Tributes to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Tributes from those who were touched by the life and the light of Ngũgĩ.

Image of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o c. March 13, 2024, courtesy of Heran Li, Comparative Literature major

Video Tributes

Dr. Mawuli Adjei

Dr. Imani Cooper Mkandwire

Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Prof. Vukosi Marivate

Dr. Ṣọlá Adéyẹmí

Prof. Akosua Adomako Ampofo

Goretti Kyomuhendo

Text Tributes

Gabriele Schwab

Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature

It is with deep sadness and a sense of shock that we are processing the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He was appointed at UCI in 2001 as a Distinguished Professor and as Inaugural Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, and he has been an esteemed and much-loved colleague in our department ever since.

Ngũgĩ was one of the most important contemporary African writers, critical theorists and public intellectuals who has dedicated his life and work to the struggle to decolonize the mind. Spanning across six decades, Ngũgĩ’s novels, plays and essays include Weep Not Child, The River Between, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, Devil on the Cross, I will marry when I want, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, Decolonizing the Mind, Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams, The Upright Revolution, and many others. He has given many distinguished lectures, including the 2003 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in South Africa. In 2002 Ngũgĩ was elected an Honorary Member in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. We at UC-Irvine were privileged to have Ngũgĩ as a distinguished colleague and as the Director of our International Center for Writing and Translation. Ever since the inaugural event of the International Center for Writing and Translation in January of 2001, the ICWT and Ngũgĩ’s presence had changed the life and spirit of the Humanities and our campus more generally. Ngũgĩ brought to UCI an astounding diversity of voices and writers from all over the world, a visible presence of indigenous people, and a continual engagement with people who came together in their commitment toward a decolonization of today’s world. To use the title of one of his books, Ngũgĩ has truly been “moving the center” of UCI. Within just a few years he had created a veritable intellectual and literary community, including people from all over campus and from the larger community. He had become a model for all of us and perhaps one of the most invaluable gifts he had brought us was the gift of joy. The events at the ICWT dealt with some of the hardest problems of our world, including continued racism, discrimination, environmental destruction, violation of human and civil rights, and the global attack on indigenous cultures and languages around the world. Yet, the spirit at the ICWT is one of joy, resilience and survival energy. Looking at today’s world, his work and his thoughts are needed more than ever.

Tragically, in 2004, the completion of his monumental novel, Wizard of the Crow, was overshadowed by the brutal attacks on Ngũgĩ and his wife Njeeri when they returned to their home country Kenya, after 22 years of political exile. It took Ngũgĩ’s unparalleled courage, resilience and indestructibly positive spirit of survival to complete the book under these conditions. The book-launch of the Kikuyu version of the Wizard of the Crow coincided with the trial against the perpetrator who spearheaded the attacks, and it also coincided with new threats against Ngũgĩ’s life. When Ngũgĩ had originally returned to Kenya after 22 years of exile, he was widely celebrated by his people. He spoke and read to large audiences, including the people from his own village. Orchestrated by his adversaries, the brutal attack was supposed to once again silence him. Yet, he persevered, broke the silence and continued to work against worldwide oppression up to his last day. In Ngugi’s first address to the press he said: “My voice is not back yet, but the spirit is strong. We should not let people who do not like what we are doing kill the spirit. This is my country for better or for worse. It is upon me and everybody else to make it a better place.” How incredibly clear do these words resonate with today’s world? Ngũgĩ’s work is part of his arduous task of making a better place, not only of his home country and the US where he lives today, but also the world at large.

His writings are about mind and mirrors, power and poverty, colonization and creative resistance, song and sadness, loss and love. “We need mirrors to see our shadows. We need mirrors to see other people’s shadows cross ours,” (116) says the Wizard of the Crow. In the past years, Ngũgĩ began working on a new book titled Normal Abnormality. We are deeply saddened that he was not able to complete this work.

