Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a giant of African literature, champion of indigenous African languages and perennial contender for the Nobel prize, died Wednesday at the age of 87.
Born in 1938, when Kenya was still under British colonial rule, Ngũgĩ dealt with the legacy of colonialism through essays, plays and novels including Weep Not, Child (1964), Devil on the Cross (1980) and Wizard of the Crow (2006). Long critical of the post-colonial Kenyan government, he was arrested by the regime of Daniel arap Moi in 1977 and imprisoned for over a year without trial. During that time, in a cell for 23 hours a day, Ngũgĩ began to write in his native language, Gĩkũyũ, instead of English, a political statement and practice he continued for the rest of his career in exile.
Ngũgĩ remained a vocal critic of his homeland’s government while living in the United States, and an astute chronicler of the legacy of colonialism in language, as outlined in his seminal 1986 text Decolonising the Mind.
“He lived a full life, fought a good fight,” wrote his daughter Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ on Facebook. Here are some of his most memorable quotes:
On colonialism:
Colonialism normalizes the abnormal.
– from Decolonising the Mind, 1986
The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from a historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of a fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never develop the continent.
– from Decolonising the Mind, 1986
On resistance:
Resistance is the best way of keeping alive. It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you’re right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.
– to the Guardian, 2018
“If the state can break such progressive nationalists, if they can make them come out of prison crying, ‘I am sorry for all my sins,’ such an unprincipled about-face would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few.
– from Wrestling with the Devil, 2018
The resistance of African American people is one of the greatest stories of resistance in history. Because against all those arduous conditions they were able to create … a new linguistic system out of which emerges spirituals, jazz, hip-hop, and many other things.
– to the Guardian, 2018
On the politics of language:
I have become a language warrior. I want to join all those others in the world who are fighting for marginalized languages. No language is ever marginal to the community that created it. Languages are like musical instruments. You don’t say, let there be a few global instruments, or let there be only one type of voice all singers can sing.
– to the Los Angeles Review of Books, 2017
Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history.
– from Decolonising the Mind, 1986
We should be able to connect to our base … and then connect to the world from our base. Our own bodies, our own languages, our own hair. When you want to launch a rocket into outer space, you make sure the base is very strong and solid. As African people, we [must] make sure our languages, our resources – the totality of our being is the base from which we launch ourselves into the world.
– to the Guardian, 2018
Written words can also sing.
– from Dreams in a Time of War, 2010
On writing in his native Gĩkũyũ:
There’s a slipperiness to the Gĩkũyũ language. I’d write a sentence, read it the following morning, and find that it could mean something else. There was always the temptation to give up. But another voice would talk to me, in Gĩkũyũ, telling me to struggle.
– to the Paris Review, 2022
The only language I could use was my own.
– to the Guardian, 2006
“I don’t see the world through ethnicity or race. Race can come into it, but as a consequence of class.” – the Guardian, 2023
On being:
Our lives are a battlefield on which is fought a continuous war between the forces that are pledged to confirm our humanity and those determined to dismantle it; those who strive to build a protective wall around it, and those who wish to pull it down; those who seek to mold it, and those committed to breaking it up; those whose aim is to open our eyes, to make us see the light and look to tomorrow […] and those who wish to lull us into closing our eyes.
– from Devil on the Cross, 1980
Being is one thing; becoming aware of it is a point of arrival by an awakened consciousness and this involves a journey.
– from In the Name of the Mother: Reflections on Writers and Empire, 2013
On self-belief:
Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.
–from Dreams in a Time of War, 2010
