It is with deep sorrow that we share that Kenyan author and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has died. He passed away on the morning of May 28, 2025, according to a message shared by his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ, in a Facebook post that honored his wish: not for mourning, but for celebration.

“He lived a full life, fought a good fight,” she wrote. “Rîa ratha na rîa thŭa. Tŭrî aira!”—words in Gĩkũyũ that roughly translate to: “Let us remember and honor the living and the dead. We are the children.”

His son Mukoma wa Ngugi also shared a heartfelt note on Facebook: “It tears my heart to say that my father, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o passed away earlier today. I am me because of him in so many ways, as his child, scholar and writer. I love him – I am not sure what tomorrow will bring without him here. I think that is all I have to say for now.”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing has rocked the African literary community. Writers and readers alike are mourning the loss of one of the continent’s most towering literary figures. Nigerian novelist Okey Ndibe wrote, “I join millions of his fans in mourning the inimitable Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He has gone home today, but his work as writer and human will endure.” Scholar and Africa Is a Country founder Sean Jacobs described him as “a G.O.A.T. of African literature—or simply literature, period.” For sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor, Ngũgĩ was “a literary giant… and one of my favorite authors.” Chika Unigwe offered her condolences to the family, writing, “An Iroko has fallen. Ga na udo.” These tributes speak to the immense impact Ngũgĩ had—not just as a writer, but as a guiding presence in the lives and work of so many.

Ngũgĩ was born in Limuru, Kenya in 1938 and rose to literary prominence in the 1960s as part of the first generation of post-independence African writers published by the Heinemann African Writers Series. In the 1970s, he decided to stop writing in English and instead publish in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ. As he once put it in a lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand: “In colonial conquest, language was meant to complete what the sword had started; to do to the mind what the sword had done to the body.” His refusal to write in English became a defining act of literary decolonization.

Ngũgĩ’s intellectual legacy spans over five decades and more than 30 books across genres such as novels, plays, essays, memoirs, and children’s stories. Early novels like Weep Not, Child and The River Between captured the violence and dreams of a continent in transition. His prison memoir Detained and the book Decolonising the Mind could be considered sacred texts of postcolonial studies. Wizard of the Crow (2006), his satire of dictatorship, received numerous literary honors and introduced him to a new generation of readers.

His later works include Minutes of Glory and Other Stories (2019), The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (2020), and The Language of Languages (2023). His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright was translated into over 100 languages by the Jalada collective in one of the most celebrated translation projects of 21st century.

Throughout his career, Ngũgĩ won countless honors: the East Africa Novel Prize early in his writing career in 1963, the Park Kyong-ni Prize on the richest prizes in the world, and most recently the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature (2022). His many honorary doctorates and global accolades speak to the scale of his influence.

Ngũgĩ was also an activist who believed that storytelling could be a weapon against injustice. He worked with grassroots theater in Kenya, most famously at the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre, to create spaces where ordinary people could reclaim their voices and tell their own stories.

Though his influence was far reaching,  he never lost his grounding in family and community. His children, many of them writers and thinkers in their own right, stood beside him as part of a broader intellectual and creative lineage. At the time of his passing, Ngũgĩ was Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

His death marks the passing of an era of writers who made the 20th century a culture-shifting period in the evolution of African literature. With Achebe, Soyinka, Aidoo, and many others, Ngũgĩ helped lay the foundations for African literature as we know it today. He fought to bring African voices to the global stage and gave other writers the language to tell stories rooted in their own histories and cultures.

The world will mourn his passing. But as he would have wanted, we will also celebrate a life lived in full commitment to language and freedom. We will share more soon in his honor.

No details have yet been shared about plans to honor his life, but the family has said that his son, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, will serve as the family’s spokesperson in the coming days.

*****************

Image by Niccolò Caranti via Wikipedia