A Digital Memorial: Over 100 Writers Celebrate Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Life and Work

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed away on May 28. In the days that followed, an outpouring of condolences appeared across social media. We learned from these messages that Ngũgĩ meant different things to different people. Understanding how hard it is to show the range of a person’s impact in a single obituary, we have once again compiled a collective tribute (something we’ve previously done for Ama Ata Aidoo and Biyi Bandele) to carry the many voices that we hope will accompany him to the world of the ancestors.

In African worlds, mourning is a form of celebration. These tributes create a public record of grief and gratitude and will hopefully become part of the living archive of African literature.

To the more than 100 contributors, we say thank you!— for responding to our emails, text messages, DMs, phone calls. This collection brings together a wide range of voices that includes writers, scholars, students, editors, and longtime admirers. Each contributor opens a glimpse of what Ngũgĩ meant to them. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi expresses awe that someone like Ngũgĩ could belong to us at all, calling him a gift the world was generous enough to lend. Tsitsi Dangarembga credits A Grain of Wheat with changing the course of her life. Molara Wood writes about discovering Kenya through Ngugi’s novels, as a schoolgirl in Nigeria. Ber Anena remembers him as the writer who gave her pride in Acoli. Ben Okri remembers his generosity and humor over drinks. James Ogude reflects on how Decolonising the Mind influenced literary conversations in South Africa as early as the 1980s. Okey Ndibe shares a story about calling Ngũgĩ in the middle of a graduate seminar so students could hear his voice. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor writes of a lifelong relationship with his work. Bhakti Shringarpure traces her intellectual formation to Ngũgĩ’s radical clarity on decolonization. Billy Kahora recounts a lifetime of encounters. Fiston Mujila calls him a major force in Africa’s cultural independence. For Scholastique Mukasonga, meeting Ngũgĩ in Addis Ababa was a moment of admiration for his humility and his choice to write in Kikuyu.

These tributes speak to the many ways Ngũgĩ touched people’s lives.

Putting together this kind of project always takes a village. Thank you to my editorial assistant Oluwadamilola Ogunmuko for sending out emails, tracking and recording the many responses. Many thanks to Darlington Chibueze for his fine editing work.

We invite you to spend time with these tributes and share them with others who loved Ngũgĩ’s work. With over 100 entries, this is a long collection. You don’t have to read it all at once. Skim, pause, return. Let it be something you revisit. If his writing meant something to you, feel free to leave a message in the comment section below.

The tributes are arranged alphabetically.

Thank you.

Prof. Ainehi Edoro (Editor, Brittle Paper)

***

Leila Aboulela

It is impossible to conceive of world literature or modern intellectual thought without the words, the process, and the painful journey implicit in Decolonising the Mind. In this seminal book, Ngũgĩ’s focus was on language, but we all knew that so much more was at stake. Bob Marley had already sung, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our minds,” based on an earlier speech given by Marcus Garvey in the 1930s. After Marcus’s passion and Marley’s soulful lyrics, Ngũgĩ came in with the chiseled intellectual clout. He was courageous and revolutionary. He was also loyal to his readers and vision of Africa, making his mark with the clearest understanding and the sharpest observations. In person, Ngũgĩ was direct, unselfconscious, interested in others. He carried his fame lightly and did not bask in adulation. The trajectory of his life is worth pondering and studying. What did Africa do with one of its greatest minds? I look forward to reading his biography and in the meantime will re-read my favorite of his novels, Petals of Blood. Thank you, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. You were a giant, and we are diminished without you.

 

Leye Adenle

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was more than a writer; he was a guiding light. Weep Not, Child was part of my childhood, a story that opened my eyes to the struggles and strength of our people. Like Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, and Cyprian Ekwensi, Ngũgĩ helped shape African literature and made it possible for writers like me to dream, to write, and to be heard. He showed us that language is power, and that stories can be a form of resistance. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and he was among the strongest. Rest well, ancestor.

 

Akin Adeṣọkan

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was, for me, one of the two purveyors of what I call “the grand gestures” of African literature, those heroic actions performed for the public but not, for all that, lacking in deeply-held convictions. Arriving in lockstep with anti-colonial nationalism, African literature as an institution has often had a feisty relationship with the larger system of cultural valuation in the realm of arts and letters. That system came with the freight of racism, cultural prejudice and unequal exchange, among other kinds of baggage, so intellectuals with a keen adversarial sense were quick to strike an oppositional pose. Ngũgĩ’s stance on the language of African literature was a revolutionary act in every sense. A good fight, neither won nor lost. It has generated enough excitement and necessity to be a feature of world literary history for years to come. Already, thanks to a younger generation of writers, battles from that fight are breaking out on other fronts, with different weapons perhaps, and perhaps with an intensity hard to grasp for sensibilities trained to look only for metrics.

 

Tomilola Adeyemo

As a child who read anything around her, I read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Black Hermit at an age when I couldn’t fully grasp the complexity of the world he created, but I felt something. Eventually, his works, among other African literary texts, became my earliest inspiration to tell stories, emboldening me to say whatever I wanted through words. The man may be gone, but his impact will always be felt. May he sleep well.

 

Muftiat Oyindamola Adeyi

The first time I truly met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, not in person but through his words, I felt both awe and fear. Even though I was reading his work years after it was written, it felt urgent, alive, and deeply personal. Although I had read a couple of his books back in high school and as an undergraduate, reading Weep Not, Child again as a graduate student was different. I came to it with more awareness and more understanding. I could feel the intention more clearly, the clarity of his protest, and the weight carried in every line. It was, and still is, a fight against every system and voice that would rather silence than listen. Because of this kind of work, I dared to believe that both the conscious and unconscious decolonization of African culture is not a moment, but a continuous journey. Ngũgĩ showed us that language is not just a tool of expression but also a vessel of memory, a site of resistance, and a place where dignity can be reclaimed. He reminds us that writing is never neutral because even storytelling carries political weight; African languages matter because they carry entire worlds that colonization tried to erase. Thank you, Ngũgĩ, for sharing your fierce pen with us. May we have the courage to wield it, always.

 

Mohammed Naseehu Ali

I read Weep Not, Child in my early teens and to this day I still have vivid memories of scenes from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s first novel. We have lost a great storyteller and thinker, a person whose life we should celebrate even though we are in mourning. His humility and tenacity as an artist and human being should be a guide to us. Rest well, good sir.

 

Rosanna Amaka

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a literary titan who not only wrote about, but lived through, and with, the experience of colonialism, and its subsequent legacy on himself, his people and nation. There are writers that you admire; ones that leave behind great lessons, good and bad; ones that lived and worked among the great. He is among the last. My condolences go out to his family. We thank God for his life, and may he rest in peace and power.

 

Ber Anena

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was among the first authors from Africa to stir my love for writing. Through his work, a writing career became more noble and his advocacy for African indigenous languages strengthened my love for Acoli—my mother tongue—both as an identity and a tool for resistance. His passing is a huge loss to the world, to African scholarship and literature. Luckily, his writing lives on, and for that, I celebrate his life and contributions.

 

Chibueze Darlington Anuonye

In March 2024, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and I scheduled an interview to discuss his life and writing. The circumstances surrounding his final months impeded the arrangement. His passing has now ensured that the interview belongs to the realm of the imagination. The last I wrote to Ngũgĩ was to thank him for signing my copies of Petals of Blood and Weep Not, Child. My mother gave me her copy of Weep Not, Child before she passed away in 2006. I read the novel and loved the relationship Njoroge shared with his mother, Nyokabi. When I lost the book five years ago, I felt a visceral loneliness only my mother’s voice could fill. Weep Not, Child placated my longing for something unreachable, yet so close. Ngũgĩ restored a childhood memory I was afraid I had lost by signing the novel in my mother’s name.

An exiled artist, Ngũgĩ started Petals of Blood in Evanston, Illinois, and wrote much of it in Limuru and Yalta. The novel itself is powered by movements. Munira, the disenchanted son of a capitalist native and a frustrated teacher; Abdulla, a former Mau Mau militant and shopkeeper; Wanja, a bartender and granddaughter of Ilmorog’s most respected woman; and Karega, Munira’s former student, were all drawn to Ilmorog by the spirit of the community, a force much larger than themselves. Like these characters, Ngũgĩ’s life intersected momentously with the destiny of his nation. The scene in which Fraudsham mourns the death of Lizzy, his dog and companion of many years, has some of the most poignant sentences I have ever read. But how can a man so broken by the death of his dog not care about his students? There is something about power that debases the humanity of the one who wields it.

Here is one of the questions I sent to Ngũgĩ last year: “As an artist who writes for and about society, I imagine that your family offers you considerable inspiration and support. How would you evaluate the role of family in your creative vocation?” Ngũgĩ can no longer respond to this question. But perhaps he has answered it in the past, in his life and work. It is left for us to listen and see well, and to decide what we want to remember.

 

Sulaiman Addonia

I first encountered Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work during my master’s studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. I read both Decolonising the Mind and I Will Marry When I Want, which he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, at the same time. The wealth of ideas, provocations, audacity, and deep love of language in these works kept me awake at night in sheer astonishment. One could easily write a book on how these texts shape a young diasporic mind. What remains with me most is his enduring call to explore ideas fearlessly, examine traditions critically, and probe language with both boldness and sensitivity.

 

Bisi Adjapon

Ngũgĩ’s The River Between remains one of my favorite classics, a novel I have read several times. Even more important than his traditional novels, Ngũgĩ defied norms and rejected a form of mental colonialism. As one who enjoys reading literature in Twi and buying alphabet books in various African languages, I appreciate Ngũgĩ’s determined use of Gĩkũyũ in his works. His influence is reflected not just in his son’s championing of African languages at Cornell University, but in the works of some modern writers of African descent. Ngũgĩ epitomizes bravery and creative freedom. Soar on, Ngũgĩ, to eternal rest.

 

Anote Ajeluorou

It’s no longer news that a great Iroko in the pantheon of African writing has fallen and now swells the ranks of Africa’s cultural ancestors. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the latest to join the ancestral roll call. A worthy elder who pointed to us the way we should go so we don’t lose our way in the forest of words and tongues that continue to alienate us from our origins, our roots. He came at the turning point in Africa’s collision with the West, became forged in the anvil of colonialism, with his own family passing through fire—the fire that would burnish his ideals, his philosophy, his writing, his theories, his linguistic rebirth, and his persistent call for the children of Africa to know themselves and to know whose children they are, and be true to themselves, to be worthy ambassadors. As an elder, he did not want the communal goat to suffer parturition in tethers. But did we heed his call? Perhaps not, but he blazed a rainbow trail across the African and global sky of letters. May Africa continue to give birth to more Ngũgĩs, so that our barns will not be starved of harvest from the field of letters. Iseee!

 

Diana Anyakwo

I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o who is a giant of African literature. His work not only inspired me and countless other authors but has helped pave the way for all of us. I love this quote from him: “Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.” May he rest in peace.

 

Poetra Asentewa

There is so much we still need to know about literature, Africa, the world, and what it means to be human. But we are never starting from scratch, never alone in our pursuit, because Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had the courage to match his intelligence with his convictions and align himself, always, against those invested in the continued oppression of others. Ngũgĩ invented much of the language we speak toward freedom, and in this way continues to live in our tongues.

