Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

It was October 1977, in Kamiriithu, a village near Limuru, in Kenya.

That day, ten thousand people came to see a play. It was called Ngaahika Ndeenda: I Will Marry When I Want.

It was not written in English. It was written in Gikuyu. And the people of Kamiriithu had put it on themselves, with two writers: Ngũgĩ wa Mirii and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

After six weeks, the government banned the play.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o had been born in that same village, on January 5, 1938. His name then was James Ngugi. His family was Kikuyu.

He grew up during the Mau Mau war. The war came close to his family. A half-brother, Mwangi, lost his life in it, fighting with the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. His mother was tortured at the village guard post.

The boy studied. Alliance High School, then Makerere University in Kampala, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1963. Then Leeds, in England.

In May 1964, his novel Weep Not, Child appeared. He was writing in English then.

But around 1970, he changed his name. James Ngugi became Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. And he began to write in Gikuyu.

In Kamiriithu, he had also helped found a community education and cultural centre.

After the play was banned, he was arrested on the orders of Vice-President Daniel arap Moi.

He was locked up in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. He stayed there for nearly a year. Without trial.

In prison, he kept on writing.

On prison toilet paper, he wrote a whole novel. Caitaani mũtharaba-Inĩ. Devil on the Cross. The first novel in Gikuyu.

He was released in December 1978.

In 1982, he went into exile, in the United Kingdom and then the United States. That same year, in Kenya, armed police destroyed the Kamiriithu theatre.

Years later, he summed up that journey in one sentence.

In 1986 came Decolonising the Mind. In it, he asked African writers to write in their own languages.

For him, Africa had to reclaim its economy, its politics, its culture. And its languages.

His attachment to his language and to the Kikuyu community of Kamiriithu echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing.

He became a professor at the University of California, Irvine. In August 2004, he finally returned to Kenya for a visit. His family could only go back safely after Moi's retirement, in 2002.

He died on May 28, 2025, in Buford, Georgia, at the age of 87.

He left novels, plays, essays.

And there remains the image of a man in prison writing, on toilet paper, a novel in his mother's tongue.