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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Decolonizing Language by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o review – final words of literary giant
On 17 July 1979, the great Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o gave a speech in Nairobi in which he questioned the logic of an African literature in European languages. He had recently been released from prison, where he had been held after his critiques of corruption and inequality had touched a nerve among leaders of the recently independent nation. But his address provoked strong reactions for another reason: up until that moment, Ngũgĩ had been closely associated with the emergence of an African tradition of writing in English and acknowledged as a key figure in the rise of the novel as a major genre on the continent; his fictional work was often cited as an example of how English was being remade in formerly colonised societies. His early novels, from 1964's Weep Not, Child onward, struck a chord with a global Anglophone audience partly because they echoed the English novelists he had read as a student at Makerere University College, the Ugandan branch of the University of London, and Leeds University, the seat of 'Commonwealth' literary studies in the 1960s. By the time of his speech, Ngũgĩ was a member of the literary establishment in Africa, a leading figure in world literature, and a leader in postcolonial thought. And while it is true that he had challenged what he saw as the hegemony of English in a 1968 manifesto, On the Abolition of the English Department, co-written with two of his colleagues at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ assumed that the abolition of English did not mean dispensing with the colonial language. In fact, for most of the 1960s and 1970s he shared a belief, common among the postcolonial elite, that a literature in the ex-coloniser's language could indeed be revolutionary. But now the novelist had decided to break away from English, to depart, as he put it, 'from Anglo-Saxon literature in order to reconnect to the patriotic traditions of a national and culture literature rooted among the people'. He would henceforth write in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ (known to Swahili and English-speakers as Kikuyu). It is therefore fitting that, in Decolonizing Language, Ngũgĩ, who died earlier this year aged 87, should return to the question of language as effectively his final statement. The 20 essays collected in the book rehearse positions first articulated in his earlier collections, Writers in Politics and Decolonizing the Mind; but the new book is notable for Ngũgĩ's attention to the dangers that mother tongues face across the world, from colonial Ireland to Sami Norway, New Zealand and beyond. Read together, the essays resonate as a manifesto for the mother tongue both as 'the very heart of our being and existence' and the ultimate firewall against 'spiritual domination'. The mission of Decolonizing Language, the 'revolutionary idea' encapsulated in the book's subtitle, is an incisive rejection of the notion that European 'languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality' or that they function as the languages 'of power and normality'. Reading the book and reflecting on the many conversations I had with Ngũgĩ as he tried to come to terms with his exile after learning of threats against his life in 1982, I was reminded of how different the situation was in 1979, when the author made his 'epistemological break' with English. I had graduated from the University of Nairobi a few months before, and had taken up a job as a trainee editor in the local office of Heinemann Educational Books, which was at the time a major publisher of African literature. My first task at Heinemann was to edit Devil on the Cross, Ngũgĩ's first novel in Gĩkũyũ. The famous author had two demands of his young editor: he insisted that his novel be edited to the same standards as the works I was editing in English and that it be directed at common readers, not elites. I went to work on the manuscript, which he had written in prison; when it was all done, and as I sat back and watched the big smile of satisfaction on his face, it dawned on me that for Ngũgĩ writing a novel in Gĩkũyũ had been a kind of homecoming. The book's initial reception stayed with him for many years: 'It was read in groups at homes and factory grounds, on public transportation even, the literate becoming the 'present' author of the story,' he noted in 2010. Ngũgĩ's decision to break with English provoked strong reactions: it was hailed by writers and cultural activists working in African languages who had felt left out in postcolonial debates that privileged English; it was criticised by prominent African writers, including Chinua Achebe, the 'founding father' of African literature, who insisted that English was a necessary linguistic tool in holding together multiethnic nations. Ngũgĩ refused to concede; instead he embarked on a global crusade defending mother tongues as indispensable tools in the decolonization of the mind. In this context, Decolonizing Language can be read as the author's final take on the overriding theme of this critical project, a clear diagnosis of the challenges mother tongues face in a world defined by linguistic hierarchies. On a more personal level, the book is Ngũgĩ's last account of his displacement from his own native ground, an acknowledgement of the heavy burden that those who write and speak the language of the other have to carry. The arguments made in the book are exhilarating; reading them in the author's absence is undeniably poignant. Simon Gikandi is University Professor of English at Princeton. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
