Akin Adesokan's Tribute to Ngugi
News of the death of the acclaimed writer and cultural theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on May 28, 2025 broke to universal shock and much sorrowing. He was old enough, at age 87, but he was so beloved no one warmed to the idea of not having him around for as long as possible—forever, if we could get away with it. The outpouring of grief was genuine, and hasn’t really let up as of this writing, two weeks later. With nearly all his (known) actions as a writer and political activist since he began publishing in the early 1960s, Ngũgĩ ensured that his passing would not go unheralded. And that, long after he’s moved on, his words will continue to reanimate the world of letters.
He was, for me, one of the two purveyors of what I call “the grand gestures” of African literature, those heroic actions performed for the public but not, for all that, lacking in deeply-held convictions. Arriving in lockstep with anti-colonial nationalism, African literature as an institution has often had a feisty relationship with the larger system of cultural valuation in the realm of arts and letters. That system came with the freight of racism, cultural prejudice and unequal exchange, among other kinds of baggage, so intellectuals with a keen adversarial sense were quick to strike an oppositional pose.
About Ngũgĩ was the complex paradox of an outspoken man silenced at home, where he so longed to be heard, but free to speak abroad in a language ill-suited to his deepest yearnings.
In the preface to Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, his book of essays first published in 1986, Ngũgĩ made the now-famous break with English as the language of his writing. “This book,” he declares, “is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writing. From now on, it is Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way.” (The other gesture came from Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghana-born writer and translator. Partly because of his tendencies toward reclusion, and partly because he took his decision without fanfare or formal annunciation, Armah’s decision never to publish again with Western publishers is not so well-known. But he, too, has never wavered, and his decision has been no less consequential for the cultural politics that once held sway in African literary circles and may have now assumed other forms.)
Ngũgĩ’s choice on the language of African literature was a revolutionary act in every sense. It came out of conviction, the awareness of the potential of using popular and accessible means, such as a ground-up experiment with theater at the Kamirĩĩthu Community Education and Cultural Centre, and the language of everyday transaction, to reach an audience with an urgent political message. He had served notice of this direction in his then-recent fiction, especially A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood. The decision on Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili and the thematics of his creative works would become mutually reinforcing, going forward.
Roadblocks lay ahead. For a writer whose writings and creative activities had already landed him in jail, and who was closing off his first decade in exile from his country, the refusal to write in English looked certain to put the Kenyan author in a tight corner, so to speak. In fact, he didn’t have an easy time of it. A good number of African writers and critics, among them Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembene, Biọdun Jeyifo, Odia Ofeimun, and Nuruddin Farah, appreciated the gesture but disagreed with different aspects. The devil was in the details: some argued that Ngũgĩ focused on the language question at the expense of the policies in which the answers lay; others thought that English, for instance, was already an African language. Ngũgĩ struck a fire hard to douse, in fact likely to burn brighter because he wasn’t the kind of player who would throw up the ball and run away. In later years, other African writers would come to view his position in a more approving or at least supportive way.
The odds were just as staunch. His books were either banned or deliberately neglected in Kenya. He was living inside the whale, pushed to make his living as a university teacher in the United States, and how would he ensure his annual pay raise if he didn’t publish in a manner legible to the system within which he operated? Besides, quiet as it’s kept, the languages of popular expression continued to proliferate across the continent, in various, mostly organic ways, and not exactly in alignment with his vision for Kamirĩĩthu. Here’s the feast, it seemed, tasteful and rich, free and plentiful, but the guest of honor was far away, picking at servings of stodgy repast alien to his palate.
At the time I first met Ngũgĩ, during the events marking Chinua Achebe’s 70th birthday at Bard College in November 2000, I was imagining an essay on the implication of his and Armah’s refusals for the global visibility of the works of African writers. His latest book, a collection of essays titled Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams had appeared in English just two years earlier.
Standing outside the conference hall with his young son who looked to be about eight, Ngũgĩ was giving an autograph to an admirer. I approached him with a friend, the poet Ogaga Ifowodo, and he was attentive enough to turn to us—he guessed that we wanted a photo-op. That’s something immediately noticeable about him: he extended a gracious, kind attentiveness to any entreaty, no matter how flippant. And he would offer a reasonable response to any question, however accusatory. I wondered if publishing that book, in English, didn’t amount to going back on his word—something in that phrasing. He chuckled, handed the pen back to the person in front of him.
“That book came out of a series of lectures I gave in English at Oxford,” he said, hesitant, considerate. I thought briefly if he could have given those lectures in Gikuyu, but I didn’t pursue the point. My friend was more interested in taking a picture with him, as were several others milling about. The moment wasn’t ideal for a chit-chat, and I banked on seeing him again during the conference.
That didn’t happen. My last direct encounter with him was over Zoom, in May 2022.
Reading Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams suggested to me that Ngũgĩ might already be moderating his stance, at least on the language question. In his early years in the US, he received much boost from the solidarity of scholars like Carol Sicherman and Simon Gikandi, both of whom did a lot to popularize his work. While in England in the 1980s, he had the steady support of the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books led by John La Rose, Sarah White, and Jessica Huntley, and was a regular feature in their events. His relocation in 2002 to the University of California, Irvine, to head the International Centre for Writing and Translation constituted a strategic move on the board.