 

Jacqueline Asiimwe 

I first encountered Ngũgĩ’s work in O-Level Literature—those African Writers Series books that felt like home, stories of us, by one of us. Then, in A-Level, I stepped into his world more fully: I played Dedan Kimathi in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, embodying a hero whose courage echoed through our shared history. At the time, my young self didn’t grasp the magnitude of the moment, or the author, but something powerful rooted itself deep within me. Years later, I find myself reclaiming our stories, our languages, our power—and I now see clearly that Ngũgĩ planted that seed. He stood as a living testament to the beauty and force of African languages and spirit. He taught me—and all of us—to speak with intentional pride. He reminded us: “The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their language…in themselves.” This line changed me. It reminded me that language is more than words; it is memory, identity, resistance.

Ngũgĩ’s own journey—from writing Weep Not, Child in English to declaring in prison that English was the colonizer’s pen, and then writing Devil on the Cross in Gĩkũyũ—became a living act of decolonization. Today, as I stand on my commitment to local stories and collective liberation, I honor him. I honor the courage it took to say, “we will write back in our own tongues, in our own names.” I honor the conviction that language is not neutral; it is a battlefield where identity and dignity are reclaimed. To Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Thank you for planting the seed of pride, for teaching us the power of rooted storytelling, and for daring us to reclaim our voice as Africans. May we continue in your footsteps, speaking boldly, standing proudly, and building upon the legacy you have entrusted us to uphold. May you rest in power, Mwalimu!

 

Uju Asika

Before I learned to read, your books sat on my parents’ shelves. Today, as we mourn your passing, your name lives on the lips and in the hearts of millions. Some knew you intimately, others like me admired you as a force of nature. A fierce advocate for literature, decolonization and African liberation. Dear Ngũgĩ, the revolution is still being written. Thank you for leading the charge in your own voice, in your own language. Rest well, sir.

 

Sylvia Arthur

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has left us with a vast legacy; his fiction serves as a chronicle of the past and a reminder of our tenuous present, while his nonfiction functions as a roadmap for both the present and our contentious future. He was not merely a great African writer; he was an exceptional African thinker, a truly great African. We remain indebted to him for being a voice and advocate for the people. Rest well, Ancestor, and thank you for your service.

 

Doreen Baingana

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is undoubtedly a father of modern African literature. Indeed, the couple of times I met him at literary festivals, he had a fatherly response to me as a writer: attentive, encouraging, engaging. He was especially curious about the state of Ugandan writing, giving the sense that a nation’s literature was a pulse to gauge the nation’s health. Ngũgĩ has now passed on the baton, the responsibility to continue the decolonizing work he began on our behalf. What an enduring legacy!

 

Walter Kudzai Barure

I cannot think of a more fitting tribute to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o than, to begin with the paradox he so often embodied: that one can weep and laugh in the same breath. I cannot compose a eulogy without remembering how he once implored us Weep Not, Child, and yet, it is through his indelible oeuvre that each tear we shed now is gently wiped away by his fire, his conviction, and his words. Ngũgĩ was never merely a writer. From the outset, he was a force of history, a man who raised his penpoint like a gunpoint to the Empire. That gesture marked the moment he became a moving target. But he never flinched. His campaign to decolonize the mind was not just a slogan; it was a lifelong insurgency of thought, language, and imagination.

I remember my first encounter with his work, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi in 2004. Reading it felt like stumbling into a burning bush: a revelatory, electrifying call to arms. Ngũgĩ didn’t just write plays; he choreographed resistance. His narratives restructured memory, history, and consciousness. Years later, I Will Marry When I Want became my most cherished tagline and quite possibly, it still lingers in the minds of some of my aunts. Ngũgĩ’s works are profoundly intertextual, each one echoing and answering the other in a resonant chorus of revolutionary wisdom. And let us never forget Devil on the Cross, penned on scraps of toilet paper while imprisoned. Even when the state confiscated his pen, his paper, and his freedom, Ngũgĩ continued to write. Resistance, he taught us, is not always armed, it is sometimes etched in fragments of dignity, smuggled through prison bars.

Ngũgĩ was a foundational architect of decolonial thought. Like a reincarnated Caliban, he cursed the bewitched gift of colonial language and returned, defiantly, to Gĩkũyũ not from nostalgia, but because he understood that language is the DNA of thought. For this, he was mocked and maligned but never deterred. He held the line until his final breath. As a political conscience, an academic par excellence, and an unrelenting humanist, he taught us to share even what is meagre, be it “the last kernel of beans,” symbolizing a collective vision of ubuntu and a moral economy rooted in care. Even as we mourn, we also celebrate how his pen has outlived the prisons, the exiles, and the silences they imposed on him. He may not have received the Nobel Prize in Literature he so richly deserved, but he gave us something far more enduring: truth camouflaged in fiction.

 

Mildred K Barya

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, rest in peace and power! Your books will continue to sustain us. Growing up in Uganda, my father introduced me to The River Between. Ever since, I’ve read every book by the author. The first book I fell in love with and read five times in three years is A Grain of Wheat. This novel is part of the reason I decided to embrace literature for life, to become a writer.

 

J Okot Bitek

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o will be celebrated and remembered for his brilliance and generosity; for guiding us through the impact of colonialism through his theorizing and creative writing, lectures, and teaching over several decades. He was kind and generous, never hesitating to sign books, take a photo, or share a story. Ngũgĩ was also a dear family friend who kept in touch. We were lucky to have spent time with him in recent years. In Vancouver, he asked, and we drove him up to Cypress Mountain, because he wanted to sing and dance on the mountain. When we got there, he would not be deterred by the rain, he sang and danced and laughed and was so happy. In Kingston, at dinner with friends who drove in from Toronto, he raised a glass and sang loudly with us in Gĩkũyũ. He made new friends that night and listened while a young man explained the several tattoos on his arms and then posed for a photo with them. While we waited for a ride to take him back to the hotel, he counted all his honorary doctorates—this would be the 13th one from Queen’s University. He was full of life, full of love. He shared stories of his long friendship with our late dad and encouraged me to keep going. I’m going to miss him so much. My deepest condolences to his family.

 

Nana Brew-Hammond

In April 2015, an hour or so before Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o delivered the Chinua Achebe Legacy Series lecture, the Black Studies Department at City College of New York hosted a small reception. I was thrilled to be invited, breathless for the chance to meet the legend who had written a novel on toilet paper while in prison for criticizing the Kenyan government. I don’t remember exchanging many words with him, too shy to do much more than listen to his banter with the author Okey Ndibe, Department Director Cheryl Sterling, and other guests. Today, watching his lecture on YouTube, I smiled at the irony as Ngũgĩ recounted his starstruck experience meeting Achebe. Once upon a time, he had been the one breathless about sharing a room with literary greatness. He couldn’t have known that one day he would be on the other side of the equation, in so many other people’s stories of meeting him, just as I had no clue, in that City College parlor over a decade ago, that I’d be writing about the moment.

 

Diweng Mercy Dafong

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, though I never had the privilege of meeting you physically, as a student and an emerging scholar, I have met you several times through your written and spoken words. Ngũgĩ, the man who lit the path through the darkness of confusion. When we were caged in silence and contradiction, your words, bold and tender, escaped the walls built to confine us. They smuggled themselves through brick-hearted barriers, breaking every chain of colonial logic. You reminded us, gently but firmly, that yes, it is wrong to fall and remain on the ground. You refused the seductive ease of the colonial tongue. Instead, you whispered resistance in strong-sounding words shaped in your mother tongue. Your pen blossomed into red roses not to beautify pain, but to reveal it. The thorns were not hidden, nor the scars denied. Your literature carried not only hope but also the weight of memory and sacrifice. You gave us Weep Not, Child, a cry that steadied our tears, held back the warm salty liquid of our suffering. With backs bent under the weight of history, we stood straighter because you reminded us of our dignity. You gave us Petals of Blood, not to reopen wounds, but to insist that truth, like beauty, is thorned, and that even death hides in the tongue.

You pointed to the Devil on the Cross, and with prophetic insight, turned the gaze inward. You exposed the masks of postcolonial hypocrisy, the chains that still choke us today. Then, with a pen sharpened by memory, you decolonized the mind. You told us: “We cannot plant a new tree in someone else’s language and expect the roots to know our soil.” And so, we returned to our languages, to our names. Whispers of Ngũgĩ are the unquenching flames that echo in every African language we dare to write. In every child who reads their world not through borrowed metaphors, but through voices that sound like home.

We do not mourn.
We remember.
We do not weep.
We whisper.
Indeed, Tomorrow Never Dies.

 

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, which I read in my early teens, had a lasting impact on the way I see literature, the world and my place in it. I kept asking myself why there were not more books like Ngũgĩ’s in the world. My life would have taken a different trajectory without that book.  Thank you for your journey in this world, ancestor of our literature.  Go well on your new travels.

 

Victor Ehikhamenor

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was the first pilot to take me to Kenya. I didn’t have to step a foot outside the boundaries of my village of Udomi-Uwessan in Nigeria, yet I followed him magically as he navigated the valleys, hills, forests and homes in rural Kenya. That is the power of literature and even the super power a figure like Ngũgĩ wielded with his books.

I first read Weep Not, Child as a recommended text in secondary school at thirteen. I was hooked. Njoroge’s ordeal and the national struggle of the Mau Mau freedom fighters to liberate Kenya from the choke hold of colonialism left an indelible mark on my mind. Ngũgĩ’s storytelling prowess and propensity for language, as one of Africa’s modernist literary giants, taught me the power of words. His early books I encountered were part of the reason I chose to study Languages and Literature at Ambrose Alli University. My final thesis, “Ideology and Change in African Fiction: A Case Study of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Novels,” was a study of his pre-independence and post-independence mindset. A vociferous soldier, Ngũgĩ fought against colonialism and all its inhumane characteristics. He liberated his people without shooting a gun. For this, he will always be remembered and revered.

 

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a pivotal figure whose work and voice traverse art, decolonization, language, literature, and politics. The value of his work will be felt for generations to come.

 

Stephen Embleton

“I have become a language warrior. I want to join all those others in the world who are fighting for marginalised languages. No language is ever marginal to the community that created it. Languages are like musical instruments. You don’t say, let there be a few global instruments, or let there be only one type of voice all singers can sing.” – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

A singular voice like no other from our continent, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o spoke and wrote in his own language, for us all. Language holds the power of a people, a community, an individual. We stand on our own, for our stories. I honour him: Camagu / ǁGammāgu

 

Tonye Faloughi

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s words awakened generations of Africans to the power, dignity, and depth of our own stories. His fearless commitment to language as liberation remains revolutionary. As someone passionate about inclusive storytelling, especially for children with disabilities, I draw strength from his insistence that our most powerful stories are those that reflect who we truly are. May we all find the courage to write, speak, and dream in our own voices, just like he did.

 

Nurudeen Farah

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was one of Africa’s greatest writers. He was also a great thinker, a man ready to take literary risks, both in his choice of language and styles, a writer ultimately of immense originality. He was my good friend, and I will miss him.