Apart from moving the intellectual center of our department and the School, Ngũgĩ was also an exemplary colleague, supporting all of us in unique ways. And he was a dedicated teacher to many graduate and undergraduate students. Three of them visited him the very weekend before he passed away. We will miss him as a beloved colleague, not only because of his contributions to our departmental discussions, but also because of his sense of humor and laughter. We will miss him and all the invaluable gifts he has offered us over the years.

Munyao Kilolo, A.B.D.

Comparative Literature Graduate Program

While the world knew him as a literary giant and postcolonial theorist, my first real encounter with Prof Ngũgĩ was not through his works. It was by being in direct conversation with him in 2015, and continuously after that. He called late at night, or early in the morning, and we spoke for hours about African languages and life. This timing confused me until I learned about time differences. He was in California, and I was in Kenya, about a 10- or 11-hour difference depending on time of year. Having never travelled anywhere internationally before then, it was not just the time differences that I did not understand. Other than his celebrity, I knew little of his extensive, critically acclaimed body of work. I had qualified for university– but because of finances, the chances of a degree were dim. I self-educated for four years. And then curated the Jalada Translation project, which connected me to Ngũgĩ.

Then our conversations began; and for a decade, he has been my teacher, my mentor, and my closest constant friend. He gave me paid work so that I could pay for my undergraduate education at USIU in Kenya. And he would tell anyone he met just how proud he was of me; that, as an undergraduate, I conceptualized and led a translation project of global impact, and I scored all A’s in my classes too. Beyond our conversations, I read his work. I was getting to know him simultaneously as a human being, in his sharing of personal stories in our frequent phone calls, and through his life transforming intellectual work. Not once, in the decade that he nurtured me intellectually, did I feel he was the distinguished Professor, and I was the ignorant kid finding his way a day at a time. I felt safe.

And this was the same feeling I had when I spoke to him on the phone for the last time on Saturday, May 24, 2025, his last weekend with us. He called me while I was writing my second essay for my PhD exam. Though physically frail, he was excited, not just for the academic milestone before me, but because of another special life event for me in the summer. But on that call, he said to me – “my asthma is back, and I cannot speak for long, I will call you again later…” There is no chance that this call will come. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop waiting for it. To hear my friend’s voice one more time, so I can tell him that I join the world every day to celebrate his work, to honor him, for in every way possible, he was to me the highest expression of being human.

Glaydah Namukasa, A.B.D

Comparative Literature Graduate Program

When I first met Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, he asked me what my name meant. I told him that Namukasa means “goddess of the waters.” He smiled and then asked if that was the name I usually go by. I said I go by Glaydah. His smile faded.

He asked me what Glaydah meant, and I told him I didn’t know. I expected the rest of his smile to disappear, but instead, it returned, broader than before. He said, “I will call you Namukasa.”

He said he was happy that I knew the meaning of the name that carried my language and culture. “Knowledge begins from here to there,” he said. “If you have knowledge of what is close to you, you can more easily acquire knowledge of what is far from you. But if you start the other way around, you are doomed.”

Today we say goodbye to you Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, but your Words will always stay with us. You have taught us how to Think, how to Contribute to knowledge, how to Create knowledge.

To us you have been a Professor, a Mentor, a Parent, a Friend, our African Literary Hero.

Professor Ngũgĩ We honor you. Your Wisdom lives on in every one of us who sat in your classroom. Your Light lives on in every one of us who walked with you through the circular paths of the University of California, Irvine campus.

May your soul rest in eternal peace.

Jackee Budesta Batanda

Writer and Journalist

Twelve Years Old and Discovering Myself in Ngũgĩ's Pages

I can still feel the weight of that book in my twelve-year-old hands -Petals of Blood, its cover worn soft from my siblings' fingers before mine. It was the December between primary school and the unknown world of secondary school, those suspended weeks when time moved differently, when I was too old for child's play but not yet ready for what came next.

Our home was a house of books. My older siblings, already navigating literature classes in secondary school, left trails of stories everywhere lining the bookshelf that groaned with worlds I was hungry to enter. By that December, I had devoured everything meant for children my age and more.

