Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-2025): Exploring Language, Exile, and the Power of Poetic Resistance

One that plays hide-and-seek with both the rationale and its aftermath. The chicken and the egg are both unable to answer the age-old question related to their birth. Or at least it should appear as easy as that. In practice, the fear of the unknown as it unfolds word after word and begins to arouse your senses even as you write is at best what can be hoped for. The muse is active only when you allow yourself to write wearing a blindfold over a set of tightly shut eyes and your hands handcuffed behind your back so that you cannot loosen the knot either out of impulse or deliberate intent to cheat your muse. The muse is best served and, in turn, best serves you if it remains invisible and faceless.

A friendship built on words can’t help but endure.

“To starve a people of their language, is to kill their memory.” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Distances have a way of losing themselves in this world of swift communication. Especially if you write every day. Even more so if your ‘greed’ makes you share what you write with another writer. Ngugi allowed this sharing of poetry. He understood the urgency of words to be heard. And took great pains to respond to every single one. We grew into writing to each other.

On receiving my first book of poems, Knotted Grief, he wrote:

“I was watching the wind bend plants, even push me around, in my backyard in Orange, California, Knotted Grief in my hands, when I suddenly realized that I could not actually see the wind. Yes, the wind that blows leaves into the air, bends trees, makes tornadoes and tsunamis, sings even, is not visible to the eye except through its effects. Your poetry is like that: you feel the poetry by its effects.”

***

It just struck me. What happens to the words that ricochet off the umbrella? The ones that came seeking? The ones denied shelter? From the storm? Bouncing into the gutters. Instead. Smashing. Their belongings scattering. Desperate in the harshness of rejection. Colliding against the walls of the sidewalk. In the throes of the torrent. The whirlpool that sucks. Drown. Drown. With no lifelines. Nor footholds. To arrest the ferocious velocity. Of the deluge.

A page from The Upright Revolution, published by Seagull Books.
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“The truth is that our people are starved, not only of food but of knowledge, dignity, and honour. The only cure for hunger is food. The only cure for oppression is to fight back.” Petals of Blood

And Ngugi did precisely that. Fight. Back. From refusing to be cowed down from writing a play in his Gĩkũyũ language and preferring prison instead to having his book Matigari banned in Kenya. And of course the exile. For decades. And of course the famous laugh that made mockery of threats including those that arrive at gunpoint.

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A lifetime that can be summed up in one word. Struggle. And the single-minded faith in the truth. Truth as companion. As shadow. As strength. In an interview to Namwali Serpell for The Paris Review this is what he had to say:

“The truth has always given me strength. When you have the truth on your side, you are consistent. Later, when I was taken to Kamĩtĩ, I found that I could respond to the tribunal of five judges even without having written anything down, because I was so sure of what had really happened. The truth gave me something to cling to.”

Mute libraries. Rows and rows of witnesses. Tight-lipped. Trembling with the desire to unburden. Testify. Accuse. Seek justice.

Only the librarian has fled.

The Language of Languages is dedicated to Ngugi’s writings on translation and the status of African languages, globally and in Africa today.
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Dear Naveen

it feels like I have known you all my life. Do these poems just come to you, like I hear it happens to those who make music? I don’t mean players of instruments, but composers? ~ Ngugi

We shared writing. Correction. I shared mine and he tended to respond. Swiftly. Knowing that every second is vital when traces of one’s vulnerable self is translated as poetry crying out for approval.

. . . even as the whispers fade and return like phantoms struggling to create an echo chamber of hope . . . failing . . . ‘a quiet involuntary bearing of witness’

***

Ngũgĩ enjoyed fables. And in many ways his “lives” were like fables. Often the dark kind.

I sent him a fable I had written about a leaf.