 

Tope Folarin

I learned so much from Ngũgĩ, but perhaps most importantly that writers bear a responsibility to both their readers and their societies. He was not the first to offer this insight, but he lived it most vividly, and he provided a template for the kind of writer and human I want to be. He will be missed, but he lives on forever in his work and ours.

 

Aminatta Forna

Ngũgĩ was big-hearted, brave, brilliant, and beloved. He behaved like a father to all the younger African writers, adored his students, answered every email or query about his work, and endlessly made himself available. I remember walking with him through New York after we’d had lunch together. He knew the city well, and we stopped at several of his favorite bookstores along the way. We saw a dog wearing shoes and laughed for a long time. He was the easiest of company. I taught his work for many years to American students for whom it was often their first introduction to the literature of the continent. I saw the impact of his words upon them, how deeply he made them think. Through his work he became a witness for his times. He once told me, during an interview, that he became a Marxist when he went to Leeds University and saw how brutally the British political classes treated striking miners. He realized then that class and not color was the most defining feature of the struggle for equality.

 

Reem Gaafar

It is incredibly humbling to stand under the same umbrella of African writing as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, albeit on the peripheries with those just recently inducted. News of the death of giants like him sounds more like a brief note added to a vast collection than a finality of a giving life; the person has taken up so much space in the world, not just by the size of their legacy but its transcendence through time, that it doesn’t seem possible that it would stop with the owner’s passing. I will remember Ngũgĩ as the person who made me feel almost ashamed of writing in English, of failing to decolonize my mind and get over my laziness to learn Arabic properly enough to untangle the stories in my head and get them down on paper in my own language. I console myself with the idea that my writing is not anywhere near the level that allows me to represent a country or culture, and so should be allowed to cling to English as a medium. But it remains an attitude I am proud of, this stick-it-to-the-colonizer statement, and the fearless man behind it who has guided and will continue to guide us in this direction with the light of a blaze burning in his wake. May he rest in power.

 

Baderoon Gabeba

Growing up in a colonial world and as someone who fought to make the postcolonial one, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o knew that, beyond its overt violence, the intimacy and ordinariness of the structures left by colonialism were its most potent weapons. Ever since, we Africans have deliberated on which words are in our mouths and which we write—as the measure of whether we have complied with or resisted the mental structure that colonialism left us. For me, this illuminates the almost desperate fluency and excellence in English which I sought amidst the racial violence and contempt of apartheid: how adhering to English as my first language offered me new avenues for radical expression while also asking me to abandon parts of myself and my heritage. Later, Ngũgĩ’s vision meant turning again to Afrikaans, a tongue I learned from my parents and community and then abandoned for complex reasons in favor of English. Now I am returning to it as a translator and reader and, crucially, as a speaker again—as someone who jokes, gossips, and thinks in its terms.

Can I write a memory of Ngũgĩ without mentioning Nyambura and Mukoma and Wanjiku? Why do we rehearse these lines again and again? Whom do we remember and from whom do we turn our heads? How do we remember a vital writer, thinker, and freedom fighter—and a flawed person who is in the words we speak and the ones we do not?

 

Jadelin Gangbo

The concept of “them” disappears when I read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. It fades when I view the world through the eyes of the characters in his narratives. History, as I know it, loses its definite contours, its shape, drawing a nearly elusive picture that is almost intangible, and I can’t help but wonder if there has ever been something like History. If there have ever been winners and losers. Did they exist? Or has everyone lost something in those dark chapters of our lives marked by colonial rule? Yes, I know there have been winners, but exactly what did they win? And if the colonizers were victorious in colonizing our people, what then is the nature of Ngũgĩ’s compassionate attempt at understanding the white settlers as they are about to give back the country to the natives in the wake of independence, leaving behind an entire life?

Ngũgĩ’s humanity resonating through his masterful storytelling gives me a sense of universality and continuation; what struck me when I first read him was that although he was writing about long-past chapters of a colonial history I had not experienced or knew little about, something about that history felt timeless. Take the passage of Gitoko’s death in A Grain of Wheat—a deaf young Kenyan man in colonial times during the Mau Mau rebellion. He is running home to his mother: “He did not see that a white man, in a bush jacket, lay camouflaged in a small wood. ‘Halt!’ the white man shouted. Gitogo continued running. Something hit him at the back. He raised his arms in the air. He fell on his stomach. Apparently the bullet had touched his heart. The soldier left his place. Another Mau Mau terrorist had been shot dead.” How many Gitogos have we seen in recent times, who for one reason or another have lost their lives in similar incidents? It is thanks to the inestimable work of authors such as Ngũgĩ that one starts to have an idea of how many people have met Gitogo’s fate and, consequently, how many more have responded to the call of joining the fight for change. Thank you, Ngũgĩ, for your contribution to our collective history.

 

Simon Gikandi

To the extent that Ngũgĩ is being considered from an academic position, the essays he has written over the last thirty years represent an impressive record. Indeed, their significance can be discerned from the fact that these works were first presented as lectures in prestigious forums, such as the Robb Lectures at Auckland University in New Zealand, the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and the Ashby Lecture at Cambridge. I don’t know how valid Stuart Hall’s distinction between an intellectual and a scholar really is in the kind of appointment you are contemplating, but Ngũgĩ cannot and should not be considered as a scholar in the traditional sense of the word. His most important work has been done in the public sphere and in the shaping of public debates about culture, society, and politics, rather than inside the guild of literary scholars. He is not a writer of monographs but essays, many of which have an intimate connection to his fictional work, a point he made a while back in his preface to Homecoming. I believe that it is in his role as a public intellectual, one with the capacity to bridge the gap between the work of the university and its various communities, that he has been most influential and transformative.—From a Letter of Recommendation written by Simon Gikandi on May 20, 2002

 

Tendai Huchu

The sad news of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing took me back to my O’ Level English Literature classes with Mr Patrick Machakata, our teacher, passionately dissecting Matigari for us over the course of the term. We had done Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, too, but in Ngũgĩ’s work we found those same themes of power, ambition and revolution reflected for our own time, our own place, in our own voice. And when I finally met the author in London in the mid-2010s, it didn’t feel like a first encounter, rather it was the continuation of a conversation we had started in the nineties. While my heart is heavy with news of this loss, I do not mourn Ngũgĩ because I know I can visit his soul any time on my bookshelf, not only in his own works but in the books written by so many of our writers whom he inspired.

 

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim

The passing of a guiding light like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would always cast a huge shadow on the continent he fought for with his words. He was a wise writer and made himself available to advance literature on the continent. I have fond memories of my encounters with him and will cherish those memories, his legacies, and his literature. He may be gone but his words will resonate on this side for a long time to come.

 

Cajetan Iheka

With the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, African literature has lost one of its most prominent writers and the continent’s languages have lost their most famous and consistent defender. Ngũgĩ insisted on the plenitude and validity of African worlds; he loved us and taught us how to love one another in his works and in his devotion to people—friends and strangers alike. We will miss his moral clarity, his revolutionary disposition, and his magnificent presence. Thankfully, he left an impressive corpus in terms of volume and voltage. The greatest tribute to the master storyteller is to return to the illumination of his writings and to grapple with the tenor of his complex thought.

 

Eghosa Imasuen

My parents kept a shelf of books, including Weep Not Child and The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. These books are an important part of my life. Travel well, oga.

 

Tade Ipadeola

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s was a name to conjure with. I read him first as James Ngugi in the mid-1980s, preparing for secondary school leaving certificate. He was formidable even then, and his novels opened up a world many Africans of my generation have come to respect deeply. I met him for the first time in Port Harcourt as a guest at the Garden City Literary Festival. He’d been invited by the Governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi. I learnt later that Amaechi had written his long dissertation on the novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. His works live on. We’ll miss his generous and profound presence.

 

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as well as being widely beloved and influential, cut a controversial and even divisive intellectual profile at earlier moments in his career. This is true especially of Decolonising the Mind, first published in 1986, and it’s true of any serious critical work. Amid due honor, celebration, and mourning, it’s important to remember the bite of some of Ngũgĩ’s most famous positions, and to continue to question them. To do less is unbefitting of a writer of his stature, who in many ways set the terms of the debates still raging today around African literature’s relationship to culture and language. Ngũgĩ should rest well, and his work should be invited again and again into the noisiest social, political, and metaphysical conversations we can muster.

 

Tsitsi Jaji

 

Karen Jennings

At a time when nations and groups of people are increasingly turning inwards, and as far-right conservatism, xenophobia, and prejudice become violent and hate-fueled, it is crucial to remember the principles of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Many have misunderstood his decision to write only in his mother tongue of Kikuyu, viewing this as a turning inwards, and therefore a turning away. But this is not the case. As Kahora has noted, Ngũgĩ clearly stated that he was “open to learning from all languages and cultures.” Moreover, he was unashamed of international influences on his writing and the value of those influences. For Ngũgĩ, writes Edoro, “language…has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.” But it is not enough for language to be used in isolation, spoken only with those of the same culture or belief systems. Instead, Ngũgĩ, as Ojaide has attested, advocated for “open dialogues with the other languages of the earth.” Only through equal, unprejudiced, open dialogue can real communication, real sharing and acceptance occur. If ever there was a time for embracing our own cultures alongside those of others, for creating dialogues, for sharing with others, no matter how different, it would be now.

 

Chika Jones

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o lived a difficult life. Worth emulating in some aspects and not worth emulating in others. He wrote, always from a place of difficulty. This difficulty marked his life, beliefs and work. This difficulty marks the act of writing a farewell to him. I think what is worth saying is this: Thank you for writing and speaking up. I hope you find Nyambura Wa Ngũgĩ’s eternal forgiveness. For the rest of us still alive: I hope we write, speak up and never forget that kindness is important, if not more important than anything else.

 

Mamle Kabu

Ngũgĩ said, “If you know all the languages of the world and you don’t know your mother tongue, or the language of your culture, that’s enslavement.” For me, his impact on the use of indigenous African languages is his most enduring legacy for our continent as, within our own lifetimes, we witness the exponential hemorrhage of culture between generations, most stark in the loss of our indigenous languages. We are grateful for his example in this regard, for his courage in speaking truth to power and for having had him for so long as a source of literary inspiration.—From Tribute to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o by Mamle Kabu

 

Danson Kahyana

The loss of Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a profound one for me, for at least five reasons. The first one is very personal: In February this year, he supported my application to the US Immigration and Citizenship Services for an EB1 visa. When I made the request to him, he was already in ailing, but this did not stop him from helping me. This speaks to the second thing that makes his passing such a terrible loss not just to me but to everyone who knew him personally: Ngũgĩ was a wonderful person who treated everybody he met with warmth and friendship that radiated far and wide, bringing to mind the Bantu philosophy of Ubuntu, often summarized as “I am because we are.” He did not allow his lofty achievements to cut him off from the communion of humanity; instead, he sought friendship with a hunger that was both enlivening and illuminating. The four times I met him in person—first in 2003 at the 30th anniversary celebrations of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, in Dakar, Senegal, and three times in 2021 in California, USA—revealed to me a man who related to people with love and humility irrespective of their status. Thirdly, he taught me a very important lesson best captured by the title of one of his early stories, “Minutes of Glory”: In life, never let tragic circumstances take away the best you got out of a relationship or a situation—instead, hold on to the beautiful memories. The fourth reason relates to what I learned from his work about Africa’s postcolonial predicament, for instance his insistence that we should write in our African languages so that we enrich them for Africa’s development. People always say that this is impossible because of Africa’s challenging linguistic terrain, but they forget the solution he always suggested—translation, which he defined as “the language of languages.” Finally, his passing marks a profound silence—the indomitable storyteller will give us no more stories. Luckily enough, he has left us a rich repertoire of work that generations shall enjoy until the end of time.

