Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writer, 1938-2025

On Jun 6, 2025

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In The Upright Revolution, arms, legs, hands and toes fantastically boast of how they each matter most before accepting competition will not take them very far. “What was the body anyway, they all asked,” observes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in the 2016 short story. “And they realised the body was them all together; they were into each other.”

Questioning hierarchies and stressing connections defined Ngũgĩ, who has died at the age of 87. An author of novels, plays, memoir and essays who was repeatedly tipped for the Nobel Prize, he cast a critical eye over his native Kenya and power, pointing out the inequities of the colonial and postcolonial conditions and how they shaped ways of thinking as well as being. Jailed and forced into exile before regime change enabled his return home, Ngũgĩ chose a new name and shook off English for Kikuyu, his mother tongue, although he translated himself. Discarding the language of empire was personal before it was political. “The only language I could use was my own,” he said.

Born one of 28 children to his father’s four wives in Kamirithu, a village north of Nairobi, James Ngũgĩ was raised in a peasant family and “the kind of household where anybody who came from outside was a bringer of narratives”. Even as an education at Alliance High School, which sought to train the elite, put him on a different road to his relatives, he was touched by Britain’s brutal crackdown on the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s. Gitogo, a deaf half-brother, was shot dead after not hearing a soldier’s command. Three months after starting at Alliance, Ngũgĩ travelled home to find his village levelled.

Weep Not, Child (1964), written during Ngũgĩ’s time at Makerere University in Uganda, channelled those experiences. The first major English-language novel out of east Africa, his debut spurred other fictions that dwelt on the forces that had shaped Kenyan history, such as The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967). It also sparked reflection on the writer’s tools: James Ngũgĩ became Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. And in 1968, the newly minted academic called for the abolition of the English department at Nairobi University in favour of one focused on the continent’s output. “Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” he asked.

The move into Kikuyu proper came in 1977, with Ngaahika Ndeenda or I Will Marry When I Want. The play, written with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, drew audiences but was closed by the authorities after only a short run. Its use of an indigenous language unnerved then vice-president Daniel arap Moi and landed Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in a notorious maximum security prison, where he penned Caitaani mũtharaba–Inĩ or Devil on the Cross (1980), on toilet paper. “Paper, any paper, is about the most precious article for a political prisoner,” he noted in Detained (1981), an account of his year-long incarceration without charge or trial. “Writing this novel has been a daily, almost hourly, assertion of my will to remain human and free.”

After learning while in London in 1982 that a bloody “red carpet welcome” from President Moi awaited him at home, Ngũgĩ — who is survived by 10 children and his estranged second wife, Njeeri — entered exile. Yet physical distance proved no mental block. In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), now a key text in postcolonial studies, he urged the continent to reclaim “its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages”, emphasising orality and hitting out at a “neocolonial bourgeoisie”. So convincing was the protagonist of Matigari (1986), a novel about a man in search of truth and justice, that Kenyan authorities issued an arrest warrant for the character.

After teaching at New York, Bayreuth and Yale universities, Ngũgĩ settled at the University of California, Irvine. A return to Kenya in 2004, two years after Moi left the scene, was marred by an attack in which Njeeri was raped. But Ngũgĩ went on, asserting that “my best novel is that which has not yet been written by me”. Wizard of the Crow, a satirical critique of dictatorship, appeared in 2006, while The Perfect Nine, a verse novel about the origins of the Kikuyu people, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.

Mukoma wa Ngugi, a writer and professor at Cornell University, told the Financial Times that his father considered writing “a place for truth-telling” where he could “question himself and what eventually became of decolonisation”.

“Kenya formed him but he didn’t fetishise it. He also really cared about words; when he was translating The River Between into Kikuyu, you could hear his delight in finally returning the river to its source,” said Mukoma, who was estranged from his father at the time of his death. “People in Nairobi are touching their hearts [as they walk past]. It’s not that I didn’t recognise the amount of work he had done, [but] it’s only now that I’m beginning to understand the enormity of it.”

Franklin Nelson is an FT writer and editor

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