If the world were a river, laden with stories of aspiration and despair, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o waded into its currents with a pen sharpened by the colonial and postcolonial pulse of East Africa. His passing leaves us to grapple not only with the absence of a towering literary presence, but with the absence of a moral compass, one built from language, our most malleable instrument of power and identity. In paying homage to Ngũgĩ, we do more than mourn a son of Kenya; we reckon with the evolution of language in literature and literature in language, with the ethics of storytelling, and with the responsibility of the writer in a world still divided by the lines of empire.
Ngũgĩ began his intellectual odyssey at a time when African literature was expected to pander and cower to Western sensibilities. But from Weep Not, Child onward, he challenged the comforting rhythms of that expectation. He refused to smoothen the dissonance between colonial English and indigenous tongues. In so doing, he taught us that the act of writing in a language imposed on us is never neutral; it is political. He drew attention to the lacunae in translation, where a word like Akins (translated to mean teacher in Gikuyu) becomes ‘teacher’, without the limbic resonance of its ancestral origin. That insistence—that the body of the essay and the soul of language are inseparable—was his seed gift to literature.
I encountered Weep Not, Child in my mid-twenties, after one of those sardonic lectures in my penultimate year at the University of Nigeria, breathing its pages in at odd hours: the slow ache of Njoroge’s boyhood, the jarring imposition of colonial politics, the ache of dreams deferred. There was something astonishingly personal in watching a boy’s mind expand across a world that also demanded his submission. But what struck me most was Ngũgĩ’s refusal to spare either his characters or his readers: he offered us the brittle truth that one does not merely wake up under colonial rule; one learns to survive within it. That lesson was sharpened in The River Between, where the gorge between two villages marks both geographical and ideological distance; and male and female elders argue over adaptation versus defiance. Here, Ngũgĩ forces us to scrutinize how language becomes a vessel for power: do we baptize it in foreign tongues, muddying its grace, or cleanse it in the ritual of original speech?
A Grain of Wheat, which came in later years, felt like migration of thought, sensibility, structure. The interwoven lives of Kiaũkũru, Mugo, and Gikonyo mirror a nation teetering between betrayal and brotherhood, the preamble and the aftermath of the Mau Mau rebellion. It is in this novel that Ngũgĩ’s critical voice sings most defiantly. He dismantles the myth of the charismatic revolutionary, of unity monolithically pursued, of language bound to liberation if only we speak English well enough. Instead, he shows us the paradox: that sometimes betrayal is intimate, and love is concealed in silence. The novel’s subtlety is what makes it devastating; each character is a question, each interaction a quiet crisis of conscience. Here, literature becomes less an archive and more a crucible of accountability: writers and nations must face not only the crimes of outsiders, but the frailties of our own hearts.
But Ngũgĩ’s influence extended far beyond storytelling. In his essays and in Decolonising the Mind, especially, he advanced one of the boldest critical arguments of the twentieth century: that language is not just a tool, but an heirloom. This became the object of critical discourse in my first year of university. We argued that by choosing to write in Gikuyu, or to champion African languages, he was rejecting the very idea that English should be the lingua franca of thought. Critics asked whether that was idealistic, even impractical. Ngũgĩ responded that if we concede that African languages are second-rate, we conjure our own linguistic inferiority. We give away not just words, but the architecture of thought, history, and sovereignty. His argument unsettled literatures everywhere; from Lusophone Africa to the Caribbean. He reminded us that every language is a worldview, every translation a compromise, and every colonial tongue an invitation to self-erasure.
In reading Ngũgĩ across the little while I’ve been a literary student, I was struck most by his refusal to sentimentalize his own people. His characters are never paragons, but contradictions: spiritual yet violent, mournful yet vindictive, generous yet jealous. They are what we are—fractured and hopeful. And language is their mirror. Devil on the Cross (written in Gikuyu during his imprisonment), for instance, photographs the collision of humor and sacred ritual in a manner that could only survive in the cadences of his mother tongue. His humor is political: a sardonic awareness that the oppressor sometimes dances in the same shoes as the oppressed, that capitalism wears the same skins as colonialism. When he shifts back to English, he does so with a visible rift in the grammar: short sentences, staccato interruptions, a conscious break from lyricism. That break is deliberate; it is a fracture in the narrative armor, reminding us that he speaks English only as a negotiator, never as a native.
Yet tribute requires more than praise. There are tensions in Ngũgĩ’s work that deserve our critical attention. He sought in African languages a purity of expression that sometimes crossed into idealism. In a globalized era, can writing in an audience of hundreds of millions (English readers) be sacrificed at the altar of linguistic authenticity? His decision raises hard questions for writers like me, inhabiting a world both global and immediate. Do we write for ourselves, or for readers we may never meet? Ngũgĩ answered clearly: we must first write from the fulcrum of our own tongues, then invite others in. But the question endures: at what point does preservation of culture become a siege mentality? When does linguistic pride tip into linguistic gatekeeping?
His essays invite us to wrestle with these dissonances. In Penpoints, Gunpoints & Dreams, Ngũgĩ offers his former students a roadmap: “nothing they cannot do with English they may not also do with their mother tongue.” But the same essay also betrays nostalgia for a precolonial linguistic Eden. Is that scrupulous longing a product of time, or of a mind unwilling to accept the cross-pollination that languages bring? Critically, we must think of Ngũgĩ not as a relic, but as a prophet, sometimes too pure for our muddied world, but never false.
In the final years of his life, Ngũgĩ was less a writer than an institution visiting universities, giving speeches, and holding symposiums. His voice remained urgent, but his pen slowed, not from age, but from deliberation. But the legacy he leaves beckons us beyond clarity. It asks us to endure contradiction. To pay tribute to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, therefore, is to wed the personal and the political: to feel the ache of mother-tongue loss, to rage at the erasure of African epistemologies, and to nurture the scraps of language still resisting assimilation. His trajectory—from Weep Not, Child to Wizard of the Crow—reveals an evolution not just in story, but in stance: from narrative witness to ideological anchor. He shaped a canon, yes, but he also shaped a cause: decolonization of the mind.
In the aftermath of his passing, young writers across Nairobi, Lagos, and Accra will feel an emptiness: the absence not only of a mentor, but of a moral interlocutor. But what he leaves—the evidence of a lifetime spent in relentless scrutiny—is our inheritance. We are left with the imperative to write from ourselves, to refuse the assimilation of everything that makes us whole, to argue that every language we carry is a locus of freedom.
Perhaps that is the most potent tribute: not tears at the loss, but ink spilled on paper, in Gikuyu, in English, in French, in the creole of our making. For that is what Ngũgĩ would have wanted: less nostalgia, more reckoning. Less reverence, more accountability. Less weeping, more witnesses. So, weep not, world. Instead, speak. Write. Resist. Remember that every sentence you craft is a declaration: of identity, of belonging, of defiance. And in that declaration, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o lives on, not merely as a memory, but as a mandate. The man lives on.