Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ

“So to now be able to go back as writers – we are not going back because of anything negative, we are going back to celebrate writing and to celebrate each other’s writing”

“for a very long time home had become a place of negativity”

“I want to work with an aesthetics that is not afraid of the political”

“I don’t want to write fiction that doesn’t say anything”

“African literature doesn’t have to be one thing; allow it to flourish in many different forms”

“I also have a very hard time with the divide of high and low culture”

“African writers are trying to tell a good story that Americans are appreciating more and more, and appreciating its diversity and cross genre aesthetics – and that is a good thing”

“I think there is more awareness that violence and civil war are not far behind flaring ethnic tensions”

“Ethnicity has become a weapon in the hands of Kenyan and African politicians that they deploy when they need votes”

“To me ‘home’ are the places I feel a need to fight in order to make them better.”

“There are various levels of home and what it means”

“I have grown up believing that anything is possible and I think in large part because of my father”

“Freedom can only be a word amidst debilitating poverty”

“we have to be wary about people who promise a single solution for the continent”

“a course in contemporary American literature should carry literatures by immigrants as well.”

“literature should show just how interconnected we are and not be used as a barrier between communities”

“even within American literature there has been constant debate as to what constitutes American literature”

“To erase a border, you have to acknowledge it stands in your way first”

“I am not afraid to air my dirty linen in public, for how else shall I get it clean”

“Why should, and to me this is the idiocy of leadership, one person feel that only he has the ability to lead a country of millions?”