Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s powerful pen cost him a heavy price. Of all the memorable nuggets that I gathered from that cold day under a grey Ontario sky, the one that still comes up my gullet was his answer to an innocent question I asked him after a talk he had delivered to students and faculty. While walking down a path covered with green buds after a sudden gusty hail shower, I asked him what the most painful experience he had faced in his life for justice and equality was. “Many. Violence is a part of your life if you are a force of resistance. The most painful one, and the one that was devastating to me, was the rape of my wife on our return to Kenya on one of our trips from the University of California at Irvine. It was completely politically motivated.”
At birth, he was named James Thiong’o Ngugi. He was born in 1938 into a family of goatherds, which included four wives and 28 children. As a teen in the 1950s, his writing — novels, dramas and essays — depicted the horror of that time in Africa. Fighting the British brute force that was on its last legs in Kenya, and caught in the Mau Mau battles that burned through much of Kenya, Ngugi faced death threats a few times in his life.
“Violence was all around. School was a place where you felt some protection and peace, but it was temporary and you never felt completely at peace. But at some point, you have to go out and confront the world,” said Ngugi. He faced the terror of the colonial master and the corrupt local elite of an evolving Kenya with words that erupted from his irrepressible pen. In 1977, as his anti-corruption novel Petals of Blood and controversial play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) attracted global outrage towards Kenya’s ineptitude as a state, Ngugi was thrown into a maximum-security jail without any trial. Ngugi being Ngugi, wrote a novel on the toilet paper in prison!
I reminded the great rebel that as graduates of English, all of us had read his iconic novel Weep Not, Child. “Yes,” he nodded, adding, “That story about two young brothers in a divided country, with different journeys shows the Kenya that faced the guile and wrath of post-independence divisiveness that almost killed our country.”
Like many other gauche scholars, I too wanted to prod him about writing in Gikuyu, the Kenyan tongue, so I mustered up the courage to ask him why I, who spoke both English and Bengali, my mother tongue, and wrote equally lucidly in both, could not use the coloniser’s tongue to subvert English by being Indian and writing in Indian English? I thought that he would give me a shaking up. “Oh my God,” he pretended to scold me, shaking his head — which had wispy white tufts — and with a very attractive raspy voice. “It’s like the enslaved being happy that there’s a local version of enslavement. English is not an African language. French is not. Spanish is not. Kenyan or Nigerian English is nonsense. That’s normalised abnormality. The colonised trying to claim the coloniser’s language is a sign of the success of enslavement. It’s very embarrassing,” he said.
Perhaps best known for the phrase “decolonising the mind”, which stemmed from one of his most lauded and most-translated works — Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), Ngugi is dedicated to those who write in African languages. Persuasively argued and passionately pursued, the collection of essays considers how the language of the colonisers continues to affect postcolonial societies and advocates for linguistic decolonisation.
Together with Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe (remembered for his seminal Postcolonial novel, Things Fall Apart) and Wole Soyinka (who wrote The Open Sore of a Continent), Ngugi was a highly respected new kid on the block in the 1950s and 1960s, during the dwindling years of colonialism on the African continent.
We applaud Achebe as the guru who showcased unabashedly, and with great storytelling technique, the disturbing feeling of uncertain identity that colonisation brutally spread. We admire Soyinka for expertly intellectualising the results of the jangling intertwining of African tradition and Western modernity. So how is Ngugi unique? It is his fearless and raw rebelliousness. His words were his swords, and his essays and philosophies, together with his fiction, were deployed as missiles. His targets at first were the inhumane and heinous colonial masters, and later the compradors or the ruling class of his own countrymen, who took the reins after the independence of Nigeria in 1958.
Ngugi first gained notice in 1962, while still in college, when his play The Black Hermit was staged in Uganda as part of that nation’s independence celebration. He followed with eight short stories, two more plays, a newspaper column, and a pair of books, including Weep Not, Child, which was billed as the first East African novel published in English. The book was also credited with opening Western eyes to postcolonial Africa. Over the years, Weep Not, Child has been studied extensively in academic settings, in India, Canada, the US and Australia, among other geographies, and is also recognised for its contribution to African literature and its insightful exploration of the human condition under colonial rule. It remains a significant text for understanding the historical and cultural dynamics of Kenya, as well as the broader implications of colonialism and the quest for liberation in Africa and beyond. The novel’s enduring relevance is evident in its continued presence in literary discussions and educational curricula, where it serves as a powerful reminder of the resilience and hope that characterise the struggle for freedom and justice.
In 1967, Ngugi became a lecturer in English literature at the University of Nairobi, and then he went to the UK. In 1989, Ngugi moved to the US for a professorship at Yale, marking the start of a stay in American universities which eventually led to him to California, where he joined the University of California at Irvine in 2002 — he was hired as a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at that institution — as well as director of the International Center for Writing and Translation. Yet he continued to return to Kenya in the years that followed. He pugnaciously held on to his citizenship and remained well-versed in Kenyan politics.
As I was writing this tribute to Ngugi, I was simultaneously listening to our own Kannada writer, Banu Mushtaq, explaining to the Booker Prize Award Committee almost the same philosophy that Ngugi shares with her. The message of celebrating diverse cultures, lives, and languages is what made her so proud of having won this precious prize. “I am happy for the entire world which is full of diversity and inclusiveness. I am happy for myself and my translator Deepa Bhasthi. This is more than a personal achievement; it is an affirmation that we, as individuals and as a global community, can thrive when we embrace diversity, celebrate our differences, and uplift one another. Together, we create a world where every voice is heard, every story matters, and every person belongs.”
Looking into his eyes, in the scuffed photograph of Ngugi in my files, I was arrested by limpid pools of intelligence and compassion. I think Ngugi would wholeheartedly approve of Banu Mushtaq’s global recognition. He died on May 28.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta where she teaches Masters English at Loreto College, and anchors the Rising Asia Literary Circle