Ngũgĩ wa Thiong-o
Jan 5, 1938 – May 28, 2025
How much of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his work is encapsulated in that brief quote above. Novelist, teller of tales, a man who both affirmed the oral, the performative, and the written, fully expressed in his culture and amplified by this giant of African literature. Oh, and the political: never ideological or coercive, but pointing very clearly to the problems in our various worlds which need be solved…
It is odd and remarkable how those figures whom we hold in so much awe, how in our mind’s eye, they remain frozen in time, in a kind of permanent age and state. In a odd way, like a monument. If they were in mid age, in your mind’s eye they remain that way, even as they, like ourselves, grow older.
I looked at the cover of Tim Reiss’ collected Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium and there is a sketch of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong‘o, one of my two very important mentors, and a giant of African literature. It is of an aged Ngugi, unlike his appearance when I was one of his students and mentees in New York Univerisity’s doctoral Comparative Lit program. I, too, have grown older. Over the years after I got my degree our contact had been largely limited to emails and online contact, rather than face to face, the last of that face to face having been when he briefly came to Istanbul where I had been teaching at the time and where a Turkish graduate student had managed to get him invited to give a talk there at Bogacizi University.
Yes, I knew that, post NYU and subsequently at UC Irvine, Ngũgĩ was having weekly dialysis. That he had had a triple bypass. I did not know that he had contracted that bane of male existence, prostate cancer.
And now, Ngũgĩ has died. Of that cancer.
Oh, Ngũgĩ! He was the counterbalance to my rather distracted and forgetful other mentor and disertation director (much as I—we—indisputably admired and cared for him), Kamau Brathwaite. Indeed, the first time I visited Ngũgĩ in his office, during the time of last of the several classes I took with him, it was to ask him to sit on my committee and to exert some balance on its other members. Which he did.
* * * * *
I first met Ngũgĩ in 1991. I confess that I did not know of him or his work until then. Who was this Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o? I took several classes from him, and these were also the first time I read his writing. I was intrigued as to how the book, Matigari ma Njiruungi, the Gikuyu version of Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s 6th novel, simply called Matigari in the English translation, how that book flew off the shelves and on to the streets of Nairobi and beyond. Word spread rapidly about the book’s fictional character, Matigari; and, in 1986,
…word got to then-President Daniel Arap Moi that a revolutionary called Matigari was going around the country asking awkward questions about truth and justice in postcolonial Kenya. Moi promptly demanded this person be arrested. After the infamous Security Branch reported that Matigari was a character in a novel, Moi demanded they arrest the book! (https://panafricanspacestation.org.za, accessed 27/6/25)[1]
Looking back, I think Ngũgĩ became somewhere between a friend—not a close friend, but someone with whom you could be open in the same way one is with friends—and a mentor. I read his fiction first, and then, as I became even more interested in his work and thinking, his non-fiction. He also introduced me to other African writers as well. The two writers he talked about who stuck with me the most were Ben Okri and, of course, Wole Soyinka, then poor Ken Saro-Wiwa (in the struggle for environmental and human rights, he was executed for “crimes” vs the petroleum industry—Shell—in the Niger Delta.) Also African women writers Buchi Emecheta (esp. The Joys of Motherhood), Mariama Bâ (So Long a Letter), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions.)
I also confess, having read only bits and pieces of the Marxist classics, my own views were more through simple observation and my conviction that a government should improve the lives of its citizens, the most humble and otherwise.[2] My own Quaker father had been a strong advocate of Native American rights. However, my understanding of how politics played out in Africa itself in terms of European colonialism—that understanding was broadened through Ngũgĩ’s work and his classes. Politically Marxist, Ngũgĩ was no ideologue; he did not speak ideologically in the classroom or in casual conversation. Nor did he use the rather convoluted vocabulary of literary theorists on the subject. No polemicist, Ngũgĩ’s concerns, as said, focussed around colonialism and the impact it had 1) on Kenyan indigenous groups like his Gikuyu and others, 2) on Africa and Africans in general, and then 3) on those in other parts of the world. What I got from both Ngũgĩ and Kamau (Brathwaite) was a closer, more specific sense about the damage done through colonialism, not only upon the daily lives of those it colonised, but, importantly, also upon African languages and culture.
As the time came to write, then defend, my dissertation, I sought Ngũgĩ’s advice more frequently and, as noted, finally asked him to sit on my defence committee. Given the demands of teaching, assisting various students like myself and others, sitting on various committees as one does in academe, and doing his own research and writing, sometimes he was not in his office. Though usually there as posted, I remember a particular time when there was no Ngũgĩ. When I caught up with him a week or so later, he apologised, saying that he had to be with his wife, Njeri, as they just had a new baby.
Another year and, again, a mysteriously absent Ngũgĩ: “So sorry,” he said when I caught up with him later, “We just had a new baby”
I smiled, “that was what you said the last time.”
He laughed.
Once I came in on the heels of a prior visitor. I apologized for possibly intruding—”Oh, no. Don’t mind. I was just having a French lesson,” he responded. I had not yet gone to Francophone Africa, on a Fulbright, where I observed directly that the assault on African languages and cultures there was as overtly destructive as were those of other colonizing powers. But I had experienced the French assault on other languages while living in Paris—”French?”
“Well, yes. Not a language I studied before.”
English. Kiswahili. His mother tongue, Gikuyu… French???
