James Githuka Ngugi was born on 5th January, 1938. His birthplace was Kamiriithu, near Limuru, in Kiambu District, in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. And died on 28th May, 2025. Between his born-day and death-day, he metamorphosed from James Ngûgî to Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, i.e. Ngûgî, son of Thiong’o. And within the same time frame, through an admixture of choice and destiny, he turned himself into a social amalgam: teacher, journalist, academic, writer, novelist, Marxist thinker, playwright, social critic, prisoner of conscience and cultural ambassador.
It was in this literary versatility that he related effortlessly with contemporaries on the broad ideological spectrum. These were people like the Wole Soyinkas, the Chinua Achebes, the Obi Walis, the Mongo Betis, the John Pepper Clark, the Ezekiel Mphahleles, the Peter Nazareths and the Jonathan Kariaras.
Others were the Chris Okigbos, the John Nagendas, and the Pio Zirimus, the Dennis Brutuses, the Ferdinand Oyonos, the Okot p’ Biteks, the Ayi Kwei Armahs, etc. It was with co-writers like these that he helped design, shape and construct the landscape of African literature. Ngûgî wa Thiong’o was particularly keen in attacking Western hegemony: colonialism, religion, education, language and culture in his writings. He had no good word for colonialism. And he was as unapologetic as he was consistent.
But because he also railed at the crooked elite of post-colonial Kenya, calling them the exact names they deserved, he found himself on the wrong side of the well-preserved coercive legacy of the colonial era. His arrests, continual detentions and constant arraignments forced him into exile in 1977: first, in the UK; and later, in the US.
There were, in Kenya at that time, many crooked politicians, pick-pockets, criminal contractors, compromised security agents, corrupt judges, armed robbers, vote-thieves, perjurers, forgers, and ritualists etc. But, it was an ordinary teacher that the Kenya bourgeoisie deemed a threat to national security! His unpardonable crime? Ngûgî refused to keep quiet in the face of elite betrayal; he refused to sit at the table with them to gorge on the public till; he refused to blend into the background of “normalised abnormalities,” to genuflect before illegitimate and self-serving power or to integrate himself into the system of bazaars and unlimited spoils.
Here was an African-African, who had invested his entire adult life in rejecting and preaching against colonialism, the European languages, religion and culture. The irony was that after his country sought to unalive him, it was the lands of the derided Western hegemony that welcomed him, permitted his criticism and even gave him succour.
In Britain, he taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London. And in the US, beginning 1986, he professed at Northwestern University, Yale University, New York University and at the University of California, Irvine.
When he visited his native land after 22 years in November 2004 ie two years after President Arap Moi left office, Kenya welcomed him with a most traumatic nightmare. Gunmen invaded where he was staying; they beat him up mercilessly and raped his wife in his presence!
It was a traumatised and depressed wa Thiong’o who returned to the US. Africa can truly shame her own! And yet, even in faraway US, this proud Kikuyu son kept Kenya, the land of his birth, in his heart. He continued to visit Kenya now and again.
Ngûgî wa Thiong’o’s life mirrored that of another great African writer, Mongo Beti. He too was exiled from his country, for 32 years, and only returned, in 1991, after President Ahmadou Ahidjo, had died. As his wife, Odile Tobner, noted after his death, “exile was not easy on Beti; he remained tortured by his concern for his embattled country.”
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Ngûgî is now gone to the silent climes, unsung at home, but enthusiastically celebrated abroad. Although he was a favourite contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature for over 10 years, he never won it. But there were others to wit: The 2001 International Nonino Prize in Italy; the 2016 Park Kyong-ni Prize; the 2019 Erich-Maria-Remarque Peace Prize; the 2022 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature etc.
Will Kenya want to bury her foremost literary ambassador to the world and East Africa’s biggest novelist and literary voice? Will Kenya now give him a posthumous national honour in order to cover her shame or atone for her guilt in exiling one of her best?
The questions are important because the gargantuan academic and versatile writer was a recipient of seven honorary doctorates from many foreign universities i.e. D Litt (Albright); PhD (Roskilde); D Litt (Leeds); D Litt &Ph D (Walter Sisulu University); PhD (Carlstate); D Litt (Dillard) and D Litt (Auckland University).
Elsewhere in Africa, universities that conferred honorary doctorates on him, include Makerere University (Uganda); Walter Sisulu University (South Africa); and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Strangely, there was none from a Kenyan university!
Rest in peace, the great Ngûgî wa Thiong’o.
PS: If you see your friend, Chinua Achebe, tell him: Things have Fallen (More) Apart:
The Falcon is Deaf
Innocence is Dead
Anarchy is the new Order
Blood flows like an Ocean
The centre has no Centre
The grave took our Best
And left us the Chaff.
PS (2):
If you likewise see Mongo Beti, do tell him too that not much has changed since he crossed the Rubicon; that he might consider writing the second editions of:
1. “Main Basse sur le Cameroun: Autopsie d’une décolonisation” (1971);
2. “La France Contre l’Afrique: Retour au Cameroun” (1993) and
3. “Lettre ouverte aux Camerounais, ou, La deuxième mort de Ruben Um Nyobé” (1986).
Simon Imobo-Tswam
Imobo-Tswam, a retired newspaper editor, writes from Abuja, Nigeria. He can be reached at simonpita2008@gmail.com
