Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Works

• 1986Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

  Four lectures and a statement of farewell to English: language carries a people’s culture and memory, and colonial schooling, which punished children for speaking Gikuyu, separated thought from the language of daily life; African writers must write in African languages for their own peoples.

• 1993Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms

  Essays on moving the centre of the world from Europe to a plurality of cultures and, within nations, from minority elites to working people; they carry the argument of Decolonising the Mind into literature, theatre and the university.

Position

Ngũgĩ is on the map as the central theorist of language in African decolonisation. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), which he called his farewell to English, he argued that language is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture – of a people’s memory, values and image of itself – and that colonial education, which punished children for speaking Gĩkũyũ at school and rewarded them for English, separated the language of learning from the language of home and so colonised the mind. African literature written in European languages, however anti-colonial in content, belonged in his view to an “Afro-European” tradition addressed to an elite; writers should write in African languages for their own peoples, and translation between African languages should replace the detour through Europe. The argument drew on Fanon’s chapter on national culture in The Wretched of the Earth and on a Marxist analysis of culture and class, and it set him against Chinua Achebe, who defended writing in an English made African. In Moving the Centre (1993) and later essays he called for moving the centre of the world from Europe to a plurality of cultures, and within nations from the elites to the people. Achille Mbembe (2015) took up his idea of decolonisation as a continuing process of “seeing ourselves clearly” in the debates on decolonising South African universities, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne borrowed his phrase that translation is “the language of languages”. His novels from A Grain of Wheat (1967) to Wizard of the Crow (2006) and his prison diary Detained (1981) accompany the theory.

Life & context

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born James Ngugi on 5 January 1938 in Kamiriithu near Limuru in central Kenya, into a large peasant family; during the Mau Mau war and the state of emergency of the 1950s one of his brothers joined the guerrillas and his mother was detained. He studied English at Makerere University College in Kampala and then at the University of Leeds; Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first novel in English published by an East African writer. In 1968, with Henry Owuor-Anyumba and Taban Lo Liyong, he called for the abolition of the English department at the University of Nairobi in favour of a department of African literatures and languages. After the Gĩkũyũ play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), written with Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ and performed with villagers at Kamiriithu in 1977, he was held without trial in a maximum-security prison for a year, where he wrote his first novel in Gĩkũyũ on toilet paper. Barred from his university post, he went into exile in 1982 and taught in London, at Yale, at New York University and from 2002 at the University of California, Irvine. He died in the United States on 28 May 2025.

Further main works

• Weep Not, Child (1964)
• A Grain of Wheat (1967)
• Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (1972)
• Petals of Blood (1977)
• Devil on the Cross (Caitaani mũtharaba-inĩ, 1980)
• Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981)
• Wizard of the Crow (Mũrogi wa Kagogo, 2004–07)