The introduction seeks to provide bold outlines of Ngugi’s complex contexts and point to how these offer new paths to his fiction. While acknowledging that scant attention has been paid to the context in which Ngugi’s works are produced, we are also seeking to understand how this context has been mediated by Ngugi’s discourse. To do this is to suggest that Ngugi as a writer of praxis also generates his context and enters into dialogue with familial and historical events, intellectual climate and other layers of institutional practices that have helped him disrupt received knowledges and histories. The contexts, far from offering some objective and reified source of knowledge, are an engagement with a society and historical moment in flux and in need of reinterpretation. One aim of this introduction is to displace our notion of context as a reified site of retrieval; another is to see how context offers readers a handle on new and disruptive ways of rereading Ngugi’s texts. I argue that contexts, whether one is thinking of family, mission education or Mau Mau emergency and related colonial experiences, are not muted sites of knowledge, nor are they self-evident sources of meaning and meaning-making, but a seething site of creativity and meaning-making.