Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s encounters with the works of Caribbean intellectuals – C.L.R. James, George Lamming and Frantz Fanon – helped him crystallize global blackness around the nexus between race and geography vis à vis politics of domination and resistance. Emerging from Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean life and thought were his pronouncements on the mismatch between aspiration and deprivation of the postcolonial, post-plantation/post-slavery Caribbean inhabitants. Their experiences, variously and collectively, signalled to Ngugi the importance of language as a cultural currency with which the formerly enslaved and/or colonised people could assert their being in and of the world, and negotiate their place in discursive praxes that had for long defaulted to European languages as the most appropriate vehicles of expression. These processes played out against the backdrop of painful histories, which had raptured the Caribbean islanders’ and some Africans’ attachment to cultures, economics and geographies, due to slavery and colonial violence. Ngugi’s encounter with Caribbean history and culture through the creative and critical works of James, Lamming and Fanon rendered the Caribbean a nucleus that Ngugi germinated and nurtured to expound on his earlier thoughts in subsequent collections of essays and memoirs that amplified his concerns with ‘decolonising the mind’ and ‘moving the centre’.