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Rarely do fiction writers pay a price as heavy as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) did for writing. He lost his Nairobi University job, was imprisoned, spent many years in exile, was attacked and robbed, and his wife was sexually assaulted, when he returned to Kenya on a visit.

Tragedy and hardship were not new to Ngugi. When he was young, and Kenya was a British colony, one of his brothers was shot dead because, being deaf, he did not hear the English officer’s command to stop. Ngugi had lived through the historic Mau Mau rebellion, during which his village, Limuru, was destroyed by British soldiers. His mother was arrested and spent three months in solitary confinement.

All these experiences fed Ngugi’s hatred for colonialism and imperialism, turned him towards Marxism and fueled his creativity. Turning adversity to advantage, Ngugi wrote his novel Devil on the Cross on rolls of toilet paper while in jail.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s birth name was James Ngugi. In 1938, when he was born, Kenya was a British colony. By the time he changed his name around 1970, Kenya was a formally independent nation. But colonial legacies are sticky, stubborn and persistent.

In 1977, after seventeen years of writing in English, Ngugi abandoned it and began writing in his native language, Gikuyu. This was hardly easy. English was the colonialists’ language, but it was also an international language. Writing in English potentially gave access to a readership that was spread across the world. English also had the paraphernalia that enables circulation of literary works – publishing houses, journals and newspapers, university courses, etc. – that native languages such as Gikuyu lacked. Many languages of the colonial subjects did not even have a script.

Also read: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: The Kenyan Icon Who Wrote For Freedom Till the Very End

English, then, was a prison, but it was also a doorway to a larger world. African writers were acutely aware of this contradiction, and many were riven with guilt. As Ngugi’s older contemporary, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), said, “Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me, there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.” However, “to carry the weight of my........

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