Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a great writer of Kenya, passed away on May 28, 2025
Farooq Sargani
Our history is erased by the post-colonial state. All the remains of the great heroes are crumbling. Maybe future generations will be unable to see the past with physical heritage.
In fact, the colonial and post-colonial state never accepts your culture, language, geography, and history. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his famous book “Decolonizing the Mind,” wrote, “For colonialism, this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction and deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature (Oral literature), and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the colonizer.”
One week ago, I had been going through the writings of Ngugi, and three days back, I saw a post of novelist Noor Junejo, who quoting a few words of Ngugi, mentioned that ‘the theorist, writer, and academic Ngugi passed away.’
A sudden demise of great writer is heart-wrenching because I am a student of colonial history and a lover of my mother tongue. I have been reading him for the past few years. He was the true advocate of Kenyan people and their language.
He opened his eyes in 1938 in Limuru, colonial Kenya. He grew up among the low-income family based on farming. In the early days of his life, he got education in his Gikuyu language. As the British government banned the local languages in the school, so, he was forced to start learning English. His first novel, “Weep Not, Child,” is also in English.
He also faced the hurdles during the Mau Mau uprising (1952-1960). Most of his novels are dramas based on the Mau Mau uprising, and he glorified the rules of the guerillas, who fiercely fought against the British and eventually ended British colonial rule but didn’t get actual freedom, and again, the people of Kenya became imprisoned by their native rulers.
The Mau Mau uprising failed to bring communism after the independence. He also criticized the new colonial government that mistreated the lower-class peasants in Kenya. For that, he was imprisoned without trial for a year by the Kenyan government. During the prison he wrote the fantastic novel ‘Devil on the Cross’ on tissue papers because of the unavailability of the notebook.
He spent much of his life in exile in the UK and the US, but he always said that ‘Kenya will always remain in my mind. I miss the everyday of Kenyan life.’
Like Kenya, our country in the postcolonial era erased our identity, history, culture, and language. Like the Ngugi who struggled for his country and spent life in exile, we too have to understand that our culture, language, geography, and history are in danger. We must resist such moves to protect our identity.
Read – Gandhi: Fighter without a Sword
______________
The reviewer is a freelance writer and student of history at the University of Karachi.
