What Ngũgĩ meant

Following the luminary Kenyan writer’s death on 28 May, Jacqueline Nyathi asked global writers how they will remember him.

Zukiswa Wanner
South African journalist and novelist
We were all fortunate to live at a time when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was alive too. His activism on writing in African languages inspired many generations of writers. Like other writers who left us before him, he is not gone but lives on through the gift of his writing.

Bhakti Shringarpure
Indian-US writer and scholar
Ngũgĩ’s passing feels like the end of an era because he was the last of the writers for whom literature and politics were inextricable. For Ngũgĩ, writing was never an individual or professional pursuit, it was meant to serve a common good. He wrote to create an awakening about oppressive structures and how to resist them. More importantly, he wrote to bring communities together.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Zimbabwean writer and scholar
Ngũgĩ was not just a man from Kenya or merely another great African writer. He was an institution in himself. His legacy will endure because he left us with the tools to tell our own stories and to dismantle oppressive systems.

Aminatta Forna
Transnational writer
My favourite memory of Ngũgĩ is one from the PEN World Festival in New York in 2015 which was that year celebrating African writing. We all stayed in the same hotel. Ngũgĩ was like a father to us all. Like good African children we vied to fetch his tea, find him a pen or organise a cab. Brave and brilliant, he was also beloved. He sang Happy Birthday to me in Gĩkũyũ. One night I invited other writers to a nearby bar. Ngũgĩ went to bed early, set an alarm for 10pm and came downstairs to join us. I taught A Grain of Wheat to students at Georgetown [University in Washington DC]. Many were majors in government or international affairs and their outlook was profoundly changed [by the book]. Every year I was reminded of the power of literature to convey truths, and of Ngũgĩ’s brilliance. The world will never forget Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Molara Wood
Nigerian writer and journalist
It is hard to put into words the immensity of this loss, the huge void left by the monumental figure of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. They don’t come greater than this. He was one of the building blocks of the imaginative landscape of our lives, of the lives of generations of readers, especially in Africa. Long before the internet, before 24-hour news cycles, my first encounter with Kenya was in the pages of his books. In schools in tiny corners of Nigeria, pupils knew about Dedan Kimathi, the Mau Mau and the Kenyan struggle against British colonialism. They would feel for Njoroge, the protagonist of Weep Not, Child, as though he were their own cousin. It is a towering testament to the role of stories in our lives. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was a master storyteller whose visions will sustain us down the ages.