Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: A writer who refused to bow

Mail & Guardian

29-05-2025

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has died. But if ever there was a writer who prepared us for this moment, for the refusal of forgetting, for the insistence that the spirit of resistance cannot be imprisoned, it was him.
Born in colonial Kenya in 1938, Ngũgĩ's life was shaped from the beginning by rupture and fire. He witnessed the brutal violence of British colonial rule, the fracturing of communities under settler capitalism and the psychic wounds left by forced conversions, Christianisation and land dispossession. He was also shaped, by the courageous resistance of the Mau Mau uprising, that great peasant revolt that has often been sanitised into nationalist myth. But Ngũgĩ did not trade in myth. He held the truth in his hands, raw, inconvenient, luminous.
For many in the Global North, Ngũgĩ was first encountered through the deceptively simple novels of his early career: Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967). These were works written in English, in the mode of a young man taught to believe that the English language was the vehicle of modernity.
But Ngũgĩ would later reject this lie so forcefully, so completely, that it would cost him his freedom. And in doing so, he would chart one of the most radical literary and political journeys of our time, from a colonial subject to a prisoner of conscience, to a living weapon of decolonisation.
Like Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ took on the betrayal of predatory postcolonial elites with the same fury that he confronted colonialism. In 1977, after staging I Will Marry When I Want with villagers at Kamiriithu, a Gikuyu-language play that tore into the heart of post-independence corruption and neocolonial betrayal, Ngũgĩ was detained without trial. In prison, he wrote Devil on the Cross in Gikuyu, on toilet paper, using a smuggled pen. It was a defiant act not just of storytelling but of linguistic reclamation. From that point onward, he would write first and foremost in Gikuyu, translating his work into English only later. As he declared in Decolonising the Mind, 'African writers must choose to write in the languages of their people … the language of real life, of work, of struggle.'
This was not the kind of superficial gesture common in performative forms of decolonial posturing. Ngũgĩ understood language as infrastructure, as the battleground where cultural memory, political power and selfhood are contested. To decolonise the mind, one must dismantle the internalised grammar of empire.
And yet, it is his final towering novel, Wizard of the Crow (2006), that best captures the full scope of his vision. Written in Gikuyu and translated by Ngũgĩ himself into English, this nearly 800-page epic is a grotesquely comic, eerily prophetic tale of a fictional African dictatorship called Aburĩria, a mirror held up to the postcolonial state. Here, language shifts and warps like the body of the dictator himself. Time becomes absurd. Gender fluidities are hinted at and then crushed under patriarchal panic. The body politic is both spectacle and corpse.
The ruler of Aburĩria, known only as 'The Ruler,' is an egotistical despot obsessed with being deified by the Global Bank. His ministers compete in a frenzy of sycophancy, constructing a Tower of Babel-style monstrosity called Marching to Heaven to honour him. In this theatre of grotesquerie, we meet Kamiti, an unemployed philosopher-turned-healer who assumes the identity of the 'Wizard of the Crow', and Nyawira, a feminist revolutionary and leader of the underground Movement for the Voice of the People. Their love, forged in resistance and trickery, is one of the most quietly radical elements of the novel. It is gendered solidarity, not romance, political tenderness, not bourgeois desire.
Through magical realism, satire and parable, Ngũgĩ lays bare the mechanics of postcolonial authoritarianism, not as a betrayal of the nation but as its logical continuation under the rules of global finance. The Ruler's body literally inflates with the disease of power. The Global Bank operates like a god demanding tribute. In this world, development is disease, progress is punishment and the nation is a prison.
The grotesque becomes the logic of governance. And this is not just an African story. In Wizard of the Crow, we already meet the future — a spectacle of power obsessed with worship, paranoid about dissent and surrounded by ministers so stupid and servile they parody themselves. This is not just an African story. In the United States The Ruler is reborn in orange skin, yelling on Fox News, flanked by cronies who echo his lies, drunk on performance and grievance. As Ngũgĩ made clear that the absurd is a structure, not an accident.
But Wizard of the Crow is not merely critique. It is a manual of survival. It insists on the subversive power of storytelling, the plasticity of language and the insurgency of laughter. It gives us spells, not the supernatural kind but the magic of those who refuse to die quietly.
What Ngũgĩ taught us, especially those of us working and writing from the Global South, is that liberation must be total. You cannot free a people without freeing their tongues, their bodies, their histories, their archives, their dreams. In a world where Euro-American liberalism continues to demand to be respected as a great moral authority while it continues its long blood lust, now most visible in the agonies of Palestine.
Ngũgĩ's refusal to write in English was more radical than any slogan. It was a withdrawal of consent from the epistemology of empire.
In a moment in which decolonial posturing is often insufferably bourgeois we must affirm Ngũgĩ's refusal of abstract theory. He was always concerned with the poor. With peasants. With workers. With women and men who labour and laugh and conspire and survive. Ngũgĩ was a Marxist, and his Marxism was never academic. It pulsed through his literature, in the rhythms of Gikuyu oral storytelling, in the community workshops of Kamiriithu, in the bodies of characters like Nyawira who refuse subordination to both domesticity and the state.
Ngũgĩ wrote against the singular hero. Against the myth of the nationalist saviour. Against the idea that liberation is a flag or a parliament. For Ngũgĩ, the masses were the protagonists. The collectivity was the hero. Even in Wizard of the Crow, where Kamiti could have become a messianic figure, he retreats. He is shaped and saved by Nyawira, and together they dissolve into the revolutionary underground, not as symbols, but as catalysts.
Ngũgĩ also took women seriously, even as he struggled, at times with fully unlearning the patriarchal codes embedded in tradition and revolution alike. His later work, including The Perfect Nine (2020), reclaims Gikuyu mythology to centre female protagonists, exploring disability, desire and divine power through poetic epic. It is a late-life meditation on gender and creation, a text that invites rereading and feminist critique.
That critique will have to grapple with the shock that exploded through the literary world in March 2024 when Ngũgĩ's son, Mukoma, took to Twitter to claim that his father had abused his late mother, Nyambura. Mukoma's sister, Wanjiku, appeared to dispute the allegation. At the moment the facts do not appear to be clear. Al Jazeera took down the article it had published on the allegations saying: 'In light of fresh information, Al Jazeera English is unable to support some elements of this article, whose text we are withdrawing from the site.'
To read Ngũgĩ today, especially from South Africa, is to confront our own betrayals. Our own post-liberation rulers drunk on vanity, greed and violence. Our subordination to the demands of capital. Our own crises of language, where English and a Europeanised form of Afrikaans dominate elite spaces, while isiXhosa, isiZulu, SeSotho, and others are treated as relics of the home, not instruments of thought. It is also to recognise the quiet brilliance of resistance, in shack settlements, in feminist groups and networks, in union struggles, in autonomous student reading groups, in WhatsApp forums of working-class learners. Like Kamiti and Nyawira, our people know how to conjure survival amid enduring oppression and its accumulation of pain and trauma.
Ngũgĩ was never awarded the Nobel Prize, despite decades of speculation. But he didn't need it. The people who needed to read him found him. He gave us language as a weapon. He gave us stories as conspiracies. He gave us laughter that bites like acid.
To lose Ngũgĩ now, in the midst of so much backsliding and betrayal, is to feel momentarily unmoored. It is to wonder: who will write us back into being? Who will remind us that our tongues are sacred? That the crow, the scorned, unwanted black bird, is a prophet?
But Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o prepared us for this too. He taught us that the dead never die in vain. That the story never ends, it only passes hands. He also taught us that stories are complex and that liberators can also be oppressors.
Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist