Prof. Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, son of internationally renowned Kenyan author and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, recounts past years when his father used to physically abuse his mother, the late Nyambura, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’os first wife.
Prof. Mũkoma says his early memories are full of days when he could visit his assaulted mum at his grandmother’s, where she would seek refuge.
“My father Ngugi Wa Thiongo physically abused my late mother. He would beat her up. Some of my earliest memories are me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge. But with that said it is the silencing of who she was that gets me,” the author says.
Not much is known about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’os first wife Nyambura, who died in 1996. The two were blessed with six children, Prof. Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ being one of them.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remarried and has since divorced his second wife Njeeri, a woman he met in the US while in exile. Details of the writer’s second marriage and divorce also remain scanty in what long looked like a perfect marriage between the 86-year-old scholar and Njeeri.
