That was the only time prior to publication of the Wisconsin Watch article that the draft order was forwarded to an email outside of the state court system, the report said.
In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, “I Will Marry When I Want,” was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, “Petals of Blood,” the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him.“The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,” he wrote in “Wrestling With the Devil,” a memoir published in 2018. “It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.”
He didn’t only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read “I am stupid” or “I am a donkey.” Starting with “Devil On the Cross,” written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past.Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In “Decolonizing the Mind,” published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors.“The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,” he wrote. “But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”
He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school’s International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships.Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence.
sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country.
“When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. ‘Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,’” Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. “Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.”The Biden administration approved the state’s waiver to implement the standards
, a month before Trump returned to office. The California rules are stricter than a Biden-era rule that tightens emissions standards but does not require sales of electric vehicles.Biden’s EPA said in announcing the decision that opponents of the California waivers did not meet their legal burden to show how either the EV rule or a separate measure on heavy-duty vehicles was inconsistent with the Clean Air Act.
Republicans have long criticized California’s waivers and have worked to find a way to overturn them. The Government Accountability Office said earlier this year that California’s policies are not subject to the Congressional Review Act, a law that allows Congress to reject federal regulations under certain circumstances with a simple majority vote not subject to the filibuster. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with that ruling, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., cleared the way for the votes anyway with a workaround that established a new Senate precedent.Democrats fought those changes, which were the latest attempt to chip away at the Senate filibuster after both parties have used their majorities in the past two decades to lower the threshold for nominations. Democrats tried in 2022 to roll back the filibuster for legislation, as well, but were thwarted by members of their own caucus who disagreed with the effort.