NAIROBI, Kenya — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the legendary Kenyan novelist, playwright, scholar, and unflinching advocate for African languages and postcolonial thought, has died at the age of 87, his family announced on Wednesday.
The death of Ngũgĩ — one of Africa’s most revered literary figures — was confirmed in a heartfelt statement issued by his daughter, Wanjiku wa Ngugi, who described her father as a man who “lived a full life, fought a good fight,” and urged admirers to celebrate his work and legacy. The statement said he died on the morning of May 28, 2025, with further details about his funeral arrangements to be announced by family spokesperson Nducu wa Ngugi.
Ngũgĩ’s death marks the end of an era in African literature and intellectual thought, but his voice will resonate for generations through his writings and tireless efforts to elevate African identity, language, and culture.
Born on January 5, 1938, in Kamiriithu village near Limuru, Kenya, Ngũgĩ was originally named James Ngugi. He would later renounce his English name, adopting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in a powerful act of cultural and political reclamation.
His education began at Alliance High School, one of Kenya’s premier institutions, before he proceeded to Makerere University in Uganda, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1963. While at Makerere, he wrote The Black Hermit, his first play, which debuted at the inaugural Ugandan National Drama Festival — a seminal moment in his early literary career.
In 1964, Ngũgĩ traveled to the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, where his exposure to global postcolonial discourse further shaped his ideological direction. It was during this period that he solidified his mission to challenge imperial narratives and write from an authentically African perspective.
Ngũgĩ’s groundbreaking novel Weep Not, Child (1964) was the first English-language novel by an East African writer, and it quickly established him as a major voice in African fiction. He followed this with The River Between (1965) and the widely acclaimed A Grain of Wheat (1967), all of which examined Kenya’s colonial legacy and the complex politics of independence.
In 1977, he made a defining decision to abandon English as his literary language, committing instead to Gikuyu, his mother tongue. That same year, he co-wrote and staged the politically charged play Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which criticized economic inequality and neocolonial oppression. The play’s impact was so profound that it led to Ngũgĩ’s arrest and imprisonment without trial by the Kenyan government.
Following his release, Ngũgĩ entered exile, first in Britain and later in the United States, where he continued to write and advocate for human rights, language justice, and cultural decolonization. His memoir, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, and later works such as Decolonising the Mind and Dreams in a Time of War, offered searing critiques of colonial structures and celebrated African resilience.
Throughout his decades in exile, Ngũgĩ held academic positions at major institutions including Yale University, New York University, and the University of California, Irvine, where he served as a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was more than a writer; he was a cultural warrior who championed the decolonization of the African mind, an intellectual beacon whose ideas influenced scholars, students, and activists across continents.
His death has triggered a wave of tributes from around the world, with literary communities mourning the loss of a visionary who challenged the hegemony of colonial languages, and empowered African writers to speak in their own voices — literally and figuratively.
Though Ngũgĩ has passed on, his message lives on. His body of work remains essential reading in postcolonial studies and African literature syllabi worldwide, and his enduring belief in the power of indigenous language will continue to inspire generations of writers and thinkers.
