Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ (born 1971) is a Kenyan American poet, author, and academic. He is associate professor of literatures in English at Cornell University and co-founder of the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Writing. His father is the author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His family was deeply impacted by the British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution.

Early life and education Mũkoma was born in 1971 in Evanston, Illinois, US, but raised in Kenya, before returning to the United States for his university education. He holds a BA degree in political science from Albright College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he specialized in how questions of authorized and unauthorized English, or standard and non-standard English, influenced literary aesthetics in Romantic Britain and Independence-Era Africa.

Career Mũkoma is an associate professor of English at Cornell University. Hurling Words at Consciousness (poetry, Africa World Press, 2006) and Nairobi Heat (novel, 2009). His most recent book is The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership (2018).

His short story "How Kamau Wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile" was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2009 and is included in the anthology Work in Progress - And Other Stories (Caine Prize: Annual Prize for African Writing) (New Internationalist, 2009). His work was also shortlisted for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing.

He has published poems in Tin House Magazine, Chimurenga, Brick magazine, Smartish Pace, and Teeth in the Wind, One Hundred Days (Barque Press); New Black Writing (John Wiley and Sons); Réflexions sur le Génocide rwandais/Ten Years Later: Reflections on the Rwandan Genocide (L'Harmattan). Some of his poems have been archived on Badilisha Poetry X-Change.

Political opinions and activism Mũkoma is a columnist for BBC Focus on Africa magazine and former co-editor of Pambazuka News.

In a 2013 The Guardian piece, he argued that the destruction of the Islamic Courts Union during the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was the cause for Al-Shabaab's rise and the later Westgate mall attack.

With two Cornell graduate students, Sriram Parasurama and Momodou Taal, who holds UK and Gambian citizenship, Mũkoma is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to block the enforcement of executive orders by President Donald Trump through deportation of foreign students and staff in higher education who were involved in pro-Palestinian protests.

Personal life In March 2024, Mũkoma posted on Twitter that his father Ngũgĩ had physically abused his mother, now deceased.

Books

Killing Sahara – novel (Kwela Books, 2013),