12-08-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Take away our language and we will forget who we are: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and the language of conquest
In the 1930s, it was common for British missionaries to change the names of African school pupils to biblical names. The change wasn't 'just for school' – it was intended to be for ever. So Ngũgĩ became James and my father, Mohamed, became Moses. While many students retained their new names throughout their lives, Ngũgĩ and my father changed theirs back, though you can still find early editions of Ngũgĩ's first book, Weep Not, Child, under the name of 'James Ngugi'. With the novel, Ngũgĩ established himself as a writer and later, by reclaiming his Kikuyu identity as an activist, began a process of decolonisation that he would explore in one of his most famous nonfiction works, Decolonising the Mind (1986), which challenged the dominance of European languages in African education and literature. Ngũgĩ worked throughout his life to promote the decolonisation of language, writing and publishing his books in Kikuyu and only later translating them himself into English. Ngũgĩ was a campaigner against the legacy of colonialism, but first and foremost a Marxist. Studying at the University of Leeds in the 1960s, he witnessed first-hand the brutality of the police towards striking white miners and realised that economic exploitation was a class issue and not a purely racial one. He endured exile, imprisonment, physical assault and harassment by the postcolonial Kenyan authorities and yet never stopped writing and publishing, even penning one of his works, Devil on the Cross (originally titled Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ), on prison toilet paper. Detained for his involvement with community theatre groups, Ngũgĩ noted that as long as he wrote in English, the authorities ignored him. Only when he began to write politically critical plays in Kikuyu, and ordinary working people could understand them, was he arrested. Ngũgĩ was one of the grandfathers of African literature, and his courage made him beloved of a generation of writers. At the 2015 Pen World Voices festival, Ngũgĩ opted to stay in the same hotel as the other African writers, while others of his stature chose loftier accommodation. Here, the likes of Lola Shoneyin, Alain Mabanckou, the late Binyavanga Wainaina, Taiye Selasi, Ngũgĩ's son Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ and me fetched the cups of tea he drank all day long, found a pen he needed or hailed a taxi on his behalf. One evening I helped organise an after-dinner party in a local bar. Ngũgĩ went to bed early, set an alarm, rose and joined us in the bar. He wanted tea, but the bar didn't serve it. So someone ran out and fetched him one. In May this year, Ngũgĩ was apparently dancing with some of his students at the University of California, Irvine, to mark the end of the semester on the Friday before his death, at the age of 87. Aminatta Forna Since the publication of my book Decolonising the Mind in 1986, I have seen, over the years, increasing global interest in issues of decolonisation and the unequal power relationships between languages. In 2018, the same issues took me to Limerick in Munster, Ireland, for a conference celebrating 125 years since the foundation of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), in 1893. The league was dedicated to the revival of Gaelic, or Irish, which by then, in its own country, had become subordinate to the dominant English. Despite many efforts, including official government support for its revival, Irish is still subordinate to English. More Irish speak and use English than they do Irish. Some of the most iconic Irish writers, such as WB Yeats and James Joyce, wrote in English, and they are studied as part of the canon of English literature. I cannot conceive of an English department anywhere in the world, including Britain itself, which didn't teach courses in these writers of Irish origin. They have become some of the greatest contributors to English literature. This unequal power relationship between the two languages in favour of the English was not always the case. The early English settlers in Ireland, Munster in particular, gravitated toward Irish because, by all accounts, in the beginnings of English settlement – particularly between the 13th and 16th centuries – the Irish language was the more endowed in classical learning. Naturally, those early settlers were drawn to the more vibrant Irish tongue. Their gravitation made sense: Irish was the majority tongue, spoken by those among whom the English planters had settled. London acted, and beginning with the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny, it passed edicts aimed at protecting the English language against the subversive encroachment of Irish or Gaelic, reinforcing by law the use of English while literally criminalising Irish. Among other things, the Kilkenny statutes threatened to confiscate any lands of any English or any Irish living among them who would use 'Irish among themselves, contrary to the ordnance'. These policies were given a literary and philosophical rationale by none other than the poet Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene and himself a settler in Munster. In his pamphlet A View of the Present State of Irelande, published in 1596, he argued that language and naming systems were the best means of bringing about the erasure of Irish memory: 'It