Then I found them, hidden like treasures among the "big people" books: Let Me Speak, with Domitila Barrios de Chungara's fierce voice documenting the lives of Bolivian miners; The Lion and the Jewel, with its dance of love and tradition; and there, calling to me was Petals of Blood.

I chose Ngũgĩ first for the simplest, most profound reason: he was East African. He was close to home. He was ours.

I remember those nights, reading under dim light, the house quiet around me except for the turning of pages. I won't pretend I understood everything- years later I would learn it was considered one of the most challenging texts, even for older students. But something else happened in those pages. For the first time, the people in a book looked like my neighbors. They spoke with rhythms I recognized. Their struggles and joys, their land and their betrayals - these weren't happening in some distant, cold country I could barely pronounce. They were happening here, in the soil and seasons I knew.

After a childhood fed on Western stories where I was always the outsider looking in, Ngũgĩ's words felt like coming home to a language I didn't know I'd been missing.

When secondary school came, and A Grain of Wheat appeared on our literature syllabus, I felt a quiet thrill of recognition. This was the writer who had already changed something in me that long-ago December. During exams, his was the text I always chose to write about - not because it was easier, but because his words had already taken root in me.

Ngũgĩ's books became more than stories. They were a political awakening; a mirror held up to post-independence Kenya that reflected shadows I could recognize in Uganda too. He taught me that our injustices, our inequalities, our complexities deserved to be written about - boldly, unflinchingly, beautifully. He taught me that the African experience wasn't something to apologize for or translate for distant audiences. It simply was, in all its truth.

His books taught me how to write about the life I saw around me without shame or hesitation. They gave me permission to document our stories, our voices, our contradictions.

Then came 2004, when Ngũgĩ visited Uganda. I was no longer that curious twelve-year-old sprawled on her bed with Petals of Blood. But when I stood among that excited group of writers meeting him, I carried her with me - that girl who had first discovered herself in his pages. Meeting the literary icon who had shaped my understanding of what African literature could be felt like closing a circle that had begun that transformative December in 1992.

I haven't read all his later works, I'll admit. Life carries us in different directions. But the mark he made on me endures - deep, indelible, foundational. He was the writer who first showed me that our stories mattered, that they deserved to be told in our own voices, on our own terms.

That twelve-year-old girl found herself in his pages. The writer I became never forgot.

Mark LeVine

Professor of History

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was not just a writer, he
was a militant

Ngugi wa Thiong’o loved to dance. He loved it more than anything else – even more than writing. Well into his 80s, his body slowed by increasingly disabling kidney failure, Ngugi would get up and start dancing merely at the thought of music, never mind the sound of it. Rhythm flowed through his feet the way words flowed through his hands and onto the page.

It is how I will always remember Ngugi – dancing. He passed away on May 28 at the age of 87, leaving behind not only a Nobel-worthy literary legacy but a combination of deeply innovative craft and piercingly original criticism that joyfully calls on all of us to do better and push harder – as writers, activists, teachers and people – against the colonial foundations that sustain all our societies. As for me, he pushed me to go far deeper up river to Kakuma refugee camp, where the free association of so many vernacular tongues and cultures made possible the freedom to think and speak “from the heart” – something he would always describe as writing’s greatest gift.

Ngugi had long been a charter member of the African literary canon and a perennial Nobel favourite by the time I first met him in 2005. Getting to know him, it quickly became clear to me that his writing was inseparable from his teaching, which in turn was umbilically tied to his political commitments and long service as one of Africa’s most formidable public intellectuals.

Ngugi’s cheerfulness and indefatigable smile and laugh hid a deep-seated anger, reflecting the scars of violence on his body and soul as a child, young man and adult victimised by successive and deeply intertwined systems of criminalised rule.

The murder of his deaf brother, killed by the British because he did not hear and obey soldiers’ orders to stop at a checkpoint, and the Mau Mau revolt that divided his other brothers on opposite sides of the colonial order during the final decade of British rule, imbued in him the foundational reality of violence and divisiveness as the twin engines of permanent coloniality even after independence formally severed the connection to the metropole.

