Who is an intellectual, and what does his or her role consist of? For whom, from what location, and for what purpose do intellectuals speak? These incendiary conundrums have persisted in the intellectual space, even more so in postcolonial studies. At a time when the notion of the “death of the intellectual”Footnote ¹ appears to be gaining momentum, Lovesey’s The Postcolonial Intellectual: Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Context reengages with the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as evoked by scholars such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha. More interestingly, Lovesey’s thought-provoking book responds to the aforementioned questions by epitomizing Ngugi, who is arguably Africa’s greatest postcolonial thinker. The Postcolonial Intellectual is an invitation to (re)consider Ngugi as one of the leading postcolonial intellectuals in light of his critical, sociopolitical, and cultural-cum-aesthetic interventions. By calling attention to a wide range of Ngugi’s oft-overlooked nonfiction writings, the author argues that Ngugi has established himself as a postcolonial/public intellectual, not “merely a novelist who happens to do theory” (39).

Chapter 1 traces the development of the notion of “the postcolonial intellectual” in Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Cabral, Fanon, and James. The author presents here Ngugi’s idea of the postcolonial intellectual, which simultaneously extends and slightly departs from the postcolonial intellectual ethos espoused in the works of the earlier postcolonial theorists, especially in relation to how Ngugi envisions the African postcolonial intellectual. The second chapter offers readers an opportunity to appreciate Ngugi’s journalistic writings. Here, Lovesey critically examines these essays and their contexts of production to bring to light his views on a range of tropes such as indigenous languages and Pan-Africanism. Chapter 3 considers the influence of thinkers such as James, Fanon, and Kettle (Ngugi’s teacher at Leeds) on the life and writings of Ngugi, as well as how these thinkers’ shared suspicion of the roles of intellectuals and their ambivalent Marxist stances shaped Ngugi’s own views. The main concern of chapter 4 is to show, with evidence from Ngugi’s Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams and Something Torn and New, how the Cabralian concepts of “revolutionary intellectuals” and “returning to the source” underlie Ngugi’s works, especially in relation to his somewhat idolatrous obsession with the use of indigenous languages as the ultimate enabler of the archiving of authentic African knowledge. Chapter 5 explores Ngugi’s framing of the image of a troubled intellectual in his memoirs. Drawing comparisons between Ngugi’s Detained and Soyinka’s and Breytenbach’s prison diaries, Lovesey argues for the prison diary as a distinctively African genre. The last chapter of the book contemplates Ngugi’s public image(s) as a global intellectual and shows his shift of emphasis from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance while making recommendations toward a new postnational Africa and the decolonization of the postcolonial intellectual.

Without a doubt, Lovesey’s fine-grained discussion of Ngugi’s nonfiction works offers readers new insights into the nonfiction works of Ngugi and brilliantly argues for his “initiation” into the pantheon of postcolonial, nay global, intellectuals. The book is so well written that there is hardly any aspect of the book to be critical of. However, I think that even though the book focuses on Ngugi’s nonfiction works, at least a chapter would have been dedicated to the critical discussions of his fiction works within the postcolonial tradition or a juxtaposition of the postcolonial ethos in his nonfiction writings with those of his fiction because it is indeed his fiction, more than his essays, that earned him acclaim as a postcolonial thinker. My thinking is that the author avoided this in order not to give an impression that supports the position of the scholars who view Ngugi’s essays as mere “guidebooks” (2) or “roadmaps for his fiction” (193). Instead of detracting from the book’s value, this approach adds to its uniqueness. I therefore invite all readers of Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry to thoroughly plough through this brilliantly crafted treatise that argues for Ngugi’s rightful position as a foremost postcolonial theorist who has played a leading role in the growth of the field of postcolonial studies.