Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (5 January 1938 – 28 May 2025) – A personal eulogy by Anver Versi

One of the titans of African Literature, the Kenyan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o died at the age of 87 in the United States on May 28. He was a fearless champion of the rights of people in their battle against oppression and a tireless proponent of literature written in African languages. Anver Versi was one of this students in the 1970s.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was my lecturer in African Literature when I was a first year student at the University of Nairobi in the early 1970s. Literature had been easily my favourite subject throughout school. I enjoyed reading everything I could lay my hands on – and two sources were my Alladin’s cave. One was the British Council Library in Mombasa and the other was a very small second-hand book shop presided over by an elderly gentleman who often let me take the books I wanted for free.

The fiction available was always either by English or American authors who took me to the highways and byways of strange and wonderful worlds peopled by equally strange beings. Nevertheless while the settings were for me exotic and often difficult to imagine as the only seasons I was familiar with were either constant sunshine or the monsoon rains, the emotions the fictitious characters felt were always familiar.

But to supplement my craving for stories and adventures, Mama Andikalo, who had been captured as an enslaved child before being freed and adopted by my maternal grandfather in Zanzibar, kept us enthralled with tales in Kiswahili that meandered about for weeks. These were about characters like the brothers Ali and Masoodi, or the enormously strong Mamadi Mkula Guniya (Juma who could eat a whole bagful of rice at a sitting); Mamiya Ndege who ruled over the world of birds; Jamila whose beauty was such that fisher folk held her likeness towards the sea and the fish jumped out to take a closer look and unfortunately for them, ended up as someone’s dinner.

Add to this was the never ending romances and melodramas of the Indian cinema – which was patronised by all races –  and the recounting and retelling of what they had seen on the screen and we were indeed able to feast sumptuously in the world of stories in a variety of languages.

But school literature was confined largely to English authors – Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Elliot, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austin and others. There was nothing by African writers, so we assumed that Africans did not write stories, although we knew that many were masterful storytellers.

My first proper introduction to African literature came during my first year at Nairobi Uni. Some time ago, the faculty of English Literature had been renamed simply Literature and African literature had been placed at the centre of the course. Much later I learnt that the driving force behind the change had been Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

At this point, only a handful of African writers had been published, mainly by the excellent Heinemann African Series which had first rescued and published Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958.

The West African Achebe and his fellow Nigerian Wole Soyinka had established themselves the masters of this brand new genre of literature and in East Africa we had Ngugi wa Thiong’o who had started his novelist life as James Ngugi. His first novel, Weep not child (1964) was quickly followed by The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967).

Our set books and reading lists at this stage were dominated by English and American authors, including if memory serves, Jane Austin and John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men) and the all other standard bearers of English literature. Achebe’s Arrow of God was one of the set books in the African literature section which was comparatively slim.

I remember there was a great deal of excitement when we learnt that Ngugi was to be our lecturer on Arrow of God. The lecture hall was packed as we awaited him. He walked in almost inconspicuously and we were all slightly taken aback to see that he was quite diminutive in size. Why we had imagined him to be taller or sturdier I don’t know.

All the other literature lecturers, mostly British or American were often quite dramatic, even flamboyant in their presentations. They often made us laugh out loudly as they dissected the text of a Jane Austen social satire or held us spellbound as they discussed the use of symbolism and metaphor in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Ngũgĩ by contrast seemed to deliberately play down any show of emotion or drama. The first time we saw him, he was wearing an open-neck shirt with a dust coloured corduroy jacket. He quickly got into work, speaking at barely above a whisper.

It was very difficult to follow his lecture as he veered off into areas that we found very difficult to follow – for example the significance of religious and cultural symbolism in Achebe. At times he would spend half the lecture, or even the whole lecture dissecting just one or two paragraphs in Arrow of God, explaining the order and composition of the sentences and why each word had been placed where it had.

We had the uneasy feeling that here were being presented with intellectual jewels that our minds could just not grasp. Our essay scores during tutorials were low, except for Lars (to the best of my recollection) who was from Finland and studying at our Uni because his father was a diplomat. His scores were double the best the rest of us could do.

One day, Lars, who had become a firm friend, took me asked and showed me the secret of his success. He had a tape recorder and was taping all of Ngũgĩ’s lectures rather than scrambling to take down notes like the rest of us. He could listen to Ngũgĩ at leisure. From then on, working from the recordings, my own marks improved considerably.

