Ngugi wa Thiong'o, dissident Kenyan novelist who drafted a book on prison lavatory paper

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who has died aged 87, was a Kenyan novelist whose work could manage to be both poignant and darkly funny as he challenged authority in many forms – political, economic, cultural and, most significantly, colonial.
In 1964, the appearance of Weep Not, Child in the UK made him the first East African writer to have a novel appear in English. This came about with the help of Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart.
They had met at the African Writers Conference that took place in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, when Achebe was advisory editor for Heinemann's African Writers series. Although the two novelists could often be muddled by the ignorant, and Ngũgĩ paid generous homage to Achebe when he died, their different approaches to writing would come to represent one of the biggest debates faced by African authors.
The question was: which language should a post-colonial writer use? Should it be the language of the former imperial power – an approach one could characterise as 'The Empire Writes Back'? Or should it be the writer's original tongue? At the 1962 conference, Chinua Achebe and his fellow Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, argued for English. However, Ngũgĩ was beginning to think differently, and by 1977, a dramatic sequence of events confirmed his belief.
That year he collaborated on a play in his native Kikuyu, whose English title is I Will Marry When I Want, and staged it in Kamiriithu, the community where he had grown up. The play concerned a rich, venal couple called, not too subtly, Ahab and Jezebel, who intimidate a local family, blackmailing them into changing their lifestyles while condemning their daughter for adopting fashionable, westernised dress. It was an immediate hit, and played to full houses for six weeks, before Ngũgĩ was arrested without trial. His house was raided, and his books – some of them Marxist – were confiscated.
He was imprisoned for a year, among other political dissidents; they were allowed an hour of sunlight a day. He used government lavatory paper to draft his next novel, The Devil on the Cross, this time in Kikuyu. The response to his play had convinced him that if he wanted to upset the authorities, and to take his audience with him, then his mother tongue was the surest way.
He crystallised this thinking in his most significant academic book, Decolonising the Mind (1986), in which he argued that the choice of language is every bit as important as what you say with it. By now, he was more openly critical of Achebe's approach, and relations between the two became less cordial as a result. Even so, Ngũgĩ's own writing went for an ingenious and highly effective compromise: he would write his books first in Kikuyu, and later produce his own English translations.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in Kamiriithu, in the Limuru region, on January 5 1938, and baptised James Ngugi. His father, Thiong'o wa Ndũcũ, had four wives at the time: Ngũgĩ was the fifth child of the third one, Wanjikũ.
She left the farm with her children when a livestock disease led Ndũcũ to become increasingly drunken and violent. In 1947, Wanjikũ single-handedly raised enough money to send Ngũgĩ to school. In 1955 he attended Alliance High School, about 12 miles from Limuru.
In a memoir, Dreams in a Time of War, he describes how he and his brother would walk to school separately, because he would be in British-style school uniform and his brother in tribal dress; and for the author, two rites of passage – his Christian baptism, with the name of James, and his circumcision by a river – happened around the same time.
The struggle for Kenyan independence left a profound mark on Ngũgĩ, and on his work. One half-brother joined the Mau Mau uprising with the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Another, who was deaf and dumb, was shot because he hadn't heard a soldier command him to stop running.
By the time Ngũgĩ left school, it was safer for him to continue his studies at Makerere University College, in Kampala. Here he found a more progressive intellectual environment than in Kenya, and a university with more Africans in positions of authority.
Ngũgĩ produced his first writing at Makerere. He wrote a short story because he had bragged that he could, and then had to deliver it.
He drafted The River Between, which would be his first completed novel (but the second to appear in print) because the East African Literature Bureau was offering a prize of £50. The first published novel, Weep Not, Child, presents the often harrowing events of the 1950s from a young perspective, and is based closely on the author's own experience of family life, with violence both outside and inside the home.
In 1964 he left for Leeds University, where he embarked on an MA on Caribbean writing. He never finished it, but he did write A Grain of Wheat, set during the days leading up to Kenyan independence in December 1963. For all the influence of social and political Marxism, the book looks sceptically at the more heroic versions of the struggle that had quickly emerged in Kenya.
He returned to Kenya in 1967, and changed his name permanently to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. He joined the Department of English Literature, and campaigned successfully for its abolition. An African Literature department appeared in its place, with a curriculum that included oral as well as written literature. Ngũgĩ's arrest in 1977, and his decision to write first in Kikuyu, can be seen as the logical conclusion of this activism.
Detention brought Ngũgĩ fame, and Amnesty International urged the Kenyan authorities to release him. President Jomo Kenyatta died on August 22 1978, and his successor, Daniel arap Moi, freed Ngũgĩ in December. But Moi's administration was to become Ngũgĩ's biggest target.
Nairobi University did not reinstate the novelist, and he left as an exile, first for London, where he would become writer-in-residence for Islington Borough Council, and later for the United States.
There he taught Comparative Literature at Yale, New York University, and later, on the west coast, at Irvine University. Although he visited South Africa during this time, he had to wait until Moi's forced retirement before returning to his homeland, having been warned about the risks to his life from the 1980s onwards.
When he did return to Kenya, on August 8 2002, his reception was triumphant, and then horrific. Crowds of admirers welcomed him at Nairobi airport; but three days later, four burglars broke into his apartment. They burned him with cigarettes, and then held him in one room while they raped his wife in another. He felt the attack had to be political, and also that if it had happened under Moi's presidency, they could both have been killed.
He returned to his settled life at Irvine, California, where he wrote more memoir than fiction, but won wide acclaim for Wizard of the Crow (2006), an epic in six books in which a tramp takes on magic powers. He uses these to help mock his identifiably Kenyan rulers, before they co-opt him to fulfil their dreams of ultimate power, which prove to be their undoing.
Ngũgĩ's plots and characters are rich in Biblical reference: for example, the tyrant who is the butt of the invective in Wizard of the Crow decides to build a Babel-like tower so tall that he can climb it for his conversations with God. Often, though, these vie with traditional Kikuyu stories. His last fiction, a verse novel called The Perfect Nine (Kikuyu 2019; English 2020) celebrates the mythical daughters of his tribe's founders.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is survived by his wife Njeeri, and by nine children from previous relationships. Some of these are novelists who write in English.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, born January 5 1938, died May 28 2025
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