By Vivid Gwede
Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o is no more.
He passed on in Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, on Wednesday, 28 May 2025.
Ngugi is not only a hero of African literature – but a hero of African thought and identity who inspired many through his writings.
His writings advanced African justice and societal transformation.
His writings also grappled with the central question of what it meant to be a writer – an African writer or precisely a writer in Africa.
This question was part of the broader questions of identity facing societies that had gained independence.
His answer was a decolonisation of the mind symbolised by writing in his Gikuyu language.
He theorised the importance of language in “Decolonising the Mind.”
The act of writing in his mother language became a key message beyond the plots and characters of his works.
This question of what it meant to be a writer in independent Africa besides Ngugi concerned other writers.
Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera questioned the idea of writing “for a specific nation or race.”
This revealed the tension between embracing one’s identity and not being limited by it.
On the specific question of the language, Marechera seemed to agree with Ngugi, “….I took to the English language like a duck takes to water.
I was a keen accomplice and student in my own mental colonization.”
Thus African writers thought deeply about the language they used and how they represented themselves and their societies.
This brought about the tension that African writers or writers in Africa faced among themselves and between reflecting their belonging to their nations in their writings or writing for a global audience.
These are the questions Ngugi was grappling with.
His answer was decolonising the mind and the language by prioritising African identity and belonging while engaging with the universal questions of the human condition that most novelists tackled.
Writing in his language, Gikuyu, might have not felt constraining for Ngugi after he decided not to write in English in 1977 because he thought the novel was universal.
He reasoned: “What’s good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.”
His Gikuyu works like “A Grain of Wheat” were translated into many languages, including the Shona “Tsanga Yembeu” by Charles Mungoshi, showing its universal “language.”
It was partly a victory for Ngugi though it remained a controversial step for some readers.
In a sense, Ngugi was a key contributor to the new generation of decolonisation thought after independence.
He contributed to a historical chain of decolonisation thinkers including W. E. B Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and Achille Mbembe.
Decolonisation thought has increasingly gained importance in both the global academy and development spaces.
Ngugi’s main contribution was in pointing to the potentially limiting role and symbolism of language in the process of decolonisation.
He was not the only one who paid attention to language as political leaders and thinkers like Tanzania’s former president Julius Nyerere, leveraged language in African unity.
Nyerere after the country’s independence in 1961 promoted Swahili in Tanzania as the official language, including educational instruction. Thus Ngugi re-emphasised the importance of language in shaping African identity.
Another theme of Ngugi’s writing was internal justice and freedom in independent African societies, including in his novels “Matigari na Njiruungi” and “I Will Marry When I Want” (a play co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii).
He grappled with the politics of liberation and the meaning of power. “We think of politics in terms of power and who has power. Politics is the end to which that power is put,” Ngugi argued.
This revealed his deeper understanding of the fact that the identity of the ruler may mask the misuse of power.
This is particularly an incisive observation in the politics of post-independence and its arrivalist celebration and mythology of the infallibility of the nationalist vision and black leader.
Like other writers of his generation, and elsewhere, this theme brought him in tension with the new political class whose idea of national unity did not tolerate divergence of thought and public scrutiny.
His writings brought him into conflict with his nation’s government.
In December 1977, Ngugi was detained, together with co-author Ngugi wa Mirii soon after releasing “I Will Marry When I Want”, by the Kenyan government ordered by then Vice-President Daniel Arap Moi and only released in 1978.
Subsequently, Ngugi spent most of his time in exile in the United Kingdom and in the United States where he passed on Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia.
The image of the harassed and exiled intellectual and artist is familiar and resonates across the continent. The censorship of thought and ideas remains commonplace.
This indicates the continuing tension between the independent African societies’ ruling classes and progressive African thinkers’ unvarnished critique of the state of African progress.
Ngugi’s treatment by the Kenyan government of Moi, which forced him into exile, highlights that we do not always treat our heroes with respect. But like every giant intellectual of his stature, he remained committed to building a legacy and living his life on his terms. In the process, he inspired many and will continue inspiring more.
Ngugi’s legacy is one of advancing African thought, African decolonisation, broad-based freedom and justice in Africa’s independent states and societies.
🔵Gwede is a Zimbabwean democracy activist. He writes in his personal capacity.
