People tell you judging books by their covers is a no-no. Just as dubious, I found when waiting to meet Ngugi wa Thiong’o, is to judge an author by his words. Thinking over the storyline of his current novel, Wizard of the Crow (Pantheon, 2006; $30) — a near-800 page epic that interweaves political satire, African mysticism, and global commentary upon a fictional landscape that shifts from the urban center to the rural countryside to the heavens above with graceful ease — I expected Ngugi (pronounced GOO-ghee) to be a giant of a man. I assumed his actual voice, much the same as his literary tone, would leap at me with ferocious power. So, when he greets me in his hotel lobby, leading me to the elevator, his figure towering to a statuesque 5’6”, his voice as forceful as a lightly tapped xylophone, I’m silenced as he smiles a radiant grin.

That quiescence is akin to what I experienced when reading about Ngugi’s life. Born in Kenya in 1938 during British colonial rule, he displayed an early talent for writing drama and fiction. But those works were written in English. Realizing, in his 30s, that “language is not simply an arrangement of sounds” but the “people who speak it,” he began crafting works in his native tongue, Gikuyu. Unfortunately, that language was deemed illegal by Kenya’s dictatorial president, Daniel Arap Moi. As Ngugi’s works became increasingly critical of injustices in Kenyan society, he was arrested by the state and tossed, without charge, in a maximum-security prison. There, he wrote a novel. On toilet paper.

An international hue and cry led to his release, but while in Britain promoting that very book, he was informed the Moi regime had plans to re-arrest, possibly even murder, him if he returned to Kenya. He remained in Britain for some years, then moved to the United States in 1989, his criticism of his homeland’s corruption never languishing. Continuing to write in Gikuyu, he, over the course of several years, constructed what would be called in English Wizard of the Crow. Returning to Kenya in 2004 to promote the Gikuyu version, he found that danger still awaited him: Days after his arrival, both he and his wife were brutally attacked.

Upstairs, in his hotel room, with the white noise of downtown traffic shuttling by stories below, Ngugi recalls the terror he and his wife faced that night and comments on mass media’s stereotypes of Africa, the strength of African women, and the travesties wrought by globalization.

Real Change: So you wrote Wizard of the Crow in California and then you traveled to Kenya for the first time in 20 years. How was it to go back?

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: It was glorious. And also gory. Glorious in the sense that it was really wonderful for me to go back to Kenya, after leaving there. It was good to be back with my wife and children, who were born in exile. It was good seeing the reception we got. Thousands of people came to the airport to see us. Some of them were holding some of my books which had been banned by the [former] Moi dictatorship. We arrived in Kenya on July 31, 2004.

Eleven days later, in a very secure part of Nairobi, at about midnight, me and my wife, we are facing four gunmen who had been sent to attack us. So there was the nightmare that my wife and I had to face on our own, escaping, literally, with our lives: I’m burned with cigarettes, I’m kicked everywhere, my wife is sexually assaulted. So, there is the image, in our minds, of beauty of the reception by the people. And, of course, the terror of the attack, which was orchestrated by the very forces that had already been against my writing and my political views.

RC: You and your wife weren’t silent about what happened. Why did you speak out?

wa Thiong’o: Like I said, we just barely escaped, so our attack was not silent. We were hospitalized for about three days. As for [my wife] Njeeri, she was very, very particular about silence of women over sexual assault. So it was very clear that she would speak out. She realized that, around rape, if you keep a cloud of silence, that won’t go around solving it. You don’t keep silent over genocide, eh? You don’t keep silent over murder. She was saying that rape, sexual assault, is of the same magnitude, on the primal level.

RC: You’re talking about genocide. There’s genocide going on in Sudan. There’s a growing cry here in the United States: “End the genocide.” But how do you confront something so massive?

wa Thiong’o: I don’t have an answer, but the world, through the United Nations, should respond vigorously, or equip an international army, in such a way, that they can effectively intervene. But Africa has a history of its people being murdered, a history of mass genocide, that goes all the way back to the days of slavery and each of the colonial histories. It is the cheapening of African lives. And this is very dangerous. What happened in Rwanda should be a shame and a blot on the international community. This must stop.