hath ever been the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all means to learn his.' The marginal status of Irish in its own land did not come about by some kind of natural evolution. The decline of Irish in its own land was brought about through conscious political acts and educational policies. Ireland, it has been observed, was England's first settler colony. It became a kind of laboratory for other English settler colonies that followed. And what was true for Ireland and other English colonies was equally so for other colonial systems, whether Spanish, French or Portuguese, or the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. It is also true in the case of domestic colonialism, such as the Norwegian suppression of the language of Sami people. The suppression of the languages of the dominated and the elevation of the language of conquest and domination were integral to the education system that accompanied conquest and colonial occupation. Linguistic suppression was not undertaken for the aesthetic joy of doing so. Spenser was clear that the colonisation of the Irish language and naming system would make the Irish forget who they were, weaken their resistance, and therefore make it easier for the English to conquer and subdue them. Language conquest, unlike the military form, is cheaper and more effective: the conqueror has only to invest in capturing the minds of the elite, who will then spread submission to the rest of the population. The elite become part of the linguistic army of the conqueror. Because of its centrality in the making of modern Britain, India became, even more than Ireland, a social laboratory, whose results were later exported to other colonies in Asia and Africa. Thomas Babington Macaulay, as a member of the Supreme Council of India from 1834 to 1838, helped reform the colony's education system as well as draw up its penal code; both activities have a special significance. In his famous 1835 Minutes on Indian Education, Macaulay advocated the replacement of Sanskrit and Persian with English as the language of education in order to form a class of 'interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect'. Macaulay saw this new language education as bringing about a 'civilised state in which the values and standards are to be the values and standards of Britain, in which every one, whatever his origins, has an interest and a part'. A century later, Macaulay's words would be repeated in colonial Kenya by the then British governor, Sir Philip Mitchell. He outlined a policy for English language dominance in African education which he saw as a moral crusade to supplement the armed crusade against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, a liberation army the British called the Mau Mau. In 1879, Capt Richard Henry Pratt founded the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he devised his own variant of the method for Native American children, less than 20 miles across the scenic Susquehanna River from the steps of the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1892, he summed up the philosophy behind the boarding school: 'Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.' His education programme followed the same colonial pattern: uproot a few from their mother tongue, which is spoken by most of their people, mould them anew in the language of conquest, and then unleash them on the governed masses. In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney quotes Pierre Foncin, a founder of the Alliance Française, an institution specifically created in 1883 for the propagation of the national language in the colonies and abroad, as being very clear about the goal of the mission. It was 'necessary to attach the colonies to the metropole by a very solid psychological bond against the day when their progressive emancipation ends in a form of federation, as is probable – that they be and they remain French in language, thought and spirit'. The goal was very clear. Imperial educational policies were meant to create colonies of the mind, among the elite of the colonised. The success of these policies is undeniable. A variation of the Irish situation, where even after independence, the intellectuals express themselves more fluently in the language of imperial conquest than in the languages from their own country, is present in every postcolonial situation. In the case of Africa, you even hear the identity of the continent being described in terms of Europhonity: anglophone, francophone and lusophone, mainly. Even where the elite are nationalistic and assertive of their independence, they find it easier to express their outrage and hopes in the languages of imperial conquest. Ninety per cent of the moneys allocated for language education goes to pamper imperial languages. Ninety per cent of the population still speaks African languages anyway. Some governments even view African languages as enemies of progress. They believe that imperial languages are really the gateway to global modernity. Under normal circumstances, it would sound odd to hear that French literature can only be written in Japanese, or English literature in IsiZulu, so that when you meet a French writer who writes in French, you look at them in surprise: why on earth are you writing in French? Or an English writer writing in English: why are you not writing in Zulu? And yet this absurdity is expected of African writers and writers from those formerly colonised. How did this absurdity come about? It is not that some languages are more 'of language' than others. And under any circumstances, to know more languages can only empower the person. But this was not