Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87

By Canadian Press on May 28, 2025.

NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country’s history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87.

Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ’s U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments.

Whether through novels such as “The Wizard of the Crow” and “Petals of Blood,” memoirs such as “Birth of a Dream Weaver” or the landmark critique “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist’s calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after.

“Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “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.”

He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ’s ability to tell “a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.” Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award.

Through Ngũgĩ’s life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn’t respond to British soldiers’ demands that he stop moving.

In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, “The Upright Revolution,” updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story “The Ghost of Michael Jackson” features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ’s tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in “The Wizard of the Crow,” in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies.

“Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,” he wrote. “When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.”

Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country’s divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country’s liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native.

One of five children born to the third of his father’s four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong’o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly.

His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word.

“It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one’s destiny,” Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. “Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.”

He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel “Things Fall Apart,” had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, “Weep Not, Child” and “The River Between,” both of which were released in the next three years.

Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement.

“He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,” Ngũgĩ later wrote. “And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.”

Hillel Italie, The Associated Press