Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author who reckoned with colonial legacy, dies at 87

Kenyan Nobel literature nominee Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Barcelona, Spain, on 8 May 2017.(Photo: EPA / Alejandro Garcia)

29 May 2025

Thiong’o, who took aim at colonial rule and Kenyan elites, spent years in jail and exile after being threatened. He was hailed as a ‘towering giant of Kenyan letters’.

Celebrated Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose sharp criticisms of post-independence elites led to his jailing and two decades in exile, has died at 87, Kenya’s president said.

Shaped by an adolescence where he witnessed the armed Mau Mau struggle for independence from Britain, Thiong’o took aim in his writings at colonial rule and the Kenyan elites who inherited many of its privileges.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o addresses the audience during a book signing event in Nairobi, Kenya, on 13 June 2015. Thiong’o, who had been living in exile since 1982 after his imprisonment by the Kenyan government in 1977 for his works, was visiting his home country as a part of his global tour to mark 50 years of the publication of his novel Weep Not, Child. (EPA / Dai Kurokawa)

He was arrested in December 1977 and detained for a year without charge in a maximum security prison after peasants and workers performed his play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want).

Angered by the play’s criticism of inequalities in Kenyan society, the authorities sent three truckloads of police to raze the theatre, Thiong’o later said.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o during the presentation of the Spanish edition of his book In the House of the Interpreter: A Memoir in Barcelona, Spain, 23 March 2018. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Andreu Dalmau)

He went into exile in 1982 after he said he had learnt of plans by President Daniel arap Moi’s security services to arrest and kill him. He became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California-Irvine.

‘Indelible impact’

Thiong’o ended his exile in 2004 after Moi left office, after more than two decades in power marked by widespread arrests, killings and torture of political opponents.

Kenya’s President William Ruto paid tribute to Thiong’o after his death in the US, following reports of a struggle with ill health in recent years.

“The towering giant of Kenyan letters has put down his pen for the final time,” Ruto said on his X account.

Thiong’o barcelona Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in Barcelona, Spain, on 8 May 2017. (Photo: EPA / Alejandro Garcia)

“Always courageous, he made an indelible impact on how we think about our independence, social justice as well as the uses and abuses of political and economic power.”

Although Thiong’o said upon returning to Kenya in 2004 that he bore no grudge against Moi, he told Reuters in an interview three years later that Kenyans should not forget the abuses of the era.

“The consequences of 22 years of dictatorship are going to be with us for a long time and I don’t like to see us returning to that period,” he said.

Thiong’o’s best-known works included his debut novel Weep Not, Child, which chronicled the Mau Mau struggle, and Devil on the Cross, which he wrote on toilet paper while in prison.

In the 1980s, he abandoned English to write in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, saying he was bidding farewell to the imported language of Kenya’s former colonial master. DM

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

Africa

‘Indelible impact’