John Thieme
Monochrome Morality
The publication of East Africa’s most famous writer’s first novel in nearly two decades is inevitably a landmark event in the history of African publishing. Additionally, Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow is a huge and highly ambitious book, a work that weighs in at more than a quarter of a million words. So, given his talent for incisive social and political commentary, one might expect this doorstopper of a novel to provide some kind of definitive fictional statement on the contemporary Condition of Africa.
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