20th March, 2024
By Nehru Odeh
Mukoma Wa Ngugi, writer, poet and Associate Professor of Literature at Cornell University has taken to his Facebook page to lampoon trolls who berate him for saying his father, Ngugi Thiong O physically abused his mother Nyambura and silenced her in order to erase her from his story.
Mukoma said it’s not their business, if he said so, because the 86-year-old Ngugi, famous writer of Weep Not Child, who is currently suffering from kidney failure and is on dialysis three times a week, is not their father. And he likened their vituperations to crying more than the bereaved.
Akin to the popular Biblical story about the rebuke Moses got from his fellow Hebrews before he confronted Pharoah, the King of Egypt, Mukoma stopped short of asking the critics who made them a judge over him.
In a very cryptic message posted on his Facebook page recently, Mukoma said:
“I understand why relatives are upset with me saying my father physically beat up my mother – it is their business as well and I can see how they would see I outed them without their consent.. Also same with my father’s friends or scholars and readers of his work.
“What I cannot stand are the people saying I lied or close friends who will not to talk to me – who are wounded as if I spoke about their father. WTF? Just because we are friends does not mean my father or mother adopted you to make us siblings. Really, WTF is this now?”
Recall that Mukoma took to his X handle on Tuesday 12 March to call out his father Ngugi whom he accused of physically abusing his mother and erasing her out of his story.
Mukoma, 53, shared a newspaper article about his mother and wrote: “My father @NgugiWaThiongo 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. Ok- I have said it.”
Still, this is not the first time Mukoma is making such a sordid revelation about his 86-year-old father, who is currently suffering from kidney failure, recently had a surgery and living alone under the care of medical personnel at his house in California, US.
In 2022, Mukoma wrote on Twitter about how his father systematically erased his mother from his story
“It hurts to see my late mother, Nyambura (my daughter is named after her) being systemically erased from the @NgugiWaThiongo_ story. We literally (of course) and figuratively would not be here if it was not for her keeping us glued together through the political persecutions,” Mukoma said.