Ngũgĩ wrote back: “Your floating leaf of life made my mind float along other streams trying to fathom the paradox of life. Like the seed which must die so that it can give life to many seeds. I learnt this a long time ago, at our home in Limuru, Kenya, when my younger brother, Njinjũ, and I (we were about 6 and 7, I the older), wanted to grow our own food, just like we had seen our parents do. They planted seeds into the ground, and, lo and behold, the garden would later turn into a forest of green, above the ground. So, we planted two seeds of maize and buried them behind our mother’s house.

We could hardly sleep waiting for dawn. We unburied the seeds, just to check, nothing had changed, and reburied them. We had to be patient, our mother told us, and wait for the rain. So we waited for a few more days, and back there we were, unburied them to check, and of course, nothing had changed, nothing changed, despite the rain. In the end, the seeds never produced anything. Thirty years later, in Leeds, England, I reread this passage in the bible: Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Wow, that was why all the life that had seemed dead in the months of white winter suddenly sprung to life in sunny spring. It also made me return to our seeds which, for my brother and I remained just seeds, two grains of corn. We never let them die. All this resonated with me and became the title of my novel: A Grain of Wheat.”

Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe brings together Ngũgĩ’s essays on Africa spanning nearly three decades.
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Covid created both containment and distance and huge anxiety. Our despair failed both to stay “contained” and “distant”. We found ourselves drawn into melancholy. I wrote this:

with nothing left to lose except

except its silver sheen

the night waits

at a courteous distance

for us to complete our conversation

in utter silence

will we meet again?

meet perhaps at another       

removed twilight

Ngũgĩ responded with:

I know, I know,

It threatens the common gestures of human bonding

The handshake,

The hug

The shoulders we give each other to cry on

The Neighborliness we take for granted

So much that we often beat our breasts

Crowing about rugged individualism,

Disdaining nature, pissing poison on it even, while

Claiming that property has all the legal rights of personhood

Murmuring gratitude for our shares in the gods of capital.

Oh how now I wish I could write poetry in English,

Or any and every language you speak

So I can share with you, words that

Wanjikũ, my Gĩkũyũ mother, used to tell me:

Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa:

No night is so Dark that,

It will not end in Dawn,

Or simply put,

Every night ends with dawn.

Gũtirĩ ũtukũ ũtakĩa.

This darkness too will pass away

We shall meet again and again

And talk about Darkness and Dawn

Sing and laugh maybe even hug

Nature and nurture locked in a green embrace

Celebrating every pulsation of a common being

Rediscovered and cherished for real

In the light of the Darkness and the new Dawn.

I reached out, yet again, with my annual provocation for the Seagull catalogue with the Idea of “Migration. Of thought. And Self. From one state of being. Of emotion. Of presence. To another. Or many others. One feeding the other…. Imagine being a refugee in your own mind.”

And he responded with a text that deserves its own unedited place in literature, so I reproduce it for you, his readers:

Migration, Art and Imagination

My ideal, when I was growing up in rural Kenya, was to get as much education as I could, and return to the village. My future lay in Limuru, where I was born in 1938. I have described life in the rural community in my childhood memoir, Dreams in a Time of War. Kenya was a British colonial settler state. Until I left Limuru for Alliance High School, in 1955, I had not really been away from the village and its surroundings for any length of time. But even this fact had not struck me as anything but normal, until in fact I joined the High School, about 20 kilometers from Limuru.

It was what we called a Dormitory, meaning we lived there during the term, and only visited my village, during the breaks. In my other memoir, In the House of the Interpreter, I have described the scene of desolation that I encountered when after one term away, I returned home and found the British had razed the entire village to the ground. Kenya was under State of Emergency, the colonial state’s way of trying to isolate the forces of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, waging war against the settler state. My village destroyed, Alliance High School, for the next four years became the new base, from which I looked back at Limuru, the region of my birth. By losing my home, I became more aware of it, the home that I had lost.

Weep Not, Child explores the effects of the Mau Mau uprising on the lives of ordinary men and women.
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Years later, the theme of return would become the constant motif in my work. In fact, my first major short story to be published in the leading literary journal of the time, Transition, was titled The Return. I wrote it while studying at Makerere University College Uganda, 1959 to 1963.