In its report on the UCI appointment, the Nairobi-based East African Standard wrote in August of that year: “And commenting on his recent appointment, Ngũgĩ said his life’s work fits the mission of the year-old centre. The mission of the centre is to discover and support writers around the world, helping them to publish their works in widely spoken language, while preserving the integrity of their native speech.” In due course, he would release Wizard of the Crow, the self-translated English version of a novel he first wrote in Gĩkũyũ. Several other books followed, indeed in an average of a book every other year until 2023. His latest was scheduled for release this year.
He tempered his stance, but he never gave up on the gauntlet he threw down with that revolutionary resolve in Decolonizing the Mind. It is but a part of his lifework on this spot of the sphere, but an important part, judging by the controversies it bred, and the complex paradox of an outspoken man silenced at home, where he so longed to be heard, but free to speak abroad in a language ill-suited to his deepest yearnings. To Ngũgĩ’s credit, controversial as it was, or is, the language question didn’t displace his profession of letters.
Rather, it became inextricably linked to his pursuits as a writer. And this is what I meant by saying that although they were public-spirited moves, the grand gestures did not want for surefire conviction. The essay in gestation during our meeting at Annandale-Upon-Hudson came out in 2003, under the title “The Return of Ajantala As Siamese Twins: Reflections on the ‘Grand Gestures’ of African Literature,” in a book of essays in honor of Oyin Ogunba, a Nigerian academic.
The basic argument of the essay was that the positions taken by Ngũgĩ and Armah constituted explicit political acts, ongoing attempts by the authors to gauge the temperature of their audience. Though different at first glance, the two positions were compatible in the final account in their assumption of that audience to be African and organic, perhaps even pre-existing. After all, there were people on the continent who could read in African languages. With that assumption, Ngũgĩ would not publish another work of fiction in English after Devil on the Cross, itself a translation of the Gĩkũyũ novel entitled Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ (1980) until The Wizard of the Crow (2006), and Armah went without a novel between the appearance of The Healers in 1978 and the publication of Osiris Rising (1995).
These were expensive gestures for writers to make at the prime of their creative lives. And gifted ones at that, whose contemporaries in other climes had similar career aims but without the same objectives. One could say that Ngũgĩ got by as a teacher in US universities, and Armah sustained himself partly as a translator of French-language texts. For a writer starting out, without the track-records or professional skills of these renowned figures of African literature, choosing either to write solely in the mother-tongue or eschew publishing with a non-African imprint was a non-starter.
At the time of the essay’s publication, the wave of African writing on which the world currently rides had not quite hit the shores. Stirrings there were, surely, and those pointed to a different awareness of the nature of the audience. In the impending future, an African writer would gain considerable visibility by winning a prize administered in England or signing with an American corporate publisher. Better still if one such young writer lived in the prize-giving country, and another deployed a cultural politics favourable to current fashion, whatever those might be. These writers wouldn’t have much truck with the oppositional or anti-imperialist stances of the Ngũgĩs and Armahs of the world.
Anything can be turned into fashion, of course, including old ideas, so Ngũgĩ’s courageous actions could become the light by which some of the new writers wish to find their way. One couldn’t quarrel with that.
In late spring of 2016, the Lilly Library housing rare manuscripts at Indiana University became the depository of Ngũgĩ’s papers. As a scholar of African literature, I accepted the library’s invitation to provide scholarly context for the significance of that acquisition. As part of the process of promoting the acquisition, Lilly also instituted a bi-annual lecture series named for Ngũgĩ, and invited the Senegalese novelist and journalist, Boris Boubacar Diop, as the inaugural speaker. Author of the celebrated Murambi among other novels, Diop is one African writer who has stood faithfully by Ngũgĩ’s side, regularly holding events with him on issues that go beyond African-language literature. Perhaps accepting the slightly older writer’s injunction (Diop will be 79 in October), he published a novel, Doomi Golo, in Wolof, and later translated it into French which his son, Moustapha Diop working with Vera Leckie, in turn rendered into English as The Hidden Notebook. Domiciled in Senegal, he also has the luck of living at close quarters with Armah, and for several years they kept up a series of intellectual exchanges whose details aren’t as well-known.
Developments like this offer an assurance that the fires of those grand gestures will spark again, warming hearts that harbour longings of their kind. Ngũgĩ’s was both grand and revolutionary. A good fight, neither won nor lost. It continues, like all struggles, and is already an unquestionable feature of world literary history. Even much younger writers, like those associated with the Nairobi-based periodical Jalada, are carrying on the charge in a manner more suited to their epoch. These and many others will miss Ngũgĩ’s companionship on the long hard road of the revolution he ignited. Memories of his presence should energize their exactions.
Armah’s decision never to publish again with Western publishers is not so well-known. But he, too, has never wavered, and his decision has been no less consequential for the cultural politics that once held sway in African literary circles and may have now assumed other form
Akin Adesokan’s latest work, a novel titled South Side, was released in May 2025 by the Nigerian publisher Parrésia. A scholar and professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, he exerts influence on African cultural environment through commentary, advocacy, and writing. His research interests are in the 20th and 21st century African and African American/African Diaspora literature and cultures. His first novel, Roots in the Sky (2004), won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Prize for Fiction in manuscript form back in 1996. He has won the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award (1998), and the Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Human Rights Award (1999).
Source: Bookartville