Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Speaks: Interviews with the Kenyan Writer

Overall, the interviews reveal that Ngugi undergoes personal crises similar to those of other writers involved in opposition to the government-such as those exiled by the apartheid government in South Africa and by the megalomaniac Idi Amin in Uganda, governments notorious for wrecking writers' personal lives and driving them to depression, drunkenness, self-destruction, and abandonment of their ideological commitments. But Ngugi does not give in to despair; rather, his personal tribulations seem to energize his activism and creative endeavors in detention and exile.