Makerere was then an overseas college of the University of London. It was in Uganda, my new country of residence for the next five years, that I found my voice as a writer, an experience I tell in my third memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver. But I did not write about Kampala, or Uganda: I wrote about Kenya. The novels, The River Between, and Weep Not Child, were the early products of my residency in the country of my educational migration. Uganda enabled me to discover my Kenya and even relive my life in the village. I discovered my home country by being away from the home country.

I wrote my third novel, A Grain of Wheat, during my sojourn in Leeds, England, 1965 to 68. The story takes place in Kenya, but the opening line came to me while in a train from Inverness, Scotland, back to Leeds. But the train made me recall the role of the train and the railway in opening Kenya for white settlement.

I returned to Kenya in 1968 and, through Community Theater, tried to reconnect with the rural where I had grown up, and where I had even built a house for my family. I was a Professor of Literature at Nairobi University but a dweller among the rural community. It felt good to be working in Nairobi but returning to my base in the rural. But on December 1977 I was arrested on account of the same community theater, and found myself in a Maximum Security Prison. This time I was uprooted from the rural base; from my professional base in the city; and also from my name. I was just a number. Not Mr, not Professor, not even simply Ngũgĩ. I was a number.

Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity.
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My sojourn in prison as a number is the subject of my fourth memoir: Wrestling with the Devil. In the memoir I talk about the theater, my arrest and my experience of incarceration. Prison was like being exiled within one’s own country. To survive the degrading conditions and the attempts to break me, I had to migrate into my mind, take refuge in the inner self, to escape what they were doing to my body.

It was during this period of exile within my country, that I thought about the unequal power relationship between colonizing languages, and the colonized, and realized very clearly that I had been exiled from my tongue. As an intellectual I had lived as a linguistic migrant in English. I wrote my first novel in Gĩkũyũ, my mother tongue, Devil on the Cross, in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. I had to be away from my mother tongue to discover my mother tongue. The thoughts that I then worked out on the politics of language were what years later would form the book, Decolonizing the Mind.

Altogether, I cannot recall a single work that I have written while being in Kenya, my own country. I am a literary migrant. It was as a migrant, a wanderer, that I also found my roots in Kenya, whose passport I still cling to, like a religious relic. This is not unique to me. Migrancy is probably one of the most formative factors in the making of history. Maybe we all are nations of migrants.

A most important aspect of migrancy is the migration of ideas. Ideas, with or without the movement of people thinking them, do travel across boundaries of region and race. We can see this in religion, literature, philosophy, science, innovations, and technology. This constant migration of ideas has really enriched human progress and human history.

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Migration is the real maker of history. Or art. Art is a product of imagination but it also nourishes the imagination. Imagination breaks the barriers of space and time to connect with the known and unknown, the worlds gone, the worlds present and the worlds to be. Imagination is the most migrant of all human attributes. That is why my memoir, Wrestling with the Devil, is a tribute to the power of imagination to help humans break free of confinement.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

***

Born in Limuru, Kenya, on January 5, 1938, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o emerged as a ground-breaking author of many novels, plays, short stories, and memoirs. After receiving widespread acclaim for his English-language novels such as Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and Petals of Blood (1977), he began writing in his mother tongue Gĩkũyũ—a conscious choice for an author who never stopped fighting against the pervasive ill effects of colonialism. 

Ngũgĩ’s struggle was also against homegrown dictatorship in Kenya. In the late 1970s, he wrote the novel Caitaani Mutharaba-Ini (Devil on the Cross, 1980) on toilet paper while being held without trial in a high-security prison by the Kenyan regime for a play he had written. He subsequently translated his works into English to reach a wider global readership, and championed the art of translation, which he termed “the language of languages”—a philosophy that Seagull Books proudly embraces. 

Until his death on May 28, 2025, Ngũgĩ was a distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Naveen Kishore is a photographer, theatre lighting designer, poet, and the publisher of Seagull Books.