More than half a century after these events, nothing would arouse Ngugi’s animated ire more than bringing up in a discussion the transitional moment from British to Kenyan rule, and the fact that colonialism didn’t leave with the British, but rather dug in and reenforced itself with Kenya’s new, Kenyan rulers.

As he became a writer and playwright, Ngugi also became a militant, one devoted to using language to reconnect the complex African identities – local, tribal, national and cosmopolitan – that the “cultural bomb” of British rule had “annihilated” over the previous seven decades.

After his first play, The Black Hermit, premiered in Kampala in 1962, he was quickly declared a voice who “speaks for the Continent”. Two years later, Weep Not Child, his first novel and the first English-language novel by an East African writer, came out.

As he rose to prominence, Ngugi decided to renounce the English language and start writing in his native Gikuyu.

The (re)turn to his native tongue radically altered the trajectory not just of his career, but of his life, as the ability of his clear-eyed critique of postcolonial rule to reach his compatriots in their own language (rather than English or the national language of Swahili) was too much for Kenya’s new rulers to tolerate, and so he was imprisoned for a year without trial in 1977.

What Ngugi had realised when he began writing in Gikuyu, and even more so in prison, was the reality of neocolonialism as the primary mechanism of postcolonial rule. This wasn’t the standard “neocolonialism” that anti- and post- colonial activists used to describe the ongoing power of former colonial rulers by other means after formal independence, but rather the willing adoption of colonial technologies and discourses of rule by newly independent leaders, many of whom – like Jomo Kenyatta, Ngugi liked to point out – themselves suffered imprisonment and torture under the British rule.

Thus, true decolonisation could only occur when people’s minds were freed from foreign control, which required first and perhaps foremost the freedom to write in one’s native language.

Although rarely acknowledged, Ngugi’s concept of neocolonialism, which owed much, he’d regularly explain, to the writings of Kwame Nkrumah and other African anti-colonial intellectuals-turned-political leaders, anticipated the rise of the now ubiquitous “decolonial” and “Indigenous” turns in the academy and progressive cultural production by almost a generation.

Indeed, Ngugi has long been placed together with Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the founding generation of postcolonial thought and criticism. But he and Said, whom he’d frequently discuss as a brother-in-arms and fellow admirer of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad, shared a similar all-encompassing focus on language, even as Said wrote his prose mostly in English rather than Arabic.

For Said and Ngugi, colonialism had not yet passed, but was very much still an ongoing, viscerally and violently lived reality – for the former through the ever more violent and ultimately annihilatory settler colonialism, for the latter through the violence of successive governments.

Ngugi saw his link with Said in their common experience growing up under British rule. As he explained in his afterword to a recently published anthology of Egyptian prison writings since 2011, “The performance of authority was central to the colonial culture of silence and fear,” and disrupting that authority and ending the silence could only come first through language.

For Said, the swirl of Arabic and English in his mind since childhood created what he called a “primal instability”, one that could be calmed fully when he was in Palestine, which he returned to multiple times in the last decade of his life. For Ngugi, even as Gikuyu enabled him to “imagine another world, a flight to freedom, like a bird you see from the [prison] window,” he could not make a final return home in his last years.

Still, from his home in Orange County, California in the United States, he would never tire of urging students and younger colleagues to “write dangerously”, to use language to resist whatever oppressive order in which they found themselves. The bird would always take flight, he would say, if you could write without fear.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

The Celebration of the Life and Work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is made possible through the support of the:

UCI Office of the Chancellor
Dean of the School of the Arts
Dean of the School of Humanities
Dean of the School of Social Sciences
Humanities Center
International Center for Writing and Translation
UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality
Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies
Office of Inclusive Excellence
UCI Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative
Alex Glasser The Center for the Power of Music and Social Change
Department of Anthropology
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Drama
Department of English
Department of Dance

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Organized by:

Adriana Johnson
Jane O. Newman
Gabriele Schwab
Ketu Katrak
Jerry Lee
Cecelia Lynch
S. Ama Wray