Kenya Fiction

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong ’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree” written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written while a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form. Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States—Ngũgĩ’s characters include women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society, big men in their Bentleys and Mercedes who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad, but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure. Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.