 

Gimba Kakanda

For generations of curious African kids, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was the earliest mirror, reflecting the extent to which we had been conditioned to see ourselves as offshore echoes or subaltern allies of the colonizer. Word after word, sentence after sentence, book after book, he dismantled the lie that the African must function only in the shadow of the West. He was not only a formative presence in our journey as young minds in search of meaning and identity but also a literary maverick who restored dignity to storytelling in African languages. Through his fierce advocacy, he gave our native tongues the self-esteem to stand shoulder to shoulder with any literary tradition in the world. His legacy will remain an enduring reason for gratitude as he takes his place among the pantheon of the greats.

 

Shubnum Khan

What a loss for writers everywhere. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o carried the vibrancy and dynamism of east Africa through the world and taught us, emerging writers from Africa, to hold on tightly to our own voices. His writings and discussions about language and its power changed the way storytelling from Africa was being crafted and I am grateful for that.

 

Billy Kahora

I first met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 2004, and it was under terrible circumstances. It was just after the attack on him and his wife, Njeeri, which had happened only two nights before the event at the Go-Down Arts Centre in Nairobi. Ngũgĩ had enough grace to still appear at the event. And he was incredibly genial, even though all of us in the audience were horrified as we could see a recent burn mark on his forehead where his assailants had put out cigarettes on him. Genial and humorous even after what he had been subjected to by the first two successive Kenyan regimes since independence and what he had seen during the colonial period. This stunned me.

This was the beginning of a series of encounters with him that continued to build him up. As editor at Kwani?, we invited him for Kwani Litfest in 2010 for an intergenerational conversation, and once again his generosity shone through the events—he gave us more time than we could have imagined. I then interviewed him in 2020, and even when I consistently challenged him about his “penchant for ideological abstraction” in the narrative voices of his novels, he was still genial. Later he thanked me for the respect that I had accorded our exchange. I only came to understand and reconcile his stylistics from a combined reading of his Globalectics essay, his relatively recently released memoirs, and Simon Gikandi’s epic work on him that helped me properly contextualize the times he was writing in. The forces against which he was working and writing could only really be challenged by the narrative weapons he chose.

I last saw him in Manchester in October 2023. Once again, he was, even while constantly receiving dialysis, generous with his time. In a closed-door session he was the most energetic—the one who did not want the event to end. We will continue to read his work, and he will live on with us.

 

Toni Kan

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o lived a long and eventful life, morphing from James Ngugi to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, from a writer of English expression to a Gĩkũyũ author, from a young rebel to a grandfather. His books were a staple when we were growing up and discovering African literature. As kids, we used to compete over who could make the best sentences from his book titles – Weep not, Child for A Grain of Wheat or The Petal of Blood that fell in The River Between because I Will Marry When I Want even if the Devil on the Cross is watching the Trial of Dedan Kimathi.

I could go on. Rest in peace, ancestor.

 

Kasimma

Dear Ngũgĩ, thank you. The struggle for independence—not just from the colonizers, but from one’s own who climb to power and proceed to smear the mud on their shoes on their siblings’ faces—the insistence on one’s right to full humanness is never an easy one. But you bore it and were imprisoned for it. You came out and continued to sing the same song. Thank you. News of your passing shocked me. While we mourn your homegoing, I imagine that our people over there rejoice in your homecoming, dabbing you with pats of acknowledgement for a job-well-done. We’ll continue where you stopped here, and we hope you’ll guide us from Mount Kenya. Laba na ndokwa.

 

Erhu Kome

Thank you Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for sharing your stories with the world. Thank you for Weep Not, Child, a story I read as a child that ironically made me weep. And thank you for the artistry of Petals of Blood. It remains one of my favorite books. Rest in peace. Your words will live on.

 

Mandla Langa

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had a profound influence on their own creativity of many South African writers. For me, conscious of the noxious effects of censorship and Bantu Education, which sought to churn out self-hating pawns of white supremacy, it was so rewarding to discover the quiet voices in Weep Not Child and The River Between. These novels gave us a sense that, truly, black lives mattered. Ngũgĩ ennobled heroes like Dedan Kemathi and the Mau Mau warriors, whose lives and activism resonated with our own anti-colonial struggles. He will be forever held in esteem. Hamba kahle, Mfowethu.

 

Siphiwo Mahala

I came to know of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s philosophy of decolonization at the time of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. In 1995, I was part of the first cohort of students to enter university in post-apartheid South Africa, and influenced by Ngũgĩ’s philosophy of decolonization, I chose to study African literature in both English and isiXhosa. Ngũgĩ had been visiting South Africa and conducting public lectures and offering expert advice on language matters since 1992. He was a guest of both Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, the first two presidents of a democratic South Africa. His unwavering commitment to language activism has significantly influenced my own journey as a literary practitioner. Today, I teach his seminal text, A Grain of Wheat, as part of my Colonial and Postcolonial Literature postgraduate class, and my own Xhosa novel, Yakhal’ Indoda, is read on Umhlobo Wenene FM, one of the biggest public radio stations in South Africa. In many ways, I owe my literary career to luminaries like Ngũgĩ, who paved the way and encouraged us during our early steps into the field. It was a profound honor to meet him, to get to know him, and to share both joy and sorrow. One such moment was the passing of our mutual acquaintance, South African National Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, in January 2018. Upon receiving my email carrying the sad news, Ngũgĩ replied, “What? I shall never hear his joyous laughter again?” Although my initial reaction upon hearing of Ngũgĩ’s passing was the same, I find solace in knowing that his words and works will continue to live on in our minds, our hearts, and our collective imagination. Rest in power, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

 

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

Sometimes, the world can be generous: it gifted us Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In such circumstances, the Ganda insists that you pinch yourself to believe. We must pinch ourselves that Mwalimu belonged to us, that we have had him for all this time, that all this time he has been generous with his time and knowledge. In return, we shall extol his fearlessness, his tenacity, his imagination and his talent across time. Thank you for the stories, Mwalimu. Now, you belong to the world.

 

Sarah Ladipo Manyika

Ngũgĩ’s departure leaves a profound silence, yet his voice—that powerful force for African languages and literatures—continues to resonate. On the page, from his novels and memoirs to poems and plays, he leaves an indelible legacy. He was a consummate storyteller, whether on a grand stage or sharing an unpublished tale around a dinner table. He was an attentive listener and celebrated other writers’ successes with genuine joy, offering encouragement with the kind of grace that made us want to write better, think deeper, and be braver. Beyond Ngũgĩ’s prolific body of work and revolutionary ideas, I will always treasure the literary friendship we shared over the decades, both in person and through correspondence. I will always remember the laughter, the dancing, the sipping of palm wine, ginger tea, and green tea, the encouragement he so generously gave to me and his infectious gusto for storytelling. He showed us that being a language warrior doesn’t mean abandoning joy—sometimes the most radical act is to tell our stories with both fierce conviction and irrepressible delight.

 

Sphiwe Marema 

Africa has lost one of its intellectual giants and anti-colonial struggle writers in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. His Decolonising the Mind gives us a distinct anti-colonial perspective on the ongoing conversation about African languages and the role they play in combating imperialism and neocolonialism. In high school, I came across Ngũgĩ’s Matigari, the story of a freedom fighter who buried his weapon, believing he had killed his oppressor. This book shaped my political consciousness as a young South African scholar. Although Ngũgĩ is gone, his writing will continue to live with us. As the youth of this continent, we are compelled to keep his legacy alive.

 

Nkateko Masinga 

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote, “Prescription of the correct cure is dependent on a rigorous analysis of the reality.” On the wings of this quote and a desire for uninterrupted introspection and a lasting cure for my world-weariness, I flew to Kenya years ago to embark on a self-curated writing residency in Naivasha, Kasarani and Voi. Ngũgĩ’s overt disdain for post-colonial Kenya had already given me the language for my own criticism of colonialism as voiced in The Sin in My Blackness, but I needed to proverbially touch the hem of his garment. His incredible body of work, archived in various spaces that I visited in the country of his birth, gave me the language to articulate my disillusion with the knowledge systems that I had unconsciously subscribed to in my upbringing, and the language to contribute to an ongoing conversation about the development of a decolonized curriculum in South African academic institutions. The reclamation of the self by embracing one’s cultural identity is a principle that Ngũgĩ not only championed but also embodied by renouncing writing in English.

“From now on it is Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way,” were his words. To eulogize him in a language he rejected is ironic, but he continued to translate his work, thereby declaring English secondary. His fierce advocacy for African languages to be prioritized was not a tool for isolation but for preservation and integration into institutions of learning, and it is up to us to continue his legacy of the acknowledgement and reclamation of our cultural identity. We have lost a true legend, whose impact will never be forgotten. Rest in power, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Thank you for giving us the blueprint.

 

Njambi McGrath

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a colossus of African literature! Like many freedom fighters who came before him, Ngũgĩ fought a good fight; he was the undisputed champion of the people. Clutching his pen like a spear and paper for a shield, he bruised many egos. No enemy was too mighty for the humble boy from Kamĩrĩĩthu. Born in 1938, Ngũgĩ was an unwilling spectator as the claws of the vulturous British ripped out the heart of his beloved Agĩkũyũ people. He witnessed firsthand the tormented tears of Agĩkũyũ mothers and heard the wails of his countrymen being castrated. His heart broke as the once-proud virtuous men were emasculated, reduced to shorts-wearing errand boys who beat women without mercy, while children were ripped from their parents’ bosoms into indoctrination camps. He decried home guards, who reveled in people’s misery for a few crumbs from their white masters. All these featured in his works.

The rolling hills of Kamĩrĩĩthu are perhaps half a day’s walk from Riara Ridge, the place of my childhood. I grew up on the staple diet of Ngũgĩ’s literature made more special by the fact that I knew the places he featured in his books. Bata shoe factory, Uplands bacon factory, and the donkeys of Limuru were the scenery that flew past as my mother and I drove to Limuru market. What Ngũgĩ gave me was a snapshot of what went on before me, during, and after. Reading Weep Not, Child, The River Between, and A Grain of Wheat was a rite of passage for Kenyan youth. Like a good wine, his works got better with age as I understood the catastrophic loss endured by my people, much of which is hidden from Kenyans whose education system is there to appease the British, aiding them in hiding their crimes.

Ngũgĩ was among the first cohort of formal British education. Being a visionary, he embraced the new medium of communication through paper and ran away with it. As the British shredded centuries-old moral codes and cultural norms of the Agĩkũyũ, Ngũgĩ had the insight to capture it all, enshrining it in literature for future generations. The Agĩkũyũ tradition of storytelling was already imbued in him, turning him into a literary giant. Ngũgĩ’s early works were an ode to his people—a lament of the corrosion of his beloved tribe. His accounts of British ruthlessness were unflinching, documenting how the Agĩkũyũ people, a tribe rich in culture, morality, decency, and ancient knowledge, were transformed by a foreigner into a culture of deceit, immorality, and treachery.

