I WOKE up on Thursday, May 29th, 2025, to a tribute to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, written by my California-based friend, Adeyombo Aderinto. That tribute alerted me to the passing of that giant of African writing; certainly, one of the greatest names in progressive African literature. Much later on Thursday, I also saw Okey Ndibe’s short tribute and a galaxy of pictures that he had taken over the years with Ngugi. For me, Ngugi, along with the Senegalese Sembene Ousmane and the South African, Alex La Guma, represented the most radical tradition of African anti- and post-colonial writing.
As part of our study of literature in the final year of secondary school in 1976, Ngugi’s WEEP NOT, CHILD, was our text for African literature. It was my introduction to the reality, as well as the deeply emotional responses, that the anti-colonial struggle in Kenya generated. That dialectical interplay would have a more profound meaning for me into the future, as I deepened my understanding of the politics of African liberation.
I went to work soon after secondary school, when I was recruited by Radio Nigeria, in 1977. I resumed work during the World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77). One of the highlights of FESTAC was Kenya’s dramatic entry, THE TRIAL OF DEDAN KIMATHI, written by Ngugi in 1976, which was based on the anti-colonial hero, who was eventually captured and executed by British Imperialism.
Ngugi was a child of the emergency in Kenya and the anti-colonial liberation struggle that the British termed the “Mau Mau Revolt.” The peasants, who were the main partisans and were led by Dedan Kimathi, knew what they were fighting for. They called themselves the Land and Freedom Army. It was a ferocious struggle that was brutally suppressed by the British and was eventually betrayed by the neocolonial elites led by Jomo Kenyatta.
It was indicative that Kenyatta was actually succeeded by Daniel Arap Moi, a home guard, who actively sided with the British during the war. Land remains central to the aspirations of the Kenyan peasantry until today. Ngugi’s family was deeply affected by that brutal war, and it wasn’t a surprise that most of his writings came against the backdrop of the war and the betrayal of its outcomes by the Kenyan ruling class.
Moi was to detain Ngugi for a year for his writings and suspicions about his possible activism in the underground Marxist-Leninist movement in Kenya. The symbolism of that detention couldn’t have been clearer: an imperialist agent in power detained a writer whose brother fought and died in the Kenyan liberation war.
By the late 1970s, my generation had become immersed in anti-imperialist and Marxist-Leninist organizing in Nigeria and around the African continent. We were inspired by the world-wide social upheaval of the epoch. These included the armed struggle in the Portuguese colonies in Africa: Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. These were not just the typical anti-colonial struggles, but they were led by movements and individuals who had very clear ideas of the content of the world they were fighting for.
Similarly, there had been the epic stirring in the belly of the largest whale in the sea of human exploitation, the United States of America, with the emergence of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and Angela Davis. Europe also saw the continent-wide students’ revolts of the 1960s and these had confluenced with the huge demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, the exemplary endeavours of the Cuban Revolution and the outstanding individuals that exemplified it’s impact, like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Against this remarkable historical epoch and the subverted reality that became the outcome of the Kenyan struggle for independence, Ngugi’s ouvre became ever more reflective of a growing consciousness in Kenya, as in much of Africa, located within the aspirations of its working people.
I think his 1977 novel, PETALS OF BLOOD, was an epic expression of the class content of the post-colonial Kenyan reality that signposted the arrival of a neocolonial bourgeoisie, entrapped in its new-fangled wealth and the bitter aftermath of the suffering for most of those who made sacrifices for the independence that hadn’t satisfied their aspirations nor recognized their heroism. Africa, through the story that Ngugi masterfully told, was on the road to perdition not liberation.
The fifty years of mind conditioning to institute neoliberal capitalism have borne out the truth of Ngugi’s remarkable insights. Today, Africa is a continent of very young people, with a median age in 2024 of 19.2 years. These are the children whose joyful burden would have been to build their continent, but unfortunately, the choices made by the ruling classes and the groveling toadying to imperialism, have deepened despair and a tragic desire to escape to other climes.
The prison experience took Ngugi on a radical new path of advocacy for and writing in his native language, Gikuyu. Although he had begun a process of interrogation of what he described as “the general bourgeois education system” in Kenya, before his detention, including efforts at “demystifying” theatrical performances. It was after his detention that the struggle for language and memory as a major aspect of the struggle to conclude liberation in the continent became a strident reality for Ngugi. He never abandoned that path till he breathed his last.
It was a truly revolutionary endeavor and the Kenyan neocolonial regime of Arap Moi, saw the danger that posed to the entire architecture of oppression. The dramatic work that he co-authored with Ngugi wa Mirii, Ngaahika Ndeeda (I Will Marry When I Want) was staged with peasants and working people taking active part, not just as actors, but as protagonists telling the stories of their lives. The symbolism, the consciousness raising, and the working people as makers of history became too powerful, a symbol of what neocolonial independence betrayed. The play was banned.
Not only that, his house was raided, and books were taken away. Some of the culprits carted away included Marx, Lenin, Mao, and other “subversives.” All through history, reactionary regimes have either seized or burnt books!
Ngugi wa Thiong’o left a very rich collection of novels, short stories, plays, poems, essays, and also an exemplary life of commitment that would inspire future generations on our much exploited African continent. A continent that has tremendous possibilities for liberation, despite the doom and gloom of contemporary existence. It was that hope for the better which ran through the works and life of one of our greatest writes, Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
A lot went on tragically in his personal life including the gang rape of his wife in order to humiliate him, his forced self-exile, and the loneliness of old age far away from the Kenya and Africa that he loved with tremendous passion. As Fredrich Engels said in his funeral oration for Karl Marx, mankind was a head shorter with his passing, and no doubts for us in Africa, we have indeed lost one of our greatest heads!
- Kawu, PhD, FNGE is a broadcaster, journalist, and a political scientist and can be reached via kawumodibbo@yahoo.com.