Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Latin America

Ngg wa Thiong'o (1938Thiong'o ( -2025) ) has gone down in history as one of the greatest literary Pan-Africanists in modern times.Beyond that, he is one of Africa's most consequential authors in Latin America. 1 Nearly all of his works are translated into Spanish, making them accessible to a Hispanic Latin American market that shares much with Africa but is largely disconnected from the latter by linguistic barriers (among other factors).Ngg is thus a rare exception given the relatively low traffic of creative texts between Africa and Latin America.Most of the translations of African literature are done by Spanish scholars-translators in a context where the enthusiasm for and reception of African literature leave much to be desired.Marta-Sofia Rodriguez Lopez, who has translated major works by Chinua Achebe and Ngg wa Thiong'o in Spanish asserts that in Spain "People are unaware, or not very conscious, of the existence of a vast and rich African culture.Africa is associated with misery, poverty and illiteracy.It seems to me that, to a large extent, we can therefore speak of simple ignorance" (2014, 243).However, apart from the growing interest for African literature in Spain, these translations are beginning to find critical readership among Latino scholars in the USA but most importantly among engaged readers in Latin America.In the latter case, African literature is not only gaining increasing interest among the literati, its readership is growing most especially among Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples who can relate with the major deconstructive and decolonial potentials of that literature.In this contribution, I examine zones of intersection between Ngg's works and Latin American historical context as reasons why the Kenyan author's works will continue to arouse the interest of Latin American readers on a wide gamut of issues.Ngg's works resonate across spaces where unequal power relations have led to systemic dispossession and where formerly colonized peoples are engaged in a quest to articulate their worldviews in their language, both strictly and symbolically speaking.That is exactly where Latin America and Africa become bedfellows in Ngg's imagination due to their dramatic and largely tragic entries into Western modernity.In the history of cultural encounters, "America" stands as a space where metaphor tragically embraced reality, shaping contemporary social