When independence came, Ngũgĩ’s acerbic writings antagonized post-colonial puppets, leaving presidents writhing in anger. Ngũgĩ’s politically charged masterpiece play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, left the government seething. Ngũgĩ shunned the emerging bourgeoisie who favored Englishness while Ngũgĩ sought to include the simple Gĩkũyũ folk for whom he built a theater. They readily participated in his immersive plays, which critiqued social injustice and the Kenyan elite, making him a true man of the Gĩkũyũ peasants. Like a true disruptor, his works saw him become a political prisoner, held without trial at the notorious Kamĩti prison, a crime scene of the British atrocities in Kenya. Coincidentally, Kamĩti was my backyard during my adolescent years. It was ironic that the Kenyan government should jail him in the very prison that bore the blood and tears of Kenya’s freedom fighters, like Dedan Kĩmathi and others, whose bodies still lie in undisclosed locations on the grounds of the prison as the British still refuse to cooperate. Like a true revolutionary, he did not let prison angst go undocumented, giving his readers an insight into his year of incarceration in his book Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary.

Ngũgĩ was woke before woke, rejecting his colonial name and writing in Gĩkũyũ as parents shunned their mother tongue to raise a generation of English speakers. I am the product of those Kenyan schools, a generation in identity crisis. But all is not lost. Instead of spending evenings in dimly lit huts of old, with elders imbuing the young with knowledge through parables, riddles, and stories, future generations will read the works of a great ancestor, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

 

Niq Mhlongo

Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o made me fall in love with literature. Detained, A Writer’s Prison Diary was the first book I read by him, and it opened my eyes to a new world and possibilities. May his soul, words and spirit live forever and continue to inspire many generations.

 

Marissa Moorman

I first read Ngũgĩ in college, between 1986-1990. Aside from Decolonising the Mind, which I also read in those years, I remember reading Devil on the Cross and I still have the Heinemann English translation edition on the bookshelf in my office. Published in 1980, and written in Gĩkũyũ while Ngũgĩ was in prison, it was sardonic, irreverent in skewering colonial hangovers and postcolonial transgressions, and it was a little wild. Much of it takes place on a matatu and it centers on a young woman, which struck me as bold. And, of course, I recall the Organization of Thieves and Robbers as Ngũgĩ’s profound critique of nationalists turned capitalists. Funny that now I realize that Devil on the Cross was published in the same year of Fela’s ITT (International Thief Thief) and points to a moment on the continent when the dreams of what independence would mean were fraying. I am going to re-read the book to revisit my younger mind.

 

Fiston Mujila

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o made us aware of the cultural hegemony that the African continent is experiencing and gave us the means to remedy it. As such, he is a major player in Africa’s cultural independence. He is not dead! His legacy will continue to nourish future generations.

 

Scholastique Mukasonga

Chaque écrivain a dû avoir à répondre à un moment ou un autre à cette question: que peut la littérature? La littérature mène aussi à d’heureuses rencontres.

C’est à l’occasion d’un séjour littéraire à Addis Abeba en 2008, organisé par  une fondation italienne, qui réunissait une dizaine d’écrivains pour la remise d’un prix littéraire que j’ai rencontré Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, qui a d’ailleurs remporté ce prix. Je garde un souvenir admiratif d’un écrivain à la fois brillant et humble qui avait fait le choix à mi-chemin de sa carrière d’écrire, tel un sage gardien des traditions de son peuple, dans sa langue maternelle, le kikouyou.

Je rends hommage à un confrère, unique en son genre, qui a su allier modernité et tradition.

 

Lilian Munetsi

Reflecting on the impactful words of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, I feel a surge of inspiration from his deep insights into the power of language. He courageously reveals how colonialists wielded the English language as a tool of control over African peoples, creating a silencing effect on African voices. Yet, Ngũgĩ does not merely lament this state, he passionately advocates for the reclamation of mother tongues in African literature, underscoring the vital link between language and cultural identity in postcolonial Africa. In his transformative book, Decolonising the Mind, he poses a bold question: “How best can we make borrowed tongues carry the weight of our African experience?” This profound inquiry resonates especially in the context of Kenya’s 1952 state of emergency, where English became the dominant language imposed on children, punishing those who dared to express themselves in their own mother tongues. Ngũgĩ’s reflections echo the words of Chinua Achebe, who questioned the morality of abandoning one’s mother tongue for another: “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal…” These sentiments serve as a rallying cry for African scholars and writers, urging them to guide the next generation toward a true understanding of what it means to be African.

Ngũgĩ’s work is a blueprint for decolonization and cultural reclamation. When the new generation embraces and amplifies his messages, they ignite a powerful legacy that honors their heritage and propels them forward. Ngũgĩ’s journey inspires us all to elevate our voices, reclaim our narratives, and champion the richness of our cultures. His legacy is a testament to the possibility of transformation through language and the enduring spirit of African identity. Pumzika kwa Amani Mzee!

 

Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Over the years, I’ve listened to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o speak—at conferences, on panels, in packed auditoriums. But my most cherished memory of him is from the Hay Festival in 2007, where I was working as an assistant to the festival director, Peter Florence, supporting what was then the largest gathering of African writers at the festival in two decades. Before his talk, we chatted briefly. When I mentioned I was a student living in Wales, he immediately asked if I spoke Welsh. I told him I only knew a few basic phrases. “Teach me,” he said. I laughed nervously, thinking he was joking but he was serious. So, we went through the little Welsh I knew. Later, on stage, he greeted the audience in Welsh to their delight.

We met again later that day. This time, Ngũgĩ was holding a small, shiny black booklet with red and white lettering on the cover: Street Welsh Phrasebook by Heini Gruffudd. “Do you have a few minutes?” he asked. “Of course,” I said. He wanted to practise more Welsh. So, we sat together, repeating phrases and stumbling through pronunciations. Helon Habila found us huddled in a corner and asked what on earth we were doing. When we told him, he burst out laughing—two African writers teaching each other Welsh! It truly was the blind leading the blind. But it was also a moment I’ll never forget. In that brief exchange, in rural Wales, Ngũgĩ’s love of language, his humility, and his playful spirit were all on full display.

 

James Murua

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose contributions were many and varied, was Kenya’s first novelist of international acclaim. His debut novel, Weep Not Child published in 1964, had a memorable fiftieth anniversary celebration back home in 2015. Ngũgĩ was the scourge of presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi, as well as the greedy elites, who were making life unbearable for fellow Kenyans. For his troubles, he was incarcerated at Kenya’s maximum prison for a year. On his release from detention, Ngũgĩ and some of his colleagues led a protest that revolutionized the curriculum and pedagogy of the University of Nairobi by centering African ideas. This was replicated across Africa, the Caribbean, and other new independent nations in the global South. After fleeing the country in 1982 when he realized he was in danger, Ngũgĩ continued to play an active role in freeing Kenyans from dictatorship in exile. As a scholar, he gave life to the struggle for the recognition of the mother tongue. One of those who “when an elder dies, a library is lost” truly applies to. Rest in peace, Mwalimu.

 

Acele Nadale

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is gone. With him goes a vast intellectual, cultural, and political heritage. He embodied the freedom of thought and thinking, the freedom to write and to speak, the kind that overcomes all obstacles, even at the risk of one’s life. The masterpiece Decolonising the Mind was one of the first theoretical texts that shaped my relationship to literature.  I had the immense privilege of moderating a panel on this text at the International Literature Festival in Berlin in 2018, in the presence of Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ. More than thirty years after its publication, Ngũgĩ’s thinking remains strikingly relevant.

Ngũgĩ will live on and endure through the legacy he leaves us. My deepest condolences to his loved ones, to his family, to all those who walked alongside him.

 

Okey Ndibe

Ngũgĩ was the consummate encourager, persistent in entreating me to write in Igbo. Once, he called me while I was in Nigeria. I told him I was in a small gathering with relatives. “Fine, put the phone on speaker,” he directed. Then he told everybody there to join him in convincing me to start using Igbo for my writing. “The Igbo language needs its Shakespeare,” he said. “Why don’t you take up the challenge?” I love to teach Ngũgĩ’s books, especially that favorite of many readers, A Grain of Wheat. Last April, the students in my graduate seminar were wrestling with a question in that finely wrought work of fiction. Right there and then, I rang Ngũgĩ’s number. Imagine my students’ thrill on hearing the author’s voice, warm, largehearted and ebullient, as he joined the conversation over his masterpiece. Several of my students described the experience as special. Even so, their treat was but a smidgen of the fortune I enjoyed in interacting with Ngũgĩ—teacher extraordinaire, chronicler of sagas, revolutionary spirit, dream weaver, young spirit—over the years. The earth has claimed Mzee Ngũgĩ, but—thanks to the staying power of his work and the imperishable legacy he bequeathed to us—his voice will yet resound.—From “The Sheer Fortune of Knowing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o”

 

Wachanga Ndiragu

In 2019, Ngũgĩ underwent triple bypass heart surgery. Around that time, I told him I was preparing for an interview with Wole Soyinka. Ngũgĩ, half-joking, asked me to find out how Soyinka had stayed so young—since Ngũgĩ was his junior. I posed the question to Soyinka. He laughed. “I figured this out a long time ago,” Soyinka said, his eyes twinkling. “I stopped drinking water. Wine is better than water.” This morning, Soyinka wrote to me: “I raise a brimful to Ngũgĩ’s spirit, and to you all into whose hands his baton is entrusted.” The laughter of resistance from these warriors remains contagious. We hear it in the stories they have shared with us. It is stamped on their biographies. They have carried a continent that does not always love them back the way it should. Yet, they have given us nothing but courage, imagination, and a path to follow.

Ngũgĩ knew that words can free us. That there is music in our languages. No one has advocated for and defended indigenous languages more forcefully than Ngũgĩ. He was ridiculed for it. But his project was a prophylactic one: to protect an environment that he so deeply cared about, because the failure to do so would cause irreparable damage and suffering. Ngũgĩ knew that silence, in a colonized world, is never neutral. His resolve to live is captured in the words of Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet, who sang that “death must not find us thinking that we die.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Your words, and the love and laughter behind them, will carry us forward. Travel well, Mwalimu Ngũgĩ. Rest well, my friend.

 

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Nematambudziko. My condolences to my beloved teacher and mentor Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ and his entire family on their immense loss. Today, we celebrate the extraordinary life of a literary giant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose writings sparked our imagination of what African literature could be. I think of his work as an act of love and care, his insistence on honoring our languages and indigeneity as tending to the wounds left by colonialism. I remember reading Decolonising the Mind for the first time and how it gave me permission to take my own indigenous storytelling lineage seriously. I remember the joy of reading Wizard of the Crow and how it gave me language to articulate the absurdity of living in Zimbabwe under the regime of an aging dictator. Thank you for trailblazing, for your fire and spirit, for watering so many minds, for taking up space and being unapologetically African. Thank you for giving us a legacy that will inspire generations to come. It is only right that I say goodbye to our ancestor in my mother tongue. Lala ngoxolo. Zorora murugare.

