Wrestling with the Devil

A Prison Memoir

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

An unforgettable chronicle of the year the brilliant novelist and memoirist, long favored for the Nobel Prize, was thrown in a Kenyan jail without charge

“One of the greatest writers of our time.” —Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Wrestling with the Devil, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s powerful prison memoir, begins literally half an hour before his release on December 12, 1978. In one extended flashback he recalls the night, a year earlier, when armed police pulled him from his home and jailed him in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison, one of the largest in Africa. There, he lives in a prison block with eighteen other political prisoners, quarantined from the general prison population.

In a conscious effort to fight back the humiliation and the intended degradation of the spirit, Ngũgĩ—the world-renowned author of Weep Not, Child; Petals of Blood; and Wizard of the Crow—decides to write a novel on toilet paper, the only paper to which he has access, a book that will become his classic, Devil on the Cross.

Written in the early 1980s and never before published in America, Wrestling with the Devil is Ngũgĩ’s account of the drama and the challenges of writing fiction under twenty-four-hour surveillance. He captures not only the excruciating pain that comes from being cut off from his wife and children, but also the spirit of defiance that defines hope. Ultimately, Wrestling with the Devil is a testimony to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement, which is truly the story of all art.

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Praise

“This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. . . . I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] masterly work. . . . Through this incredibly vivid account, one can learn much about Kenyan colonial and postcolonial history. For all readers who want to understand better issues of injustice.”

—Library Journal (starred review)

“Engrossing . . . At once exhilarating and defiant, [Ngũg&#297] wa Thiong’o’s memoir is a thought provoking document of a grim time in Kenyan history.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Long after the Kenyatta tyranny, the author refocuses the narrative so that it is less about the specifics of abuses suffered under that regime and more about sustaining the spirit of resistance while subjected to years of incarceration. . . . Four decades after the imprisonment detailed here, the issues remain fresh.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Wrestling with the Devil is a powerful testament to the courage of Ngũg&#297 and his fellow prisoners and validation of the hope that an independent Kenya would eventually emerge.”

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With elegant prose and compelling arguments, this is highly recommended.”

—Booklist

“The Ngũg&#297 of Wrestling with the Devil called not just for adding a bit of color to the canon’s sagging shelf, but for abolition and upheaval.”

—Bookforum

News and Reviews

Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review

This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. . . . I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence.