Reckoning with Ngũgĩ: Language, Memory, and the Politics of Legacy

By KINYUA, Laban Kithinji

Research Fellow – African Studies Centre, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

Introduction: Ngũgĩ’s Death and the Challenge of Remembering Differently

The death of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in late May 2025 is more than the passing of a literary giant—it is a moment that invites sober reflection on the unresolved political, cultural, and ethical questions he posed across decades of writing and activism. For many, Ngũgĩ stood as a towering figure of African intellectual defiance: a writer who rejected colonial languages, suffered detention without trial, and lived in exile for his uncompromising stances. In the days following his death, memorials and commentaries have rightfully highlighted his literary brilliance and ideological clarity. Yet to genuinely engage with Ngũgĩ’s legacy is not merely to praise his courage or admire his prose—it is to ask what his life, his choices, and his persistent return to the question of language reveal about the enduring challenges of decolonisation, nationalism, and cultural autonomy in contemporary Africa. It also demands that we confront a harder question: why, even after the so-called democratic opening of the early 2000s, did Kenya remain a country to which one of its most important thinkers could not fully return? What does Ngũgĩ’s extended exile tell us about the deep continuities of authoritarianism beneath Africa’s democratic facades?

To reflect on Ngũgĩ’s passing only in celebratory terms is to risk narrowing the complexity of his intellectual and political life. His stature as a global literary icon is unquestionable, and his contributions to postcolonial theory and African letters have shaped generations of scholars and writers around the world. Yet within Kenya itself, his legacy has often sat uneasily with the institutions and elites that might have been expected to embrace him. His calls for a return to African languages, his trenchant critiques of the postcolonial state, and his insistence on linking literature to radical social transformation have not always found a home in mainstream academic or political discourse. If anything, Ngũgĩ’s exile—physical, linguistic, and institutional—points to a deeper ambivalence in Kenya and beyond about the place of radical critique in national life. To take his death seriously, then, is to do more than mourn; it is to ask why so many of the ideas he championed remain unfulfilled or unwelcomed, and what that reveals about the limits of intellectual freedom, cultural decolonisation, and political imagination in our time.

Among the Agĩkũyũ—Ngũgĩ’s own community—the dead are rarely spoken of with criticism. Cultural wisdom demands that the departed be remembered for their virtues, not their faults. The proverb gutiri uru utuuraga, no wega utuuraga (“no evil endures, only good remains”) reflects a broader African ethic of reverence toward the dead, one that enshrines silence around uncomfortable truths in favour of communal cohesion. Yet this cultural logic, while deeply rooted, may constrain deeper forms of remembrance. Achille Mbembe has argued for what he terms a “critical mourning”—an ethical posture that invites the living to reflect on both the contributions and contradictions of those who shaped our intellectual and political traditions. Ngũgĩ’s life, rich with brilliance and defiance, is also layered with tensions. His unyielding stance on language—his insistence on African-language purity as a condition for true decolonisation—has drawn critique for its rigidity. Tony Mochama, in his incisive essay “Deconstructing the Ngugi Debate on Language Purity,” points out that Ngũgĩ’s position risks erasing the vibrant linguistic hybridity found in forms like Sheng, which express the lived experiences of urban youth navigating globalised, postcolonial realities. To mourn Ngũgĩ critically, then, is not to diminish his legacy but to reckon with the enduring complexities of cultural revival, language politics, and intellectual responsibility in Africa’s present. It is to refuse a memorialising that sanitises, but also to resist the temptation of condemnation—for his story, like the continent’s, was always unfolding in struggle.

The Visionary: Language as a Battlefield of Decolonisation

In the wake of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passing, former Makueni Governor Kivutha Kibwana reflected on the profound impact of Ngũgĩ’s work, emphasizing how his commitment to indigenous languages challenged the lingering shadows of colonialism. Ngũgĩ’s unwavering stance on linguistic decolonization served as a catalyst for reexamining the role of language in shaping cultural identity and resisting imperial legacies.

