Kenyan novelist, playwright, essayist and social activist Ngugi wa Thiong'o will deliver a lecture on "Decolonizing the Mind: Language as a Way of Understanding Ourselves" on Tuesday, October 2, at 5 p.m. in Adelphi's Ruth S. Harley University Center Ballroom, 1 South Avenue, Garden City. The event, co-sponsored by Adelphi's Ruth S. Ammon School of Education and the Center for African American and Ethnic Studies, is free and open to the public.

Ngugi is one of the most widely read African writers of our time. He is among a few authors who have written successfully in more than one language. He began his career writing in English, but eventually turned to writing in his native language, Gikuyu. During the lecture, Ngugi will discuss his book, "Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature," in which he explores language as a criti-cal form of self-identity and how language colonization impacts society.

Ngugi burst onto the literary scene in 1962 in East Africa with the performance of his first major play, "The Black Hermit," at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda. A prolific writer, he has published numerous books, short stories, essays, a memoir and several plays. His novel, "Weep Not, Child," about the effects of the Mau Mau War on individuals and families in Kenya, has received critical acclaim. His book, "Petals of Blood," for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyan government in 1977, describes the inequality in post-independence Kenya, and capitalism's negative effects on traditional Kenyan society. His 2006 masterpiece and what some have described as his crowning achievement, "Wizard of the Crow," deals with the forces affecting our lives today through an analysis of dictator-ships as the extreme of authoritarianism. Ngugi's books have been translated into more than 30 languages and continue to be the subject of critical books, monographs and dissertations.

Ngugi is currently a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature and director of the International Center for Writing and Transla-tion at the University of California at Irvine. Ngugi was born in 1938 in Limuru in the Gikuyu Highlands of Kenya. Like many of the dispossessed peasants in Petals of Blood, his father worked as a laborer on the estate of an African landowner. Ngugi's mother was one of his father's four wives, and Ngugi was one of about 28 children in the family. He studied at Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda and the University of Leeds, Britain. He is a recipient of seven honorary doctorate degrees and an honorary member of the American Academy of Letters.

For more information about this and other events on campus, please visit www.adelphi.edu, or call the Cultural Events Hotline at (516) 877-4555.