Nzube Nlebedim

Ngũgĩ’s writing was revolutionary, and revolutionaries always secure their place in history’s hall of fame. Ngũgĩ earned his long ago and tirelessly inspired others to join the just war against colonial domination. He wielded the full power of storytelling and taught other African writers to appreciate and center African languages and culture. May he rest in peace.

 

DK Nnuro

My friend Dr. Tameka Cage Conley, Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University, tells an epic Ngũgĩ story; it returned to me as soon as I heard of his passing, such that Tameka was the first person I reached out to. Twenty-five years ago, she’d driven for almost an hour from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, where Ngũgĩ was speaking at Dillard University. The weather people were predicting a hurricane, but Tameka was determined to see Ngũgĩ, come hell or high water—perhaps literally, in this case. Against the warnings of loved ones, she set off for Dillard and made it there without incident. Ngũgĩ was every bit the oracle he is—I say is because oracles endure. During the Q&A Tameka asked Ngũgĩ about surviving colonialism, and in response “…he emphasized by stomping his foot, repeatedly, that the sole purpose of colonialism was to crush the identity of the soul, the spirit of the African.” Later he would graciously sign her copy of A Grain of Wheat, the novel that made Tameka fall in love with his work. For me, it was Weep Not, Child, which my friend from high school, a Kenyan American, gifted to me to correct my troubling bias for the literatures of Western and Southern Africa. It was the novel that made me worshipful of Ngũgĩ, the writer; Ngũgĩ, the liberator (that stomping for emphasis!), such that I get it—how much I get it!—that on her way back to Baton Rouge Tameka would find herself driving in torrential downpour, needing to pull off the side of the road, fearing that she and her car would “be swept away by water and wind,” and yet still so damn pleased that she’d met her literary hero. “I would have done it all again,” she says.

I get it, Meka. I get it.

 

Pitika Ntuli

The last time we spoke to Ngũgĩ, last week, he laughed at me. He said to me, “I thought you were a very educated guy who understood language.” And we just don’t. I said, “What? What are you up to?” He said to me, “Spell imperialism.” I said, “I-M-P-E…” When I got to E, he said, “Stop. There should be no E in imperialism. There should be an I.” And it immediately struck me that once you put an I in that word, it means imp, it means war. We’ve actually been fighting a war.

A single syllable from Ngũgĩ is a philosophy in writing, is a philosophy in thought. It throws up hope for us African people to go back to our own roots and discover who we really are. And we can only do that from the depth and the marrow and the spleen of our languages. I miss him for his laughter and for the contribution that he has made. He’s so highly adored in South Africa. As soon as his news came, I could not even cope with my phone because people knew how close he was to me. When he came here, wherever we are, wherever there are children, he would cease to become a guest of honor. He would be there among the children, talk to them and encourage them. I remember this more than anything.

 

Mazi Nwonwu

Weep Not, Child and The River Between are some of the books that shaped my writing style. From loving them as a child to longing to capture the wonder of rural Kenya that read so familiarly to someone who was so removed. A testament to how alike our lives were across sub-Saharan Africa. I still think of hills and valleys when I think of the great Ngũgĩ. Like him, I also pushed aside the entrenchment of an English name at the height of career recognition. Travel well, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

 

Chief Nyamweya

Ngũgĩ was a literary giant with a deep, albeit often unrequited, love for his country and continent. He was forced into exile as far too many of Africa’s most brilliant children are. But that never diminished his love for his home. He taught us to take pride in our voices, languages, and history. Not to isolate ourselves or attempt to resurrect the past, but to have a firm foundation from which to grow out into the world with the confidence of a Mugumo tree. Ngũgĩ may have left us, but he will live forever in our hearts.

 

Aiwanose Odafen

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a towering pioneer of African literature, a steadfast voice whose words illuminated paths for countless writers. When I think of Ngũgĩ, one word comes to mind: revolutionary. Words cannot describe the trailblazing legacy he leaves behind. Without Ngũgĩ’s fearless example, many would not have thought it possible to write authentically about the African experience; to be unapologetic about who and what we are, our language, our art. He showed us that our voices matter, that our narratives deserve space on the world’s stage. His passing calls not for mourning but for celebration of a life well lived. Ngũgĩ has gone to be with the ancestors; may light guide his path.

 

Richard Oduor Oduku

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s influence on the global architecture of literature is assured. A foundational thinker, prolific to the extreme and rooted to the core, the expansiveness of his output, spanning over 30 books, cannot be dimmed, much less by modern-day paper-thin social media critics. He is a literary legend in every sense of the word. His place in the literary canon is incontestable.

Away from the literature textbooks I grew up with, my closest encounter with Ngũgĩ was nearly a decade ago, when Jalada Africa, a trailblazing and visionary writers’ collective, decided to publish a “Languages Issue,” which birthed a “Translations Issue.” The idea, at the time, was simple: get a short story from one of the most impactful writers in Africa and translate it into as many African languages as possible. Our first choice was Ngũgĩ. In 2016, Ngũgĩ gifted the collective a fantastic fable: “Ituĩka Rĩa Mũrũngarũ: Kana Kĩrĩa Gĩtũmaga Andũ Mathiĩ Marũngiĩ” [“Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright”]. Jalada’s managing editor, Munyao Kilolo, worked hard to actualize the dream. It took only a few months for Ngũgĩ’s fable to become the most translated short story in the history of African writing, and within a year, the fable had become the most translated work globally in modern times by an African author. I translated the fable into the Dholuo language.

The work, which Munyao Kilolo affectionately calls “a practical vision” and which Ngũgĩ praised as a “conversation between cultures” and as a demonstration of how the hierarchy between languages can be torn down, inspired new series of lectures on languages and translation. Ngũgĩ was enamored with the avalanche of digital tools that Jalada and an expanding army of translators were employing to decolonize the mind.

When the Translations Issue became a global phenomenon, with translations in more than 100 languages, Ngũgĩ published a special edition of The Upright Revolution, in collaboration with a few cultural publishers across the continent. It is possible that Jalada’s work inspired Ngũgĩ’s last book, The Language of Languages—a work that “brings together for the first time Ngũgĩ’s essays and lectures about translation, written and delivered over the past two decades.” We mourn the loss of the consummate scholar and the self-declared “language warrior,” but more importantly, we are honored by the inheritance of words he has left us. I invite everyone to turn their gaze to ongoing literary translation projects across the continent, particularly to Ituĩka, a platform that is boldly expanding the original vision of the Jalada Translations Issue.

 

James Ogude

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing has left a huge intellectual gap in Africa’s cultural and political landscape. Instead of mourning him, I have chosen to celebrate the intellectual legacy of this generous and authoritative African sage I was privileged to have encountered during my undergraduate days at the University of Nairobi and much later, as a scholar of Ngũgĩ and African literature generally. When I arrived in South Africa in 1991, Ngũgĩ was the most widely known African writer in the academy, in spite of apartheid. As early as 1981, the widely respected South African journal, English in Africa, had dedicated a special issue to his works. His most widely referenced text then was Decolonising the Mind. Indeed, he is the most widely taught African writer in the global north and the global south, alongside Chinua Achebe—the man who published his award-winning novel, Weep Not, Child, under the Heinemann African Writers Series. When the prestigious Cambridge University Press decided to publish a worldwide series on “Leading Writers in Context,” again Achebe and Ngũgĩ featured from Africa, and I am deeply privileged to have been asked to serve as the editor of the volume on “Ngũgĩ in Context.” His works have been translated into several languages across the globe. I hope we will soon see his works translated into African languages across the continent.

 

Ben Okri

“When I first met [Ngũgĩ] I expected to meet a socialist firebrand but instead encountered a genial, engaging man who had read some of my writing and asked about my influences. I was genuinely surprised by his warmth, his humour and his friendliness. He was at ease with white as well as black people. He loved a good drink, enjoyed conversation and had a genuine love for literary small talk.”—From “In his company you could not be lazy”

 

Matt Omelsky

As for so many scholars of African literature, Ngũgĩ’s work has had a formative influence on me for many years. It began when I was studying at New York University, taking Introduction to Pan-Africanism with the great Trinidadian critic and translator J. Michael Dash. Ngũgĩ had taught for a decade at NYU and left for the University of California Irvine not long before I arrived. Reading Weep Not, Child, the class introduced me to his singular politics and way of narrating his nation’s history and culture. Just as important, the class put Ngũgĩ in an international frame from the very beginning for me, and this would only deepen over the next two decades of studying and teaching his work. I would come to recognize a certain kindred relationship between the way he frames Gĩkũyũ cosmology in Weep Not, Child and its rupture wrought by colonialism, and the way Things Fall Apart and Death and the King’s Horseman present their own genres of metaphysical rupture and dispossession. Especially now that he’s departed us, it’s impossible not to think of Ngũgĩ as part of the pantheon of global black radicalism, along with Fanon, Cabral, Shakur, Biko, Du Bois, Lorde, and others. I’m so grateful for the gifts he’s given us and generations to come.

 

Othuke Ominiabohs

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wasn’t just a writer, he was a force of nature, a literary giant whose works and actions shifted the tide of African literature for good. Writers never really die. His legacy will live forever.

 

Ondjaki
Where tears dance

the fragile future dances.

from your smile

an old tree was born.

 

E C Osondu

Ngũgĩ tells the story of how when he returned to his village after college and told the village elders that he was no longer a Christian, one of them replied: “How can you claim not to be a Christian if your name is James and James was the half-brother of Jesus Christ?” We must give credit for Ngũgĩ’s Damascus-road conversion on the issue of language and literature to the wise old man in his village. Also, to Obi Wali, who first declared at the Makerere conference that you cannot write African literature in a non-African language. Ngũgĩ, knowing the difference between theory and praxis, would go on to put this into practice by writing his novels first in his mother tongue.

The issue of land is the overarching subject of African literature: who owns the land? Who forcefully took the land? What should be built on the land—shrines or churches or schools and shops that sell Western goods? What should traverse the land—donkeys and other domestic African animals or Western things like cars and bicycles and so forth? No surprise that a character from his novel is named Howlands—what an aptronym! By asking the question—how can you possibly dismantle the house of words built by the master using the master’s language— Ngũgĩ laid the foundation for building, brick by brick, a truly authentic edifice of African literature. This edifice must, of course, be built on African land.

Ngũgĩ was prolific and profuse, producing novels, essays, and memoirs until his passage. Thus, he showed by example how it should be done—in the words of Naija Gen Z—more workings, more doings, less cho cho cho. Ngũgĩ’s legacy is that until African literature rids itself of the colon in the colonial, it will continue to be a literature of mimicry and inauthenticity.

 

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

“Grief was not a thing you finished with. It was a companion that changed its shape—sometimes a shadow, sometimes a knife. You carried it until you learned to breathe around its weight.”—Weep Not Child

There is a disorienting sense of loss in understanding that Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is no longer among us: a great tree that upheld a continent and people in the world has fallen. With this comes a selfish, quiet fear: What happens now, without his gently fierce, towering presence, his clarity? Yes, he was old, and yes, we knew he had been unwell, still, Ngũgĩ was always there, a constant in our lives, larger than life, wrestling with history for us, challenging fate and offering languages their worlds. A man spoken of with awe in the corridors of thought, imagination, struggle, and with resentful reverence in many decaying chambers of empire, he stood as a monument of enduring defiance. For me, he was the doorway: A Grain of Wheat was my first encounter with the literatures of Africa in school.