                  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision in the late 1970s to renounce writing fiction in English and fully embrace Gĩkũyũ as his literary language was one of the most radical and controversial intellectual moves of the postcolonial period. His 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature crystallised the ideological foundation of that shift: that the continued use of colonial languages—English, French, Portuguese—functioned as a form of epistemic domination, alienating African peoples from their histories, cultures, and modes of knowing. For Ngũgĩ, language was not simply a medium of expression; it was the very terrain on which cultural and political sovereignty was fought and lost.

Decolonising the Mind remains a foundational text for thinking through the afterlives of colonialism in education, literature, and the everyday. “The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation,” Ngũgĩ wrote, drawing a straight line between linguistic domination and the perpetuation of colonial hierarchies. This powerful framing inspired generations of scholars, activists, and artists—not only in Africa, but across the Global South—who found in Ngũgĩ’s clarity a language for their own refusals and recoveries. From indigenous education movements in Latin America to language rights struggles in India and the Philippines, Ngũgĩ's insistence on the necessity of cultural decolonisation continues to resonate.

                  Despite the challenges in implementing Ngũgĩ’s linguistic ideals through traditional literary forms, there are important ways in which his vision has taken on new life—particularly through vernacular media. The liberalisation of the Kenyan airwaves beginning in the late 1990s, especially after 1998, led to the proliferation of community and commercial radio and television stations broadcasting in indigenous languages. In the Gikuyu-language media ecosystem—dominated by stations like Inooro FM, Kameme FM, and Gukena FM—Gĩkũyũ has become a language of everyday journalism, satire, public debate, and cultural performance. These platforms have created robust archives of spoken Gikuyu, often outside formal academic or literary frameworks. While the Agĩkũyũ literary tradition in written Gĩkũyũ has not flourished as Ngũgĩ had hoped, these vernacular broadcasts arguably mark a vernacular modernity: dynamic, commercialised, but nonetheless constitutive of a public in local linguistic terms.

                  Crucially, this growth occurred in defiance of initial political opposition. During the authoritarian rule of President Daniel arap Moi, there was marked resistance to the idea of media outlets operating in local languages. The regime feared that such stations could deepen ethnic divisions, stoke identity-based political mobilisation, and unravel the fragile narrative of national unity—especially in the context of Kenya’s history of ethnicised political competition. The state’s anxiety was, in some ways, a backhanded affirmation of Ngũgĩ’s thesis: that language is not neutral but fundamentally tied to questions of power, belonging, and imagination. That vernacular media could be feared as subversive speaks to their potential not only to inform but to reconfigure the public sphere in terms other than those inherited from colonialism and one-party authoritarianism.

Moreover, the rise of digital media across Africa has opened new frontiers for the use of indigenous languages. On platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, young Kenyans—many from economically marginalised backgrounds—have turned to vernacular storytelling, satire, skits, and vlogging in Gĩkũyũ and other local languages. While these productions are often motivated by the pursuit of livelihood and visibility rather than overtly ideological decolonial agendas, their cumulative effect is nonetheless profound: they mark the return of African languages to public and popular discourse. In this sense, the digital economy may be actualising aspects of Ngũgĩ’s linguistic dream in forms he could scarcely have anticipated—fluid, multimodal, and youth-driven. It may not be literature as he defined it, but it is a living archive nonetheless.

                  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s unwavering commitment to linguistic decolonization—advocating for the exclusive use of indigenous African languages in literature and scholarship—stands as a testament to his dedication to cultural authenticity. Yet, the practical implementation of this vision in a rapidly evolving, multilingual Africa presents significant challenges. In urban centers like Nairobi, languages such as Sheng have emerged, reflecting the dynamic interplay of indigenous tongues, colonial languages, and contemporary socio-economic realities. In many African countries, including Kenya, the multilingual realities on the ground—including the widespread use of urban creoles like Sheng—have challenged the neat binaries of “colonial” versus “native” languages. This linguistic hybridity raises questions about the feasibility of Ngũgĩ's purist approach in capturing the lived experiences of modern African societies.

                  Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò offers a critical perspective on such decolonization efforts. In his work Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, Táíwò has questioned the way “decolonisation” has often been invoked as a slogan rather than a material programme. In this critique, symbolic gestures—such as switching languages—can obscure the structural transformations needed to dismantle the legacies of colonial domination. While Táíwò does not focus directly on Ngũgĩ, his linguistic purism, may inadvertently stifle African agency by rejecting the adaptive and syncretic nature of African cultures. Languages, regardless of their origins, can be appropriated and transformed to serve African contexts, emphasizing the importance of flexibility and pragmatism in cultural expression. Engaging with Táíwò's critique invites a reevaluation of Ngũgĩ's legacy, not to diminish his contributions, but to adapt his ideals to the complexities of contemporary Africa. It challenges us to consider a more inclusive approach to decolonization—one that honors indigenous languages while also embracing the linguistic and cultural hybridity that characterizes modern African identities. In doing so, we can strive towards a future that balances respect for cultural heritage with the realities of a globalized world. The radical clarity of Decolonising the Mind thus sometimes left little room for the messy, improvisational, and hybrid realities that characterise postcolonial African societies today.

                  Moreover, the infrastructural and political support required to fully shift African education, media, and publishing into local languages has often been lacking. Ngũgĩ’s vision called for not only linguistic change but a transformation in the political economy of language—something few states have been willing or able to pursue seriously. The project of decolonisation, then, while stirring in theory, has remained partial and uneven in practice.

                  Still, to reckon with Ngũgĩ’s linguistic politics is not merely to assess their feasibility, but to honour the provocation. His vision of decolonisation was never just about literature—it was about building African futures that are not haunted by the imperatives of empire. Whether or not one agrees with his hard line on language, Ngũgĩ forced us to ask what it means to truly reclaim the tools of thinking, feeling, and imagining. That is a question we cannot afford to set aside.

The Exile that Never Ended: Democracy Without Dissenters?

That Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o remained in exile long after the end of Kenya’s one-party dictatorship is one of the most quietly damning facts of the country’s post-authoritarian history. The democratic transition of 2002, which saw the ousting of Daniel arap Moi and the rise of Mwai Kibaki’s coalition government, was heralded as Kenya’s “second liberation.” Yet even with this apparent opening, Ngũgĩ never truly came home—not politically, not institutionally, and arguably, not spiritually. His brief return in 2004 was marred by an arson attack and burglary at his residence, an incident that, while dismissed by state officials as mere criminality, symbolised something deeper: the continuing discomfort of the Kenyan establishment with radical intellectuals, especially those whose critiques were forged in the heat of the authoritarian decades.

                  The fact that Kenya’s post-Moi governments did not actively embrace Ngũgĩ—let alone institutionalise his ideas—raises unsettling questions about the nature of democratic reform in postcolonial Africa. Has democracy merely replaced repression with amnesia? If multipartyism brought procedural change, it did not necessarily usher in the kind of cultural and epistemic shift that thinkers like Ngũgĩ envisioned. Indeed, one might argue that Ngũgĩ’s continued marginalisation within Kenya, despite his global acclaim, reflects the enduring suspicion with which African states regard organic intellectuals—those who emerge not from state apparatuses or donor-funded consultancies, but from below, from the fissures of language, memory, and struggle.

                  There is, of course, a longer pattern at work here. African states, from Ghana to Ethiopia, have long celebrated dissidents in death while silencing them in life. Statues are easier to manage than thinkers. And Ngũgĩ’s case is particularly instructive because he not only criticised colonialism, but also laid bare the failures of the postcolonial elite to remake the nation in emancipatory terms. His rejection of English as a literary language, his critiques of nationalism’s betrayals, and his persistent invocation of a people-centered cultural revolution were never going to sit comfortably with governments invested in elite continuity and neoliberal adjustment.

                  Ngũgĩ’s prolonged estrangement also reminds us that exile is not just a geographic condition—it is structural. One can be exiled from the very imagination of the nation, from its academic syllabi, its media narratives, its commemorative calendars. His absence from Kenya’s cultural mainstream is thus not only about physical distance; it speaks to a broader discomfort with confronting the unfinished business of decolonisation. That discomfort is not just Kenyan—it is continental. It suggests that many postcolonial African regimes remain trapped in what Mahmood Mamdani has called “decentralized despotism”: systems that mimic democratic openness while retaining colonial logics of control and exclusion.

                  In the end, Ngũgĩ’s exile became part of his message. It exposed the fragility of political transitions that do not transform the terms of cultural legitimacy or power. It raised, in quiet defiance, the question: what kind of freedom excludes its fiercest dreamers?

The Return That Never Was

                  If Ngũgĩ’s life in exile symbolised his estrangement from the postcolonial Kenyan state, then his death, too, raises uncomfortable questions about belonging, return, and ancestral obligation. His choice to be cremated—rather than buried in his ancestral home of Limuru—has unsettled many, particularly among the Agĩkũyũ, where death is not just an end but a return: to the soil, to the community, and to memory. For a man who so fiercely advocated a return to African cultural roots, the decision to undergo a form of interment widely seen as “un-African” by many elders and rural kin may appear deeply contradictory.

                  In Agĩkũyũ thought, the dead are not gone; they are woven into the fabric of the living through ritual, land, and place. Burial is not merely a private act—it is a social inscription that affirms continuity with lineage and land. Prominent elders, especially those who have spoken for the community, are expected to be laid to rest with solemnity and visibility. That Ngũgĩ chose otherwise—that he neither returned in life nor in death to Limuru—risks rupturing the mnemonic and symbolic relationship his people might have used to anchor his legacy.

                  One wonders what it would have meant for Ngũgĩ to be buried in Limuru, near the site of Kamĩrĩthũ Community Education and Cultural Centre—the theatre project that catalysed his political persecution in the 1970s. Such a burial could have drawn a powerful arc from resistance to remembrance, from land to language to liberation. It would have allowed the community to claim him—not only as a global thinker but as a son of the soil, a mũthamaki wa Gĩkũyũ (the Gĩkũyũ King), whose life and death stood against forgetting.

Instead, his cremation—though arguably a modern, practical, and perhaps personal choice—leaves behind an ambiguity. Will his Gĩkũyũ community remember him? Will schoolchildren in Kiambu recite his proverbs, stage his plays, or read Caitaani Mũtharaba-Inĩ (Devil on the Cross)? And beyond remembering, how can they—and others—actualise his vision of a living, evolving Gĩkũyũ language and imagination?

                  Perhaps Ngũgĩ’s final contradiction is not a failure, but a call: for the community to reconstruct him, in song, speech, satire, and story. Not because he returned to them, but because they choose to return to what he symbolised. In the end, no archive is perfect, no intellectual free of contradiction. What matters is what we do with what they leave behind.

Between Message and Messenger: Reckoning with the Contradictions

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s life presents a challenge not only of remembering, but of reckoning. If his public life was marked by intellectual clarity and moral defiance against colonial domination, his private life—by his own son’s account—was marked by pain, violence, and unresolved contradiction. Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ’s public acknowledgment that his father abused women, particularly his “goat wife,” sparked waves of dismay and defensiveness. While some tried to shield the elder Ngũgĩ by separating the man from his work, others, like writer and public thinker Mwende Kyalo, have urged us to confront these contradictions as part of his legacy, not in spite of it.

                  Kyalo’s reflections remind us that Ngũgĩ’s ideas—especially his rallying cry for decolonisation—cannot be confined to anti-imperial struggle alone. If decolonisation, as Ngũgĩ so forcefully argued, begins in the mind, it must also unfold in the intimate, familial, and gendered realms. And yet, Ngũgĩ’s revolutionary commitments seem to have stopped short of interrogating patriarchal power. As Kyalo bluntly put it, “He spoke of decolonization with his hands around the throats of those he called family. It doesn’t make him complicated; it makes him implicated.” These are not easy words to write or read. But they reflect a generational shift: one that demands ethical consistency from those who lead, write, and represent liberation.