the case in colonial contexts or any context in which there is a dominating and dominated. It was never a case of adding a new language to what one already had. For the colonial conqueror, it was not enough to introduce an additional language to any community. Imperial languages had to be planted on the graveyard of the languages of the dominated. The death of African languages gave life to European languages. In order for the imperial language to be, the language of the colonised had to cease to be. Amnesia for African languages; anamnesis for European languages. These two conditions are not inherent in the character of the languages involved. They are mental conditions consciously brought about by how the imperial languages were imposed. In Decolonising the Mind, I have talked about the corporal punishment meted out to African children caught speaking an African language at school, children who were then made to carry a placard around the neck proclaiming their stupidity. In some cases, the culprit was made to swallow filth, thus associating African languages with criminality, pain and filth. This was not just in Africa. In his 2015 testimony to the Waitangi Tribunal about his experiences of school in New Zealand, Dover Samuels, a Māori politician, tells a similar story. Caught speaking Māori in the school, he said: 'You'd be hauled out in front of the rest of the class and told to bend over. You'd bend over and he'd stand back and give you, what they called it then, six of the best. On many occasions, not only did it leave bruises behind on my thighs but drew blood.' The Sami people in Norway went through a similar experience in the period between 1870 and 1970 – what they call the brutal century – in an attempt to turn them into fluent Norwegian-language speakers. Violence against native languages is the running theme in the spread of English in Ireland, and in Scotland and Wales. In Wales, those who spoke Welsh in the school compound were made to stand in front of the class, with a placard reading WELSH NOT hanging from their neck. Violence was central in creating the psychological bond of language, culture and thought: colonies of the mind. You would think that after liberation and independence, the new nations, at the very least, would dismantle that unequal power relationship. But that is precisely the power of the colonies of the mind: negativity toward self has become internalised as a way of looking at reality. It is a classic case of conditioning you will find in manuals of behavioural psychology. Conditioning is a system of reward and punishment: punishment for undesired behaviour and reward for the desired behaviour. It is often used in various degrees of intensity in bringing up children or taming animals. The undesired behaviour becomes associated with punishment, and hence pain; the desired behaviour with reward, and hence pleasure. The object of conditioning, a child or an animal, comes to automatically avoid the space of pain, the forbidden behaviour, and gravitate toward the space of pleasure, the required behaviour. In the case of learning, one became the recipient of glory for excelling in the language of conquest, but the recipient of a gory mess for uttering even a single word in one's mother tongue. One's mother tongue became the space of pain, to be avoided, and the conquering language became the space of pleasure, to be desired. The trauma experienced by the first generation of the conditioned can be passed on as normal behaviour that needs no explanation or justification; the later generations may not even understand why they associate pain with native languages and pleasure with foreign languages and cultures. The elite and educational planners of the formerly colonised societies assume that European (imperial) languages are inherently global and best able to carry intelligence and universality. That assumption may also explain why criminalising African languages continues to this day, now administered and enforced by African educationalists who don't see the irony of what they are doing: an African punishing another African for speaking an African language, by order of an African government. The trauma initially wrought by the colonial education system is thus passed on, inherited. Abnormality becomes normalised. The colony of the mind prevents meaningful, nationally empowering innovations in education. Control by the coloniser of the colonised is inherent in the inequality of the education system. Education may become a process of mystifying the cognitive process and even knowledge. Here we need to make a distinction between education and knowledge. Knowledge is a question of continuously adding to what we already know in a dialectical play of mutual impact and illumination. The normal cognitive process starts from the known and heads toward the unknown. Every new step makes more of the unknown known and therefore adds to what is already known. The new known enriches the already known, and so on, in a continuous journey of making dialectically related connections. Knowledge of the world begins where one is. Education, on the other hand, is a mode of conditioning people to make them into, and function in, a given society. It may involve transference of knowledge, but it is conditioned knowledge, branded by the world outlook of the educator and the education system. A careful study of the colonial process, as a particular instance of the dominant and the dominated, the master and the servant, can be useful in thinking about balanced and inclusive education. Colonial education was never balanced or inclusive. The colonial process was always a negation of the normal