Few lives are lived so remarkably that, when someone passes, admirers and news outlets cannot agree on how to describe the person. Ngugi wa Thiong'o is one such man. Throughout his life, Thiong'o was not only a novelist, poet, and academic, but also a political prisoner, tireless advocate for native African languages, and, some argue, East Africa's foremost novelist.
As Kenyan journal The Elephant poignantly stated after his death , "To call him merely a "great African writer" would be to shrink his genius - he was one of the most vital thinkers of our age, a voice who spoke from Kenya but to humanity." Thiong'o's death was announced by his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, and the news was met by an immediate outpouring of tributes from the likes of Kenya's President William Ruto and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, a testament to his impact and legacy not only across Africa, but around the world.
Thiong'o was born James Ngugi in colonial Kenya in 1938 in the rural village of Kamirithu to a farming family whose land had been repossessed under the British Imperial Land Act of 1915. His formative years were marred by tragedy as his family became involved in the 1952-1960 Mau Mau Uprising. His half-brother Mwangi was actively involved in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army resistance and died as a result another of his brothers was deaf and was shot dead by soldiers whose orders he did not hear and his mother was tortured at a home guard post in the family's home village.
At the age of seventeen, Thiong'o left Kamirithu to attend Alliance High School near Nairobi, but returned during holidays to find his village razed by colonial forces. Despite these tragedies he faced at such a young age, his academic prowess led to him being accepted at Makerere University in Uganda, where he earned his BA in 1963, then to the University of Leeds in England in 1964.
A literary breakthroughThiong'o's literary career began by writing in English. His debut novel, Weep Not, Child 1964, is credited as the first major English-language novel from East Africa and tells the harrowing story of Kenyan brothers confronting British colonial brutality during the Mau Mau rebellion. The manuscript gained exposure when Chinua Achebe secured its publication in the Heinemann African Writers series after reading it at the 1962 Makerere writers' conference. The novel went on to win UNESCO's first prize at the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Senegal.