Publisher and author, Firoze Manji, writes about his comrade and friend Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the literary giant from Kenya and unflinching advocate for African languages. Ngũgĩ passed away on 28 May 2025, leaving behind a legacy that bridged continents and generations. For those who knew him—whether through his words or in solidarity campaigns—his life was a testament to the power of art as resistance.
By Firoze Manji
I am deeply saddened to learn of Ngũgĩ’s passing. Ngugi did not just write books—he declared war. War on colonialism and neocolonialism, on linguistic shame, on the very idea that African thought must be filtered through colonial grammar to be ‘literature.’ When news of his death broke, I felt bereft, always assuming that we would soon have our next conversation.
When I helped organize London protests for his release in 1978, we shouted his banned titles outside Kenya’s High Commission. We prepared banners saying ‘Kenyatta sheds Petals of Blood’, Waingereza walifunga Kimathi, Mzee anafunga Ngugi! (The British locked up Kimathi, Mzee [Kenyatta] locks up Ngugi!). Years later, when I visited him at his home near Kamiriithu, the site where the people’s theatre at which Ngaahika Ndeenda was performed, and which the regime destroyed, he told me: ‘You thought you were demanding my freedom? You were demanding yours.’ He showed me the manuscript he’d scribbled on scraps of paper in prison. ‘They gave me a pen to confess,’ he laughed. ‘I used it to imagine.’ ‘They thought they buried me in prison,’ he laughed, ‘but they planted a seed.’ His warmth and clarity in person mirrored the fearlessness of his writing.
I always resented the fact that so much of his writings were relegated to the African Writers Series. True, the series brought attention to the wealth of writers from the African continent. But many of them were, like Ngũgĩ, literary giants, not merely ‘African writers’. Their contribution to art, politics and and thinking were and are of universal relevance. The failure to recognize this universalism is perhaps one of the reasons that, despite being nominated several times, Ngugi was denied the Nobel prize for literature.
Ngugi’s most important contributions was on language. His novels, essays, and unyielding belief in the dignity of African languages reshaped world literature. To call him merely a ‘great African writer’ would be to shrink his genius—he was one of the most vital thinkers of our age, a voice who spoke from Kenya but to humanity. Ngũgĩ’s decision to write in Gĩkũyũ was not symbolic—it was an act of intellectual insurrection. He tore down the lie that creativity required the approval of imperial languages. ‘To think in my mother tongue,’ he told me once, ‘is to dream in freedom.’ His Gĩkũyũ works (Mũrogi wa Kagogo, Matigari) were not ‘translations from English’—they were the originals, the canon itself. Beyond ‘African Writer’: Western obituaries will box him into ‘African literature.’ But Ngũgĩ belonged to the same pantheon as Dostoevsky, Marquez, and Orwell—writers who exposed power’s machinery. Wizard of the Crow is as universal as 1984; Decolonising the Mind, perhaps as urgent as Fanon.”
In his Foreword to Daraja Press’ edition of Mau Mau From Within: The Story of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, he wrote: ‘We don’t have to use the vocabulary of the colonial to describe our struggles, especially today when there is worldwide movement to overturn monuments to slavery and colonialism.’
For those of us who stood beside him—in protest, in lecture halls, or in his Limuru home—he was also a generous comrade, always leaning forward to listen, even as the world often leaned away from him. I admired how attentive he always was to younger aspiring writers. At conferences where we both spoke, I watched him corner young African writers, urging them to ‘write dangerously.’ He’d ask: ‘Who owns your language? Who profits from your silence?’ His belief in them was visceral. ‘Talent is common,’ he told them. ‘What’s rare is the courage to use it.’
In his piercing 2020 interview with Daraja Press, Ngũgĩ laid bare his life’s mission: ‘Colonialism stole our land, but language was the theft of our dreams.’ He recounted how, as a child, British teachers beat Gĩkũyũ out of his classmates—‘not just with canes, but with the lie that our words were small, ugly things.’ His entire oeuvre, from his early writings as ‘James’ Ngugi, to Petals of Blood, Decolonising the Mind and Wizard of the Crow, was a counterattack: ‘I write in Gĩkũyũ not to be provincial, but to prove that the universal lives in the particular.’
Kenya today claims Ngũgĩ as a national treasure—yet how recklessly it squandered him in his prime. No streets are named for the man whose books were banned in schools; politicians quote Decolonising the Mind while gutting funding for indigenous-language education. When I last visited Nairobi, a young poet told me, ‘They praise Ngũgĩ now because he’s no longer dangerous.’ But Ngũgĩ’s legacy is danger: the kind that outlives regimes.
‘Kiumbi kiaguo ikio ki, kiaguo ikio. “A thing that forgets its origins will soon die.” Ngũgĩ, they jailed you, exiled you, misnamed you—yet here you remain.
Rest well, comrade and friend.
This celebration of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is reposted with the kind permission of the author and originally appeared on Daraja Press website here.
Firoze Manji has more than 40 years experience in international development, health and human rights, he is the founder and publisher of Daraja Press.
Featured Photograph: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o signs copies of his book Wizard of the Crow at the Congress Centre in central London in 2006.
