By Hellen Magoi, PhD Candidate, University of South Australia

*Photo: Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his wife Njeeri Thiong’o

This morning, Thursday, 29^th May 2025, I woke up in Adelaide, where I currently live, to the devastating news of the passing of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a fearless intellectual and one of Kenya’s most formidable sons. At the time of his death, he was among the most influential African writers, thinkers and public intellectuals of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. His death marks the end of an era, but his words, wisdom, and legacy will continue to echo across Africa and beyond.

Ngugi’s work shaped generations of scholars, activists and readers across the globe. He was more than a novelist or playwright. He was committed to decolonial thought, cultural freedom and a champion of African languages and identities’ renaissance.

Born in 1938 in Kamiriithu village during the height of British Colonial rule in Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (formerly James Ngugi) grew up amid colonial violence and dispossession of the Mau Mau uprising, Kenya’s armed resistance against colonial land seizure and oppression.  He recounts this turbulent era in his seminal novel A Grain of Wheat.(wa Thiong’o, 2012), where he explores the moral and political complexities of the independence struggle and betrayal that followed. He is unflinching in his portrayal of how colonialism devastated African societies.  

Ngugi pioneered decolonial thought in his book Decolonising the Mind (Wa Thiong’o, 1998). He believed that the struggle of African differences and cultures depended on reclaiming a radical commitment to free Africa from the lingering shackles of colonialism in its political, cultural and psychological forms.

Ngugi made a bold decision to stop writing in the language of the coloniser and instead write in his mother tongue, Gikuyu. He believed that the survival of African identities and cultures depends on reclaiming indigenous languages from the margins to the centre of cultural production. For Ngugi, language was not neutral, it was a site of struggle.

Through his novels, essays and activism, Ngugi gave us tools to dream, to resist and to reimagine our future. His legacy is not just why he wrote, but in what he refused to surrender, his language, his culture and his people.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, son of Kenya, our pride and joy,  has died in a foreign land. A land once an architect of colonial domination. A land that birthed racism and capitalism, he so detested. How deeply ironic and profoundly tragic that this great champion of African languages’ dignity and sovereignty took his last breath far from home, far from his Kamiirithu village, far from his people, culture and the ancestral soil he so fiercely defended through his life and pen

One wonders if in his final days, Ngugi longed to return home to be among his peers, fellow Thespians of Kamiriithu, storytellers and freedom dreamers. Perhaps he imagined spending his twilight years seated under the shade of a tree with his agemates, laughing over shared memories and enjoying a warm bowl of Irio, Mukimo and Ugali, comfort food from his childhood that nourished more than the body. 

Having recently visited Ngugi’s powerful books,  I am struck anew by the depth of his wisdom and the vision he offered not only Kenya but Africa and the world. I feel deeply honoured to have lived in his time, to have been shaped by his writings, and to have witnessed his defiant voice in a world that too often tried to silence him.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o will now be laid to rest, but his fight must continue. In his memory, we must unite. Africa must unite, Africans must be united, Africans in diaspora must unite.

Let us honour him not with statutes or speeches alone but with action. Let us teach his works. Let us preserve our languages. Let us reject the inferiority imposed by colonialism.

Rest in power, Prof. Ngugi wa Thiong’o. You may have lived and died in exile, but your spirit will live forever in the soil and stories of Africa.