cognitive process. Imperial Europe – its names, its geography, its history, its knowledge – was always seen as the starting point of the educational journey of the colonised. In short, colonisation, in the area of education, was always predicated on the negation of the colonised space as the starting point of knowledge. In the area of language, it meant a negation of native languages as valid sources of knowledge or as means of intellectual and artistic inquiry. The lack of roots in our base creates a state of permanent uncertainty about our relationship to where we are, to our abilities, even to our achievements. Decolonisation must be at the heart of any balanced and inclusive education. Both the formerly colonising and the formerly colonised are affected by a system that has shaped the globe over the last 400 years. Knowledge starts wherever we are. Our languages are valid sources of knowledge. We all love the stars, but we don't have to migrate to Europe, physically or metaphorically, in order to reach them. In the case of languages, we have to reject the commonly held wisdom that the problem in any one country or the world is the existence of many languages and cultures, and even religions. The problem is their relationship in terms of hierarchy. My language is higher in the hierarchy than yours. My culture is higher than yours. Or my language is global; yours is local. And in order for you to know my language, you must first give up yours. The view that my god is more of a god than your god is very ungodly. This view leads some people to see their own language as inherently more of a language than other languages and therefore to insist that they themselves must be ranked higher in knowledge and power. This is what I call linguistic feudalism. All languages, large and small, have a lot to contribute to our common humanity if freed from linguistic feudalism. Education policies should be devised on the basis that all languages are treasuries of history, beauty and possibility. They have something to give to one another if their relationship is that of the give-and-take of a network. Even if one of the languages emerges as the language of communication across many languages, it should not be so on the basis of its assumed inherent nationality or globality, but on the basis of need and necessity. And even then, it should not grow on the graveyard of other languages. Balanced and inclusive education calls for a new slogan: network, not hierarchy. We have to understand that all languages, big and small, have a common language: it is called translation. Education should never lead to linguistic and cultural self-isolation. I want to connect to the world, but that doesn't mean I have to negate my starting base. I want to connect to the world from wherever I am. I believe that the goal of education is knowledge that empowers, that shows our real connections to the world, but from our base. From our base, we explore the world: from the world, we bring back that which enriches our base. That, it seems to me, is the real challenge in organising knowledge and transmitting it in an inclusive and balanced education system in the world today. We have to reject the notion that splendour is not splendour unless it springs from squalor. Palaces are not palaces unless erected on prisons. My millions are not millions unless mined from a million poor. For me to be, others must cease to be. Education must convey knowledge that empowers us to imagine more inclusive palaces, where my being enables your being and yours enables mine. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Penguin Books, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply. Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
TimesLIVE
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- TimesLIVE
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: A voice of fire, a mind of freedom
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.
Daily Maverick
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — 5 things you should know about one of Africa's greatest writers
The late Kenyan author committed to giving voice to the decolonial moment and vowed, in the late 1970s, to write only in his home language. One of Africa's most celebrated authors, Kenyan writer and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, has died at 87. Having published his first novel – Weep Not, Child – in 1964, Ngũgĩ pursued a rich and acclaimed career as a writer, teacher and decolonial thinker. His last creative effort was Kenda Muiyuru (The Perfect Nine), a Gikuyu epic that was longlisted for the 2021 International Man Booker Prize. Kenyan academic and writer Peter Kimani sets out five things you should know about this legendary African writer. He understood the politics of his time Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is regarded as one of Africa's greatest writers of all time. He grew up in what became known as Kenya's White Highlands at the height of British colonialism. Unsurprisingly, his writing examines the legacy of colonialism and the intricate relationships between locals seeking economic and cultural emancipation and the local elites serving as agents of neo-colonisers. The great expectations for the new country, as captured in his seminal play, The Black Hermit, anticipated the disillusionment that followed. His fiction, from the foundational trilogy of Weep Not, Child, The River Between and A Grain of Wheat, amplify those expectations, before the optimism is replaced by disillusionment in Petals of Blood. He shaped a new African story African fiction is fairly young. Ngũgĩ stands in the continent's pantheon of writers