Ngugi sometimes joined us at the Junior Common Room for a cup of tea and a bite to eat. If we thought he was in a good mood, my Finish friend and I would ask if we could sit at his table. On these occasions, he was a very different person. He relaxed and would talk in a mixture of English and Swahili, displaying a very keen and intelligent sense of humour.

Inevitable collision

Unbeknown to us, there were many undercurrents stirring. His first three novels focused on the relationship between the colonial administrators and Kenya villagers, many of whom had been dispossessed of their lands to White settlers and forced to work as farmhands for a pittance. In A Grain of Wheat, he crafted a tense and disturbing tale on the dilemma between fighting for freedom and the need to stay alive, even at the price of betraying those you love the most.

But his entire tone changed when he wrote Petals of Blood in 1977. This was set in the post-colonial period. He believed the people, who had paid for independence with their lives had been betrayed and the new moneyed and powerful African elite has simply replaced the White colonists but cared nothing for the people. This was a great betrayal.

Carey Baraka, a Kenyan writer who visited an ailing Ngugi roughly one year before his death at his home in Irvine, where he was he was working as a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, writes:

“Influenced by his reading of Marx and Frantz Fanon, in these later works he began to engage much more directly with the state, with class, with education, with every aspect of postcolonial life. Petals of Blood, published in 1977, attacked the new political elite in independent Kenya. It was the first of his works published as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and the last novel he wrote in English.

“In this novel, education is no longer a tool of liberation; it is the educated elite who betray the people. This was the first salvo from what the critic Nikil Saval has described as ‘the rageful midperiod Ngũgĩ, who excoriates the Kenyan bourgeoisie, with their golf clubs and other ersatz re-creations of the colonial world they once abjured’”.

This novel and in particular his play his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii in Gikuyu alarmed the ruling elite. They were prepared to overlook the novels as these were read by a relatively small literate section but a play in Gikuyu (the traditional language of the country’s largest tribe) which raised challenging questions about the government was a different matter.

This of course set him on an inevitable collision course with the authorities when all forms of dissent were being crashed underfoot.

The then Vice-President, Daniel arap Moi ordered his arrest. He was detained at the Kamiti Maximum Security prison without charge for over a year. While in jail, he used the toilet paper to write about his experiences in Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981).

After his release, he lost his job at the university and following a series of harassments, he took his family to live in exile, first in England and later in the United States. He continued to be an activist to write in his native Gikuyu.

In 2004, he felt it safe to return to Kenya at the end of the Moi era when he visited Nairobi to launch his new novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow). Two weeks later, he and his wife were attacked an armed gang and his wife was raped. “It wasn’t a simple robbery,” he said. “It was political – whether by remnants of the old regime or part of the new state outside the main current; the whole thing was meant to humiliate, if not eliminate, us.” This was his last visit to Kenya.

The language conundrum

Perhaps what made him stand out the most significantly from his peers was his complete rejection of English. While many writers considered English a unifying tool they could use to reach large audiences, he believed that it was impossible to shake off the colonial mentality unless one wrote in one’s mother tongue. In Decolonising the Mind, he attacked the hold of colonial languages, such as French and English, over former colonies.

His steadfast stance over the use of language eventually led to strains between him and Chinua Achebe (who had helped him get on the African Writers series). The discussion rages even today.

Summarising Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s stature among African writers, Carey Baraka writes:  “If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite.”

From my personal perspective, I feel privileged to have been a student of one of my literary heroes. I know realise how deep his understanding not only of the African literary genre but also the millennium old African cultural heritage had been. He took me on a journey that has not yet reached its end and he gave value to all the stories, in all their linguistic glory, that have been my constant companions since childhood.

That this giant of world literature who was tipped to win the Nobel Prize so many times was not awarded that accolade remains one of the most blatant examples of injustice in the Nobel’s history.

But his legacy will live long. I can still clearly picture him as he stood in the lecture hall, a small smile on his face, his hooded eyes always kind as he launched off into the arcane mysteries of the African novel; and the mischievous twinkle that came into his eyes when he cracked a joke at the university’s Junior Common room while we sipped a cup of tea made from leaves that came from his beloved corner of the country. May he rest in eternal peace – the battle for justice he started continues.