Ngũgĩ’s literary fire did more than awaken us; it helped make sense of our discontent, shaping the questions we learned to ask of our nations, and the world. His stories were the soil from which our consciousness grew, his characters familiar kin in a Kenya torn and tender. Through his works he did not just narrate our world, he reimagined it. For many of us, he was our guide to the truth that language is not neutral, that stories are weapons, and that to write as an African is also an act of subversion. How do you mourn a mind that mapped your interior world before you even knew you had one? Each of Ngũgĩ’s books is a revelation: a mirror and a scalpel. His words grew with us, fought with us, stayed with us. Now that he is gone, we pause, a little bewildered. There was a way he was in the world that made it a little more reassuring for those of us connected with, and of Africa. The longing returns: to hear him speak once more in his steady, searing cadence.

Later, as we stepped into the literary landscape ourselves, we would say “Kenya,” and the stranger who might become a friend would say, “Ngũgĩ.” It happened in every country I entered: “This person, a writer. She’s from Ngũgĩ’s country.” We wrote because Ngũgĩ made space in the world for us. Unapologetically Kenyan, profoundly African, globally unbound. He was both an icon and a guide. His love for our many African languages, his vision of a liberated country and continent, and his unwavering belief that art must serve the people gave us permission to imagine in a thousand other directions. Now that he has joined the great ancestors, perhaps the world will finally begin to reckon with the vastness of his gift: this writer-scholar who steps into the transtemporal archive of our becoming.

 

Nadia Owusu

I recently re-read and taught Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seminal essay Decolonising the Mind. The seminar focused on literature that intersects personal and historical trauma. Some students, like me, were not born in the United States; many were first-generation Americans, and most were people of color. Almost all had grown suspicious of “craft” as it is often taught—cultural preferences and peculiarities presented as universal principles. It was a joy to see my students affirmed by what Ngũgĩ said about his colonial literary education: “The location of this great mirror of imagination was necessarily Europe and its history and culture and the rest of the universe was seen from that center.” Through his brilliant novels, essays, and political activism, Ngũgĩ taught me to reject that center and to refuse to stand outside of myself to look at myself. We have lost a giant of African letters, but his voice and example will endure, daring us to imagine and fight for a better world.

 

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

On Sunday, 1st November 2009, I had breakfast with Ngũgĩ after we had both been part of Wasafiri Magazine’s 25th anniversary celebrations at the Southbank Centre in London. Random House had released my first novel Tail of the Blue Bird earlier in the year, and I had begun to cycle ideas for my next novel—which I would not complete for over 10 years. After answering a couple of my fanboy questions and telling me I started with a good one when I said the first book of his I read was Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ seemed far more interested in the work that I was doing. I asked him why, and he said that he liked to talk to young writers and see their enthusiasm because he got “professional jealousy,” and that kept him going. He followed up with his trademark chuckle as I marveled at the surrealness of the moment: I was having breakfast with Ngũgĩ!

While I read some of his novels as a boy in Ghana and loved his quirky brand of satire, it was more my encounter with his nonfiction book Decolonising the Mind later on that became pivotal in my life as both a writer and an editor. Decolonising the Mind leads us away from the path of proving mastery of the colonizer’s dance towards dancing with our feet in our own home. I felt like the politics of the book gives a language for the reclaiming of self that is not rooted in reaction or protest; it places its adherents in a starting position that is not one of pleading but one of assertion. For any colonized people, that language is an invaluable gift. For me, it became the foundation of my editorial penchant for encouraging my writers not to italicize words that are native to them—an edict I use in my own work—and my use of syntax in my writing that reflects the real-world use of language in the places where I set my work. Interestingly, if we follow the thread of Decolonising the Mind‘s precepts, there will be no “first African to…” narrative, because we have our own path. In this way, it is curiously apt, triumphant really, that we know the majesty of his writing, the enormous power of his satire, and the Nobel Committee never usurped his brilliance to name him the first person writing in an African language to win the Nobel. He already has his kingdom with us. Rest well, Mwalimu.

 

Victoria Princewill

Great public intellectuals tend to share one rare gift: the ability to give language to ideas that are foundational in their truth and altering how we think about reality. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writing, as I experienced it, beginning with Something Torn and New, did exactly that. As a young diasporic writer, born, raised, and still living in England—as a woman and a racial minority—I was taught that a rigorous education was a passport: not quite out of oppression and into power, but at least from subjugation into self-determination. That idea felt true to me early on and remained firm, even as other narratives collapsed under the weight of the power dynamics that shaped them.

Growing up in the “West,” some questions, fundamental ones, were impossible to answer if divorced too far from your ancestral culture. In the hushed, composed halls of private schools, you quickly learned those questions were considered inappropriate or ill-mannered. Why was Africa so poor? I often wondered. It wasn’t until I learned — separately — that Africa was rich, but only in resources, that I was able to redirect my questioning. From that point, I pursued a deeper geoeconomic understanding of the world.

As the age of decolonization replaced the postcolonial era, my focus stayed on the world-system, on the essentiality of education, history, and economic justice. I immersed myself in understanding how internationally regulated plunder, repackaged as the free market, had entrenched inequity on a global scale.

I read constantly. First in English. Later, in French. It took reading Something Torn and New to realize I had been working through ideas of justice in colonial languages. I was a novelist telling forgotten stories, researching East Africans who lived in Iran, listening to the sounds of Afaan Oromoo, naming historical architecture in transliterated Farsi and yet I hadn’t paused to consider the centrality of indigenous language in restoring not just identity but structure to a continent whose fifty-four countries were drawn and redrawn under colonial order. In Something Torn and New, Ngũgĩ makes the case with elegance and force: a continent cannot be postcolonial while communicating almost exclusively in colonial languages. To truly decolonize, we must reclaim and revive the languages that predated colonial invasion. He argued this as principle and as practice. He laid out how it might work in real time: using colonial tongues as bridges, not bases. To spread indigenous languages, to preserve

culture and memory, by translating through, not into, the colonizer’s speech.

This idea—poetic, literal, and temporal—stayed with me. I am British-born, British-based, and a descendant of the Kalabari Kingdom in what is now southern Nigeria. Our language, spoken by perhaps 250,000 to 500,000 people in 2025, is at risk. In a world of billions, for a people with traceable 17th-century roots, that’s vanishingly small. It was because of Ngũgĩ that I began to study how to speak, read and write Kalabari. Ngũgĩ’s work is bold, urgent, and skeptical of how we fetishize colonial languages. His clarity, his refusal to be flattered by the West, and his deep investment in the value of what imperialism deemed small taught us that power must be scrutinized, not absorbed. To stand apart from power, even when invited in, is a rare form of discipline. That Ngũgĩ’s canonical work is still largely unheeded tells me his courage was singular. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a great chapter closed, an exceptional mind gone. I have lost someone from whom I still had so much to learn.

 

Kwei Quartey

I met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o years ago at a book event, and what stayed with me wasn’t just his brilliance, but his humility, quiet presence, and profound wisdom. I remember thinking—part envy, part awe—Will I ever carry myself with that kind of spirit?

 

Ato Quayson

Like many people I knew Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o mainly from his writings, yet I feel his recent passing as a deep personal loss. There are reasons for this. I met and interacted with Ngũgĩ many times at conferences and public functions and held him in deep regard as a legend of African literature. I also kept abreast of the many wonderful stories told about him: his unbridled joy on the dance floor, his incredible sense of humor in personal conversation, and his generous mentoring of students and colleagues alike of different generations. My son’s mother is Italian and I am Ghanaian, but when he was born I suggested that we name him Kamau, after the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite, whose first name was originally Edward, had been given the name Kamau by Ngũgĩ’s grandmother in 1971 when he went to visit the Kenyan writer at his home while on a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Nairobi. We discovered later that the name Kamau means “the silent warrior” in Gĩkũyũ, giving the young man a great boost of confidence drawn from the subtle force of his name.

— From “I have come a long way, and I want to sleep”

 

Sarita Ranchod

I was reading Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms when I heard about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing. His words felt like a sacred parting gift. Just days earlier, I had been re-reading Decolonising the Mind. What struck me once more was the clarity of Ngũgĩ’s writing. The ideas he explores are far from simple—yet he delivers them with searing precision. I found myself aspiring to that level of clarity. To convey something meaningful in plain, resonant language is no small feat. It is a form of power. It is also, as Ngũgĩ demonstrated, a political act.

Working in international development institutions, I write constantly; however, my words are rarely my own—they belong to institutions that hold their copyright. And they are written in my first language, English, reflecting my entanglement with colonialism in how I think, dream, imagine, and create. I aim to write plainly—not because the work is simple, but because accessibility is political. In my work on equity and inclusion in global organizations, I have observed how language shapes who gets to speak and who remains silent. I have heard from brilliant, multilingual colleagues who hesitate to contribute in English for fear of making errors or being judged by those trained in elite institutions. For many, remaining silent becomes safer than risking sounding “wrong.”

Ngũgĩ knew this terrain intimately. He showed us that colonial subjugation was about many things, including language—what we are allowed to say, in what tongue, and with what consequence. His insistence that we decolonize not just what we write but also how and for whom, remains vital. The advocacy I do today—urging organizations to value the many languages people think and express themselves in—has roots in his work.

Reading Moving the Centre brought another grief into focus: the memory of Professor Rok Ajulu, a remarkable Kenyan thinker who taught and mentored me in political economy at Rhodes University in the 1990s. Under his guidance, we debated the periphery and the center, and in remembering him in this moment, I return to Ngũgĩ’s conception of “many centers,” where multiple truths and knowledge systems coexist with dignity. That vision continues to shape my feminist, decolonial social change work. Advancing global south feminisms and equity and inclusion is not neutral. These efforts require confronting deep-rooted hierarchies of power in knowledge, language, citation, institutional culture, and definitions of rigor. In feminist spaces, we often ask: Whose knowledge counts? Who gets to speak? How do we reclaim narrative power in a world still bent on silencing us?

Ngũgĩ taught us that these are not abstract questions. They are daily struggles. We must speak, write, and live from our many centers. By doing so, we honor Ngũgĩ not only in tribute—but in practice.

 

Novuyo RosaTshuma

I remember studying Decolonising the Mind in graduate school and experiencing a cosmos-shaking shift. Go well, light of Africa! Inkanyezi yethu.

 

Reginold A. Royston

Language is the first media. A magic that combines words, sound, power. azucar, asé, sankofa, wepa, ayé, ujamaa, amandala, gqom. Ngũgĩ is his own language, his own discipline, his own poem. A masterpiece, written on toilet paper. He is among the sainthood of writers martyred for their art, the anti-thesis to machinic language, and yet the essence of the cipher.

 

Morakabe Raks Seakhoa

“Keepers of African memory must do for their languages what all others in history have done for theirs,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2003 Steve Biko Annual Memorial Lecture, Cape Town, South Africa.