who started writing when Africa's decolonisation gained momentum. In a certain sense, the writers were involved in constructing new narratives that would define their people. But Ngũgĩ's recognition goes beyond his pioneering role at home: his writing resonates with many across the continent. One could also recognise his consistency at churning out high-quality stories about Africa's contemporary society. This he always did in a way that illustrates his complete commitment to equality and social justice. He has done much more, through scholarship. His treatise, Decolonising the Mind, now a foundational text in postcolonial studies, illustrates his versatility. His ability to spin the yarns while commenting on the politics that goes into literary production of marginal literature is a very rare combination indeed. Finally, one could talk about Ngũgĩ's cultural and political activism. This precipitated his year-long detention without trial in 1977. He attributed his detention to his rejection of English and embracing his Gikuyu language as his vehicle of expression. Critics are divided on his greatest works It's hard to pick a favourite from Ngũgĩ's more than two dozen texts. But there is concurrence among critics that A Grain of Wheat, which was voted among Africa's best 100 novels at the turn of the last century, stands out for its stylistic experimentation and complexity of characters. Others consider the novel as the last signpost before Ngũgĩ's work became overly political. For other critics, it's Wizard of the Crow – which came out in 2004, after nearly two decades of waiting – that encapsulates his creative finesse. It utilises many literary tropes, including magical realism, and addresses the politics of African development and the shenanigans by the political elite to maintain the status quo. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages around the world. He stopped writing in English in 1977 Without a doubt, Africa would be poorer without the efforts of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and other pioneering writers to tell the African story. He was an important figure in postcolonial studies. His constant questioning of the privileging of the English language and culture in Kenya's national discourse saw him lead a movement that led to the scrapping of the Department of English at the University of Nairobi – replaced by a Department of Literature that placed African literature and its diasporas at the centre of scholarship. He never stopped writing Ngũgĩ remained active in writing, even in old age. Among his later offerings was the third instalment of his memoir, Birth of a Dreamweaver, that looks back on his years at Makerere University in Uganda. This is the period when he published his novels Weep Not, Child and The River Between, while still an undergraduate. Also at this time he wrote the play The Black Hermit, which was performed as part of Uganda's independence celebrations in 1962. In later years he was busy restoring his early works into Gikuyu, from English. Ngũgĩ appeared on the list of favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for a number of years. Since the workings of the Nobel award committee remain secret – the committee's deliberations are kept secret for 50 years – it will be decades before we know why he was overlooked when so many felt he deserved the prize. DM Peter Kimani is professor of practice at Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications in Karachi, Pakistan.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
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3 things Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o taught me: language matters, stories are universal, Africa can thrive
Celebrated Kenyan writer and decolonial scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o passed away on 28 May at the age of 87. Many tributes and obituaries have appeared across the world, but we wanted to know more about Thiong'o the man and his thought processes. So we asked Charles Cantalupo, a leading scholar of his work, to tell us more. When I heard that Ngũgĩ had died, one of my first thoughts was about how far he had come in his life. No African writer has as many major, lasting creative achievements in such a wide range of genres as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. His books include novels, plays, short stories, essays and scholarship, criticism, poetry, memoirs and children's books. Read more: His fiction, nonfiction and plays from the early 1960s until today are frequently reprinted. Furthermore, Ngũgĩ's monumental oeuvre is in two languages, English and Gĩkũyũ, and his works have been translated into many other languages. From a large family in rural Kenya and a son of his father's third wife, he was saved by his mother's pushing him to be educated. This included a British high school in Kenya and Makerere University in Uganda. When the brilliant young writer had his first big breakthrough at a 1962 meeting in Kampala, the Conference of African Writers of English Expression, he called himself 'James Ngũgi'. This was also the name on the cover his first three novels. He had achieved fame already as an African writer but, as is often said, the best was yet to come. Not until he co-wrote the play I Will Marry When I Want with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii was the name 'Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o' on the cover of his books, including on the first modern novel written in Gĩkũyũ, Devil on the Cross (Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ). I Will Marry When I Want was performed in 1977 in Gĩkũyũ in a local