4 days ago
Weep Not, Child: A tribute to Africa's literary giant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
It was incredibly humbling standing in a congested gathering of people at the Wits Great Hall to hear 'greatness' lend its wisdom to receptive ears on the topic, Decolonising the Mind: Secure the Base, in March 2017.
I had the privilege of attending the address when I was in my mid-twenties. The hairs on my arms stood on end and my internal voice said unto me, 'You are in the presence of greatness. Keep quiet and listen.'
I attended with my mother and my uncle, her brother, both of whom self-identify as black in the broad Biko sense. I am racially ambiguous, though sometimes perceived as white.
In that particular moment at his address, aware of being in the presence of greatness that stood on the shoulders of the deceased legends Aimé Cesaire and Franz Fanon, I really had no other response but to stand in awe and listen to a hero who (at the time) was very much alive.
Greatness, the man who was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, received standing ovations and cheering on in African languages when he spoke.
I remember his anecdote about middle and upper-class parents in Kenya calling their children to greet their guests, and pretending to look embarrassed that their children spoke only English. Meanwhile, they were secretly proud of that fact, as though it was a badge of honour, showing education and their class.
It gave me food for thought about globalisation and the loss of indigenous culture through the loss of languages. What does it mean? Is it really true that in the age of technology, only English will get you to succeed, or shouldn't we be promoting many languages and getting technological apps to write and speak in these languages too?
He, himself, practised what he preached when he gave up English in the 1970s and started writing in Kikuyu and kiSwahili.
The legacy Ngũgĩ leaves for us and generations to follow
Ngũgĩ was born in colonial Kenya in 1938 and died on Wednesday, 28 May 2025 at the age of 87. His daughter, Wanjiku Wa Ngũgĩ, announced his death on social media. She wrote, 'he lived a full life, fought a good fight'.
Indeed, he fought a good fight – for justice, intellectual freedom and inquisition for Africa.
Both my mother and I read his (English translated) works in our respective undergraduate years in our twenties. To this day, his discourse shapes our conversations, and I hope, one day, it will shape the conversations of my own children, whom I pray will be thinkers who will also hold reverence for the greatness of Ngũgĩ's works.
Ngũgĩ's work, just as that of Cesaire and Fanon, holds legacy power. He stands as a revolutionary whose pen served as a weapon of resistance against injustice and illegitimate political power, a tool for decolonisation mobilisation, and a literary genius.
Ngũgĩ's work redefined the boundaries of African languages and identities as limitless. He redefined the African 'post-colony' for all that it is and all that it has the potential to be. Ngũgĩ's work echoes the cries, the resilience, and the aspirations of a continent still healing from the scars of colonisation and empire.
His call was never for Africans to claim victimhood and dwell therein, but to reclaim identity by decolonising our thinking, behaviours and daily practices. Secure the base, he said. Make Africa count.
Through his novels, plays, essays and prison memoirs, Ngũgĩ's work challenges imperial power, questions inherited colonial structures and reimagines liberated, self-defining Africa. It embodies a radical vision for Africa defining itself on its own terms — politically, socially and linguistically.
The chronology of his intellectual journey through his works stands as a larger political project aimed at dismantling colonial legacies and reimagining African identity from the inside out. That is, an Africa defined by its own people, not the superimposed Western narratives.
Ngũgĩ's literary genius
His debut novel, Weep Not, Child (1964), explores the Mau Mau uprising through the eyes of a young boy. This piece was the first novel in English written by a black East African.
In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he poetically posits that 'the bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation' and develops this thought through his central argument that language is the carrier of culture, memory and identity. When a people lose their language, he argues, they risk losing their ability to define their own reality.
In The River Between (1965), a poetic and tragic tale of cultural conflict between Christianity and traditional beliefs in a Gĩkũyũ village, he pens 'a people without a history is like the wind over buffalo grass'.
Various commentaries posit that in this metaphor, the wind represents the gale-like forces of colonialism and cultural imperialism, and buffalo grass, a plant that bends and yields to external pressure, represents a people without strong roots in their own history — easily swayed, easily displaced.
Here, it stands to reason that Ngũgĩ's fundamental point is that people who do not know or affirm their history are at the mercy of external forces. Here, Ngũgĩ alerts us to the dangers of not being rooted in one's identity and being absorbed by the histories handed down about Africans, written by non-Africans.
Of course, what he meant was we must write our own stories, in our own languages.
His body of work collectively contemplates the ways by which history is not simply a record of the past — it is the foundation of a people's present dignity and future direction. Without an understanding of where one comes from, both individually and collectively, one becomes vulnerable to manipulation, alienation and erasure, he argued.
In remembering Ngũgĩ and his legacy, it compels me to want to know more about my own history; to write down the stories, recipes and memories of my grandmothers and great aunts who are still alive (coming as they all do, and I do, from a diverse cultural and racial history of three continents: India, Africa, Europe).
