Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed away at the ripe age of 87 as a towering figure of African literature who has left behind an unimpeachable legacy.
By Afrocritik’s Literature Board
A few days ago, on May 28 2025, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s family announced his passing. He was aged 87 and in a Facebook post announcing her father’s demise, his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, wrote: “He lived a full life, fought a good fight. As was his last wish, let’s celebrate his life and his work”.
It is true that Ngugi had indeed lived a full life, one in which his work and its political reverberations have left a mark on the African imagination and on world literature. Throughout his life—whether in fiction, polemics, proletarian theatre, or in speaking truth to power—Ngugi had pursued a relentless decolonial project. This can be evidenced directly in the political trajectory of his life.
As a young man, he began his career writing under the name James Ngugi; he once praised colonialism for what he saw then as its civilising and liberating power. But as he matured in both thought and experience, he underwent a radical transformation. The older Ngũgĩ came to view colonialism as a violent system of erasure, one that alienated Africans from their languages, cultures, and histories.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in 1938, in Kamiriithu, near Limuru, Kiambu district, Kenya, and was baptised James Ngũgĩ. This was in colonial Kenya, during the final decades of the British Empire’s global dominion and just before the outbreak of the Second World War. His early life would unfold under the shadow of imperial violence and rising anti-colonial agitation, culminating in the Mau Mau uprising, a brutal conflict that shaped both Kenya’s struggle for independence and the contours of Ngũgĩ’s political consciousness.
Educated first in colonial mission schools (Kamandura, Manguu, and Kinyogori Primary Schools) and later at the prestigious Alliance High School (the premier secondary in East Africa at the time). Thus, Ngũgĩ was the product of a deeply stratified and deliberately curated colonial education system that privileged European values and languages.
Yet, it was at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, which was then a college of the University of London, where Ngũgĩ came of intellectual age. He studied literature during a time of continent-wide political and cultural ferment: Ghana had become the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957; in East Africa, Uganda was the first to achieve independence in 1962, followed by Kenya in 1963.
The university campuses of East Africa pulsed with debates on decolonisation, Pan-Africanism, and the role of the writer in the new African nations. While still at Makerere, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had participated in the first conference of African writers in 1962 (an event that is today regarded as a seminal moment in the history of modern African literature) which was held at the university.
There, he met a number of burgeoning African writers, including Chinua Achebe, who would help him publish his first novel, Weep Not, Child (1964) with Heinemann. The novel tells the sensitive story of a young boy’s struggle to get an education in an increasingly fractured colonial Kenya during the Mau-Mau Uprising.
Showing an understanding of the politics that would define Africa, the book was an early indication of the direction of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s later work. In his 2010 memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, a work of beauty and retrospective thoughtfulness, we see the intersections between the storylines of Ngũgĩ’s early novels and the events of his coming of age in colonial Kenya. It would appear that the writer had been deeply shaped by his early experiences.
Ngũgĩ’s academic journey would later take him to the University of Leeds in the UK, where exposure to Marxist and postcolonial thought further radicalised his approach to literature and politics. By the late 1960s, he had returned to East Africa, taking up a lectureship in English Literature at the University of Nairobi.
It was here, in 1967, that he began a sustained intellectual revolt against Eurocentric curricula. Alongside fellow thinkers, Taban Lo Liyong, and Awuor Anyumba, he co-authored the provocative manifesto, “On the Abolition of the English Department”, published in Homecoming (1969). The essay argued for the re-centring of African literature and oral traditions within academic syllabi, asking pointedly: “If there is need for a study of the historic continuity of a single culture, why can’t this be African?” This directly led to the department being renamed simply, the Department of Literature.
The ensuing years cemented Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s reputation as both a literary innovator and a political dissident. By this time, he had begun to question the writing of African literature in English, and increasingly began to move away from writing in English, this being at a time when the corrupt practices and class politics of postcolonial Kenya deeply frustrated him.
The major change in Ngũgĩ’s life in the 1970s was his camaraderie with the Soviet Writers Union (he spend time in a writing residency in Yalta in the mid-1970s), where his contact with the workings of the communist state further radicalised his politics in its complete identification with Kenya’s poor classes against what he saw as the double-edged oppression of the new African political elite that has emerged in the post-independence era. Thus, he assumed a more practical approach to his decolonising project. The effect of this ideological pivot was immediately felt in his writings.
In 1977, he published his novel, Petals of Blood, a monumental criticism of Kenya’s post-independence political class and a call to revolution. It was his first socialist novel. This dual commitment to storytelling and political criticism reached a dramatic climax in 1977, when his politically charged play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii and performed in Gikuyu, led to his arrest and detention without trial by the Kenyan government.
His imprisonment marked another turning point: upon release, he abandoned writing in English entirely, adopting Gikuyu as his literary language in a symbolic act of linguistic decolonisation. He also dropped his baptised name James Ngũgĩ for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. His novel, Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross) (1980), which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison, became his first novel to be first written in the Kikuyu language. Its storyline advanced revolutionary solutions to the entrenched political class of postcolonial Kenya
Devil on the Cross began with a prologue in which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o casts himself in a prophetic role within the Kenyan context. He hears a clarion call from the masses, urging him to “reveal what now lies concealed by darkness”. From the text, it becomes clear that what lies hidden is imperialism, now reappearing in the form of neocolonialism. For Ngũgĩ, imperialism or neocolonialism was synonymous with “the Devil”. As such, no effort should be spared in eradicating it: “The Devil, who will lead us into the blindness of the heart and into the deafness of the mind, should be crucified, and care should be taken that his acolytes do not lift him down from the cross to pursue the task of building Hell for the people on Earth” .
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s politics in the 20th century was unapologetically Marxist; he believed strongly—as many writers of his generation did, including Achebe—in the intersection between literature and politics. In his seminal collection of essays, Writers in Politics, eloquently defended this approach to literature: “Literature cannot escape from the class power structures that shape our everyday life,” he wrote. “Here a writer has no choice. Whether or not he is aware of it, his life reflects one or more aspects of the intense economic, political, cultural, and ideological struggles in a society. What he can choose is one or the other side in the battlefield . . . what he cannot do is to remain neutral. Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what and whose politics.” It was especially evident whose side Ngugi was on.
This writerly manifesto was first seen when his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), was staged—a direct, full-on trenchant critique of President Jomo Kenyatta’s government. Kenyatta, once a childhood hero to Ngũgĩ for his role in fighting for Gĩkũyũ land rights, had, upon taking power, betrayed the very ideals he once championed.
Instead of redistributing stolen land to its rightful owners, he and his close allies consolidated wealth and property for themselves. Ngũgĩ’s outspoken resistance landed him in Kamĩtĩ Maximum-Security Prison, where he was detained alongside 18 other political prisoners. In his 2018 prison memoir, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir, he recalls, “Here I have no name. I am just a number in a file: K6,77”.
It was within this carceral silence that he began writing, Devil on the Cross, also known as his first novel in Gĩkũyũ Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ, scribbled onto rolls of toilet paper. The process was grueling. “Because I was breaking away from my dependence on English,” Ngũgĩ explained to the Paris Review in 2022, “the main problem I faced in prison was that there was this little devil who used to come to me — a devil dressed in English robes.”
With no robust written tradition in Gĩkũyũ to lean on, he struggled to find equivalents for political concepts —“some word like imperialism, say”—while the ever-present temptation whispered: Why struggle so hard? I’m right here… The slipperiness of the language, he said, often forced him to revise entire sentences whose meaning had shifted overnight. “There was always the temptation to give up”, he confessed. “But another voice would talk to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle.”
Succeeding all this, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was forced into exile, first in London and then the United States where he continued to write and teach, eventually taking up a long-term position as Professor of Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Over the past three decades, he has become a foundational figure in postcolonial studies, with his 1986 essay collection Decolonising the Mind widely regarded as a seminal text in global academia. In it, he critiqued the lingering dominance of colonial languages in African intellectual and cultural life, arguing that the recovery of indigenous languages is central to cultural sovereignty.
In short, much of Ngũgĩ’s work as a writer is mediated and shaped by the politics of language. His views on the agency of African languages as conduits of the literary imagination were inexorable. In the last major profile of him written by Carey Baraka, he repeated his years-long mantra in this regard:
It’s like the enslaved being happy that theirs is a local version of enslavement. English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s an example of normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing.
While Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s other political engagements form a significant part of his legacy, it was Decolonising the Mind that marked the most radical rupture in both his intellectual trajectory and the broader landscape of postcolonial thought. The book articulated a profound theoretical intervention: that the colonization of African minds did not end with political independence, but persisted insidiously through the internalized dominance of European languages and epistemologies. He reiterate the political dynamics that conditions the possession of lnaguages in an interview with Billy Kahora:
The struggle for languages is important. Remember there is no language that is more of a language than any other. If you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture and add to it all the languages of the world, that is empowerment.
Through incisive essays, Ngũgĩ charted how African children, raised within colonial education systems, were taught to see their world through the eyes of Europe, dislocating them from their histories, languages, and communities. Decolonising the Mind became revolutionary for not only its theoretical rigor, but its unapologetic call to action—the demand for a linguistic decolonization that restores the dignity, voice, and agency of African peoples through the reclamation of their own “languages of struggle.”
The consequences of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s political radicalism extended well into the 21st century. In 2004, during a return visit to Kenya after decades in exile, Ngũgĩ and his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngũgĩ, were violently attacked in a Nairobi apartment. A politically charged assault widely interpreted as a chilling reminder of how his previous ideological and political defiance continued to provoke hostility at home from the powers that be.
For a man who had sagely observed that, “Our lives are a battlefield on which are fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it”, this was a true watershed moment. The legacy of his activism, however, has carried on, if not always seamlessly, through his family. A father to nine children, Ngũgĩ’s intellectual and creative influence is evident in four of them who have become writers in their own right: Tee Ngũgĩ, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, and Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ.
Yet in 2024, this literary lineage was shaken by a candid and unsettling revelation. In a public statement, Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ, himself a professor and novelist, lifted the veil on a long-silenced chapter of their family history, disclosing alleged domestic abuse involving Ngũgĩ and his first wife, the late Nyambura. “Some of my earliest memories”, Mũkoma wrote, “are me going to visit her at my grandmother’s where she would seek refuge. But with that said it is the silencing of who she was that gets me. Ok, I have said it”.
The disclosure would complicate the public image of one of Africa’s most celebrated intellectuals. But upon the announcement of his passing away on 28th May 2025, celebrations of his influence and life both in the literary and political sphere were in no measure lacking. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed away at the ripe age of 87 as a towering figure of African literature who has left behind an unimpeachable legacy. The consensus was clear: though the man behind the words has departed, his words, and the radical hope they carried, will endure. Few have lived as fully or spoken as boldly; and for that, we are collectively richer.
Frank Njugi is an Award-winning Kenyan Writer, Culture journalist and Critic who has written on the East African and African culture scene for platforms such as Debunk Media, Republic Journal, Sinema Focus, Culture Africa, Drummr Africa, The Elephant, Wakilisha Africa, The Moveee, Africa in Dialogue, Afrocritik and others. He tweets as @franknjugi.
Evidence Egwuono Adjarho is passionate about African literature and dedicates her time to amplifying it through book reviews and video contents. She is currently undergoing training as a photographer. Connect with her on Instagram, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn: @evidence_egwuono
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1.