RC: You mentioned the cheapening of African lives. Africa is seen, not only as a continent of genocide, but it’s also now the continent of AIDS.

wa Thiong’o: Yes, Africa is viewed as the land of poverty, the land of AIDS, the land of massacres, and so on. Yes, that’s true, although [these problems are] all over the world, like in the United States. This is not to say it isn’t a problem in Africa. It is. But the tragedy for us in Africa is that, in fact, there are several Africas. We are rich in gold, diamonds, oil, rubber; we produce coffee, tea, chocolate, cocoa. We’re a continent of plenty. But the resources go always to benefit those outside of Africa, particularly in the West. So, Africa is very rich, but poor.

But there is the other side of Africa. Look what the continent went through with slavery: a depopulation, literally, where civilization was wiped out over large parts of the continent. Africa has had many blows, and still Africa survives, the African people will keep on rising. The truth is that the new Africa should be seen.

RC: Well, people should be seeing the new Africa, but how do you, we, project the positive side, the Africa that’s rising?

wa Thiong’o: I would say we need literature from the continent and writing from people with progressive views outside of Africa. Look at the way Africa is portrayed in the media here. If you mention poverty in the media, you know that on TV, the image is nearly always of a Black person. If you think about diseases — AIDS and so on — the picture that pops up on TV to illustrate that is of Africa. So the picture then is created that Africa is only one of people who are disease-ridden and so on.

The other thing is, whenever they have a portrait of Africa, it is in terms of wildlife — lions and wild beasts— that don’t show that in Africa there are also buildings of concrete and glass, that there are cities, that there are vehicles, there are traffic jams, there are traffic lights, that there are scientists, that there are Nobel Prize winners. All these things are there. The complex view of Africa is the lion, the hut, and the skyscraper. Squalor and wealth are equally part of the continent because they are a part of each other. This is the reality.

RC: You were talking about Nobel Prize winners in Africa and that makes me think of Wangaari Mathaai, who’s from your country.

wa Thiong’o: Yes. A really remarkable woman. She’s done good, hard work for the environment. But people forget also that she was one of the first woman professors of veterinary science [in Africa]. She’s a really accomplished person intellectually, in her own right. And she is Kenya, she is Africa. African women are shown as only dressed in their beads, or cultivating, the peasant woman in the fields, barely able to survive. Wangaari Mathaai and that woman are equally part of that continent.

RC: Like you, Wangaari Mathaai was jailed.

wa Thiong’o: Yes, she fought for human rights in Kenya very voraciously, she fought for environmental integrity. And for all this she was jailed, she was beaten, she was harassed, she was abused in Parliament, she was the object of ridicule by the dictatorship. But she does stand up: She’s surviving. In that sense, she’s once again a symbol, to me, of African womanhood. The African woman is not just a passive figure: She has also agency. Wangaari Mathaai symbolizes that.

RC: So, this question is kind of a leap, but: You two were both jailed, and you describe Kenya as a dictatorship. Here, we’re hearing more instances of people being detained, illegally, by the United States government — held for indefinite periods, without being told why. So, not to belittle your experience, but what do you think about reports of people being held for the War on Terror?

wa Thiong’o: I talk meaningfully about my own situation in Kenya, in Africa. I can talk about the culture of silence and fear, which is part of the narrative of Wizard of the Crow. I can talk about people having been jailed in Kenya, for the books they have borrowed in libraries or bought in bookshops. Some people have been killed because of this. So I know that a culture of silence and fear is very dangerous, in any form, for a community.

Now, I use examples because they are things that I know, concretely. Others have to draw parallels, get what they can get from all these experiences and determine whether it is relevant. But all I can say about what happened in Africa is that people should learn lessons from that. They should not say, “Oh, that only happens in Africa. It cannot happen to us.”

RC: So this book has strong women and paints the rising Africa. It also describes globalization.

wa Thiong’o: In the novel, I look at globalization because it is doing two things which are very dangerous for the stability of the world. You have a group of Western nations who are becoming wealthier and wealthier. Then you’ve got a majority of nations, largely from Asia and Africa, who are getting poorer and poorer. And the gap between them, as a result of globalization, is widening. And these few Western nations depend on the resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So, that’s one thing. But another rift, which is also widening, is within nations themselves, big or small, in Africa, Europe, America, or elsewhere. So the gap is forever widening.

Now, my feeling is that the two rifts between nations and within nations is a great foundation for the increasing instability we are seeing in the world today. My own feeling, which I’m implying in the novel, is that these fundamental rifts within and between nations have to be addressed. They can’t be glossed over.