Remembering the Incredible Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born James Ngugi on 5 January 1938 and passed on last year, 28 May 2025. Ngũgĩ was a Kenyan revolutionary author and academic, described as one of Africa’s leading novelists and an important figure in modern African literature who refused to be bound by jail and exile. His writings examined the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, as well as the complex relationships between Africans seeking economic and cultural emancipation and the African élite serving as agents of neo-colonialism.
Ngũgĩ’s most important contributions were on language. His novels, essays, and unyielding belief in the dignity of African languages reshaped world literature. For Ngũgĩ, decolonising the mind meant a process to end a false universalism in the guise of “Westernised” canons that attributed truth only to Western forms of knowledge production but without succumbing to a relativism in which all perspectives were equally valid.
In 2025, he commented, “In Kenya, even today, we have children and their parents who cannot speak their mother tongues … They are very happy when they speak English and even happier when their children don’t know their mother tongue. That’s why I call it mental colonization.”
Sources:Wikipedia.South African History Online (SAHO).Ngethe Kamau, "'Petals of Blood' as a Mirror of the African Revolution", The African Communist, No. 80, First Quarter, 1980.
Castro Khw
