The world didn’t just loose a writer when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o passed on May 28 2025, but one of the fiercest defenders of language, literature and identity. For many Nigerian writers, students, and anyone with a flair for literary works, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong was more than just a writer. He was a voice that could not but be reckoned with, a reminder that being African is enough.

Born as James Ngũgĩ under the British colony in 1938, his world stretched beyond the pages of his books shaped by his family loss and violence during the Mau Mau uprising. He accquired his education from prestigious schools like Alliance High school, Makerere University and the University Of Leeds in England.

Many writers took pride in mastering English but Ngũgĩ walked the opposite direction and by  1977, he ditched his English name and gave up the colonial tongue to write in Gikuyu, his native language.

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His first novel, Weep Not Child, and thereafter, The River Between established him as a groundbreaking figure in East African Literature and in 1977, he wrote a  controversial play, I Will Marry When I Want that criticised post-colonial inequality, which led to his arrest without trial.

Armed with a tissue and a pen in detainment, Ngũgĩ wrote one of his first novel in Gikuyu, titled: Devil on the Cross. This work earned critical acclaim. He demonstrated that language is more of a territory than a tool.

In 1982 he was forced into exile where he settled in United Kingdom and later the United States teaching in universities. After over two decades in exile, his attempt to reconnect with is homeland ended up in violence and betrayal

Ngũgĩ made a bold turn writing in Gikuyu and insisting that African stories deserved to be told in African languages. “Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world,” he was quoted to have said.

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Ngũgĩ’s push for African languages to be heard resonates in Nigeria today. Podcast in pidgin, Igbo Youtube shows, Yoruba TikToks, and street slangs that will always remain heard, have been helped by the growth of communications technology, overcoming the encumbrances of book publishing that writers of Ngugi’s era faced. Ngũgĩ left a legacy that reminds Africans that stories do not need permission and languages do not need subtitles to matter

Anita Chinedu