Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Second liberation hero, literary giant with few peers

On May 28 2025, Kenyans received sad news of the passing of Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o, an academic giant, pioneer scholar of African literature, an academic elephant on the African novel, a mukuyu tree of African prose and style, an iroko tree of decolonisation literature and a lion of African orature, cultural revivalism and deconstruction of ‘whiteness’ and ‘bourgeois’ hegemony in Africa.

Ngugi pioneered in many areas and his story cannot be told in a single article such as this.

Mourning such an icon is not possible; we can only celebrate him.

Ngugi was part of the movement of Kenya’s second liberation which started in the 1960s and 1970s and succeeded in 1992. For his role in liberation, he was arrested and detained many times due to his literary works. It is therefore not surprising that more than three generations of Kenyan scholars have been weaned on the writings of Prof Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

Many of his ideas remain relevant today as they were when he first wrote them, thereby guaranteeing him great academic legacy, which will continue to influence many generations to come.

He will forever be celebrated as true rebel with a pen, and with a cause. Many scholars agree that Ngugi refused to be put down and some of the characters in his books show similar defiance and resilience.

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I beg the indulgence of the reader to allow me to mourn the academic giant by moving back and forth without being a slave to chronology and academic correctness.

I was introduced to Ngugi at a fairly young age, in high school, by our Literature teacher Francis Makanga Musieka who took us through his novel, The River Between. Ngugi was in detention at the time and we were told that he was detained because of his books, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross and I will Marry when I want (with Ngugi wa Mirii).

The banning helped to make the books even more popular and we read them in hiding. At the University of Nairobi, we listened to nostalgic stories about his time when we joined in 1986. We were told about Okot p’Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong and many others who had since left. 

Studying Ngugi’s novels at the Ingotse Secondary School allowed us to look at literature differently. As we went through The River Between the antagonism between Kinuthia and Waiyaki, Muthoni and Nyambura, Joshua and Kabonyi created interesting oppositional binaries, and tensions, as well as paradoxical dualities that were illustrative of the title of the book, hostility between the two ridges, Makuyu and Kameno, and the symbolic role of Honia River as a unifying and cleansing factor. 

I remember the contents of the book as if I read it only yesterday due to the trauma stories of encounter between Europeans and Africans, Christianity and indigenous religion, English and Gikuyu, and many other images, tropes, plots and subplots, resulting in victims such as Muthoni, who died due to female circumcision.

The book inspired me and many other literary minds like Kennedy Buhere, David Matende, Adalo Moga, Rose Mutiso, and Peter Matu, who pursued literature at the University of Nairobi.

We attended literature classes, and yet we were studying different courses such as political science, history, sociology and geography, due to how the literary giants on campus taught, with many not failing to mention and quote Ngugi. These included Chris Wanjala, Henry Indangasi, Hellen Mwanzi and Kavetsa Adagala. They had some scholarly swag and arrogance about them, just like their mentor, and we loved it. The defiance and coded language of describing the state, which at the time was authoritarian, was not only attractive but also inspiring.

When writing about Ngugi, many things come to mind. The first is that he had very few peers in Kenya and this was revealed very early during his days at the Alliance High School and Makerere University- he wrote his first novel while in high school, an achievement that very few people have accomplished. Some people did not understand him and this tended to get him into a lot of trouble.

My second urge is that Ngugi was a literary genius and a great wordsmith who was misunderstood by the state, and his ideas were many years ahead of time.

The third impulse is about the originality of his ideas at a very young age, before he was polluted by external literature. One sees a cultural nationalist who was aware at a very young age of the need to preserve what was in Africa. 

The River Between inspired me to read Ngugi’s other books such as Petals of Blood, for which he was imprisoned by the Kenyatta administration in 1977, A Grain of Wheat, and Weep Not, Child as well as Devil on the Cross and I will Marry when I Want (with Ngugi wa Mirii).

Most of his works were set and staged in Central Kenya among his Kikuyu people but had universal applicability, nuanced messages, tropes, plots and subplots. Ngugi’s works carried political, social, economic, cultural, gender, environmental, and other subjects that made the books universal. Each reader came out with something new and different. Even more recent works such as Wizard of the Crow; The Memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War, In the House of the Interpreter, carry the trauma but are less nuanced in African culture.

There is evidence that Ngugi’s more recent works were influenced by Western sites and spaces he now occupied and where he was affected by tensions at home and in his mind as an exile. They reveal something potent about home and nostalgia, and the effects of displacement in highlighting trauma.

As a country, we did not treat Ngugi very well.

He stands among only five Kenyan “mega-professors” since independence, alongside Ali Mazrui, Calistus Juma, TR Odhiambo (the founder of ICIPE), and Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai

Ngugi was the most famous Kenyan novelist, literary scholar, thinker, author and philosopher, and this is evident in his works translated in over 50 languages across the world. He was the best-known Kenyan scholar in the US besides Mazrui and his novels formed my entry point to African studies when I taught at Central Washington University in the US. I was surprised when I visited Gerlew in Denmark in 1994 to be asked many questions by students who had read works of Ngugi. I was also asked a question about Ngugi a few years ago, in 2016, when I visited Pilsen University in the Czech Republic, where his works had been translated into local languages.

Born in Limuru in 1938, Ngugi was a child of two worlds of colonial Kenya and post-colonial Kenya, which he rejected. He rejected colonial pigeon holes from a young age at Alliance, Makerere and the University of Leeds because they were based on wrong criteria and categorisation, which he revisited from time to time in his works. He defied colonial privileging of pure and applied science at the expense of the humanities and social sciences.

The Kenya of his birth and youth was a British settler colony (1895-1963) in which natives were mishandled and mistreated. As an adolescent, Ngugi lived through the Mau Mau War of Independence (1952-1962), in which many were detained while others were killed. Many of his works reveal stories of power, influence, authority, oppression as well as poverty.

Despite being one of the best students in science courses at Alliance, Ngugi opted to pursue English and Literature. When he arrived at the University of Leeds for his master's degree, he already knew what he wanted to do and many of his lecturers often turned to him to teach the class.

He is perhaps the only Kenyan to hold a professorial position while holding one degree. Many of his works were equivalent to some master's and doctoral dissertations. It was the reason he served as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at various high-profile universities, such as those from Ivy League, such as Yale and flagship universities, such as the University of California, Irvine, and New York University.

Ngugi produced big books with big ideas. His discourse on decolonisation scholarship was very highly regarded and presented alongside the likes of Frantz Fanon and his great books, such as The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.

In 2000, I met Ngugi for the first time at the African Studies Association conference in New York, alongside Mazrui, and was struck by his humility and commanding presence.

When we invited Ngugi to Kisii University in 2015, the interest in his talk was so huge that we could not get enough space to host the audience. Ngugi’s call for African unity, the recognition of heroes like Otenyo and Koitalel arap Samoei, and the decolonisation of African thought resonated deeply.

Ngugi’s legacy as a rebel with a pen endures, challenging us to confront colonial legacies and neocolonial threats. Kenya may not have treated him well, but Ngugi’s ideas will continue to shape the world.

Prof Amutabi is a Fulbright Scholar and deputy vice chancellor, Technical University of Kenya