Writer took our story to globe, but, in defiance not submission

The death of Ngugi wa Thiong’o marks the closing chapter of an extraordinary era—an era when literature was not mere art, but ammunition; when the University of Nairobi was not just a place of academic instruction, but a bastion of ideological revolution; when writers wrote not just to entertain, but to liberate.

Alongside Okot p’Bitek and Micere Githae Mugo, Ngugitransformed the University of Nairobi’s literature department into the pulsating heart of East Africa’s intellectual and political awakening. These three literary giants made literature dangerous—dangerous to colonial hangovers, to oppressive regimes, and to those who sought to silence African voices. They made it impossible to study literature without confronting power. They taught us that the battle for freedom was as much fought on the page as it was in the streets.

Though I was reading law at the university during that glorious period, my soul gravitated toward their lectures. The corridors of the literature department were my sanctuary. The lecture halls, their words, their challenges—they fed a different part of my being. They reminded me that the law is not neutral, and that a lawyer without a sense of justice is but a technician of tyranny. But it wasn’t just in classrooms that their brilliance shone. Some of my most memorable moments were spent at the Norfolk Hotel’s coffee terrace, where Okot p’Bitek would regularly gather a small circle of us—students from law, literature, and philosophy—for spirited conversations over tea, which almost always matured into long Tusker-fueled debates. Occasionally, Ngugi and Micere would join, their presence instantly elevating the gathering into something akin to an underground seminar on decolonisation.

It was at one of these meetings that Ngugi challenged me to rethink my name—Evanson. “What does it mean?” he asked. “Who gave it to you? And why do you still wear it?” That day, I shed my colonial name and embraced the fullness of my identity. Today, only my law degree certificate bears that name, a relic of a self I left behind. That’s what Ngugidid: He didn’t just write books; he rewrote people’s sense of self.

To call Ngugi a literary figure is to miss the scale of his legacy. He was a philosopher of language, a prophet of political clarity, and a warrior of cultural restoration. He dared to write in Gikuyu when the publishing world demanded English. He dared to produce plays with peasants when the state preferred silence. He dared to imagine an Africa free from mental bondage when many had surrendered to Western paradigms of success. He endured arrest, exile, censorship, and yet never lost his voice—or his vision.

Ngugi was not content with winning literary prizes. He sought to decolonise the African mind. His seminal work Decolonising the Mind was not merely a text; it was a manifesto. It reminded us that the most enduring chains are those we wear invisibly, in our speech, our thought, and our worldview. He taught that the coloniser’s greatest triumph was not the land he stole, but the mind he captured.

His death leaves Kenya culturally orphaned. He was our last living link to a golden generation of African thinkers who dared to make the university a space of resistance, not retreat. He was the last standing tree in a forest of literary giants felled by time. Okot p’Bitek left us with Song of Lawino—a raw, lyrical indictment of cultural betrayal. Micere Mugo gave us poetry infused with fire and feminism. And now Ngugi, whose Petals of Blood and A Grain of Wheat etched the soul of a nation in revolt, is gone.

And with him goes a part of our global literary standing. Kenya once commanded the world’s attention not just through athletics, but through words—through characters like Munira and Wanja, through stories that tore through the myths of independence and revealed the neo-colonial rot beneath. Ngugi carried our stories to Harvard, Yale, and beyond—but always in defiance, never in submission.

His pen challenged presidents. His name stood taller than parliaments. His ideas stirred generations.

Now that he has joined his comrades, we who remain must ask: What shall we do with their legacy? Shall we reduce them to statues and street names, or shall we pick up their pens and keep writing, keep questioning, keep fighting?

Ngugi taught us that liberation is a continuous act, and that the mind must be unchained anew with every generation. His death is not just a personal loss—it is a national reckoning. A call to return to the roots, to the language, to the courage that once made our universities sites of resistance, not factories of conformity. Farewell, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. You gave us words. Now we must use them.

The writer is a lawyer and former MP