory seems to have lost interest in local knowledge, history, and context, I thought a critique of Ngugi's works was an ideal way of bringing the referent back into literary studies. But once I had decided to write a book that would foreground how a specifically African context weaves its way into Ngugi's texts, I was confronted with a serious theoretical problem: does an insider's knowledge of the conditions in which works are produced help or deter critique? In writing this book I have tried as much as possible to eschew the role of the native informant.