Ngũgĩ and I: A Personal Tribute
“Mzee! Wakai Awa! Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Rest in Power!”
Remembering Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The great Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has passed.
Tribute – Vanguard | Tribute – The Guardian
Ngũgĩ is one of the figures who made me fall in love with African literature. I read his early novels in high school in Freetown and it was from Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967) that I first learned about Kenya (rural life and culture, traditional and western education, colonization, the Mau-Mau and anti-colonial struggle). And much later, when I later tried to write about African cultural studies as a PhD student, Ngugi’s work in general and especially the collective play co-written with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, ‘Ngaahika Ndeenda’ (‘I will marry when I want’) and the activist work of the Kamirithu Centre (Kitata, 2025) in his home village of Limuru from which the play emerged, were instrumental in my articulation of what African cultural studies could be. The result was my dissertation (and after, my first book) in which I argued for a paradigm shift from a hegemonically aesthetics based English Literature in Africa to a more complex aesthetic and utilitarian African cultural studies: A Prescience of African Cultural Studies: The Future of Literature in Africa is Not What it Was.
As much as I loved Ngũgĩ’s fiction, I came to admire him even more and to utilize what he produced as a most passionate postcolonial theorist and political and cultural critic. The perhaps lesser-known collection, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms became a favourite because the essays were particularly valuable for my articulation of African cultural studies (Wright, 1995). Ngũgĩ is most famous for Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, a work that crossed over from African thought to become a global postcolonial/decolonial thought staple. It epitomized what became his lifelong anti-colonial stance and work on the politics of language. Indeed, Ngũgĩ is famous for eschewing the colonizer’s language, English as the medium for his creative writing and even the colonizer’s Christian name, “James” (his early novels were published under the name James Ngũgĩ). He opted instead to write in his mother tongue, Kikuyu and to only translate works into English if and when he chose to. So, for example, in 1980 Kikuyu readers got to read Caitani Mutharabaini, which he wrote on toilet paper while imprisoned and which he later translated and published in English in 1982 as Devil on the Cross. Indeed, he advocated that African writers write in their mother tongue and at a stretch in regional languages such as Swahili – lingua franca in much of Eastern Africa. He also chose to use his Kikuyu name and naming, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Ngũgĩ, son/child of Thiong’o).
As a fierce critic of corruption in successive Kenyan governments, Ngũgĩ’s works were censored and he was imprisoned (which he wrote about in Barrel of a Pen and Detained) and upon his release, with the threat of assassination looming, he spent the rest of his life in exile, very briefly in the UK, then mostly in the USA (as a professor successively at Yale, Northwestern, New York University, ending his career as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine). Not just a Kenyan nationalist, Ngũgĩ was in fact a devoted, lifelong pan-Africanist, and later in life became very interested in Indigenous thought and global critical politics, as evidenced in works like Globaletics, his coinage of the particularly utilitarian notion of “poor theory,” his insistence on and continuous forging of links between the local and the global, and his exhortation that since it was European colonizers who carved out the continent’s “countries,” Africans should free themselves from what he identified as “the straightjackets of nationalism.”
One never thinks they will actually get to meet their intellectual heroes so I was beside myself with excitement when Ngũgĩ was invited to give the keynote address at the 2007 conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and I (African, new to UBC, recovering English major, and newly minted Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Comparative Cultural Studies) was asked to give the response to his address. After his talk and my response, Ngũgĩ made some excuse about needing rest and asked me to leave the conference venue with him (leaving behind a very disappointed gaggle of high-profile scholars who were obviously intent on rubbing shoulders with the esteemed keynote speaker). Rather than going back to his accommodations, he actually wanted me to walk the campus with him, including a stop at the bookstore (which, to my relief, carried some of his works). We had the longest talk about individual African countries, pan-African politics and the responsibilities of Africans in the diaspora to the continent. I remember being astonished that he displayed in-depth knowledge of the history of and current issues in my native Sierra Leone. It felt like a dream to have this long chat with Ngũgĩ as we walked the campus then sat outside his digs, with students walking briskly, blissfully by. I wanted to shout- “Can you see who I am with, who is talking and laughing with me? Can you believe it?”
The next time I met Ngugi in person, we were both on an invited plenary panel of the Postcolonial Education Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in San Diego in 2009, where he greeted me as one would a long-lost brother, with a big grin and a long hug. Perhaps I can be forgiven for not remembering the details of any of the presentations, swept up as I was by the very presence of the man and my astonishment at his very genuine modesty. He was the most down-to-earth person and always so very keen to hear from and engage others, as if his much-anticipated talks were simply an excuse to meet and learn about and from others.
And finally, and in the most sustained way, I interacted with Ngũgĩ (albeit via Zoom meetings) when I was invited by Tim Reiss (literary scholar and Ngũgĩ’s colleague at UC Irvine), to contribute to a book about Ngũgĩ and his relationship to and reception in the Americas, Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I chose to explore what it might mean to take up Ngũgĩ seriously in the politics of (re)articulating both an American and a global cultural studies. What was particularly thrilling for me about the project was that Ngũgĩ himself was part of the collective- enthusiastically engaging everyone’s drafts, and encouraging us to critique his own essay. This was truly a labour of love for us and I consider that essay particularly important because it was a small contribution to a project that was so meaningful; a rigorous celebration of a towering figure who adamantly refused to be so identified. The pictures I have taken with Ngũgĩ have always been quite meaningful and with his passing, they have now become some of my most treasured images.
To a fearless, radical social justice theorist and activist, avid pan-Africanist, and passionate advocate for global equity and representation of the marginalized I say:
“Mzee! Wakai Awa! Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Rest in Power!”
References
- Kitata, M. (April, 2025). Theatre and architecture: Kamirithu decolonial theatre, and Kamirithu polytechnic. Africa Habitat Review Journal, 20(1). http://uonjournals.uonbi.ac.ke/ojs/index.php/ahr
- Ngũgĩ, J. (1964). Weep not child. Oxford, UK: Heinemann.
- Ngũgĩ, J. (1965). The river between. Oxford, UK: Heinemann.
- Ngũgĩ, J. (1967). A grain of wheat. Oxford, UK: Heinemann.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o & Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ. (1970s). Ngaahika Ndeenda. Limuru: Kamirithu Cultural Centre.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o & Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ. (1977). I will marry when I want. SocialistStories.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1982). Detained: A writer’s prison diary. Oxford, UK: Heinemann.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1982). Devil on the cross. Oxford, UK: Heinemann.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1983). Barrel of a pen: Resistance to repression in neo-colonial Kenya. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Oxford, UK: James Currey.
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (2012). Globaletics: Theory and the politics of knowing. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Reiss, T. J. (Ed.). (2021). Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
- Wright, H.K. (1995). Would we recognize African cultural studies if we saw it? A review essay of Ngũgĩ’s Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom. The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 17(2), 157–165.
- Wright, H.K. (2004). A prescience of African cultural studies: The future of literature studies in Africa is not what it was. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
- Wright, H.K. (2021). From British-American to transnational cultural studies: Appropriating Ngũgĩ for the journey. In T. Reiss (Ed.), Ngũgĩ in the American Imperium. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
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