If you're a Bahamian nationalist, a Caribbeannest, a pan-Africanist, or just someone who doesn't believe everything that you see on TV or hear on the radio, you ought to be reading Ngugi wa Thiong'o.Ngugi is the reason I decided, decades ago, to begin writing plays. Ngugi, who was originally christened James in the colonial Kenya of the early 20th century, was once a novelist himself -- one of the greatest in all Africa. When Achebe ruled the west coast, Ngugi ruled the east. He was a Marxist, a Kenyan nationalist, and, during the war of liberation (otherwise known in the empire as the Mau-Mau Rebellion), chose to reject his Christian name in favour of the Gikuyu Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote four great novels in English, and then decided two things: one, that he would no longer write in the colonizer's language, and switched to Gikuyu, and then that he would no longer write novels, because the masses of people he was trying to reach inhabited an oral society, and theatre would reach more of them than novels.He impressed me, and I began writing plays.Now, after over 20 years, Ngugi has written another novel. And it's available in English. And it's been featured over at the LitBlog Co-Op, here, over the past month or so.