An eloquent voice for freedom

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a celebrated author who taught at UC Irvine and was a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in literature, died May 28. He was 87.

Ngũgĩ was a world-renowned writer of novels, plays and essays, many of them skewering the harsh sociopolitical conditions of his homeland, Kenya. The son of a goat-herder, Ngũgĩ rose from poverty to pen widely acclaimed plays, social commentary and novels, including a book he said was written on toilet paper while he was imprisoned in his native land.

“The world has lost one of its greatest writers,” said Chancellor Howard Gillman.  “His work illuminated the lives and stories of an entire continent and gave a voice to hundreds of millions of people who, before him, had no voice.”

Ngũgĩ first gained notice in 1962, while still in college, when his play “The Black Hermit” was staged in Uganda as part of that nation’s independence celebration. He followed with eight short stories, two more plays, a newspaper column and a pair of books, including Weep Not, Child, which was billed as the first East African novel published in English. The book was also credited with opening Western eyes to postcolonial Africa.

In 1967, Ngũgĩ – whose name was pronounced “Googie” and means “work” – became a lecturer in English literature at the University of Nairobi, the first in a series of academic appointments that included teaching stints at Northwestern and Yale universities before he was hired by UC Irvine in 2002 as a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature, as well as director of the International Center for Writing and Translation.

“Ngũgĩ was a passionate and inspirational teacher,” says Tyrus Miller, dean of the School of Humanities. “He was also a world-class novelist, playwright and intellectual whose works eloquently testify to an irrepressible human demand for freedom, compassion and hope even in the midst of oppression and adversity.”

Originally named James Thiong’o Ngũgĩ, he was born in 1938 into a peasant family that included four wives and 28 children. As a teen in the 1950s, he lived through Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion against British colonial rule – and his early writing depicts the terror of that time.

“Violence was all around us,” Ngũgĩ later recalled. “School was a sanctuary, but at some point, you have to go out and confront the world.”

He did so with his pen and eventually landed in prison because of it. In 1977, as his anticorruption novel Petals of Blood and controversial play “Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want)” drew international attention to Kenya’s social inequities, Ngũgĩ was thrown into a maximum-security jail without a trial.

He was freed a year later, after Amnesty International identified him as a prisoner of conscience, and fled Kenya after learning of a plot by the nation’s dictator to kill him.

“We often take imagination for granted, but it is one of the most important elements of the human,” Ngũgĩ said years after the episode. “That is why dictatorships imprison writers, artists, singers, etc. They want to shrink the collective imagination. They don’t want any calls for the populace to imagine a future different from the one decreed by the oppressive state.”

He was known for the phrase “decolonizing the mind,” which stemmed from one of his best-known and most-translated works: 1986’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Dedicated to those who write in African languages, the collection of essays considers how the language of the colonizers continues to affect postcolonial societies and advocates for linguistic decolonization. In 2019, the book won the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize.

During his time at UC Irvine, Ngũgĩ produced some of his finest work. Wizard of the Crow won a 2006 California Book Awards gold medal for fiction, and In the House of the Interpreter was shortlisted for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Ngũgĩ was also regularly considered to be a Nobel front-runner.

“I’d be happy if I got it,” he told one interviewer, “but I don’t write for prizes. I appreciate what they call a ‘Nobel of the heart,’ which is when people tell me again and again, ‘Your work has impacted me.’”

In 2013, he was awarded the UCI Medal, the highest honor conferred by the university.

Ngũgĩ is survived by nine children, several of whom are also writers.

“Ngũgĩ was a treasure, one of the great novelists of our time,” said Vicki Ruiz, a National Humanities Medal recipient, former dean of the School of Humanities, and Distinguished Professor emerita of history and Chicano/Latino studies at UC Irvine. “He was also a dedicated, charismatic teacher whose undergraduate evaluations were absolutely stunning. Students made comments such as, ‘It’s an honor to have him as an instructor.’”