Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed away on May 28, aged 87. Born in 1938 as James Thiong’o Ngugi, his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, broke the news in a Facebook post. It further read: “He lived a full life,
fought a good fight. As was his last wish, let’s celebrate his life and his
work.” The literary titan played a key
role in shaping modern African literature. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's literary oeuvre spanned almost six decades, during which he spun the narrative of transformation: a
nation from a colony to a democracy.
Ngugi was Nobel worthy but not a winner. This never came in
the way of his fierceness as a writer of truth in native African languages.
Educated at Alliance, a boarding school run by British missionaries, it was a
promised land for his parents, who scrimped to pay the tuition. Ngugi was born in
a large family of agricultural workers before the colonial authorities wiped
out his entire village in the face of the Mau Mau uprising. The movement of
independent fighters that began in 1952 lasted till 1960. By then, it had a
firm grip on the consciousness of Ngugi, who left to study at Makerere
University. At a writer’s conference in Makerere, he met Chinua Achebe. Held in
reverence, he shared the manuscript of his debut novel ‘Weep Not, Child’, which upon
its release in the year 1964 received critical acclaim. His debut novel, without
haste, was followed by ‘A Grain of Wheat’ and ‘The River Between’.
The year 1977 was significant. It was in that year that he
dropped his name, James, at the time of his birth. He even dropped
English for his native tongue, Kikuyu. He wanted to be completely free of the
colonial influence. It was also in the year 1977 that his last English language
novel, Petals of Blood, was released. It was an attack on the leaders of
independent Kenya. Accusing them of elitist tendencies, he poured vitriol on them
for turning their back on the citizens committed to the grassroots. The same
year, his play Ngaahika Ndeenha (I Will Marry When I Want) echoed another
attack. This landed him in jail for a year. In prison, he wrote his
first Kikuyu novel, ‘Devil on the Cross’, on the toilet paper. Hardships didn’t end
there. He left for the US to dodge a plot to kill, and thus began a 22-year-long
exile.
Later, he received a hero’s welcome on his return but he was
brutally attacked and his wife raped. Shameful and disgusting to the core, he flew
back to the US and resumed his professorships at Yale and several other
universities of eminence. He even had a fallout with Achebe after the publication
of an influential essay, ‘Decolonising the Mind’, which left an indelible mark on
post-colonial literature.
Ngugi’s later years were filled with family disputes and a long list of diseases. Now that he is gone, he has left a long legacy riddled with controversies. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once spoke of Ngugi as “one of the most important writers working today”, now gone, making the literary world darker.