I was undertaking graduate studies in linguistics at Yale University when I learnt that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o would be a member of the faculty in the Comparative Literature department. I had read Ngũgĩ widely and his writings had inspired me tremendously. When he released Petals of Blood, I read a chapter every day to my high school class before embarking on other matters. In the evenings, I would engage in deep discussions on Ngũgĩ's writings with my room-mate (the late Kaara wa Macharia who, like Ngũgĩ, had to go into exile during the crackdown on dissident intellectuals in Kenya). Later I watched the performances Ngaahika Ndeenda (I will Marry When I Want) at Kamĩrĩĩthũ and the ‘rehearsals’ of Maitũ Njugĩra (Mother, Sing for You) at the University of Nairobi.

At the peak of those difficult days of Daniel arap Moi's rule, many students of literature, history, and political science were specifically targeted by the police because they were considered to be leftist and under the tutelage of radical scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. But the students were reading on their own in study groups and drawing on the ideas of Nelson Mandela, Samora Machel, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon. During a police search in our rural home in 1982, I was accused by three police officers, who had specifically come to arrest me, of hiding and distributing copies of the Pambana underground magazine, authored by radical academics. Three hours of searching for the seditious literature in every nook and cranny did not yield fruit and the officers left our home quite frustrated. For a fortnight, they assigned a plain clothes officer to follow me wherever I went. Soon after, several of my friends were arrested and others exiled. This was after the August 1, 1982 attempted coup d'etat against the Moi regime.

Daniel arap Moi was particularly concerned about Ngũgĩ's continued stay in exile. In his Daily Nation article reproduced in this volume (Article 9), Levin Odhiambo Opiyo narrates how Moi constantly put pressure on the British Government to have Ngũgĩ repatriated, often accusing him of propaganda and planning to start a communist party in Kenya.