About:
Ndirangu Wachanga
Ndirangu Wachanga is a Professor of media studies and information science at the University of Wisconsin. Wachanga’s work is about memory. He is a globally renowned documentarist and archivist.
About Ndirangu
Ndirangu Wachanga is the authorized documentary biographer of Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ali Mazrui, Micere Mugo, Willy Mutunga, Abdilatif Abdalla, and Henry Chakava. His documentary, Ali Mazrui: A Walking Triple Heritage, won the 2015 New York African Studies Book Award.
Wachanga's documentary projects have been screened in several locations across the globe, among them Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Rutgers, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and African Studies, and University of South Africa.
Globally known as a documentarist, Wachanga’s projects are as archival as they are cultural and social activism. To archive is to memorialize. As a memory worker, he has interviewed various African intellectuals and writers: From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986), Wole Soyinka to Ngugi wa Thiong’o; from Micere Mugo to Ama Ata Aidoo; from Angela Davis to Sonia Sanchez; from Carole Boyce Davis to Tsitsi Dangarembga; from Simon Gikandi to Ali Mazrui; from Njabulo Ndebele to Keorapetse Kgositsile; from Manthia Diawara to Abena P.A. Busia; from Tsisti Jaji to Sisonke Msimang to Mukoma wa Ngugi to Otoniya Okot Bitek.
Wachanga’s project recognizes that memory informs as it troubles debates about the nature of the postcolonial state in Africa. By examining biographies of intellectuals, Wachanga’s projects are an invitation to resist the urge of forgetting.
Some of his archival work is hosted by Princeton African Humanities Colloquium, which is directed by Prof. Simon Gikandi
His most recent publications include His most recent publications include Micere Githae Mugo: Making Life Sing in Pursuit of Utu (2022), Ngūgī: Reflections of his life of Writing (2018 – edited together with Simon Gikandi) and Growing up in a Shrinking World: How politics, culture and the nuclear age defined the biography of Ali A. Mazrui (2017), and Making Life Sing in Pursuit of Utu: The Life Story of Micere Mugo (Forthcoming). His work has also been published in various peer reviewed journals and as book chapters.
East African Educational Publishers commissioned him in 2020 to translate The Trial of Dedan Kimathi from English to Gīkūyū and Kenda Mūiyūrū from Gīkūyū to Kiswahili. Both titles are forthcoming.
Wachanga is a frequent commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Voice of America. He has written for different media globally.
Wachanga has served as a Visiting Professor of documentation at Princeton University (Winter 2018 and 2020); was a Carnegie African Diaspora Program Fellow (2018), and as a Visiting CODESRIA Professor at the United States International University – Africa (2019).
Wachanga is a tenured Full Professor of media studies and information science at the University of Wisconsin.