Of the many encounters I’ve had with Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, personally and through reading his transformative books, his Steve Biko Annual Lecture presentation, “Consciousness and African Renaissance: South Africa in the Black Imagination,” stands out higher than Mount Kilimanjaro in my mind. If there was ever a masterclass on African literature in African languages, with an understandable leaning toward the South African linguistic sphere and her countless authors in their African mother tongues, this one is second to none. In that presentation, Ngũgĩ excavated the history of colonialism in South Africa—of course within the African continent, Asia, and the Americas context—its thievery of not only the land but also the dispossession of the indigenous people of their languages and inversion of their memory.

I first met Ngũgĩ in the early 1990s when we, the now-defunct Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), invited him on a speaking tour of South Africa. What stands out in my mind was his challenge to us to translate from Kikuyu into isiZulu and other African languages his book, Matigari. He emphasized that the translation should not be via any colonial languages.

Ngũgĩ has left us a very rich and everlasting legacy, a roadmap to our ultimate total liberation. As he said in 2012 in South Africa, “one of the basic, most fundamental means of individual and communal self-realization is language. That’s why the right to language is a human right, like all the other rights, enshrined in the constitution. Its exercise in different ways, communally and individually chosen, is a democratic right.”

Rest well, our Elder of African Letters. Your revolutionary spirit lives in all of us. Amandla!

 

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

I met Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in 2016 when he headlined the Ake Arts and Book Festival. In literary terms he was a giant of a man, and in real life, or at least at the festival he made himself like one of us, sitting among us during lunch, chatting, joining conversations, and smiling. It was an amazing opportunity to meet in person the man behind the letters, a man who stood for social justice, stood up for the oppressed, and inspired debates about whether Africans should write first in their indigenous languages or not. Rest well Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Your memory will live on forever.

 

Vamba Sherif 

A few writers influenced me as much as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o did through his characters who fought against injustice and colonialism. Their struggles reflected my world and Ngũgĩ’s deep humanity appealed to me, a boy growing up in Liberia. It takes love, courage, and sacrifice to capture the struggles and the beauty of the colonized and the oppressed in and out of Africa as he did in his work.

I had the privilege of meeting him, in 2007, at the Time of the Writer Festival in Durban, South Africa, where I had been invited as a fellow writer and he was to give a keynote speech. I had convinced the Dutch media to do a radio documentary on him. I met my hero while sitting in a restaurant, and he was walking toward me in an African tunic. He turned out to be soft-spoken and humble and accessible in ways that calmed me and allayed my fears of disappointing myself. He was as open as writers rarely are, and talked with grace and wisdom about his life and writing. We kept in touch after the festival, and he was deeply involved a few years ago with me and others when we decided to initiate a conversation series called KAAAL, Kemet Awards for the Advancement of African Languages. It was the Professor, as we all referred to him fondly, who helped us coin the name for the awards, and he was generous enough to attend many of the episodes of the series.

“Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture,” wrote the great novelist and essayist in his seminal Decolonising the Mind; and he remained true to these words. “Sherif,” he told me during our first meeting, “if you were to write a story in your mother tongue, instead of in Dutch or in English or in Arabic—if you were to write just a simple story, a short story and not a novel—you would have done your people great pride. Go on and do it and see what effect that would have on a child in Liberia.” One of the giants of literature and one of the great intellectuals of the world has left us. May we remember his humanity and immense contribution to the power of the written word. May we keep his memory alive. Rest well, Professor!

 

Bhakti Shringarpure

Politics and literature, the politics of literature, literature as politics, literature of politics, literature as resistance, literature as dissidence, literature for the people…I can only string these ideas together because of Ngũgĩ. But my grand debt to Ngũgĩ is the almost tactile understanding of what exactly is colonialism and how it dwells within us and all around us. I first came across decolonization as a term and as violent political process in the writings of Frantz Fanon, but it was the thinking on the act of “decolonizing” that Ngũgĩ’s writings hammered into me. I have since written, spoken and edited books about this so no need to carry on further except to say that there is work to be done, and political, economic, social and psychological decolonization is yet to be achieved. Thanks to Ngũgĩ, I stand firm on the belief that dislodging our inherently colonial mindset is the only way forward for our ailing world. There are so many beautiful tributes and obituaries getting published about this lovely man whose words, warmth and intellect touched so many. Social media is evidence of an avalanche of love for him. People are posting unique and previously unseen photographs with him, a testament to Ngũgĩ’s sweetness and patience to chat and hang out and laugh and ask to learn words in your language and allow photos to be taken with him everywhere he went. May Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-2025) rest in peace, beauty and power.—From Haphazard notes on mourning Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

 

Lynda Spencer

Mwalimu, you had a gift for storytelling. Asante sana for all the narratives which will live on forever.  Travel gently, Hamba kahle, Lala ngoxolo.

 

Kiru Taiye

It is with sadness that I read the news of the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. I met him years ago at Ake Festival, and I was lucky enough to read out part of his work, The Upright Revolution, translated into Igbo to the audience. Listening to him talk about his passion for telling our stories in our local African languages was both enlightening and inspiring. We have lost an African giant. My heart goes out to his family. Travel well, sir. Good night, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

 

Wole Talabi

A titan has fallen. A mighty library has been lost. But Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s words live on. He has entertained, educated and inspired so many minds, mine included. Those words, those stories, his legacy will carry on for generations, echoing into infinity.

 

Tlotlo Tsamaase

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a legend beyond, and a wisdom we have lost. No words can fill this void. My condolences to his family, and may he rest in peace.

 

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Ngũgĩ was an elder before he became an ancestor—a guiding light in many ways for the work I do in language and literature. Thankfully, I got to spend some time with him—first through his books, then a few times at Aké Festival in Abeokuta in 2016, and since then through emails, blurbs, personal engagements, and interventions. He was always accessible, always principled, and always wise. When I wrote to invite him on behalf of the editorial board to become a guest editor on what became the annual Best Literary Translations anthology, he was curious whether the translations were into English from African languages, or from English into African languages. To him, as those familiar with this aspect of his public advocacy will already be familiar, there was nothing exciting in the former, when African languages continue to languish in a state of drought and neglect.

Before then, Ngũgĩ had blurbed my first full book-length translation into Yorùbá in 2021 and the multilingual-multimedia translations anthology I co-edited in 2023. “African languages must talk to each other… This project adds to a much-needed and necessary conversation among African languages,” he said about the latter. And for the former, he had written, “Translation is the common language of languages. Túbọ̀sún is among the young practical visionaries of New Africa.” He was eager to support efforts that helped push African languages forward, no matter how small. I cannot thank him enough for his role in mainstreaming translation and publishing in the mother tongue. He consistently explained to us why reclaiming our own mother tongue in our literature matters. It was my pleasure to translate his Upright Revolution to Yorùbá for the Jalada Project. May Ngũgĩ’s vision endure and may the future of African languages in literature and culture be better than today because he lived, and because his words moved the rest of us to action.

 

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

I never had the opportunity to meet Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in person, though I first met him through his writing during the gloomy days of the Abacha government in the late 1990s. I found Secret Lives and Other Stories at Abia State University’s library, the first book by Ngũgĩ I read, which introduced me to the rich complexity of Kenyan lives. The book lifted me out of the bog of gloom, imbuing me with glimpses of possibility. I had read short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Collette, and Katherine Mansfield, but somehow, I couldn’t relate much to their worlds. It was not until I read Ngũgĩ’s Secret Lives that I believed I could also write stories, especially about sundry Nigerian experiences; indeed, that book transformed and motivated me to work on my debut short story collection. Go well, Elder Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

 

Ejiro Umukoro

Remember Ngũgĩ’s words of old,

Weep not, child, for freedom’s tale is told.

Language is home, a sanctuary true,

Where words ignite, and hope breaks through.

The power of words, a force so grand,

A tool of resistance, a people’s stand.

So let us rise, with hearts aflame,

And march towards freedom, with Ngũgĩ’s name,

Before you cross, let our voices be heard,

And weep not, child, for a brighter world is blurred.

 

Chika Unigwe

I first met Ngũgĩ through his novels which were recommended reading in Nigerian secondary schools. It seemed implausible that I would one day meet him in person, one day be in the same room as he was, one day talk to him, one day be familiar enough to call him Mzee. But in the way that writing makes impossible dreams come true, I met him (for the first time at the Time of the Writer Festival in South Africa) and we talked, and he became this familiar, avuncular figure I began calling Mzee. It is incredibly touching that despite his years of forced exile, despite the terrible, haunting experience with robbers when he returned to Kenya in 2004, despite seeing how Africa was being ruined by corrupt, avaricious leaders, he maintained a contagious optimism in the continent. What he believed in, he believed in fully, which was why he began writing in his local language and advocated for African writers to do the same. Practicality is no match for such optimistic belief in the complete and utter decolonization of our literature. I am happy that for himself, he found a way to make that dream possible. For those of us who continue the work, writing in the colonizer’s language because we must, because even if we could write in our own languages there is no infrastructure, because it is practical, Mzee is that voice in our ears urging us on. We may disagree on the method, but we agree that the work never ends. And he has shown us what is possible. I am grateful he lived. May his family be consoled, and may his soul rest in peace.

 

Uwem Akpan

I met Professor Ngũgĩ once in Kennesaw, Georgia. He was very fatherly. Suddenly, we were talking about very personal things, and I wasn’t even the only person in the room. I really treasure his gift of putting others at ease. Ngũgĩ did so much for Kenyan, African, and world literature. But as we say goodbye to him, I restrict myself to two aspects of his life.

First, it touches me that he didn’t only write literature, which is in itself quite a job, but fought for his ideas in the streets of Kenya. Ngũgĩ drilled home the message by writing his plays in his native language and staging them in the villages. When I worked in the slums of Kibera, Kenya (2000-2003), the folks talked about him nonstop. And they remembered the price the government exacted from him because of this. Sometimes, I ask myself: Am I more useful to Africa writing about her from the “coziness” of America, or should I be “home” fighting for her future in marches and protests? I believe Nigeria, my country, has become a worse place because writers no longer get into political activism. We just write and sell literature and buy more literature! We write about our rich African culture, but we’re out here—even when it’s becoming clear that the “owners” of America don’t want us! Nigeria might have the largest number of “important” and “loud” African writers, but Gabon and Botswana have better electricity and standards of living! Where shall we find a new breed of African writers to sacrifice like Ngũgĩ did for Kenya? Second, this giant of literature also taught me something about the actual production of literature: he took the crazy thing called “rewrite” seriously. Each time I remember to tell my workshop students Ngũgĩ rewrote A Grain of Wheat after 20 years, they sit up and listen to my pleas to rewrite.

May God give the Ngũgĩ family the grace to celebrate even the pain that comes from burying such a humble, simple, and humane man.

 

Molara Wood

It is hard to put into words the immensity of this loss, the huge void left by the monumental figure of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. They don’t come greater than this. He was one of the building blocks of the imaginative landscape of our lives, of the lives of generations of readers, especially in Africa. Long before the internet, before 24-hour news cycles, my first encounter with Kenya was on the pages of his books. In schools in the tiniest corners of Nigeria, pupils knew about Dedan Kimathi, the Mau Mau and the Kenyan struggle against British colonialism. They would feel for Njoroge, the protagonist of Weep Not Child, as though he were their own cousin. It is really a towering testament to the power of literature, of the role of stories in our lives. Ngũgĩ was a master storyteller whose visions will sustain us down the ages.