With regard to his switch from English as his writing language to his mother tongue, Gikuyu, later articles about Ngũgĩ quoted him, rightly, as saying about English, the language in which he first made his reputation as a writer,
I don’t want it to be my primary language… if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment.[3]
Indeed, in a much later email, when I was then living in Latin America, Ngugi wrote:
Dear Bronwyn,
Good to hear from you. Quiero aprender español. Me puedes enseñar a mi español?[4]
Of all that I learned and appreciated from knowing this man—and, yes, we often shared political views—it was his thoughts on language were to have most profound affect upon me, intellectually speaking. With UNESCO estimating languages disappearing at the rate of one every fortnight, Ngũgĩ’s views are largely responsible for the fact that, whenever possible, we at Cable Street—a largely English language publication—that when we publish work that is in another language, that we publish the original, first, side by side with its translation.
I also have an odd memory of the time Ngũgĩ brought the original manuscript of Devil on the Cross into class. As has been widely noted, the book was handwritten on toilet paper, the very rough kind supplied prisoners in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison where Ngũgĩ was incarcerated for a year without formal charges, though ostensibly for producing a play in Gikuyu—Ngaahika Ndeenda, in English, I will Marry When I Want. The play “covers post-colonial themes of class struggle, poverty, gender, culture, religion, modernity vs. tradition, and marriage and family,“[5] and was written by Ngũgĩ but developed with the participants. Clearly his arrest was also because he was considered a political threat by the current, independent regime. It was not only that Ngũgĩ was politically on the left, but he rightly opposed the rule of Jomo Kenyatta and, then, Daniel Arap Moi, both of whom sadly, moved as so many revolutionaries have, from leaders of an independent nation to dictators.
And it was during his time incarcerated as prisoner K6,77, in 1978, that he made the decision to stop writing in English. As he later noted in his Decolonising the Mind, “the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” (The Atlantic online, May 20, 2022, Accessed 24/6/25) I remember him telling us in class, “I thought, how am I going to write a novel in a language that has no novels…?” He resolved the dilemma of how to go about writing such in a language whose tales, epics, verse were from a rich orature rather than a body of literature by framing the novel in terms of a traditional competition which rewarded the tale-teller who could brag “most eloquently of how he or she achieved [in this case] spectacular thievery.” (The Wall, Issue 8, Summer Reads.)
But back to the original toilet paper “manuscript”of Caitaani Mutharaba (Devil on the Cross), that he brought to our class. Its pages were an ochre shade, but like stiff wax paper, not what one would not want to use for the purpose it was originally intended. As Ngũgĩ passed it around, one member of the class (or was he just sitting in?) kissed the manuscript. He was cloyingly worshipful, but—how did he do it?—Ngũgĩ remained stunningly neutral.
In the same way, though I had seen him grit his teeth at the offenses one can encounter working at a university, in the world of academe, he knew how to fight back, quietly, grimly—which, second to my own intellectual objectives, was why I wanted him on my side.
I look over the emails: infrequent and generally short, regarding some of his more recent work—
I have been idle on the novel front but my third memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver, comes out on October 4, with the New Press.”
Did I tell of the drama of my fable, The Upright Revolution? You will have to excuse me if I have already done so! I am at an age when my children keep on telling me, you have told us that before!!
Did you know of my latest, The Perfect Nine? It is my first attempt at an epic in verse. Please let your friends know about it.[6]
He enjoined me persevere not just in the dissertation, but long after that was done, in my own work—”Bronwyn, it is better to publish and embark on a new work, rather than endlessly revising the old one.” At that, I remembered it had been nearly 20 years between Ngũgĩ’s Caitaani Mutharaba (Devil on the Cross) and his Mũrogi wa Kagogo (The Wizard of the Crow), and I wondered if he was also speaking of his own struggles to get back to fiction. On the other hand, his mind and life was so intimately involved with his thinking on, as noted, language, its creative and intellectual uses, that perhaps his return was more evolution than struggle. When he produced Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow, in English) that long-awaited novel, it, too, satirised a corrupt world of an African dictator’s reign—easily, these days, the corrupt worlds of other nations, even our own. Mũrogi wa Kagogo actually seemed a naturally and continuing evolution of his work, which had always dealt with the importance of language and the offenses of the state against the ordinary citizen, colonial or otherwise. That he continued with Kenda Mũiyuru, The Perfect Nine, which also lauded women as primary actors in his culture, only speaks to his continued evolution as a writer.
Our last email exchange between us was not quite three years ago, just as he become so beset by bad health:
Dear Bronwyn,
Always great to hear from you. I am glad to hear you are reading my first verse attempt at an epic: The Perfect Nine. In the Gikuyu edition, Kenda Mũiyuru, I had to invent my own metric system based on the concept of Nine/Ten. So the lines would be in multiples of ten or Nine, or their variations, line 5, 3 etc. Nine of course is also the nine months in which we all dwell in the womb of our mothers.
Best,
Ngũgĩ
Dammit, I miss him.
— Bronwyn Mills
[1] We understand that PASS radio will have broadcast a two hour memorial reading of Ngugi’s work Monday 30 June and Wednesday July 2 at 6 pm (SAST). We have seen that one can listen to back broadcasts via PASS, and we also expect to see a YouTube version for those who would like to listen. A recording of a 1991 lecture, “The Writer in Postcolonial Africa’“, which Ngugi delivered in South Africa about African writers is also available via PASS.
[2] I have a distinct memory of a performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe where one player asks, “How do the rich get richer?” and the other next to him made obscene motions with his hips while shouting, “Screw the poor!”
.[3]Italie, Hillel (7 May 2025). “At age 87, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remains impassioned about the power of language”. AP News. Retrieved 31 May 2025.
[4] “I want to learn Spanish. Can you teach me Spanish?”
[5] Njugi, Joseph M. (2010). A critical analysis of cultural celebration in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o plays: Mother sing for me and I will marry when i want (co-authored with Ngugi Wa Mirii) (Thesis thesis). University of Nairobi, Kenya.
[6] Later, reviewed in Issue 14 of Witty Partition (the previous name for the current Cable Street).