Kenya’s foremost literature giant Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is ailing in the US amidst a bitter divorce from his second wife Njeeri.
That Ngũgĩ is sick, lonely and divorced has been brought to light by a heartbreaking story that has been published by the Guardian.
The story follows an interview that Carey Baraka of the Guardian conducted during a three-day visit to Ngũgĩ in the US.
According to the report in the Guardian, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is currently relying on caregivers to get by.
“We were interrupted by the doorbell. Two people came in: they were there to do his cleaning, cooking and shopping. In a few hours, he told me, a health aide would come to check his vitals,” Baraka wrote in the Guardian story.
The story went on;
“As Ngũgĩ has grown older, his health has deteriorated. In 1995, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which he survived, despite a grim medical forecast that gave him three months to live.
In December 2019, he underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Around the same period he began to suffer from kidney failure, the same condition that killed one of his brothers.
By the time I visited, he wasn’t able to leave the house much, apart from his three dialysis appointments each week. “I can’t move now because of my illness. You have to come to me. I’m the king,” he said.”
Baraka continued in part, revealing that Ngũgĩ might be suffering the onset of dementia too:
“He walked to the dining table, his gait slow and careful. Ngũgĩ has made peace with the physical difficulties of growing old, but he has not gotten used to the memory lapses. “Sometimes it frightens me when this happens,” he said, “and I think: “This is it.”
On his divorce, Baraka narrated that it was Ngũgĩ who made the revelation. “He said, ‘I know I look like a bachelor, but I’m not.'” Baraka reported in the Guardian.
“He and his wife were going through a divorce. Before the two of them separated, they lived in University Hills, a part of Irvine where a lot of university faculty stay, near the beach.
He’d drive out to look at the Pacific Ocean often. His most recent book, The Perfect Nine, came to him during one of those drives.
But then he’d moved out, and now he was bereft of the smell and sight of the ocean that had inspired his writing, living alone, far from the beach, unable to drive.”
