Africa has just welcomed the path-finding Ngugi wa Thiong’o into the pantheon of ancestors.
It was on Wednesday, May 28, 2025 the news broke that the revolutionary Kenyan novelist, playwright, essayist and academic has departed the shores of planet earth.
Legends never die because they are bound to transmogrify into higher spiritual realms.
Ngugi put his hand to good use to ensure that he would never die because he wrote himself into the consciousness of the whole wide world.
He was 87 when he passed away but he packed many lifetimes into the great life that he lived through his radical being.
Ngugi was born on January 5, 1938, in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, and given the name James via Christian baptism.
He published his first three novels, Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat as James Ngugi. Actually, The River Between was written before Weep Not, Child.
Weep Not, Child earned popular readership across Africa when it was put on the school curriculum as one of the first titles in the esteemed African Writers Series (AWS). The child protagonist Njoroge was a hero across Africa among the teeming youths.
A child of a large peasant stock in Kenya, Ngugi was educated during British colonial rule at Kamandura, Manguu, and Kinyogori primary schools, before attending Kenya’s Alliance High School.
He was a prodigious student and got admitted to the acclaimed Makerere University College, Uganda.
There was the epochal African Writers Conference that held in Makerere University in June 1962 where Ngugi who was a student met with Chinua Achebe who had then published Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease.
Ngugi gave Achebe the manuscript he was working on.
According to Ngugi in his autobiography, Birth of a Dream Weaver – A Writer’s Awakening published by Harvill Secker, “Toward the end of the conference, Achebe returned my manuscript. He hadn’t finished the whole draft of Weep Not, Child but he had read enough to see that I had a tendency to pile up on a point already made, like flogging a dead horse. The comments were brief but went right to the heart of the matter. Then he added that he had already shown the manuscript to Van Milne of Heinemann. Milne later asked if I could send the manuscript when I had finished revising it… I didn’t know that Achebe had already accepted the post of editorial adviser for what would later become the Heinemann African Writers series, and Weep Not, Child would be the fifth in the series…”
A Grain of Wheat, which is rated by many critics as Ngugi’s greatest novel, was published in 1967 while he was a student at Leeds University in the United Kingdom. The historical novel tells the multi-pronged tragic story of Kenya’s Mau-Mau struggle, the state of emergency and the dawn of independence as per Uhuru day with the quiet hero Mugo bearing a heavy secret.
It was in 1977 that Ngugi legally changed his colonial name James Ngugi to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a powerful statement of reclaiming his African identity and rejecting colonial influence.
In the words of Ngugi, “The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people’s definition of themselves… I had to decolonize my own mind.”
The publishing of Petals of Blood in 1977 marked a radical bend in Ngugi’s writing course and cause.
Ngugi waged the intellectual war of advocating for the writing of African literature in African languages, somewhat extending the earlier call of Obi Wali in his essay, “The Dead End of African Literature?”, to wit, writing in colonial languages does not amount to producing African literature.
Ngugi also championed the cause of changing the name from English to Literature departments in African universities.
As a politically conscious change-agent who walked his talk, Ngugi established the Kamiriithu Community Education and Cultural Centre and collaborated with Ngugi wa Mirii to write and produce in Gikuyu language the 1977 play “Ngaahika Ndeenda” (I Will Marry When I Want).
He was imprisoned by the government of Arap Moi, but he refused to be silenced as he continued his writing in prison, thereby writing on toilet paper the novel Devil on the Cross, published first in Gikuyu and later in English.
He also wrote the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi with Micere Githae Mugo, based on the life of the Mau-Mau uprising hero.
He perforce went into exile in 1982 following relentless government pressure.
When he returned to Kenya in 2004 for a one-month visit, he was attacked at home and his wife was raped.
Ngugi’s novel Wizard of the Crow was listed by The Economist magazine as one of the Best Books of the Year in 2006.
Four of Ngugi’s children are published authors of distinction.
Ngugi was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995 and given only three months to live, but the dogged maestro somehow survived. He had triple bypass heart surgery in 2019, and a protracted struggle with kidney failure.
He joined the ancestors in Buford, Georgia in the United States on Wednesday, May 28.
He left a lasting legacy as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the first Director of the International Centre for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine
Ngugi was a recipient of about 13 Honorary Doctorates, and was Honorary Member of the American Academy of Letters.
His published works are too numerous to list here!
