An outpouring of respect - April 1994 tribute to Kenyan expatriate Ngugi wa Thiong'o to be held at Pennsylvania State University

American Visions, April-May, 1994

For three days in early April, an international roster of scholars, writers and artists will converge at Pennsylvania State University, in Schuylkill Haven, to honor 56-year-old Kenyan expatriate and New York University professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

"This is an extraordinary, though not unprecedented, outpouring for a living writer," says conference director Charles Cantalupo, a professor of English at Penn State. "No other African writer is the subject of more literary analysis. Ngugi is accomplished not only as a writer of high literary reputation, but he is also a published essayist, literary critic and writer of two children's books. . . . His works encompass history, cultural studies and politics."

Ngugi was first published as a novelist in the early 1960s. His 1964 novel, Weep Not, Child, received the first-place award for an English-language novel at the first Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, for which poet Langston Hughes was a jurist. His most recent work includes a 1993 book of essays, Moving the Centers: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, and the recently released documentary Sembene: The Making of African Cinema.

The conference will focus on writers of East Africa as well as a range of issues relevant to other African, African-American, Caribbean, Commonwealth and postcolonial writers. It includes readings by Amiri Baraka, Kamau Brathwaite, Ngugi and others; papers focusing on Ngugi's works; book displays; a film series; a performance by the Gambian griot Al-Haji Papa Bunka Susso; and an art exhibit based on Ngugi's works by Rhode Island College professor Lawrence F. Sykes.

"Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts" events are scheduled for April 7 to 9, at the Perkins Student Center on the Penn State Berks Campus.