Mzee Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: The Baobab Has Fallen, But Its Roots Will Uproot Empire

My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est - Stupidity Must be Destroyed!

May 29, 2025

“The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. The language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind

The baobab has fallen. A mighty iroko tree, deeply rooted in Kenya's red soil yet towering over the entire African continent, has come crashing to the ground.

Death is inevitable; it is the price we pay for living. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, that eternal warrior on the battlefield of ideas, that tireless scribe who turned the pen into a machete against mental slavery, has joined the ancestors. He passed yesterday, but the echoes of his truth-telling thunder still shake the walls of every colonial institution. No one would forget Ngũgĩ’ in a hurry.

Fellow Africans, let us not mourn like the colonially educated elite mourns - with crocodile tears and confused gibberish about “multiculturalism,” “globalism,” and “shared humanity.” No! Let us cry with clenched fists and burning spirits. Let us weep like the Maasai warrior for a fallen elder, with fire in our veins and drums in our hearts.

In the end, we all become memories. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is not dead. He merely changed form. He now lives in the pages of Petals of Blood, in the burning paragraphs of Decolonising the Mind, in every African who dares to call their oppressor by name, and in every child who one day will read Matigari and truly understand what it means to be free - mentally, culturally, and spiritually.

Ngũgĩ’ lived a life of struggle and letters. He was a prodigious writer who chose the liberation of Africa as his central theme. He was as relentless as he was unwavering in his total decolonization of Africa, especially in the cultural and spiritual realms.

Born James Ngugi in 1938 in Kamiriithu, Kenya, in the shadow of Mount Kenya and under the colonial yoke of the British Empire, Ngũgĩ’s journey was one of transformation - spiritual, political, linguistic. From the early days when he wrote Weep Not, Child, the first novel in English by an East African, to the seismic decision to renounce colonial languages and embrace Gikuyu as his medium of artistic expression, Ngũgĩ was always in revolt. He was not merely a writer but a revolutionary spirit armed with syntax, structure, and soul. Yes, he had a soul, an uncompromising African soul.

He attended Makerere University in Uganda and later the University of Leeds in the UK, where he imbibed the classics. But unlike his fellow Black intellectuals, who became enamored with Shakespeare and forgot their grandmothers’ names, Ngũgĩ came back to Africa more determined to speak in his mother tongue. He returned to Kenya and began teaching literature, only to realize that, like in all African colonies, the curriculum in his native Kenya was designed to erase Africa from the African mind.

So he fought back. He rejected the colonial canon and championed African literature in African languages. He co-wrote and staged Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want) in Gikuyu, a play that so unnerved the post-colonial elites and their Western sponsors that the Kenyan state threw him in prison without trial in 1977.

Yes, you heard right. A writer - jailed for a play. Not for murder, not for robbery, not for coup plotting. A play! Such is the power of words when wielded with courage. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

If Mao’s aphorism that political power flows from the barrel of the gun is correct, we can say that spiritual power flows from the loaded word.

It was in the filth of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison, among lice and the stench of decaying dreams, that Ngũgĩ wrote Devil on the Cross — on toilet paper, no less.

While many of our so-called intellectuals were sipping wine in Western embassies, Ngũgĩ was scratching freedom into scraps of tissue paper.

“The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves.” - Decolonising the Mind

Ngũgĩ’s books are sacred texts of liberation. Africans should stop being cowards. We should speak truth to power, clearly and without shame or fear: Ngũgĩ’s Decolonising the Mind should be required reading in every African school and in every government building, military barracks, and embassy. It is not a book - it is a sword, a scalpel, a mirror, and a compass.

In its pages, Ngũgĩ dissects colonialism's psychic violence and its most insidious legacy - linguistic imperialism. He shows us how English, French, and Portuguese were not just languages but weapons and taught us not to communicate but to dominate. Too many of our people, sadly, are still addicted to the master’s tongue, walking around with Oxford accents and empty heads.

“Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized.” - Decolonising the Mind

This is why Ngũgĩ made the radical decision to stop writing in English — the language that had given him international fame. While Chinua Achebe chose to “Africanize” English, Ngũgĩ abandoned it. Why? Because he understood that true liberation could not come in the oppressor's language. Writing in Gikuyu was not mere linguistics - it was rebellion, resurrection, a return to the source.