community centre. It was banned and Ngũgĩ was imprisoned for a year. And still so much more was to come: exile from Kenya, professorships in the UK and US, book after book, fiction and nonfiction, myriad invited lectures and conferences all over the world, a stunning collection of literary awards (with the notable exception of the Nobel Prize for Literature), honorary degrees, and the most distinguished academic appointments in the US, from the east coast to the west. Yet besides his mother's influence and no doubt his own aptitude and determination, if one factor could be said to have fuelled his intellectual and literary evolution – from the red clay of Kenya into the firmament of world literary history – it was the language of his birth: Gĩkũyũ. From the stories his mother told him as a child to his own writing in Gĩkũyũ for a local, pan-African and international readership. He provided every reason why he should choose this path in his books of criticism and theory. Ngũgĩ was also my friend for over three decades – through his US professorships, to Eritrea, to South Africa, to his finally moving to the US to live with his children. We had an ongoing conversation – in person, during many literary projects, over the phone and the internet. Our friendship started in 1993, when I first interviewed him. He was living in exile from Kenya in Orange, New Jersey, where I was born. We both felt at home at the start of our working together. We felt the same way together through the conferences, books, translations, interviews and the many more literary projects that followed. Since Ngũgĩ was such a voluminous and highly varied writer, he has many different important works. His earliest and historical novels like A Grain of Wheat and The River Between. His regime-shaking plays. His critical and controversial novels like Devil on the Cross and Petals of Blood. His more experimental and absolutely modern novels like Matigari and Wizard of the Crow. His epoch-making literary criticism like Decolonising the Mind. His informal and captivating three volumes of memoirs written later in life. His retelling in poetry of a Gĩkũyũ epic, The Perfect Nine, his last great book. A reader of Ngũgĩ can have many a heart's desire. My book, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Texts and Contexts, was based on the three-day conference of the same name that I organised in the US. At the time, it was the largest conference ever held on an African writer anywhere in the world. What I learned back then applies now more than ever. There are no limits to the interest that Ngũgĩ's work can generate anytime anywhere and in any form. I saw it happen in 1994 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and I see it now 30 years later in the outpouring of interest and recognition all over the world at Ngũgĩ's death. In 1993, he had published a book of essays titled Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Focusing on Ngũgĩ's work, the conference and the book were 'moving the centre' in Ngũgĩ's words, 'to real creative centres among the working people in conditions of gender, racial, and religious equality'. First, African languages are the key to African development, including African literature. Ngũgĩ comprehensively explored and advocated this fundamental premise in over 40 years of teaching, lectures, interviews, conversations and throughout his many books of literary criticism and theory. Also, he epitomised it, writing his later novels in Gĩkũyũ, including his magnum opus, Wizard of the Crow. Moreover, he codified his declaration of African language independence in co-writing The Asmara Declaration, which has been widely translated. It advocates for the importance and recognition of African languages and literatures. Second, literature and writing are a world and not a country. Every single place and language can be omnicentric: translation can overcome any border, boundary, or geography and make understanding universal. Be it Shakespeare's English, Dante's Italian, Ngugi's Gĩkũyũ, the Bible's Hebrew and Aramaic, or anything else, big or small. Third, on a more personal level, when I first met Ngũgĩ, I was a European American literary scholar and a poet with little knowledge of Africa and its literature and languages, much less of Ngũgĩ himself. He was its favourite son. But this didn't stop him from giving me the idea and making me understand how African languages contained the seeds of an African Renaissance if only they were allowed to grow. I knew that the historical European Renaissance rooted, grew, flourished and blossomed through its writers in European vernacular languages. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and more took the place of Latin in expressing the best that was being thought and said in their countries. Yet translation between and among these languages as well as from classical Latin and Greek culture, plus biblical texts and cultures, made them ever more widely shared and understood. Read more: From Ngũgĩ discussing African languages I took away a sense that African writers, storytellers, people, arts, and cultures could create a similar paradigm and overcome colonialism, colonial languages, neocolonialism and anything else that might prevent greatness. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Charles Cantalupo, Penn State Read more: Why auction of Buddha relics was called off and why it matters – an expert in Asian art explains Mbare Art Space: a colonial beer hall in Zimbabwe has become a vibrant arts centre Waiting for Godot has been translated into Afrikaans: what took so long Charles Cantalupo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
