Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Tirthankar Mitra

The death of Ngugi wa Thiong’o on May 28, 2025, marks the passing of one of literature’s most uncompromising voices. A novelist, playwright, essayist, and activist, Ngugi transformed the landscape of African letters—not merely through story, but through struggle.

 Instead of picking up arms following the example of his brothers, Ngugi used his pen all his life to express his protest against inhumanity. The topics of his writings were all around him. Jailed, exiled, assaulted, yet never silenced, he embodied a moral clarity rare in any age.

He explored the inequities and ambiguities of colonialism in his native Kenya as well as the misdoings of the postcolonial elite. While doing so, he led a passionate campaign for African authors to eschew the language of their colonial rulers.

His passing at 87 left many promises unfulfilled, as Thiong’o was often tipped for the potential Nobel Prize. But it did not make him bitter.

Rather, it imbued Ngugi with a sense of gentle humour. When the Nobel Prize went to Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa in 2021, he said that he was less disappointed than the photographers who gathered outside his home.

A lecturer in the English department at Nairobi University, he felt it should be renamed. Its focus ought to be shifted to literature around the world, “If there is need for ‘a study of a historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African?” he wrote in a paper.

His works inspired successive generations of African authors, with contemporaries like Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

Thiong’o showed his class from his debut novel, Weep Not Child, 1964. It is a story of Kenyan brothers whose family must confront the challenges of the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule.

He spoke of Kenya’s largest ethnic tribe, the Kikuyu, in Devil on the Cross 1980, written in the Gikuyu language. It is the first modern novel in this language.

Ngugi continued to write in Gikuyu and had the dubious distinction of an arrest warrant being issued for the fictional character of his 1986 novel, Matigari. It was banned in Kenya.

His novel, Wizard of the Crow, was based on African kleptocracy. It was set against the backdrop of the dictatorship of the Free Republic of Aburiria.

He was nominated for the Booker prize in 2021 for his novel in verse, The Perfect Ten. He was the prize’s first nominee writing in an indigenous African language. He saw language as a site of resistance, a battleground where cultural memory could be reclaimed.

Ngugi’s life is an object lesson to authors facing apparently overwhelming odds. He wrote Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper.

He penned this book while being detained by Kenyan authorities for years without trial. He had written a play which earned him this prison term.

Ngugi was educated in British-run Alliance High School. But his schooling failed to cut him off from his linguistic roots-Gikuyu.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 1, June 29 - Jul 5, 2025