In novels like A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, and Matigari, Ngũgĩ mapped the betrayal of African independence by comprador elites who replaced the white rulers with Black ones while keeping the same colonial systems intact. He was merciless in criticizing neocolonialism, which he rightly called a house-enslaved person’s paradise.

His essays, too, were weapons of mass deconstruction. In Writers in Politics and Moving the Centre, Ngũgĩ challenged the West’s monopoly on narrative and called for a truly global literature that would move Africa from the margins to the center. He did not beg for inclusion - he demanded justice.

“African languages should be the basis of all African learning, the foundation of all knowledge production.” - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

In an age of sellouts, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was the unbending tree. He maintained his cultural and spiritual integrity to the end.

A poser for us: How many African intellectuals today can you name who have refused the allure of Western approval or do not seek validation from Western Institutions. ? How many have left literary prizes and publishing contracts to stand with the people?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o could have spent his life in New York lecture halls and European conferences. He could have danced for the white man’s applause like many of our “thought leaders.” He could have won the Nobel Prize - that rotten carrot dangled before every African who learns to speak “progressive” English.

But Ngũgĩ was not for sale. He rejected being a pet of the West. He did not write to entertain the colonial elite or to become a darling of the New York Times Book Review. He wrote to liberate minds, confront power, and shout from the mountaintops of Gikuyu that Africa was not a begging bowl but a sacred continent of stories and souls.

He paid the price - exile, imprisonment, blacklisting—but he never wavered. While others built careers, he built consciousness. How many of us are willing to pay a price for the cause we believe in or for any cause?

“Language as communication and as culture are products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication.” - Decolonising the Mind

The danger is that we will reduce Ngũgĩ to a statue, a postage stamp, a Google Doodle, and a Meme. The ministries of education will issue toothless tributes while continuing to teach Shakespeare and Dickens in African classrooms to African children in foreign languages.

Let us not insult the dead. If we genuinely want to honor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, let us start by making his books - especially Decolonising the Mind - compulsory in every African school. Not optional, not elective. Compulsory. From Lagos to Lilongwe, from Nairobi to Nouakchott, let our children read him as they read the Qur’an or Bible - with reverence, fervor, and the understanding that this is our scripture of freedom.

Let us build public libraries in his name - stocked with books in African languages, not just dusty volumes of European irrelevance. Let us demand curricula reflecting our cultures, histories, and struggles.

Let every African president begging in Brussels be forced to read Petals of Blood. Let every minister who signs deals to export our youth like livestock be made to memorize Matigari. Let every UN bureaucrat who lectures Africa on “governance” be reminded that our ancestors governed empires long before Belgium or Washington existed.

“The imperialist tradition of feudal Europe, the tradition of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, is a tradition of conquest, robbery, exploitation, and mass murder.” - Decolonising the Mind

And let us remember this: Ngũgĩ did not die a millionaire. He did not hoard wealth or build monuments to himself. His legacy is his truth. His monument is in the minds he liberated.

Let those of us capable pick up his pen — and wield it like a Massai spear.

We live in an age of forgetting. Our memories are colonized as much as our economies. We remember what Paris tells us to remember. We mourn who CNN and the BBC tell us to mourn. But not this time.

Africa, remember Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Teach your children that this was a fearless African who looked the Empire in the eye and spat in its face, stood when others knelt, wrote in prison, and never wrote for permission.

Let African schools be filled with his voice. Let the churches preach his courage. Let the tongues of our youth wrap themselves around his sentences. Let every old and young African ask themselves: What would Ngũgĩ say?

“Language conquest, unlike the military form, wherein the victor must subdue the whole population directly, is cheaper and more effective.” - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

And let the answer guide us to action.

Dear Ancestors,

We send you Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — son of the soil, prophet of the page, warrior of words. Receive him with honor. Please give him a seat beside Sankara, Nkrumah, Awolowo, and Lumumba. Let him speak in Gikuyu and be understood. Let him teach even among the stars.

And to those still walking this wounded earth: Let us not mourn a hero by forgetting his mission. Let us mourn him by becoming him. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is dead; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work must continue.

“We must reconnect ourselves to our revolutionary traditions, draw correct lessons from our history, and build a future rooted in the real, not the colonial mirage. - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Fare thee well, Mzee Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Say hello to your fellow revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, who liberated me psychologically as you did culturally and spiritually.

A luta continua.

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, and Social Commentator.)

My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est - Stupidity Must be Destroyed!

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