Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: A voice of fire, a mind of freedom

TimesLIVE

08-06-2025

In the corridors of postcolonial thought and the vast terrain of African letters, one name echoes with the clarity of resistance and the depth of conviction: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. To speak of Ngũgĩ is to speak not only of literature but of struggle, not only of art but of liberation. His words have long outgrown the pages they were written on. They have become weapons against forgetting, monuments to dignity and blueprints for cultural self-reclamation.
Born into a Kenya ravaged by British imperialism, Ngũgĩ's life was shaped by the brutality and disorientation of colonial rule. The soil of his childhood was soaked in the blood of the Mau Mau Rebellion and the shadows of empire loomed large over every classroom, every church sermon and every official document. The colonial legacy, as he would later argue, was not only political but deeply epistemic. It had dismembered the African mind, made us strangers to our own histories, and taught us to mistrust our languages, customs, and gods.
Ngũgĩ did not take this betrayal lying down. Instead, he turned his life into a mission of re-membering what had been dismembered. His early novels, including The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, and Petals of Blood, captured with devastating beauty the psychic toll of colonialism and the ambiguities of independence. These works did not flatter, they interrogated. They held both the coloniser and the complicit postcolonial elites to account. Through them, Ngũgĩ laid bare the reality that political freedom without cultural sovereignty is no freedom at all.
His resistance was not merely theoretical. It crystallised in acts of profound courage. One of the most emblematic of these was his collaboration with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ on the searing play I Will Marry When I Want. This was art not written for the academy or for foreign publishers, but for peasants and workers. It was performed in Gikuyu, staged in villages, and filled with the raw anger of the dispossessed. The play dissected class exploitation, cultural alienation and religious hypocrisy. It exposed the spiritual residue of empire that lingered long after flags changed hands.
The state responded with repression. Ngũgĩ was arrested and imprisoned without trial. He witnessed the machinery of authoritarianism turn its sights on artists and thinkers. Yet, even in a maximum-security prison, he wrote. He used toilet paper, working in secret. For Ngũgĩ, the pen has always been more than a tool. It is a flame. And fire, once lit, cannot be imprisoned.
He emerged from prison not broken but more radicalised. He rejected English as his language of literary expression and deliberately embraced Gikuyu. This was not merely a linguistic shift; it was an intellectual revolution. By choosing to write in his mother tongue, Ngũgĩ defied the colonial assumption that knowledge must pass through Western filters to be legitimate. He insisted that African stories, philosophies, and epistemologies were complete in themselves and must be told in the languages of their birth.
The exploitation of African labour continues under new names. The erasure of African languages continues in global curricula. The theft of African futures is repackaged as foreign direct investment and foreign aid
In doing so, Ngũgĩ offered a profound lesson to all of us. The true struggle is not only political but also cognitive. The colonisation of the mind is perhaps the most enduring of empires. It is only through cultural self-knowledge that we begin to dismantle it. He became a fierce advocate for the decolonisation of education, challenging African institutions to stop reproducing the logic of empire and to begin producing knowledge grounded in African realities, cosmologies and aspirations. He called on Africa to shape its own future.
His work remains painfully relevant. In the face of contemporary struggles such as neocolonial economic dependency, cultural commodification, migration crises and state repression, Ngũgĩ's voice reminds us that these are not isolated events. They are echoes of a past never fully confronted. The exploitation of African labour continues under new names. The erasure of African languages continues in global curricula. The theft of African futures is repackaged as foreign direct investment and foreign aid.
He stood with Africans who demanded the nationalisation of the banks, the gold mines and the land. These were people who sought to strike a fatal blow at the financial and gold-mining monopolies, and at the farming interests that have, for centuries, plundered the continent and condemned its people to servitude. Such a step is not only necessary but also imperative. The realisation of the continent's goals is inconceivable, indeed impossible, unless and until these monopolies are dismantled and the wealth of the continent is returned to its people. The democratisation and breaking up of these monopolies will open new fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the continent's history, this class will have the opportunity to own, in its own name and right, mines and factories. Trade and private enterprise will grow and flourish as never before.
His life and work teach us the following truth: to be African is not a passive identity but an active resistance. We must speak our truth in our own tongues. We must love ourselves deeply enough to fight for our histories, our knowledge systems, and our collective future
And yet, Ngũgĩ does not leave us in despair. He is, at his core, a writer of hope. His belief in the power of ordinary people to resist, to imagine, and to transform is unshakeable. He believes in the strength of solidarity among workers and intellectuals, women and men, Africans and diasporic communities. He believes, deeply, in the power of the word to awaken, to mobilise and to heal.
His life and work teach us the following truth: to be African is not a passive identity but an active resistance. We must speak our truth in our own tongues. We must love ourselves deeply enough to fight for our histories, our knowledge systems, and our collective future.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is not simply a writer. He is a compass. He is a map-maker for generations seeking direction in a postcolonial maze. He is a sower of intellectual seeds that bloom in classrooms, prisons, fields and stages across the continent.
We honour him not just for what he has written, but for what he has ignited: the right to be fully African, unapologetically human, and radically free. We will forever salute Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, a pan-Africanist of note. Your pen is not only mighty; it is immortal.
Andile Lungisa is an ANC national executive committee member and former president of the Pan African Youth Union.