{"id":142950,"date":"2025-05-29T19:48:02","date_gmt":"2025-05-29T19:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87"},"modified":"2025-05-29T20:20:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-29T20:20:05","slug":"ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87","title":{"rendered":"Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, a revered Kenyan author dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Kenya. <\/strong><\/span>Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 wa Thiong’o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country’s history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87.<\/b><\/p>\n

Derek Warker, publicist for Ngu\u0303gi\u0303’s U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303\u2019s son Nducu wa Ngugi said he died in Bedford, Georgia. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 was receiving kidney dialysis treatments.<\/p>\n

Whether through novels such as \u201cThe Wizard of the Crow\u201d and \u201cPetals of Blood,\u201d memoirs such as \u201cBirth of a Dream Weaver\u201d or the landmark critique \u201cDecolonizing the Mind,\u201d Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 embodied the very heights of the artist’s calling \u2014 as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after.<\/p>\n

\u201cResistance is the best way of keeping alive,\u201d he told the Guardian in 2018. \u201cIt can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you\u2019re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngu\u0303gi\u0303’s ability to tell \u201ca compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.\u201d Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award.<\/p>\n

Through Ngu\u0303gi\u0303’s life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn\u2019t respond to British soldiers\u2019 demands that he stop moving.<\/p>\n

In a given book, Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, \u201cThe Upright Revolution,\u201d updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story \u201cThe Ghost of Michael Jackson\u201d features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303\u2019s tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in \u201cThe Wizard of the Crow,\u201d in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies.<\/p>\n

\u201cRumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWhen they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country\u2019s divides \u2014 a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country\u2019s liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native.<\/p>\n

One of five children born to the third of his father\u2019s four wives. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong\u2019o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly.<\/p>\n

His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one\u2019s destiny,\u201d Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. \u201cNgu\u0303gi\u0303 wrote a story, it was published.\u201d<\/p>\n

He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria\u2019s Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel \u201cThings Fall Apart,\u201d had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, \u201cWeep Not, Child\u201d and \u201cThe River Between,\u201d both of which were released in the next three years.<\/p>\n

Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,\u201d Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 later wrote. \u201cAnd suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with \u201cA Grain of Wheat.\u201d Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. \u201cWhy can\u2019t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?\u201d Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote.<\/p>\n

In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 wa Mirii, \u201cI Will Marry When I Want,\u201d was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, \u201cPetals of Blood,\u201d the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,\u201d he wrote in \u201cWrestling With the Devil,\u201d a memoir published in 2018. \u201cIt is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read \u201cI am stupid\u201d or \u201cI am a donkey.\u201d Starting with \u201cDevil On the Cross,\u201d written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past.<\/p>\n

Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In \u201cDecolonizing the Mind,\u201d published in 1986, Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBut by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?\u201d<\/p>\n

He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school\u2019s International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships.<\/p>\n

Even after leaving Kenya, Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta\u2019s successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. \u2018Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,\u2019\u201d Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 later told The Penn Review. \u201cWriting is that which I hav<\/p>\n

For More News And Analysis About Kenya<\/span> Follow Africa-Press<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Kenya. Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 wa Thiong’o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country’s history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":142949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,7,7204],"tags":[8911,1150,544,8783],"class_list":["post-142950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-culture-and-art","category-head-lines","category-to-homepage","tag-colonialism","tag-death","tag-kenya","tag-writer"],"yoast_head":"\nNg\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, a revered Kenyan author dies at 87 - kenya<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction b ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, a revered Kenyan author dies at 87\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ngu\u0303gi\u0303 wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction b ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"kenya\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AfricaPressTunisiaa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-05-29T19:48:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-05-29T20:20:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/kenya\/sites\/28\/2025\/05\/sm_1748533670.106561.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"538\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"cfeditoren\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/#\/schema\/person\/068c7ab4e9634ae78ec5d54ec46598bb\"},\"headline\":\"Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, a revered Kenyan author dies at 87\",\"datePublished\":\"2025-05-29T19:48:02+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2025-05-29T20:20:05+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\"},\"wordCount\":1739,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/kenya\/sites\/28\/2025\/05\/sm_1748533670.106561.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Colonialism\",\"Death\",\"Kenya\",\"Writer\"],\"articleSection\":[\"all news\",\"culture and art\",\"head lines\",\"to-homepage\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/kenya\/all-news\/ngugi-wa-thiongo-a-revered-kenyan-author-dies-at-87\",\"name\":\"Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o, a revered Kenyan author dies at 87 - 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