3 days ago
Remembering Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Freedom, he wrote
Ngugi wa Thiong'o was in his teens when he returned from his elite British-run English-medium school one day to find his family home in Kenya razed by the colonial rulers in response to the Mau Mau uprising. Only a hedge they had planted remained, he later wrote in In the House of the Interpreter (2012), 'beyond it our homestead is a rubble of burnt dry mud, splinters of wood, and grass'. It was a moment that never left him, becoming the seed of a quiet rebellion that would eventually make him one of Africa's fiercest literary minds and unwavering moral voices. The writer, 87, who died on May 28, wrote to rebuild what had been destroyed — not just in his village, but across a continent's collective memory.
Thiong'o's life was shaped by the winds of colonialism, repression, resilience, and the corruption-laden aftermath of independence in Kenya. But he refused to be blown off course. He wrote as if words were weapons to carve out a space for truth. His Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first major novel in English by an East African writer. But after imprisonment without trial — punishment for a play he had co-written in his native tongue Gikuyu on corruption — Ngugi turned away from English altogether. In a prison cell, he began Devil on the Cross (1980), scribbled on toilet paper, the first modern novel written in his mother tongue. From then on, he insisted that African stories be told in African languages.
Thiong'o's continued exposition of malfeasance in post-colonial Kenya earned him the wrath of political gatekeepers. Exile followed, but so did global recognition, as he became a lodestar for generations of African writers — among them Nigerian greats Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. If there's one lesson Thiong'o leaves behind, it is that the fight for freedom does not end with the fall of a regime. And that the stories of a people, told in their own words, are acts of liberation in themselves.