                  There is something to be said about the historical context Ngũgĩ came from—a time when political ideas could be celebrated independently of the person who carried them. Just as the U.S. could champion human rights abroad while funding repressive regimes in Africa, many public intellectuals of Ngũgĩ’s generation were permitted to “preach water” while “drinking wine.” But as Kyalo notes, the moral expectations of leadership have changed. In an era of feminist critique, digital memory, and survivor testimony, we no longer separate message from messenger so easily. If Ngũgĩ taught us to resist imperialism, should we not also resist domestic tyranny, gendered silence, and the reproduction of violence within the home?

                  This is not a dismissal of Ngũgĩ’s legacy—it is, in fact, a continuation of the critical spirit he championed. Kyalo’s challenge is grounded not in vengeance but in fidelity to thought itself. “To claim only praises is to be disingenuous even to him,” she wrote, “because wasn’t his work all about critical thinking and political analysis?” In this sense, reckoning with Ngũgĩ’s contradictions is not an act of betrayal; it is an extension of his pedagogical mission. If he was a teacher to the end, then our responsibility is not just to quote him—but to learn from all of him.

                  It is in this light that we must also reconsider what decolonisation truly entails. To reclaim language, one must also have a self that is decolonised. But how can we speak in the fullness of our languages when our social relationships remain organised by domination—be it gendered, generational, or epistemic? Perhaps the next phase of Ngũgĩ’s project does not lie in a return to ancestral languages alone, but in the transformation of our social worlds—so that the languages we reclaim are not only spoken, but lived.

Conclusion: To Inherit, To Reckon, To Continue

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was not merely a writer, nor only a theorist of decolonisation—he was, as Mwende Kyalo put it, “a movement, a collective bundled up in one.” His death does not close a chapter; it reopens many. It invites us to confront not just what he achieved, but also what he left undone—and what we have yet to do with the questions he so forcefully posed. In this sense, his passing is not a punctuation mark, but a provocation.

                  To reflect honestly on Ngũgĩ is to wrestle with the contradictions he embodied: a man who called for cultural return, yet died in exile; who championed African languages, yet struggled to live out the intimate ethics they encoded; who gave us the sharpest tools for thinking about power, but left behind wounds that remind us thought alone is not enough. If Ngũgĩ’s life revealed the cost of speaking truth to power, his legacy demands that we also speak truth to those we admire.

                  But admiration still matters. Ngũgĩ gave African thinkers and artists a grammar of resistance—against colonial epistemologies, against cultural erasure, against the devaluation of indigenous expression. His fiction reimagined freedom in the ruins of empire. His essays taught us that the mind, too, can be a battlefield. And his refusal to capitulate—despite detention, exile, censorship, and disappointment—remains a model of intellectual courage.

                  The future of Ngũgĩ’s legacy does not lie in statues or state tributes. It lies in what we do with his provocations. It lies in the classrooms that teach Decolonising the Mind alongside critiques of patriarchy. It lies in the vernacular digital spaces that keep Gĩkũyũ alive on new terms. It lies in communities that refuse to separate political vision from personal integrity. And it lies in those willing to read him not as a saint, but as a brilliant, fallible man who dared to imagine otherwise.

                  In mourning Ngũgĩ, we are invited to remember—but also to remake. His work is now ours to carry forward, not by imitation, but by re-interpretation. If decolonisation is a project without an end, then let this be the beginning of a more honest, more complete continuation.

References

·        AllAfrica. “Kenya: Four More Arrested Over Attack On Ngũgĩ.” August 16, 2004. https://allafrica.com/stories/200408160168.html

• Kyalo, Mwende. Public Facebook posts. May 29 – June 6, 2025.

• Kibwana, Kivutha. Public Facebook post. May 25, 2025.

• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press, 1996.

• Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019.

• Mochama, Tony. “Deconstructing the Ngugi Debate on Language Purity.” Standard Media, 2025.

• Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ. The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity, and Ownership. University of Michigan Press, 2018.

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. James Currey, 1986.

• Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. Hurst Publishers, 2022.