Ngahiika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) is a 1977 play produced by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Mirii. The play was first done at Kamirithu, Limuru, in Kikuyu language. It satirized the state of neocolonial Kenya, criticizing the new crop of black bourgeoisie that had arisen and drew the wrath of the then president Jomo wa Kenyatta. The play centres on Kiguunda, a peasant farmer and his family as he is tricked by Kioi wa Kanoru, a representation of the postcolonial black elite into selling his prized piece of land.

Ngahiika Ndeenda was powerful in its use of an indigenous language to deliver critique against the government at a time when a big chunk of the native population could not understand English. The play also drew from the local community to find actors and actresses delivering very organic theatre.

The 1977 Gikuyu play and the play that precedes it, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, mark Ngugi’s first substantial incorporation of local language into his work in the play. In both plays, and the subsequent works of Ngugi, we see Ngugi emerge as a Gramscian organic intellectual moving away from the realist writing influenced by Marxist thought that is experienced in his earlier works.

Describing his experience producing this play, Ngugi writes of this time as being the most exciting in his life and the true beginning of his education, where he learnt his language anew and rediscovered the creative nature and power of collective work (Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary). In making this play, Ngugi drew from Paulo Freire’s mutual learning theory fashioning this work with the people it so represented. Ngugi describes this experience with the Kikuyu community base at Kamirithu as the key to the epistemological break between his earlier works and his work today.