Kenya’s celebrated author Ngugi wa Thiong’o passes on

By Wanderi Kamau

Kenya’s world-celebrated writer and academic, Prof Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, has passed on, his family has said.

According to a short statement released by his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ, the legendary, award-winning writer passed on today, Wednesday, 28 May 2025, in the morning.

“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of our dad, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, this Wednesday morning, 28th May 2025. He lived a full life, fought a good fight. As was his last wish, let’s celebrate his life and his work. Rîa ratha na rîa thŭa. Tŭrî aira!

The family’s spokesperson, Nducu wa Ngũgĩ, will announce details of his celebration of life soon,” she stated.

Until his death, Ngũgĩ, 87, served as Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Ngũgĩ was born in Kenya, in 1938, into a large peasant family. He was educated at Kamandura, Manguu, and Kinyogori primary schools; Alliance High School, all in Kenya; Makerere University College (then a campus of London University), Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Leeds, Britain.

The Kenya of his birth and youth was a British settler colony (1895–1963). As an adolescent, he lived through the Mau Mau War of Independence (1952–1962), the central historical episode in the making of modern Kenya and a major theme in his early works. Ngũgĩ burst onto the literary scene in East Africa with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962, as part of the celebration of Uganda’s independence. “Ngũgĩ Speaks for the Continent,” headlined The Makererian, the student newspaper, in a review of the performance by Trevor Whittock, one of the professors.

In a highly productive literary period, Ngũgĩ wrote additionally eight short stories, two one-act plays, two novels, and a regular column for the Sunday Nation under the title, As I See It. One of the novels, Weep Not Child, was published to critical acclaim in 1964, followed by the second novel, The River Between (1965). His third, A Grain of Wheat (1967), was a turning point in the formal and ideological direction of his works. Multi-narrative lines and multi-viewpoints unfolding at different times and spaces replaced the linear temporal unfolding of the plot from a single viewpoint. The collective replaced the individual as the center of history.

The revolutionary scholar and playwright

In 1967, Ngũgĩ became Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Nairobi. He taught there until 1977 while, in between, also serving as Fellow in Creative Writing at Makerere (1969–1970), and as Visiting Associate Professor of English and African Studies at Northwestern University (1970–1971).

During his tenure at Nairobi, Ngũgĩ was at the center of the politics of English departments in Africa, championing the change of name from English to simply Literature to reflect world literature with African and Third World literatures at the center. He, with Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba, authored the polemical declaration, On the Abolition of the English Department, setting in motion a continental and global debate and practices that later became the heart of postcolonial theories.

Prof Ngugi (centre) with his children, Wanjiku wa Ngugi (right) and Prof Mukoma wa Ngugi (left). Photo/Brittle Paper

“If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” they asked. The text is carried in his first volume of literary essays, Homecoming, which appeared in print in 1969. These were to be followed, in later years, by other volumes including Writers in Politics (1981 and 1997); Decolonising the Mind (1986); Moving the Center (1994); and Penpoints, Gunpoints and Dreams (1998).

The year 1977 forced dramatic turns in Ngũgĩ’s life and career. His first novel in ten years, Petals of Blood, was published in July of that year. The novel painted a harsh and unsparing picture of life in neo-colonial Kenya. It was received with even more emphatic critical acclaim in Kenya and abroad. The Kenya Weekly Review described it as “this bombshell,” and The Sunday Times of London as capturing every form and shape that power can take.

The same year, Ngũgĩ’s controversial play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), written with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, was performed at Kamĩrĩthũ Educational and Cultural Center, Limuru, in an open-air theatre, with actors from the workers and peasants of the village. Sharply critical of the inequalities and injustices of Kenyan society, publicly identified with unequivocally championing the cause of ordinary Kenyans, and committed to communicating with them in the languages of their daily lives, Ngũgĩ was arrested and imprisoned without charge at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison at the end of the year, December 31, 1977.

An account of those experiences is to be found in his memoir, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1982). It was at Kamiti Maximum Prison that Ngũgĩ made the decision to abandon English as his primary language of creative writing and committed himself to writing in Gĩkũyũ, his mother tongue. In prison, and following that decision, he wrote, on toilet paper, the novel Caitani Mũtharabaini (1981), translated into English as Devil on the Cross (1982).

Exile, activism, and global recognition

After Amnesty International named him a Prisoner of Conscience, an international campaign secured his release a year later, in December 1978. However, the Moi dictatorship barred him from jobs at colleges and universities in the country. He resumed his writing and his activities in the theater and, in so doing, continued to be an uncomfortable voice for the Moi dictatorship.

While Ngũgĩ was in Britain for the launch and promotion of Devil on the Cross, he learned about the Moi regime’s plot to eliminate him on his return—or, as coded, to give a red carpet welcome on arrival at Jomo Kenyatta Airport. This forced him into exile, first in Britain (1982–1989), and then the U.S. (1989–2002), during which time the Moi dictatorship hounded him, trying unsuccessfully to get him expelled from London and from other countries he visited.

In 1986, at a conference in Harare, an assassination squad outside his hotel was thwarted by Zimbabwean security. His next Gĩkũyũ novel, Matigari, was published in 1986. Thinking that the novel’s main character was a real living person, Dictator Moi issued an arrest warrant for his arrest. But on learning that the character was fictional, he had the novel “arrested” instead. Undercover police went to all the bookshops in the country and the publisher’s warehouse and took the novel away. So, between 1986 and 1996, Matigari could not be sold in Kenyan bookshops. The dictatorship also had all Ngũgĩ’s books removed from all educational institutions.

Prof Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his estranged wife, Njeeri Thiong’o, pictured at the launch of his autobiography *Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir* on August 19, 2010. Photo/Daily Nation

In exile, Ngũgĩ worked with the London-based Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners in Kenya (1982–1998), which championed the cause of democratic and human rights in Kenya. In between, he was Visiting Professor at Bayreuth University (1984); Writer in Residence for the Borough of Islington, London (1985); and took time to study film at Dramatiska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden (1986).

After 1988, Ngũgĩ became Visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale (1989–1992), in between holding the Five Colleges (Amherst, Mount Holyoke, New Hampshire, Smith, East Massachusetts) Visiting Distinguished Professorship of English and African Literature (Fall 1991). He then became Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University (1992–2002), where he also held the Erich Maria Remarque Professorship of Languages, before moving to his final position at the University of California, Irvine.

He remained in exile for the duration of the Moi dictatorship (1982–2002). When he and his wife, Njeeri, returned to Kenya in 2004 after twenty-two years in exile, they were attacked by four hired gunmen and narrowly escaped with their lives.

Ngũgĩ continued to write prolifically, publishing in 2006 what some have described as his crowning achievement, Wizard of the Crow, an English translation of the Gĩkũyũ language novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo. Ngũgĩ’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages and continue to be the subject of books, critical monographs, and dissertations.

Paralleling his academic and literary life has been his role in the production of literature, providing, as an editor, a platform for other people’s voices. He edited the following literary journals: Penpoint (1963–64); Zuka (1965–1970); Ghala (guest editor for one issue, 1964?); and Mũtĩiri (1992–).

He also continued to speak around the world at numerous universities and as a distinguished speaker. These appearances include: the 1984 Robb Lectures at Auckland University in New Zealand; the 1996 Clarendon Lectures in English at Oxford University; the 1999 Ashby Lecture at Cambridge; and the 2006 MacMillan Stewart Lectures at Harvard. He is recipient of many honors, including the 2001 Nonino International Prize for Literature and eleven honorary doctorates.