Decolonizing, but in English – Sorry Ngugi wa Thiongo

One of Kenya’s greatest literary minds, transitioned to the realm of an ancestors on 28^th May 2025. His passing marks the end of an era but, his words remain, sharp, urgent and uncompromising.

A fierce intellectual and cultural worrier, Ngugi’s life was a long rebellion against the violence of colonialism and the subtle tyranny of mental enslavement. He chronicled the fractures of Kenyan society with the precision of a surgeon, form Weep not child to Wizard of the crow.

In the 70’s Ngugi made a radical and irreversible turn, he rejected English as the primary medium for his fiction and turned fully to Gĩkũyũ his mother tongue, as the vessel of his fiction. It was a bold and reckless move in a world still dazzled by the queens English. I was first introduced to Ngugi by my father who handed me, like one might hand down a sacred guard – Caitani Mũtharabainĩ. I was about fifteen and should have been lost in the romance of a Mills and boons. But wapi? Here was the devil, no subtitles, no glossary. It was a real cross carry. I had to read with my brow furrowed and my pride bruised. I did not understand much in that book – but I began to hear the music of my own people in literature. Not in translation. Not in apology. But in their full thunderous voice. That was my fathers failed attempt to decolonize my mind.

The next Ngugi book I read was the River Between – my all-time favorite. I still see that river in my minds eye, winding, patient, ancient. It curved more than just valleys, it carved questions in me. As a teenager, read it like a political allegory, which it is. But it wasn’t until much later as an adult, that I realized, it was also a love story. A quiet aching one. Ngugi had hidden tenderness in the fold of rebellion and I hadn’t known how to see it yet. The book that truly shifted my perception, the one that completed the decolonizing work my father had unknowingly began was Decolonizing the Mind. This book speaks to me, it had confronted me. It laid bare the subtle ways colonialism had infiltrated, our speech, our education, even our silence.

As a professional in the heritage sector, decolonizing is a current buzz word, sprinkled generously in conference titles, panel discussion and funding proposals. But often we are merely regurgitating ideas Ngugi gave us, clear and uncompromising in the 70’s. He had mapped the terrain, language is the carrier of culture. But how many of us are willing to carry through? To write, speak and even dream in the mother tongues we were taught to abandon – so that we can seek validation in foreign languages. Ngugi’s choices were not without cost. Imprisoned without trial in 1977 for his play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), exiled for decades, and blacklisted at home, he paid the price of telling the truth. And yet, he never wavered. His later works—written in Gĩkũyũ then self-translated into English—demonstrate the full flowering of an imagination liberated from colonial scaffolding.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a giant—even in death. In the days following his passing, Kenya has been abuzz with his name. Social media timelines, radio talk shows, barbershops, and university corridors alike have all lit up with tributes, memories, and debates. As is typical of how we mourn our legends, opinion has split. Some question his wish to be cremated—calling it unafrican. Others lament that he spent most of his life in the West and has denied us the chance to celebrate him with the full-blown, trumpet-blaring African funeral party he surely deserved.

But we forget—selectively, as humans often do—that Ngũgĩ did not choose exile the way one might choose a travel destination. He fled. He left Kenya not for luxury but for survival. His words had unsettled the powerful, and the price for speaking truth here was prison, censorship, and danger. The West gave him safety, not necessarily home.

Ngũgĩ’s life was full of contradictions: a village boy from Limuru who became a global scholar; a man who fiercely denounced empire while teaching in its most elite institutions; a writer whose boldest act of nationalism was to write in a language many of his own countrymen could no longer read. And more recently, his son, Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ, unearthed painful truths from the vault of childhood—portraying him not just as a literary giant, but as a complicated, and at times violent, man. That too is part of the legacy. Greatness is rarely neat. In the end, Ngũgĩ remains what he always was: deeply human, deeply African, and utterly unignorable.

And this commentary, ladies and gentlemen, has been written by a Muthoni—in English. My own decolonizing work, it seems, remains beautifully untidy. But perhaps that, too, is the point: it was never meant to be clean, or complete. Just courageous.